[Content Note: Hostility to consent; painful sex.]
"Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. They've gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of 'bad sex.' They've worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously. Meanwhile, the gender for whom bad sex sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm, the gender whose sexual needs the medical community rushes to fulfill, the gender that walks around in sartorial comfort, with an entire society ordered so as to maximize his aesthetic and sexual pleasure — that gender, reeling from the revelation that women don't always feel quite as good as they've been pressured to pretend they do, and would appreciate some checking in — is telling women they're hypersensitive and overreacting to discomfort? Men's biological realities are insufficiently appreciated?"—Lili Loofbourow, in a terrific, must-read piece, "The Female Price of Male Pleasure."
After reading this piece, all I could think was: Most men will never allow themselves to really contemplate and internalize how painful sex is, emotionally and physically, for so many women, because that would be such a boner killer.
If that sounds like a joke, it isn't. It is a lamentation.
[H/T to Fannie.]
Quote of the Day
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!
* * *
I just purchased one of those grocery check-out line recipe magazines that has over a hundred soup recipes and dozens of bread recipes. I am very excited to try ALL OF THEM, lol! If any of them turn out especially yummy, I'll be sure to share them here. ;)
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 371
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) 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:
Earlier today by me: This Is What Happens When the President Is a Bigot and Devin Nunes and His F#@king Memo.
Lindsey Bever, Sarah Kaplan, and Abby Ohlheiser at the Washington Post: The Doomsday Clock Just Moved: It's Now 2 Minutes to 'Midnight,' the Symbolic Hour of the Apocalypse.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds after what the organization called a "grim assessment" of the state of geopolitical affairs.Everything is fine.
"As of today," Bulletin president Rachel Bronson told reporters, "it is two minutes to midnight."
In moving the clock 30 seconds closer to the hour of the apocalypse, the group cited "the failure of [Donald] Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change."
The organization — whose board includes 15 Nobel Laureates — now believes "the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II," Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. "In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels."
Krauss, a theoretical physicist, and Rosner, an astrophysicist, added: "To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger — and its immediacy."
* * *
Ari Berman at Rolling Stone: How the GOP Rigs Elections.
To say that Republicans are facing a toxic political environment heading into the 2018 midterm elections would be a massive understatement. Donald Trump is the most unpopular president at this stage of his term in modern American history. Just three in 10 Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, and Democratic voters' enthusiasm to vote in 2018 tops Republican voters' by 17 points. But because of sophisticated gerrymandering, Republicans who should be vulnerable, like Wanggaard, have been seen as untouchable. "It's more challenging than it should be because of the way the districts are drawn," says Jenni Dye, who works for Democrats in Wisconsin's state Senate. Wanggaard is among 11 Republican state senators up for re-election in 2018, but no one has stepped forward to challenge him yet.David Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight: Hating Gerrymandering Is Easy; Fixing It Is Harder. "It's easy for opponents of gerrymandering — the drawing of political boundaries for the benefit of one party or group over another — to argue what districts shouldn't look like. ...But it's much more difficult to say what districts should look like, because reformers can disagree on what priorities should govern our political cartography. Should districts be drawn to be more compact? More conducive to competitive elections? More inclusive of underrepresented racial groups? Should they yield a mix of Democratic and Republican representatives that better matches the political makeup of a state? Could they even be drawn at random? These concepts can be difficult to define and often stand in tension with one another."
The gerrymandering in Wisconsin, which experts call among the most extreme in U.S. history, is but one part of Republicans' stealth plan to stay in office. Since Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature took power, they've also introduced some of the country's harshest voting restrictions, passing laws that make it harder for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote and cast ballots. At the same time, the state has become the "Wild West of dark money," according to Lisa Graves, a senior fellow at the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, with Republican politicians like Walker raising unprecedented sums from billionaire donors to finance their campaigns.
"All three of these things have to be seen as part of a whole," says Eric Holder, Barack Obama's attorney general, who founded the National Democratic Redistricting Committee in 2016 to challenge Republican gerrymandering efforts. "Unregulated dark money combined with these voter-ID laws combined with gerrymandering is inconsistent with how our nation's system is supposed to be set up. American citizens ought to be concerned about the state of our democracy. We could end up with a system where a well-financed minority that has views inconsistent with the vast majority of the American people runs this country."
And, on the same topic, ICYMI:
"Here we lie at the interconnected horror of the Trump administration's autocratic manoeuvres. Consider this scenario for 2018: The repeal of net neutrality will stem the flow of information, making voter suppression harder to document." https://t.co/3OjQIJJplD
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) November 26, 2017
I've said it before, and I will say it again: If you're someone who is putting your future hopes in the outcome of the 2018 midterm elections, you'd better preoccupy yourself with fighting every effort to disenfranchise voters for the next 10 months.
* * *
[Content Note: Misogyny]
The headline asks why Yellen was not re-appointed (despite, as the story argues, achieving her goals near-perfectly). Words this story does not contain: woman, gender, sexism, misogyny. I think I might see the problem, folks. 🧐https://t.co/XBUlH8bnpB
— Aphra Behn (@Shaker_aphra) January 25, 2018
I'll take "Great Mysteries of Life" for $200, Alex.
GOP Senate candidate flips out over ‘women’s rights’: ‘I want to come home to a cooked dinner every night’ https://t.co/prJrBYWapw
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 25, 2018
He seems nice.
[CN: Sexual assault] Itay Hod at the Wrap: David Copperfield Accused of Drugging, Assaulting 17-Year-Old Model in 1988. There are details about the assault at the link. Copperfield is one of the many men in the entertainment industry about whom there have long been "open secrets" regarding sexual predation, as I noted back in October.
Bush's "David Cop-a-Feel" line reminded me that David Copperfield is another dude whose predation is an open secret. https://t.co/8WQODnJ0Ey
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) October 26, 2017
[CN: Sexual assault] Kaiser at Celebitchy: Being Accused of Abusive Behavior Has Been 'Very Hard' on James Franco. Boo hoo. How's it been for his victims? These PR placements about how upset Franco is are gross AF. I like what Kaiser says at the link: "This, too, is performance art." Yup.
* * *
Matt Shuham at TPM: 24-Year-Old at Highest Levels of Drug Czar Office Will Leave This Month. "The inexperienced 24-year-old who quickly ascended from Trump campaign volunteer to the highest levels of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy will leave that office by the end of the month, the White House confirmed to the Washington Post Wednesday night. The Post first profiled Taylor Weyeneth 11 days ago, reporting based on public records requests that his resumes misleadingly included a masters degree from Fordham University (one he never completed) and a claim that he'd worked at a New York law firm for eight months longer than he had (he was 'discharged' after not showing up for work), among other irregularities." Whoooooops.
Lachlan Markay at the Daily Beast: A Coal Giant Gave $1 Million to Donald Trump's Super PAC as It Sought Help from Trump. "A major coal company wrote a seven-figure check to [Donald] Trump's leading super PAC as it sought a major federal energy policy intervention that would save the company billions. Murray Energy donated $1 million to America First Action on August 8, according to newly released Federal Election Commission records. That was four days after its CEO, Robert Murray, personally appealed to the White House to prop up a struggling utility that buys coal from his company. The administration ultimately did not intervene." Cool cool cool.
OF COURSE Mike Pence cast the tiebreaking vote to advance Sam Brownback's confirmation to "an at-large ambassadorship for international religious freedom." https://t.co/YPECR70Yd8
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 25, 2018
Casey Michael at ThinkProgress: A Dangerous Piece of Fake News Is Spreading Like Wildfire on Facebook.
Two weeks ago, Facebook announced that it would be reformatting its maligned News Feed, looking for the latest means of steering away from the fake news controversies that have dogged the company over the past year. Hoping to undercut the fake news publishers pumping falsehoods and conspiracy to users, Facebook announced it would now be prioritizing "more posts from friends and family" and "less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses."Goddammit. Meanwhile... [CN: Objectification; misogyny; hostility to consent] Alex Hern at the Guardian: AI Used to Face-Swap Hollywood Stars into Pornography Films without Consent. "Advanced machine learning technology is being used to create fake pornography featuring real actors and pop stars, pasting their faces over existing performers in explicit movies. The resulting clips, made without consent from the women whose faces are used, are often indistinguishable from a real film, with only subtly uncanny differences suggesting something is amiss."
In theory, the move should help gut outlets known for outright fabrication – the types of fake news outlets that consistently pushed pro-Trump material through the election.
But in practice, at least thus far, it appears the move has fallen woefully short of its goal.
A study from NewsWhip found earlier this week that one of the top four stories with the most engagement since Facebook's change belonged to YourNewsWire, a notorious fake news factory. The story, which claimed that an unnamed "CDC doctor" said the flu vaccine was "causing [the] deadly flu outbreak," had at the time generated more overall engagements than any story from outlets like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, CNN, NPR, or even Fox News. (The YourNewsWire story has since fallen a few slots.) At last check, the YourNewsWire story had nearly a half-million total Facebook engagements.
Not only is this terrible news for the countless women whose lives will be ruined by this technology, but imagine for a moment what it means for the creation of fake news. Fucking hell.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Devin Nunes and His F#@king Memo
As you may recall, Rep. Devin Nunes had to "step aside" from the Russia investigation because he completely destroyed his credibility by running interference for the White House during the investigation by the House Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, of Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
But that hasn't stopped him from continuing to scheme on behalf of the administration.
For the last week, Nunes has been peddling a memo which reportedly details allegations that the FBI committed surveillance abuses during the 2016 election.
A #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag supporting the document's release inflamed resentments among Trump supporters who believe the "deep state" has targeted their beloved president because he's too awesome or whatever, and not that he's under investigation because he's profoundly corrupt and quite possibly a traitor.
Except, the promoters of the hashtag were so suspicious that Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff sent a letter to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook requesting "urgent assistance" in determining whether the hashtag had been fueled by Russian bots in another attempt "to manipulate public opinion." And a CNN analysis has found that the hashtag "appears to have been driven at least in part by a swarm of Twitter accounts set up in the past week."
And now Betsy Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman report on the contents of the memo, which is so irresponsible and explosive that even Trump's Justice Department doesn't want it released.
A controversial Republican memo alleging surveillance abuse specifically names FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein along with former FBI Director James Comey.Let's be clear: Jeff Sessions' Justice Department is saying that this memo is "extraordinarily reckless."
Capitol Hill sources on both sides of the aisle say the memo's release is only a matter of time. And when it comes out, these current and former officials — all GOP bêtes noires — are likely to face even more criticism from the right over their involvement in FBI counterintelligence work.
...A groundswell is building to release the memo—written by Devin Nunes, the California Republican and key Trump ally who chairs the House intelligence committee—which former FBI agents fear will damage public trust in the bureau. While Democrats say the memo deliberately misrepresents the procedures for obtaining a foreign-intelligence surveillance warrant, The Daily Beast has learned that Hill Republicans are gearing up to use an obscure parliamentary rule to release it.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has expressed serious concerns about the memo's potential release. In a letter sent to Nunes on Jan. 24, Stephen Boyd, the department's top congressional liaison, wrote that "it would be extraordinarily reckless for the Committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the HPSCI [the House intelligence committee] of the risk of harm to national security and to ongoing investigations that could come from public release."
That letter also said the department is "unaware of any wrongdoing" related to the FISA process—indicating the department disagrees with the scores of congressional Republicans who say Nunes' memo provides proof of wrongdoing.
But if Nunes is still intent on releasing it, which he is, then someone in the White House is communicating their support to him, which means there's a(nother) fracture between the White House and the Department of Justice.
The White House wants to damage public confidence in both the FBI and the Special Counsel's investigation. Nunes is happy to help. And the Republican leadership is eminently willing to allow this authoritarian minion to assist with the dismantlement of the republic, without resistance or consequence.
This Is What Happens When the President Is a Bigot
[Content Note: Homophobia and transphobia.]
Something I've said many times over the past year is that Donald Trump didn't invent bigotry, but he has mightily empowered it.
At the Daily Beast, Samantha Allen reports on a grave consequence of that reckless sanction: A new survey, commissioned by GLAAD and conducted by The Harris Poll, found that support for LGBTQ Americans among their cishet countrypeople has precipitously diminished, marking "the first time in the four-year history of the Accelerating Acceptance report that GLAAD has witnessed a decline in LGBT acceptance."
"This year, the acceptance pendulum abruptly stopped and swung in the opposite direction," GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in the 2018 report, noting the sharp contrast between this year's results and the last three years of watching Americans report being "more comfortable with LGBTQ people and more supportive of LGBTQ issues."Naturally, there have been direct, interpersonal consequences for members of the LGBTQ community: "55 percent of LGBT respondents to the GLAAD survey reported experiencing discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity in 2017, as compared to 44 percent who said the same in 2016."
The annual GLAAD survey asks non-LGBT Americans to describe how comfortable they are in several scenarios involving LGBT people, like learning that a doctor is LGBT, witnessing a same-sex couple holding hands, or worshipping alongside and LGBT person at church.
This year's version, conducted in November 2017, found "a decline with people's comfort year-over-year," not just in a few of the scenarios, but "in every LGBTQ situation."
For example, in 2016, 27 percent of non-LGBT Americans said that they would be "very" or "somewhat" uncomfortable with learning that a family member is LGBT; in 2017, that figure jumped all the way up to 32 percent.
...The popular wisdom was that 2017 was a uniquely awful year for LGBT Americans; the Accelerating Acceptance report is one of the first tangible signs of how bad it has been.
Another troubling finding was that the number of self-identified "allies" dropped significantly:
The GLAAD survey sorts non-LGBT Americans into three broad categories based on their comfort level across the LGBT scenarios: "allies" who are "very" or "somewhat" comfortable with every scenario, "detached supporters" who vary in comfort based on the question, and "resisters" who report being "very" or "somewhat" uncomfortable in every situation.That the number of "allies" has diminished is very telling, for a couple of reasons.
The proportion of "resisters" has held steady at 14 percent of non-LGBT Americans since 2015 but the ratio of "allies" to "detached supporters" took a turn for the worse over the past year. Now, GLAAD counts 49 percent of the non-LGBT respondents as "allies," down from 53 percent in 2016. Over that some time span, the percentage of "detached supporters" rose from 33 percent to 37 percent.
1. It speaks directly to the disingenuousness of "ally" as a fixed identity.
2. It confirms my suspicions that lots of privileged people who most aggressively identify as "allies" are doing it to mask their discomfort, as opposed to because they have an interest in doing the work to leverage their privilege on behalf of people without it. And, given the slightest room to indulge that discomfort, they will.
Relatedly, there are a lot of privileged folks who aren't particularly principled about their support for marginalized communities. They simply identify as "ally" when that's the more popular position, and jettison that identity when it's no longer fashionable.
3. Finally, and most importantly, as many social justice advocates have long argued, a public expectation of support for marginalized people matters. Hugely.
That is, privileged people must feel ashamed for failing to support marginalized populations, or a number of them won't fucking do it.
Empathy will only get us so far. The rest depends on creating a public perception that it's entirely unacceptable to not show support.
That's why Trump empowering bigotry is so dangerous. The whole "he's just saying what we're all thinking" stuff was always going to result in a backlash, because what it was doing was tearing away the boundaries that decent people had set in terms of what was publicly tolerated.
He unmuzzled bigots who felt constrained — and rightly so — by social disincentives to express their bigotry. Unleashing queerphobic rhetoric in turn creates space where more people feel okay about their reservations, as opposed to feeling obliged to interrogate them. Visible support from fewer cishet people — including those who are silent because they believe equality has been achieved (nope) and wouldn't need vigilant nurture even if it had been (wrong) — then creates even more space for expressed bigotry to thrive.
It's an ugly cycle and a massive failure among privileged people.
Trump is the ringleader of this grotesquery, but behind him roars an entire circus of seething hatred and dangerous indifference. Their spectacle is contagion, and it must be shut down.
YES!!!
I am very excited to see Ava DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time, which I have been waiting to see brought to the big screen since I loved the book as a girl, and this has only increased my excitement, and I didn't even think that was possible!
When Disney makes Barbies of your movie’s characters and you just want to stare at them all day in disbelief because you loved Barbies as a girl but never had any like these. #WrinkleinTime pic.twitter.com/7PzQsiNoyG
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 25, 2018
In case you can't view the image embedded in the tweet, from left to right are pictured a Barbie doll of Mindy Kaling's character from the film (Kaling is Indian American); of Oprah Winfrey's character (Winfrey is Black); and of Reese Witherspoon's character (Witherspoon is white).
Regardless of one's feelings about Barbie, and there are valid criticisms of the franchise, seeing Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit as Barbies, for grown-up girls (and boys) who once loved Barbies and A Wrinkle in Time, is pretty damn terrific.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Lostshadows: "What's something good that's happened in your life recently?"
I got a nice message from an old friend.
I'll Believe It When I Read a Leak About It
Breaking: Trump says he "would love to" testify with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and that he would speak under oath https://t.co/Ltq0zhAo0k
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 24, 2018
Trump is also a pathological liar, so. https://t.co/2CXZR5U7YC
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
On talking to Bob Mueller:
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 24, 2018
"I'm looking forward to it, actually," Trump tells reporters (per audio via MSNBC). "There's been no collusion whatsoever. There's no obstruction whatsoever."
"Subject to my lawyers and all of that, but I would love to."
"Subject to my lawyers and all of that." And there's the caveat. https://t.co/owHFspV77n
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
Wednesday Links!
This list o' links brought to you by a cold glass of water.
Recommended Reading:
Rinku Sen at Colorlines: [Content Note: Nativism] How the GOP is Using the Budget Process to Destroy Immigration as We Know It
Jeff Faux at the Economic Policy Institute: Davos Is Trump's Kind of Town
Monica Roberts at TransGriot: [CN: Racism] Cecile Richards Is Right: White Women MUST Do Better
Anshuman Iddamsetty at the Outline: [CN: Fat hatred] How Video Games Demonize Fat People
Rhett Jones at Gizmodo: Even Burger King Is Roasting Ajit Pai over Net Neutrality Repeal
Momo Chang at the Center for Asian American Media: Q&A with Ann Curry, Whose New PBS Show We'll Meet Again Premiered This Week
Inkoo Kang at Slate: [CN: Whitewashing; homophobia; violence] The Deracination of Andrew Cunanan
Daniel Johnson at Black Youth Project: Yance Ford Becomes First Trans Director to Receive an Oscar Nomination
Christianna Silva at Towleroad: Laverne Cox Makes History as Cosmo's First Transgender Cover Girl
Gerald Jonas: RIP Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed Writer of Fantasy Fiction
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Powerful Women Are Icky
[Content Note: Sexual violence; misogyny.]
Earlier today, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced former Olympic gymnastics doctor and serial sex abuser Larry Nassar in her courtroom, and did not contain her feelings about Nassar and his crimes while doing so.
While lots of survivors and our allies celebrated Judge Aquilina's palpable disdain for Nassar, a number of male journalists felt it was important to publicly complain about her tone.
Jonathan Chait tweeted: "Statements by the survivors have been extraordinary. A judge performing like this leaves me cold."
What the fuck is this? "Leaves me cold" is doing my head in. Is a judge yelling at a disgusting pervert abuser creepfuck supposed to get him hot? Sorry about your sadpants because a judge was correctly disdainful of a serial sex abuser. JFC. https://t.co/7t7IpTr7Bt
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
Armando Llorens tweeted: "I'm asking for it here but the judge isn't an advocate for parties. They're supposed to be impartial."
NB: A judge being angry about sexual violence, *which is against the law*, isn't ipso facto being an advocate for a party in her court. It might look that way, insofar as the judge is angry about a crime *done to human beings*, as opposed to a crime done to a piece of property.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
Matt Yglesias tweeted (and then deleted): "Larry Nassar is clearly an evil man, but I don't care for the judicial grandstanding and dunking on the convict from the bench."
Honestly, my question is how the fuck any human being listens to those victim statements and *doesn't* share the judge's righteous outrage.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
Because her response? Was the right one.
As I further noted on Twitter, one of the phrases that I have had in my rhetorical arsenal for more than a decade is: "I'm not offended; I'm contemptuous." The reason it is evergreenly useful, in my experience, is because lots of men misidentify as inappropriate anger, or some variation thereof, what is actually women's contempt.
Judge Aquilina was full-tilt contemptuous. And that was entirely appropriate. Contempt is 100% the correct governance of interactions with a person who has committed sexual violence against dozens of girls.
Her contempt was on behalf of those girls. Her contempt was on behalf of survivors of sexual violence everywhere who have been denied justice. Her contempt wasn't, however, for smug fucks who squirm at evidence of earnest contempt for unfathomable harm.
I valued that contempt. That contempt felt more like justice (to me) than even the sentence delivered, because it is even rarer than convictions.
I think there are a number of reasons why some number of men didn't value Judge Aquilina's contempt, but one thing is disappointingly evident:
In the year of our lord Jesus Jones two thousand and eighteen, it is still abundantly clear that there are a lot of men who don't like visual evidence of any woman wielding power over any man, and will find lots of Very Important Reasons to convey their discomfort.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) January 24, 2018
Even when that woman is an esteemed judge, and the man is a serial sex abuser.
The What Happened Book Club
This is the fourteenth installment of the What Happened Book Club, where we are doing a chapter a week.
That pace will hopefully allow people who need time to procure the book a better chance to catch up, and let us deal with the book in manageable pieces: I figured we will have a lot to talk about, and one thread for the entire book would quickly get overwhelming.
So! Let us continue our discussion with Chapter Fourteen: Trolls, Bots, Fake News, and Real Russians.
* * *
Woo, this chapter. Goddammit. There is a lot to deal with in this very technical chapter, reflecting on Russian interference in the election, but I'm going to start with my favorite quote of the whole thing, and one of my favorite quotes of the book, from the section on Vladimir Putin's grudge against Hillary Clinton: "Our relationship has been sour for a long time. Putin doesn't respect women and despises anyone who stands up to him, so I'm a double problem."
LOLOLOLOLOLOL DAMN.
And that's all the laughter we're gonna get from this one, folks.
Because, although Clinton gets deep in the weeds in the chapter, in her typically meticulous style, the real story here is one of a Cassandra, who keeps raising flags that the men who run this country choose to ignore.
The chapter opens with Clinton describing how the body politic works like the human body, requiring an immune system in order to keep functioning in a healthy way. She then goes on to describe how the defenses of our democracy have been deliberately undermined:
In 2016 our democracy was assaulted by a foreign adversary determined to mislead out people, enflame our divisions, and throw an election to its perfect candidate. That attack succeeded because our immune system had been slowly eroded over years. Many Americans had lost faith in the institutions that previous generations relied on for objective information, including government, academia, and the press, leaving them vulnerable to a sophisticated misinformation campaign.It's tough to bear thinking about how the person who wrote this accurate postmortem on how we got here is the same person who was widely mocked in 1998, two decades ago, for correctly noting the existence of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
There are many reasons why this happened, but one is that a small group of right-wing billionaires — people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch — recognized long ago that, as Stephen Colbert once joked, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." More generally, the right spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality. Think of a partisan petri dish where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes.
Their efforts were amplified in 2016 by a presidential candidate who trafficked in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, a candidate who deflected any criticism by attacking others with made-up facts and an uncanny gift for humiliating zingers. He helped to further blur news and entertainment, reality TV and reality.
And then there are the understated passages in which Clinton notes she was ringing alarm bells on Russia, while as Secretary of State —
In a series of memos, I warned President Obama that things were changing in Russia, and America would have to take a harder line with Putin. Our relationship was likely to get worse before it got better, I told the President, and we needed to make it clear to Putin that aggressive actions would have consequences.— and after:
In the wake of Russia's Ukraine operations, I expressed my concerns to some of my former national security colleagues. Moscow had clearly developed new capabilities in psychological and information warfare and was willing to use them. I was worried the United States and our allies weren't prepared to keep up or respond.And she was preparing to tackle this challenge head-on as president, had the very scenario about which she was warning hadn't preempted her presidency.
I wanted to go further than the Obama administration, which resisted providing defensive arms to the Ukrainian government or establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, where Putin had launched a military intervention to prop up the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. I also intended to increase our investment in cybersecurity and pursue an all-hands-on-deck effort to secure cooperation between the government and the private sector on protecting vital national and commercial infrastructure from attacks, including nuclear power plants, electrical grids, dams, and the financial system.Hillary Clinton had Putin's number, perhaps more than anyone else in the United States. She was best prepared and eminently willing to face him down, without hesitation. No wonder he did everything he could to stop her.
All of this is to say that I had my eyes open. I knew Putin was a growing threat.
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 370
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) 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:
Earlier today by me: Mueller Is Still Investigating and Garrison Keillor Is Also a Liar.
Melanie Schmitz at ThinkProgress: Republican Senator Meets with Justice Neil Gorsuch to Discuss Unspecified 'Important Issues'.
Hours after he nearly shattered a glass elephant by tossing a "talking stick" at Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) during bipartisan spending talks on Monday (yes, that actually happened), Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) decided to buff up his image further by hastily tweeting that he was having dinner with a Supreme Court justice to discuss "important issues."Gorsuch is a fucking disgrace.
"I enjoyed having dinner tonight at the home of Senator John Cornyn and his wife Sandy with our newest Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, Transportation Secretary Chao and a few of my other Senate colleagues to talk about important issues facing our country," the senior senator wrote.
Alexander's tweet prompted a flurry of angry responses, with many concerned the event was a breach of ethics, or at best bad optics.
...Objectively speaking, there's nothing wrong with a member of Congress (or the executive branch) dining or hunting or hobnobbing with a Supreme Court justice. ...What's troubling about Alexander's dinner with Gorsuch, rather, is the fact that the two met to discuss unspecified "important issues facing our country" — something which Supreme Court justices are rightfully discouraged from doing, as it gives an obvious appearance of partiality and may flout certain ethics rules.
* * *
[Content Note: War on agency] Teddy Wilson at Rewire: Republicans' Forced Waiting Period Laws Could Proliferate in 2018. "State-level GOP lawmakers are ready to unleash a new crop of medically unnecessary proposals to force people to wait a day or two — or three — before they receive abortion care. Mandatory waiting periods are among the most common restrictions that have been pushed by abortion rights foes and approved by legislatures in recent years. Already in 2018, Republicans in New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Colorado have introduced forced waiting period bills."
I think my favorite (cough) part about this is how Republicans, including the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, believe in "fetal personhood," but still don't believe in the personhood of people who carry those fetuses. Our personhood, our autonomy, our agency, and our right of consent are nonexistent to the same wrecks who believe that a fetus is a rights-bearing person. Cool.
[CN: War on agency] Amanda Michelle Gomez at ThinkProgress: Texas' Sneaky Plan to Defund Planned Parenthood. "Republicans in Congress weren't able to 'defund' Planned Parenthood last year, but some remain hopeful that they can in 2018. While eyes fixate on Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — an agency packed with anti-abortion sympathizers — signaled it would approve efforts to withhold federal dollars to Planned Parenthood if states asked. Texas has already sought federal permission to do so and the green light could come any day now."
[CN: Transgender harm] Amy Littlefield at Rewire: When Their Doctor Disappeared, Transgender Patients Scrambled to Find Care in Pence's Indiana. "[W]hen they pulled into the parking lot, they found the lot empty, the lights off, and the door locked. There was no note to explain where Dr. Wallace had gone. Keener called the office; a representative told her Wallace no longer worked for Parkview Physicians Group, and referred her to another doctor in the network. When Keener explained to that new office that her son was on hormone therapy, the receptionist's voice grew cold. 'We don't do that here,' she said, according to Keener. ...[T]he ripple effect of Wallace's disappearance highlights a national problem that goes beyond policy: The shortage of doctors trained and willing to care for transgender people, particularly in rural or right-wing areas, where patients frequently rely on informal networks and word-of-mouth to find care."
[CN: Racism; whitesplaining] Afua Hirsch at the Guardian: I've Had Enough of White People Who Try to Deny My Experience. "To be black, in a society that invented race for the specific purpose of dehumanising people who are black, and then invented an equally formidable system of denial, is to carry the burden of history that others would rather forget. I found myself having to explain this reality last week, on the Sky News show The Pledge, in what I had hoped would be a debate about the utility of Trump's 'shithole countries' remark, and the racism of Jo Marney, girlfriend of the Ukip leader. Remarkably, given the premise, the argument became a race to the bottom. 'Does racism exist any more?' my white co-panelists wanted to know. They thought not. There are so many ways to prove the simple falsehood of this belief, it's hard to know where to start."
[CN: Class warfare] Monique Judge at the Root: Bank of America Can Kick Rocks: Here Are Some Free (or Low-Fee) Checking Alternatives. "Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank by assets, decided this month that providing free checking accounts to lower-income customers was too much of a burden to bear and removed the option from its account offerings. Customers must now either maintain a daily balance of $1,500, have a direct deposit of $250 or more, or pay a monthly fee of $12. I'm going to guess that if you don't have a direct deposit of $250 or more going into your account, $12 being taken out of it is going to hurt a bit. There is no shame in that. A great many people are just one missed paycheck away from financial disaster. This is the country in which we live. No one, however, should be penalized for that. If Bank of America wants to put its foot on the neck of already marginalized people, then The Root is here to provide you with some alternatives to free checking accounts."
[CN: Class warfare] Matt Krupnick at the Guardian: 'People Will Sign Anything': How Legal Odds Are Stacked Against the Evicted. "Just 1% of New York City housing court defendants were represented by an attorney in 2013, compared to 95% of landlords, according to a recent city report. It is a situation that is echoed nationwide. But recently New York, which handles at least 150,000 eviction cases annually, became the first city in the United States to guarantee evicted tenants the use of an attorney. In the Massachusetts city of Quincy, a pilot project to provide lawyers to tenants led to two-thirds of represented tenants staying in their homes, compared to one-third of unrepresented tenants. And those with lawyers received almost five times the financial benefit, such as damages and cancellation of past rent. 'In housing court, it makes a tremendous difference,' said John Pollock, a Baltimore attorney who leads the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. 'When you introduce a defendant's attorney to the process, it changes the expectations.'"
* * *
[CN: Sexual harassment and assault. Covers entire section.]
Tracy Connor at NBC News: Gymnastics Doctor Larry Nassar Sentenced to Up to 175 Years for Sex Abuse.
After a remarkable hearing that featured gut-wrenching statements from 156 of his accusers, former Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison for molesting young girls under the guise of treatment.
"I wouldn't send my dogs to you, sir," Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said in the Ingham County, Michigan, courtroom where Nassar was forced to listen to victims for seven days before learning his fate.
...Nassar, 54, agreed to a minimum 40-year sentence when he pleaded guilty last year to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual misconduct in Ingham County. He still faces sentencing in Eaton County for three more counts, and he's already been sentenced to 60 years in federal prison for possession of child pornography.
"I signed your death warrant," Aquilina said.
...The judge took out a six-page letter he sent the court last week in which he insisted what he had done to the victims "was medical not sexual," that he was a "good doctor" and the victim of a media frenzy, and that prosecutors had pressured him to to admit to things he had not done.
"'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'" she read, her voice full of scorn.
...Although Nassar admitted he molested seven girls — including a family friend, starting when she was 6 — the judge allowed all accusers to speak before she announced the penalty. She could not have imagined the result: a wall-to-wall outpouring of anger, grief, and demands for accountability from world-famous athletes to unknown teenagers.
"I feel nauseous even standing in front of you," 18-year-old Kaylee Lorincz told Nassar, who sat in the witness box crying. "Like the feeling as if I'm being assaulted by you all over again."
Lorincz, who said she was 13 when [she was abused], told Nassar she didn't need an apology. What she and the other victims wanted, she said, was accountability from the institutions that employed him.
"I only hope that when you get a chance to speak, you tell us who knew what and when they knew it," she said. "If you truly want us to heal, you will do this for us."
A day earlier, Brooke Hylek offered another suggest to Nassar.
"Enjoy hell," she said.
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina tossing #LarryNassar's pathetic letter aside is everything. pic.twitter.com/z5s3KGlOIr
— Brittany Stephanis (@bmstephanis) January 24, 2018
🔥 🔥 🔥
Emma Graham-Harrison at the Guardian: U.S. Military Fails to Tackle Sexual Abuse of Children by Afghan Allies, Report Finds. "The U.S. military showed little interest for years in tackling widespread sexual abuse of children by Afghan security forces it still funds and trains, according to a newly declassified report by a US government watchdog. The exact scale of the problem remains unclear due to a lack of guidance on how to respond to suspected cases, a lack of training on how to report them, and in some cases reluctance to do so for fear of reprisals, said the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) in the report. 'The full extent of child sexual assault committed by Afghan security forces may never be known,' the report from SIGAR said. But two-thirds of the individuals and organisations interviewed for the recently declassified report said they were aware of 'child sexual assault incidents or related exploitation by Afghan security forces,' the watchdog said. The investigation was requested by 93 members of Congress, after an article in the New York Times warned that child sex assault was 'rampant' among Afghan forces."
Tom Ley at Deadspin: WWE Releases Enzo Amore Following Rape Allegation. "Pro wrestler Enzo Amore, whose real name is Eric Arndt, was released by WWE today. In a statement announcing his suspension yesterday, WWE said that the organization has 'has zero tolerance for matters involving sexual harassment or sexual assault.' Before WWE's announcement, Pro Wrestling Sheet reported that Arndt is currently being investigated by Arizona police in connection with a rape allegation. ...According to ABC 15, local police have confirmed that they are investigating Arndt, and that the alleged incident took place on Oct. 19, 2017 at the Clarendon Hotel and Spa. FightfulOnline is reporting that Arndt was aware of the charges against him but did not disclose them to WWE."
So, just to recap: World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. is apparently taking sexual assault more seriously than the U.S. military.
Jonathan Tamari at the Philly Inquirer: Pat Meehan Says He Saw Younger Aide as 'a Soul Mate' But Denies Harassment. "U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan acknowledged Tuesday that he had a deep 'affection' for a younger aide and told her last year that he saw her as 'a soul mate,' but said he never pursued a romantic relationship with the woman and, despite paying her a secret settlement, denied her claims of sexual harassment. ...Meehan confirmed the outline of the Times story, which said the married 62-year-old expressed his romantic desires to his aide after she began a serious relationship with someone else, then grew hostile when she did not reciprocate. ...The report by the New York Times was amplified in part because as a member of the House Ethics Committee, Meehan had been helping review sexual harassment claims against several other representatives." Whoooooops.
Kieran Corcoran at Business Insider: 'An Incessant Stream of Harassment': Undercover FT Reporter Describes High-Powered Charity Dinner Where She Was Groped 'Several Times'. "The Financial Times journalist who went undercover as a hostess at a seedy, men-only gathering of Britain's elite described the experience as 'an incessant stream of harassment.' Madison Marriage, who is an accounting and tax correspondent for the newspaper, was hired to work at the Presidents Club Charity Dinner at London's Dorchester Hotel, which took place last Thursday. Along with around 130 other women, she was told to wear a revealing black dress, matching underwear, and high heels while entertaining guests from the highest echelons of business, the media, sport, and entertainment. ...In an interview with the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire, Marriage described the 'uncomfortable' experience, and said she was personally groped several times."
David Folkenflik at NPR: New York 'Daily News' Exec Investigated After Harassment Complaint. "A top editor at the New York Daily News has been accused of sexual harassment and is now under investigation by the paper's parent company after inquiries by NPR. Managing Editor Robert Moore has been accused of creating a sexualized atmosphere, pressuring women for attention, and punishing those who objected. Tronc would not say whether he remains on the job or has been suspended or placed on leave. ...Moore is the second Tronc newspaper executive in four days to be put under investigation owing to NPR's reporting. Last week, Los Angeles Times Publisher Ross Levinsohn went on leave after Tronc started an investigation of him too, following an NPR report that he had been a defendant in two sexual harassment suits in earlier jobs and faced accusations of misconduct toward women. Levinsohn initially stayed on the job but within a day had taken what was called a voluntary leave of absence."
Emily Peck at the Huffington Post: Five Women Sue Monster Energy over Abusive, Discriminatory Culture.
Even as he awaits a criminal trial for allegedly strangling his girlfriend during a business trip in 2016, Brent Hamilton is still the head of music marketing at Monster Energy, the multibillion-dollar beverage company partly owned by Coca-Cola.Fucking hell. And, as we are all now painfully aware, if we weren't already, this is hardly an anomaly.
John Kenneally is a vice president at Monster despite three women accusing him of bullying, harassment and retaliation. They say he actively undermined their reputations and forced them out of the company. HuffPost obtained text messages he sent to one of these women, in which he described her as a 'whore,' made a racially charged comment about 'black dicks,' and used the term 'bitch' to refer to both her and another female employee.
Another manager, Phillip Deitrich, regularly humiliated a female subordinate in front of co-workers and sabotaged her ability to work effectively, according to a sex discrimination lawsuit she filed. He still has a job. She left the company.
Hamilton, Kenneally, and Deitrich are at the center of four lawsuits that women filed against Monster last year. Hamilton stands accused of assault, and the three lawsuits involving the other two men are about sexual discrimination, HuffPost has learned.
A fifth lawsuit, filed in 2016 by a woman who worked in the company's human resource department, alleges she experienced harassment that was enabled by the company's female former head of HR.
HuffPost interviewed all five women who have sued the company, which is best known for its highly caffeinated energy drink. A sixth woman, a former employee who says she was also mistreated, declined to go on the record because she wants to protect her privacy.
The women's lawsuits and personal stories paint a detailed and disturbing picture of what systemic sex discrimination does to women's lives and careers. Women at Monster allege that they were punished for speaking up, saying their professional reputations were tarnished and careers derailed. Egregious behavior by mainly male executives went without consequence.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Garrison Keillor Is Also a Liar
[Content Note: Sexual harassment and assault.]
Here is a thing that was true yesterday, is true today, and will be true tomorrow: People who sexually harass and/or assault other people lie about it.
They might lie by denying altogether having done the thing(s) of which they are accused, but, they are equally, if not more, likely to lie about something of which they are accused by minimizing its gravity.
Remember: No one is more intimately familiar with the rape culture, and how to exploit it to their advantage, than someone who wants to commit sexual harassment and/or assault.
And one of the ways they exploit it is avoiding outright denials in favor of conceding that something happened, but that it was either consensual or no big deal, thus framing their accuser as vengeful, oversensitive, mistaken, and/or lying.
All of which the rape culture has already entrained us to believe about accusers. Especially female accusers.
By confessing to something "awkward" or "misunderstood," but by no means criminal, the sexual harasser and/or assaulter positions themself as the honest one — because people inclined to afford them the benefit of the doubt will eagerly believe that a truly guilty person would deny anything happened at all.
Why confess to anything? the people who want to extend good faith to accused abusers will wonder, answering their own question in its very asking.
Which brings me to Garrison Keillor, a textbook case in the dynamic I'm describing.
When Keillor was sacked in November, for unspecified "sexual misconduct," he sent an email to Minneapolis Star Tribune in which he described his offense thus: "I put my hand on a woman's bare back. I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called."
He was just consoling a friend. It was an accident for which he apologized multiple times. She assured him it was no big deal, until that bitch called an attorney.
That was his version of events. Minnesota Public Radio's investigation has somewhat different findings, ahem.
MPR News has interviewed more than 60 people who worked with or crossed professional paths with Keillor. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work in the industry or feared repercussions from Keillor or his attorneys.The investigation found "a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized, or belittled." It did not find that Keillor accidentally put his hand on a woman's bare back and that she is a vindictive hysteric who decided to report him to a company that subsequently fired him for no reason.
The revelations create a portrait of Keillor more complicated than that of the folksy, avuncular storyteller whose brand of humor appealed to millions of listeners. They suggest a star who seemed heedless of the power imbalance that gave him an advantage in his relationships with younger women. They also raise questions about whether the company knew enough — or should have known enough — to stop the behavior of the personality who drove much of its success.
...In an interview with MPR News Tuesday afternoon, [Jon McTaggart, president and CEO of MPR and American Public Media Group] said the company's separation of business interests from Keillor came after it received allegations of "dozens" of sexually inappropriate incidents involving Keillor and a woman who worked for him on A Prairie Home Companion. He said the allegations included requests for sexual contact and descriptions of unwanted sexual touching.
Sexual harassers and assaulters lie. That is what they do. And the reason they do it is to recruit their fans or friends or random folks into being their co-conspirators.
Failing to believe victims abets abuse. So does believing abusers when they lie.
Mueller Is Still Investigating
So, there is a lot of news about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation this morning. Let's take it one piece at a time.
1. Carol E. Lee at NBC News: Flynn Kept FBI Interview Concealed from White House, Trump. There are three key takeaways from this story.
First, that the White House didn't know that Michael Flynn met with the FBI until two days after it happened, and only then because then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates told White House Counsel Don McGahn — a conversation during which Yates warned McGahn that Flynn had (supposedly) lied to Vice President Mike Pence and others about his communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, thus putting him in a "serious compromise situation."
Second, that Mueller has already completed a number of interviews with high-ranking officials:
By the end of 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller's team had spoken with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, former FBI Director James Comey, and numerous members of Trump's campaign and White House inner circle. Flynn pleaded guilty last month to lying to the FBI during his January 24 interview and is cooperating with the Russia investigation.So Mueller is zeroing in on possible obstruction, which is no surprise. Renato Mariotti, a candidate for Illinois Attorney General and former federal prosecutor, notes that, also per NBC News, "Mueller will interview Bannon by the end of the month and is seeking to interview Trump. This tells us that Mueller is close to wrapping up his obstruction investigation, given that he's preparing to interview the key witnesses."
NBC News also has learned that former acting attorney general Sally Yates, who informed the White House about Flynn's interview two days after it took place, has cooperated with the special counsel. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who was allegedly asked by Trump to lean on Comey to drop his investigation, has also been interviewed, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
One person familiar with the matter described Pompeo, Coats, and Rogers as "peripheral witnesses" to the Comey firing.
If it's accurate that we're nearing the end of the obstruction piece of the investigation, I find it both curious and consternating that the name Mike Pence isn't showing up anywhere on the radar. I'll come back to that.
Third and finally: One other piece of info to note from the NBC story: "One of the two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn was Peter Strzok, whom Mueller removed from the Russia investigation last summer after the Justice Department's inspector general's office found he'd written text messages to a colleague criticizing Trump, according to people familiar with the matter."
Strzok is one of the two FBI employees who texted unfavorably about Trump and has served as the centerpiece of a Republican conspiracy theory about bias corrupting Mueller's team. Just yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson appeared on Fox News to peddle some bullshit about Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI lawyer with whom he was texting, communicating about a "secret society" working to oust Trump.
Sen Ron Johnson claims "informant" who has news about the FBI "Secret Society" working to overthrow President Trump. pic.twitter.com/QzGhXBEUYD
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 24, 2018
Johnson: —that secret society? We have, we have an informant, that's talking about a group that were holding secret meetings off-site. There's, there's so much smoke here; there's so much suspicion—Cool interview.
Fox News Anchor Bret Baier: Boy, let's stop there. A secret society; secret meetings off-site of the Justice Department.
Johnson: Correct.
Baier: And you have an informant saying that.
Johnson: Yes.
Baier: Is there anything more about that?
Johnson: No, we have to dig into it.
I point this out because the Republicans will continue to try to use Strzok to discredit Mueller, and we'll probably be hearing a lot of nonsense about how the Flynn investigation was corrupt since Strzok did the interview.
2. Katelyn Polantz at CNN: [Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] New Signs Gates May Be Negotiating with Mueller's Team.
Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates has quietly added a prominent white-collar attorney, Tom Green, to his defense team, signaling that Gates' approach to his not-guilty plea could be changing behind the scenes.Gates is a longtime associate of Paul Manafort and was arrested and charged with him in October.
Green, a well-known Washington defense lawyer, was seen at special counsel Robert Mueller's office twice last week. CNN is told by a source familiar with the matter that Green has joined Gates' team.
...Green's involvement suggests that there is an ongoing negotiation between the defendant's team and the prosecutors. At this stage, with Gates' charges filed and bail set, talks could concern the charges and Gates' plea. The defense and prosecution are currently working together on discovery of evidence.
Rick Gates may have “flipped” and joined Mueller’s team. If true, that’s very bad news for Manafort. Given the weight of the charges against Gates, cooperating is likely his best option. https://t.co/PBKy9MyvxX
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) January 24, 2018
So, let me pause here to repeat myself: The optimist's view of this news is that it's reassuring, as it seems as though Mueller is being very methodical and deliberate while also moving as quickly as he can.
The cynic's view is that these strategic leaks are designed to reassure us that something meaningful is still underway, and gives The Resistance a basket in which to put its hope for accountability eggs, thus deterring civil unrest while Trump and the Republican Party continue to usher in authoritarian rule.
No matter your position, optimistic or cynical, we all need to be concerned about how, the longer this investigation drags on, the worse the best possible outcome gets. Even if Mueller's investigation results in Trump's removal (or resignation) from office somewhere down the road, which is still incredibly unlikely, how much irreversible damage will be done in the interim, with a vice-president and his entire party positioned to protect every erosion of our norms and liberties?
A vice-president whose name still isn't anywhere near this investigation, despite the fact that he was hand-picked by Manafort, led the presidential transition team, damn well knew what Flynn was up to, and continues to be right in the thick of everything this corrupt administration is doing.
So, yes, news news news about Mueller's investigation. But can it mean anything, if it doesn't touch Pence? Will it ever result in anything meaningful at all, or will it have just served — intentionally or effectively — as a distraction, as a way of convincing us that the rule of law still stands in this country, while the president and his party quietly dismantled it?
Because the stories of corruption, demanding investigation, never end. This morning alone, there are two new reports related to the firing of James Comey:
1. Caitlin MacNeal at TPM: Trump Asked FBI Official Who He Voted for in 2016 Election. "During a May 2016 meeting in the Oval Office shortly after James Comey was fired as FBI director, [Donald] Trump asked the new acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe, who he voted for in the 2016 election... McCabe and Trump met more than once in the week after Comey was fired, according to the New York Times. In one of those meetings, Trump asked who McCabe voted for, to which McCabe replied that he did not vote, current and former officials told the Washington Post. Trump then brought up the fact that McCabe's wife received a campaign contribution from a super PAC associated with former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2015 for her Virginia state senate race, according to the Post."
2. Sari Horwitz and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post: FBI Director, Under Pressure to Make Changes, Is Replacing Comey Aides. "FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, who has been under political pressure to remove top officials at the bureau, is filling two senior positions previously held by people who served under former director James B. Comey. Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who is acting head of the Justice Department's national security division, has been selected to be the FBI's next general counsel, according to three people familiar with the matter. He replaces James Baker, who was reassigned late last year. ...Wray also will replace his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, with Zachary J. Harmon, a colleague from the law firm where Wray was a partner before joining the bureau."
One thing that happened nearly two years ago. One thing that is happening now. There is so much to investigate — and it will never end, if the investigation never ends.
Trump just continues to oversee an administration rife with abuses of power, undermining our democratic institutions and norms at every turn.
If this investigation is to have any meaning, if there are ever to be consequences for anything, Mueller needs to draw a line. Sooner rather than later. Of course these things take time, and there must be a balance between thoroughness and haste.
But this investigation feels increasingly out of balance to me.
I value a meticulous investigation and I don't want Mueller's team doing sloppy work that yields no results. But I also value urgency — and the delivery of effective results that put a stop to this pressing threat to the republic.
Happy Birthday, Fiona!
Well, the news this morning is already terrible AF, so here is a video the Cincinnati Zoo just published of baby hippo Fiona getting a birthday cake made of watermelon and pineapple for her first birthday, while visitors sing "Happy Birthday" to her. Because she is a generous baby hippo, she shares her birthday cake with her mama.
[Video Description: As described above. There's really no more to it than that, aside from the fact that, after they're done singing, the onlookers take pictures of the hippos, who are SO CUTE.]
Put that in the bank, because the rest of the morning is gonna be rough.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Drazil: "What helps you feel better?"
It depends on what is making me feel bad. Sometimes I need to be alone; sometimes I need company. Sometimes I need quiet time with people I trust (and snuggles from pets); sometimes I need raucous laughter. Sometimes I need to do something about it; sometimes I need to redirect my mind and my energy toward anything else. Sometimes there's nothing for it but time.
