Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker FloraFlora: ""What is your favorite word that you or someone else says when they start to say a swear word and then self-censor for whatever reason, and how did you come across it?"
The only thing that comes to mind at the moment is my own "flying flunderton," which I conceived as an alternative to "flying fuck" for when kids are in earshot, lol.
Wednesday Links!
This list o' links brought to you by dragonfruit.
Recommended Reading:
Geraldine DeRuiter at the Everywhereist: [Content Note: Misogynist abuse; threats] What Happened When I Tried Talking to Twitter Abusers
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the Guardian: [CN: White supremacy] An Open Letter to the NFL's Owners
Genevieve Burgess at Pajiba: [CN: White supremacy; bullying] I Have No Sympathy for White Americans Complaining About Being Ethnic Minorities
Ragen Chastain at Dances with Fat: [CN: Fat hatred] This Is My "After" Body
Alice Bolin at Vulture: [CN: Discussion of violence as entertainment; hostility to consent] The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime
Rachele Merliss at Bust: Constance Wu's Message About Crazy Rich Asians Highlights the Importance of Representation
Matt Wilstein at the Daily Beast: [CN: Spoilers for previous seasons] Inside Better Call Saul Season 4's "Hurtling" Sprint Toward Breaking Bad
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
More Thoughts on Playing the Woman Card
The Atlantic ran a piece by Lara Bazelon, describing the sexism and bias that many female trial attorneys face.
It's worth reading in its entirety, not just because it highlights the way male attorneys sometimes leverage sexism against their female opponents, but because the experience of being a trial attorney parallels the experience of being a politician in several ways.
For instance, just as trial attorneys craft a narrative from the facts in service of swaying decision-makers toward a favored outcome, so do politicians. Just as trial attorneys can tap into the implicit and explicit identity-based biases of juries and judges in constructing their opposing counsel and clients as flawed and untrustworthy, so too can politicians with respect to their opponents.
And, as much as some people like to frame both trials and political contests as one-on-one boxing matches with the outcome determined solely on the merits of the attorney and politician, it continues to matter to juries, judges, and the public who tells the trial or campaign narrative.
For instance, from Bazelon's piece:
When I asked Faiella for a copy of Doyle's motion, she said that she could send me examples from more than two dozen cases across her 30-year career. She said that at least 90 percent of her courtroom opponents are male, and that they file a 'no-crying motion' as a matter of course. Judges always deny them, but the damage is done: The idea that she will unfairly deploy her feminine wiles to get what she wants has been planted in the judge's mind.Bam, so right away the female attorney is on notice that the judge is primed to view any display of emotion as hysterical.
And further:
Let's start with the clothes. In my office, and in the U.S. Attorney's Office, where the federal prosecutors worked, the men stuck to a basic uniform: a dark suit, a crisp button-down shirt, an inoffensive tie, and a close shave or neatly trimmed beard. If they adhered to that model, their physicality was unremarkable — essentially invisible.A man in a suit and tie, particularly if he is white, is perceived as "human neutral" in both the courtroom and the political sphere. Almost everyone else is viewed as an aberration. And, as Bazelon continues, this framing is pervasive:
Women's clothing choices, by contrast, were the subject of intense scrutiny from judges, clerks, marshals, jurors, other lawyers, witnesses, and clients. I had to be attractive, but not in a provocative way. At one trial, I took off my suit jacket at the counsel table as I reviewed my notes before the jury was seated. It was a sweltering day in Los Angeles, and the air-conditioning had yet to kick in. The judge, an older man with a mane of white hair, jabbed a finger in my direction and bellowed, "Are you stripping in my courtroom, Ms. Bazelon?" Heads swiveled, and I looked down at my sleeveless blouse, turning scarlet.
What makes the issue especially vexing are the sources of the bias — judges, senior attorneys, juries, and even the clients themselves. Sexism infects every kind of courtroom encounter, from pretrial motions to closing arguments — a glum ubiquity that makes clear how difficult it will be to eradicate gender bias not just from the practice of law, but from society as a whole.Opponents of female politicians often complain when women point out sexism they experience. It's "playing the woman card," they cry, as though candidates do not have lived, identity-based experiences. The unspoken rule behind this critique seems to be that if cishet white men don't experience something, nobody else gets to mention it.
Critics of Hillary Clinton, for instance, sometimes claimed that her supporters framed everything as misogyny in the 2016 election. Yet, just as sexism pervades every aspect of a courtroom encounter, I believe it's impossible to disentangle bias from even legitimate critiques of female politicians because the legitimate critiques are invariably layered upon, and weaved within, the illegitimate, misogynistic critiques in ways that make women seem exponentially worse than their cishet white male opponents.
The legitimate critiques of progressive female politicians also often serve as a gateway rationale for "progressive" misogynists to hold female politicians to vastly higher standards than their male opponents and, ultimately, dismiss them from consideration altogether.
You know how it goes: I'd vote for a woman, just not that woman.
It's why I will always believe that Donald Trump was the candidate for many of the men who didn't care if people called him a misogynist, and Bernie Sanders was the candidate for many of the men who did. Sometimes I wonder how much of The One True Revolution is built upon the reality that many misogynists who were anti-Trump simply needed, and found, in Bernie Sanders a candidate who wasn't the woman. But, when white men continue to dominate the narration of U.S. politics, who within the mainstream media will tell you that?
In many ways, male and female politicians and trial attorneys are playing the same games by entirely different sets of unwritten rules, rules that the populace widely fails to acknowledge as real phenomenon and that also twist and turn depending on other axes of identity — race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, body size, and more. I also notice that many critics of female politicians love to cite their purported "unpopularity," "untrustworthiness," and "unlikeability," devoid of the context of these biases. Many people want to believe that a female politician's loss rests solely on her shoulders and is not a reflection of a system that has been rigged for cishet white men since its founding.
Our justice system and our political climate are worse off for it. I don't know what all the answers are to rectifying this situation, particularly when we must adhere to the unwritten rules — rules that prop up the system — in order to win, both in politics and the courtroom.
What we must continue to do is to hold politicians and trial attorneys accountable when they leverage these biases for their own careers and political gain, at least through critique, even if it it's met through cries of "playing the woman card." And, importantly, it's why cishet white men need to listen and believe us when we say that these unwritten rules and biases exist as a fundamental part of our lived experiences, because cishet white men have a vested interest in the status quo.
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!
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I recently made chocolate chip cookies with molten chocolate middles. At least, that was the idea, but the truffle centers sort of melted into the cookie batter instead. They were still tremendously tasty!
Ingredients:
Cookie batter (either made from scratch or store-bought)
Lindt chocolate truffles
Vanilla ice cream
Directions:
Spray or grease your muffin tin. Preheat oven to 350. Line each cup in muffin tin with a layer of cookie dough — not too thin and not too thick. Place a chocolate truffle in the middle. Cover with another medium-thick layer of cookie dough. Bake for 15-20 minutes, or until tops are cooked through and starting to get brown. Let rest for at least 10 minutes. Pop out with a rubber scraper and serve with ice cream!
Note: We kept the leftovers unrefrigerated and uncovered, and they were still good several days later.
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 559
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.
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Earlier today by me: On Day One of the Manafort Trial and Trump Supports Homegrown Election Meddling and We've Only Seen the Beginning of Foreign Meddling.
Here are some more things in the news today...
[Content Note: Nativism; abuse; trauma. Covers entire section.]
Cady Voge at the Guardian: Family Separations: Surviving Danger Only to Suffer Trauma at the U.S. Border. "Nine months after entering the U.S., [13-year-old] Aaron still stutters when he talks, and he refuses to speak to his father. 'The relationship we had is broken; the trust we had is broken,' Carlos says. Their story is a familiar one of leaving a homeland to avoid falling prey to gang violence, but ending up traumatised by their experiences arriving at the border. After facing widespread backlash over a policy of child separation at the border, the U.S. government is now seeking to reunite families. But parents and mental health professionals say the effects of the trauma of separation will persist long after parents and children have found each other again."
Rebekah Entralgo at ThinkProgress: HHS Official Says He Warned About the Trauma Family Separation Would Cause and Was Ignored. "Jonathan White, an executive director in the office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday about the family separation crisis. The former deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and a trained clinical social worker, White said he was involved in multiple discussions about immigration policies that could result in the separation of families throughout the course of a year and repeatedly 'raised a number of concerns…about any policy which would result in family separation.'"
Or maybe he wasn't ignored. Maybe, as I keep saying, malice is actually a policy objective of this administration. https://t.co/Zr5FLC1LYp
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 31, 2018
Julie Hirschfeld Davis at the New York Times: White House Weighs Another Reduction in Refugees Admitted to U.S.
The White House is considering a second sharp reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, picking up where [Donald] Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program intended to offer protection to the world's most vulnerable people, according to two former government officials and another person familiar with the talks.Rage seethe boil. I'm so goddamned tired of Stephen Miller. Fuck that guy.
This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the president's senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off on deep cuts.
Last year, after a fierce internal battle that pitted Mr. Miller, who advocated a limit as low as 15,000, against officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Pentagon, Mr. Trump set the cap at 45,000, a historic low. Under one plan currently being discussed, no more than 25,000 refugees could be resettled in the United States next year, a cut of more than 40 percent from this year's limit. It would be the lowest number of refugees admitted to the country since the creation of the program in 1980.
For those who say Trump is okay with legal immigration you’re wrong. Trump hates all immigration. https://t.co/XbHLX9lQHt
— Mana Yegani (@Law_Mana) July 31, 2018
Gabe Ortiz at Daily Kos: Trump Officials Refuse to Answer Whether They'd Put Their Own Kids in Migrant Family Jails. "Trump administration officials stammered and refused to answer U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono's question about whether they would send their own children to the migrant family jails that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Matthew Albence tried to claim during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday are like 'summer camps.' 'You would send your child to these centers?' the bad-ass from Hawaii asked Trump officials who were testifying about the administration's barbaric 'zero tolerance' policy kidnapping children from parents at the border. 'Yes? No?' ...Watch their stammering in the video [at the link]."
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[CN: Class warfare] Sarah Varney at NPR: Puerto Rico's Wounded Medicaid Program Faces Even Deeper Cuts. "Blue tarps still dot rooftops, homes lack electricity needed to refrigerate medicines, and clinics chip away at debts incurred from running generators. Yet despite these residual effects from last year's devastating hurricanes, Puerto Rico is moving ahead with major cuts to its health care safety net that will affect more than a million of its poorest residents. The government here needs to squeeze $840.2 million in annual savings from Medicaid by 2023, a reduction required by the U.S. territory's agreement with the federal government, as the island claws its way back from fiscal oblivion." Goddammit.
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..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2018
Tom McCarthy at the Guardian: Trump Pushes Jeff Sessions to End Mueller's Russia Investigation 'Right Now'. "Donald Trump appeared to order his attorney general Jeff Sessions to pull the plug 'right now' on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump campaign ties to Russia with a tweet on Wednesday morning. ...The phrase '17 angry Democrats' is Trump's shorthand for a conspiracy theory imputing political bias to the special counsel's team. Mueller is a Republican, his direct superior is a Republican, and his teams includes members who have made political donations in the past to both Democrats and Republicans. Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, expressed alarm at the president's order. 'The President of the United States just called on his Attorney General to put an end to an investigation in which the President, his family and campaign may be implicated,' Schiff tweeted. 'This is an attempt to obstruct justice hiding in plain sight. America must never accept it.'"
Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other highly prominent and respected political leaders. He worked for me for a very short time. Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion - a Hoax!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2018
Dan Mangan at CNBC: Trump Accuses Government of Not Telling Him Former Campaign Boss Paul Manafort 'Was Under Investigation'. "The tweet seemed to suggest that unnamed people in the government should have warned Trump about hiring Manafort before he did in 2016. ...He followed up his tweet about Manafort with another one in which he raged: 'Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign, one of the most successful in history, is a TOTAL HOAX.'"
So, everything is fine with the very stable genius currently occupying the Oval Office.
Speaking of people who work for Russia...
Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast: Accused Russian Spy Maria Butina Told American CEO: Send Cash to Moscow. "Maria Butina, the accused Russian operative, didn't just allegedly cultivate the National Rifle Association on behalf of the Kremlin. The 29-year-old Russian national also braced one of America's best-known businessmen, pushing him to increase his investments in his bank in Moscow — a bank that was also facing financial collapse. The encounter...indicates that courting American politicos wasn't her only mission. She also took a keen interest in contentious, complex matters involving international finance — all while attempting to influence the primary financier of what would become Washington's most Trump-friendly foreign-policy think tank."
Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier at BuzzFeed: Russian "Agent" and a GOP Operator Left a Trail of Cash, Documents Reveal. "Anti-fraud investigators at Wells Fargo flagged the transactions — by Paul Erickson, a conservative consultant from South Dakota, and Maria Butina, who is in jail awaiting trial on charges of secretly acting as a Russian agent — as 'suspicious,' noting in some cases that they could find no 'apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose' to explain them. Now counterintelligence officers say the duo's banking activity could provide a road map of back channels to powerful American entities such as the National Rifle Association, and information about the Kremlin's attempt to sway the 2016 US presidential election."
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Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: Trump Is Leading a 'Hate Movement' Against the Media. "On Tuesday, CNN's Jim Acosta — one of [Donald] Trump's favorite human targets — and other members of the media were abused and heckled by Trump supporters at a rally in Florida. Videos of the event — see here or here — show the crowd at one point loudly chanting 'CNN sucks,' with many angrily brandishing middle fingers in the direction of the living, breathing members of the press corps. Trump's son, Eric Trump, tweeted out video of the 'CNN sucks' chant, with the hashtag #Truth, while directly singling out Acosta. And the president himself retweeted his son. The president's son is actively encouraging Trump supporters to direct rage and abuse toward working journalists, and the president is joining in, helping to spread the word."
IMPORTANT: A Republican lawyer representing Steve Bannon, Don McGahn, Reince Priebus in the Russia probe and Judge Alex Kozinski on harassment allegations is deciding which of Brett Kavanaugh's records are turned over. This has NEVER been done. This is the National Archives' job.
— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) August 1, 2018
[CN: Sexual assault; coercion] Andy Towle at Towleroad: GOP Lawmaker Used Nude Photos of Ex-Girlfriend to 'Catfish' Men into Having 'Graphic Sexual' Discussions. "Illinois GOP state Rep. Nick Sauer has been accused by an ex-girlfriend of creating a fake Instagram account using nude photos of her in order to 'catfish' men into having 'graphic conversations of a sexual nature.' The Chicago Police Department is investigating. ...Kelly told Politico that she met Sauer, who is seeking re-election to a second term, on Tinder and the two began a two-year relationship which ended after she discovered he was cheating on her. She discovered that he had been using the nude photos she had shared with him on his fake Instagram account when a man who thought he had been communicating with her reached out to her and told her about it."
[CN: Violent misogyny] Cameron Joseph at TPM: Top House Republican: Man Killed His Wife 'Because The Woman Was Unfair'.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the influential House Rules Committee, told a social conservative activist who was pushing him to support the end of no-fault divorce that the way the family court system in Dallas used to process cases had led to some tragic consequences. To illustrate his point that the system had badly needed change, he used a baffling example.JFC.
"Dallas County, a few years ago, went through a number of terrible shootings. And I gathered together, they were at the time Republican district judges, and I said 'guys, men, women, we've now had I think four or five shootings.' One of them was from a big-time guy in Highland Park, who went and killed his wife, just gunned her down. And that was because the judge was unfair, and the woman was unfair. And she demanded something, and he was out. And it was frustration," Sessions said during a local GOP event earlier this summer. "So now we go through the court system. And unfortunately lives have to be lost and there has to be tragedy — there now is a better system."
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And finally:
"Jane Sanders wears many hats at the institute... The institute is being run by her son, David Driscoll, a political neophyte who previously worked at Burton Snowboards. His estimated salary for the job is $100,000." https://t.co/fNmDXbSuaE
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 31, 2018
Honestly, all I can do at this point is laugh all the mirthless laughter in the entire multiverse at people who still think this guy is the Flawless Progressive Immortal they keep insisting he is. He's a grifter, and his whole family is a bunch of grifters. Who each probably get paid in $27 checks every half hour.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
We've Only Seen the Beginning of Foreign Meddling
While the president and his party of Democracy Killers continue to pursue their own special brand of domestic election meddling via voter suppression, gerrymandering, eradicating campaign finance regulations, media manipulation and consolidation, and various other fuckery, foreign election meddling continues apace. And of course the two are not mutually exclusive, as Republican indifference to foreign interference to their benefit allows the latter to proliferate.
One of the ways that Russia's interference manifests between election cycles is the relentless exploitation of differences between an increasingly polarized populace. It's no secret that Russian trolls are working very hard to create a massive fissure between the U.S. left and right, which becomes an irreparable break.
Which is why the juxtaposition of these two stories I happened to read back-to-back this morning is so chilling (emphases mine):
1. Oliver Roeder at FiveThirtyEight: Why We're Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets.
FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it's the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls' actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught.2. Isaac Stanley-Becker at the Washington Post: 'We Are Q': A Deranged Conspiracy Cult Leaps from the Internet to the Crowd at Trump's 'MAGA' Tour.
...The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. "So far it's only had two brains looking at it," Linvill said of their trove of tweets. "More brains might find God-knows-what."
...Even a simple timeline of these tweets can begin to tell a story of how the trolls operated. For instance, there was a flurry of trolling activity on Oct. 6, 2016. As the Washington Post first pointed out using the Clemson researchers' findings, that may have been related to what happened on Oct. 7, 2016, when WikiLeaks released embarrassing emails from the Clinton campaign. There was another big spike in the summer of 2017, when the Internet Research Agency appeared to have shifted its focus to a specific type of troll — one the researchers call the "Right Troll" — that mimicked stereotypical Trump supporters.
...Right Troll and Left Troll are the meat of the agency's trolling campaign. Right Trolls behave like "bread-and-butter MAGA Americans, only all they do is talk about politics all day long," Linvill said. Left Trolls often adopt the personae of Black Lives Matter activists, typically expressing support for Bernie Sanders and derision for Hillary Clinton, along with "clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout."
..."Russia's attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war," the authors conclude in their paper. "This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war."
..."There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election," Warren said. "I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It's a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America."
"They are trying to divide our country," Linvill added.
Believers in "QAnon," as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. "We are Q," it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a "Q" pattern: "Where we go one we go all."
The symbol appeared on clothing, too. A man and a woman wore matching white T-shirts with the YouTube logo encircled in a blue "Q." The video-sharing website came under criticism this week for unwittingly becoming a platform for baseless claims, first promoted on Twitter and Reddit by QAnon believers, that certain Hollywood celebrities are pedophiles. A search for one of those celebrity's names on Monday returned videos purporting to show his victims sharing their stories.
The prominence of the "Q" symbol turned parts of the audience into a tableau of delusion and paranoia — and offered evidence that QAnon, an outgrowth of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led a gunman to open fire in a D.C. restaurant last year, has leaped from Internet message boards to the president's "Make America Great Again" tour through America.
"Pray Trump mentions Q!" one user wrote on 8chan. He didn't need to. As hazy corners of the Internet buzzed about the president's speech, his appearance became a real-life show of force for the community that has mostly operated behind the veil of anonymity on subreddits.
It is stunning to me how many ppl in this #TRUMPTAMPA crowd have QAnon signs or t-shirts. That is not a healthy sign for GOP or for America.
— Adam Smith (@adamsmithtimes) July 31, 2018
Reading the piece on Russian disinfo trolling, which ends by noting it's still continuing, followed by the piece on the QAnon cult, was jarring.
We are not anywhere near the end of this thing. We are, in fact, at the beginning.
Even if Donald Trump gets ousted, even if Mike Pence follows him out the door, even if the Democrats retake the majority and Nancy Pelosi is made Queen Empress of the United States of Feminism, this isn't going away.
Trump Supports Homegrown Election Meddling
Last night, at yet another Make America Clap for Me Again rally in Florida, Donald Trump said: "We believe that only American citizens should vote in American elections. Which is why the time has come for voter ID, like everything else. Voter ID. If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID. And you need your picture."
First of all, it's not accurate that you need ID to buy groceries, or anything else. You may be asked for an ID if you write a check or use a credit or debit card, but if you pay with cash, no one's asking to look at your ID. It would be considered a gross violation of privacy (and possibly illegal) to require an ID for a cash purchase.
So, big surprise, Trump once again doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Or he does — and is simply knowingly lying in order to try to normalize the idea of voting ID requirements.
Although requiring ID to vote is not unconstitutional, thanks to a challenge brought in my home state of Indiana, it is nonetheless a blatant (and effective) strategy to disenfranchise people without state ID who are disproportionately likely to be Democratic voters: People of color, elderly people, disabled people, and/or people in poverty.
Republicans support voter ID laws because they hate actual democracy. When there are free and fair elections in this country without widespread disenfranchisement and voter suppression, they can't win.
So they support homegrown election meddling — and now the sitting president has (again) openly endorsed it from his podium.
On Day One of the Manafort Trial
Yesterday was the opening day of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort's trial on corruption and fraud charges. Rachel Weiner, Justin Jouvenal, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post have a detailed recap of the happenings on Day One, and here is their brief summary:
On the subject of Tad Devine, it appears as though Devine has made a deal in exchange for his testimony, so we may never get to hear him testify about what he knew and/or thought about the Russian campaign to use Bernie Sanders supporters as agents in their disinformation campaign. We did, however, get to hear him testify about how impressive his pal Manafort is:
- A jury of six men and six women was selected.
- The government presented its opening statement, accusing Manafort of failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars he earned working for a pro Russia political candidate in Ukraine and using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle, including purchasing a $15,000 jacket "made from an ostrich."
- Manafort's defense sought to place the blame on his former business partner, Richard Gates, who they said embezzled money from Manafort.
- Prosecutors called their first witness, Tad Devine, who was Bernie Sanders's chief strategist in the 2016 election.
"Manafort had hired great people, [opening witness Tad Devine] said, and had 'substantial resources …I was really impressed by him.' ...Devine described his relationship with Manafort as 'friendly.'" https://t.co/0RJURE9Uog
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 31, 2018
Yuck. As I've repeatedly observed, we already knew, of course, that Devine and Manafort remain "friendly" — because they were still in communication during the 2016 campaign, to try to orchestrate a debate between Trump and Sanders, explicitly designed to harm Hillary Clinton.
Anyway. Like I noted on Monday, this trial is primarily about Manafort's international corruption, not about collusion while chair of Trump's campaign. Indeed, as Marc Fisher observes at the Washington Post, neither the name "Trump" nor the word "Russia" was even mentioned during the first day of the trial. The focus will largely be on the financial benefits (and attendant frauds) from his entanglement with kleptocrats.
To that end, this piece by Franklin Foer at the Atlantic is very, very good: This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort.
As Communism fell, the former Soviet Union became the scene of one of the biggest heists in history, and the opportunity of a lifetime for Paul Manafort. In Russia, the KGB steered billions into offshore accounts during the dying days of the regime, the beginning of a pattern of plunder best described by the late Karen Dawisha in her instant classic, Putin's Kleptocracy. These funds became the basis for some of the fortunes of those who now appear as characters in the Russiagate scandal. Vladimir Putin himself amassed wealth that totaled more than $40 billion, when Dawisha calculated his haul several years ago. Russians who invested in Trump real estate over the years had many motives. But everything we know about kleptocracy suggests that they were likely attempting to relocate their money to a place where it would both disappear from public view and have the protections that come with the American rule of law.Head on over and read the whole thing.
An important part of this story is Ukraine. Paul Manafort went to work there in 2004 — and the country's ruling party remained his primary client until 2014. During those years, the country hemorrhaged more than $118 billion in illicit financial flows, according to the Kleptocracy Initiative, a think tank that has published invaluable reports about the scourge of corruption. (To set that number in relief, the country's entire gross domestic product in 2013 was $181 billion.) Stealing this money wasn't a victimless crime: It came at the expense of Ukraine's development as a market economy; it sucked funds away from public investment; it eroded faith in democracy and Western institutions. The West hypocritically lectured Ukraine about good government while it profited from Ukrainian oligarchs parking cash in Vienna, London, and New York.
Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs stole these vast fortunes, but they couldn't accomplish the feat on their own. They needed enablers, and in the course of Mueller's prosecution of Manafort, we've come to see how pillars of the American establishment filled this role.
And if you're looking for regular trial updates, follow the WaPo's live coverage of Day Two.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker vashti_lives: "This is one of my favorite small talk questions: Do you believe in ghosts? And, correspondingly, have you ever seen a ghost? Do you know anyone who's ever seen a ghost?"
I don't believe in ghosts and I have never seen one.
However.
One of my aunts had a previous husband who died, and she and my uncle both believed he haunted their house. We'd be sitting in the living room visiting, and we would hear the sound of someone stomping back and forth across the floor upstairs, even though no one was up there. My aunt would tilt her face upward and yell, "Knock it off! You're bein' agitatin'!" and then it would stop. I always found it rather amusing, and completely unexplainable.
Your Best Photograph
If you're a photographer, even if a very amateur one (like myself), and you've got a photo or photos you'd like to share, here's your thread for that!
It doesn't really have to be your best photograph—just one you like!
Please be sure if your photo contains people other than yourself, that you have the explicit consent of the people in the photos before posting them.
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Here's a picture I took recently of the view out my bedroom window from my bed:
I just love this view of the tree and the sky out the window, especially as the sun begins to set. The light makes it look like a painted backdrop at that time of day, which makes the view surreally beautiful — different from how it's beautiful the rest of the day.
I have the previous owners to thank for the lovely curtains, as well as the green cushion on the window bench, which were custom-fit, so they left them behind for us.
"Further Evidence the Kremlin Continues to Exploit Platforms Like Facebook to Sow Division and Spread Disinformation."
Facebook has discovered "bad actors" on its platform, including Instagram, which have been engaged in what they euphemistically term "coordinated inauthentic behavior." The company disclosed having removed 32 pages and accounts as a result of the discovery two weeks ago. The accounts were created between March 2017 and May 2018, and had already amassed large followings and spent a significant sum on Facebook advertising.
Nicholas Fandos and Kevin Roose at the New York Times report:
In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had...been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.A couple of things: Facebook is owed no thanks for ferreting out 32 accounts across the entirety of Facebook and Instagram while under pressure from the FBI, especially when some of those accounts operated undetected for more than a year, even as they were purchasing ads as part of their disinformation campaign.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said that the activity bore some similarities to that of the Internet Research Agency, but that the actors had better disguised their efforts, using VPNs, internet phone services, and third parties to purchase ads for them.
...Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues.
Facebook discovered coordinated activity around issues like a sequel to last year's deadly "Unite the Right" white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Specifically, a page called "Resisters," which interacted with one Internet Research Agency account in 2017, created an event called "No Unite the Right 2 — DC" to serve as a counterprotest to the white nationalist gathering, scheduled to take place in Washington in August. Mr. Gleicher said "inauthentic" administrators for the "Resisters" page went as far as to coordinate with administrators for five other apparently real pages to co-host the event, publicizing details about transportation and other logistics.
...Coordinated activity was also detected around #AbolishICE, a left-wing campaign on social media that seeks to end the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, according to two people briefed on the findings. That echoed efforts in 2016 to fan division around the Black Lives Matter movement.
..."Today's disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation," [Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee] said.
This is clearly the bare minimum of what is needed, and I have zero faith that Facebook is up to the task — or, frankly, willing to fully engage with the task in its demanding scope — of closing the cavernous exploitations in its platform.
Secondly, the fact that Russia is seemingly doubling down on fucking with leftists ahead of the midterms strongly reeks to me of more intent to try to "both sides" election interference out of existence. And big parts of the left are not paying enough attention to how they've been already been played once before to avoid being taken in again.
Discussion Thread: Self-Care
What are you doing to do to take care of yourself today, or in the near future, as soon as you can?
If you are someone who has a hard time engaging in self-care, or figuring out easy, fast, and/or inexpensive ways to treat yourself, and you would like to solicit suggestions, please feel welcome. And, as always, no one should offer advice unless it is solicited.
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I'm going to figure out something indulgent to do for myself. I don't know what it is yet, but all the self-care I've been doing lately has been extremely agitating healthcare-related stuff, requiring countless calls to multiple doctors' offices and various departments at my insurance company, many of which have not even yielded good outcomes.
I try to think about it as important self-care, which it is, but the fact is that it's still exhausting, especially when I'm not feeling well to begin with.
So! My next act of self-care will be something truly calming and enjoyable. As soon as I have the energy to figure out what it is, lol.
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 558
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.
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Earlier today by me: Trump Is Brazenly Setting the Stage to Declare Elections Illegitimate and Still Not Over It.
Here are some more things in the news today...
Today begins the trial of Paul Manafort. Andrea Chalupa has marked the day by doing a terrific Twitter thread with crucial background on Manafort, which begins here:
1. As jury selection in case of Trump’s former campaign manager begins today, launching the first trial of Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference. Manafort has been charged w/tax & bank fraud, laundering $30M in offshore bank accounts: https://t.co/iqlZKTxmco
— Andrea Chalupa (@AndreaChalupa) July 31, 2018
Speaking of collusion, cough... Duncan Campbell at Computer Weekly: Briton Ran Pro-Kremlin Disinformation Campaign That Helped Trump Deny Russian Links.
A British IT manager and former hacker launched and ran an international disinformation campaign that has provided [Donald] Trump with fake evidence and false arguments to deny that Russia interfered to help him win the election.It isn't just right-wing sources who have bought this garbage. As you may recall, Shaker Aphra_Behn called bullshit a year ago on a Nation article promulgating this nonsense.
The campaign is being run from the UK by 39-year-old programmer Tim Leonard, who lives in Darlington, using the false name "Adam Carter." Starting after the 2016 presidential election, Leonard worked with a group of mainly American right-wing activists to spread claims on social media that Democratic "insiders" and non-Russian agents were responsible for hacking the Democratic Party. The hacking attacks had damaged Trump rival Hillary Clinton's campaign.
The claims led to Trump asking then CIA director Mike Pompeo to investigate allegations circulated from Britain that the Russian government was not responsible for the cyber attacks, and that they could be proved to be an "inside job," in the form of leaks by a party employee. This was the opposite of the CIA's official intelligence findings.
Trump went further at his July 2018 summit with President Putin in Helsinki, saying he believed Putin's claim that Russia had not interfered. In doing so, he rejected multiple highly classified US intelligence agency reports given to him over the past 18 months, including by former president, Barack Obama.
D. Parvaz at ThinkProgress: With the U.S. Focused on Election Interference, Putin Puts His Energy Gambit into Action. "Russia's expansion in the energy market goes beyond Europe, spanning continents, conflicts, and economies. It can take the form of selling energy (natural gas), building and protecting infrastructure (Syrian oil fields), or investment (Iran's oil fields). It can take the form of debt relief that then yields preferential rights or contracts for Russian businesses, including energy companies. ...'Russia's energy tactics are a global strategy that seeks to influence current and future energy markets,' said Theodore Karasik, project investigator for the Russia in the Middle East Project at the Jamestown Foundation. 'Influencing energy markets is part of the equation in order to garner political advantage, and specifically, geopolitical advantage,' he told ThinkProgress. ...'The energy gambit is the long game.'"
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Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick at the Washington Post: U.S. Spy Agencies: North Korea Is Working on New Missiles. "U.S. spy agencies are seeing signs that North Korea is constructing new missiles at a factory that produced the country's first intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, according to officials familiar with the intelligence. Newly obtained evidence, including satellite photos taken in recent weeks, indicates that work is underway on at least one and possibly two liquid-fueled ICBMs at a large research facility in Sanumdong, on the outskirts of Pyongyang... The new intelligence does not suggest an expansion of North Korea's capabilities but shows that work on advanced weapons is continuing weeks after [Donald] Trump declared in a Twitter posting that Pyongyang was 'no longer a Nuclear Threat.'"
"The Treasury Department is considering a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans through a change that would not need approval from Congress, officials said." https://t.co/Z78OrMa5VO
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 31, 2018
Thomas Kaplan at the New York Times: Trump Is Putting Indelible Conservative Stamp on Judiciary.
With another judge expected to be confirmed Tuesday by the Senate, [Donald] Trump and Senate Republicans are leaving an ever-expanding imprint on the judiciary, nudging powerful appeals courts rightward through a determined effort to nominate and confirm a steady procession of young conservative jurists.This is a very long piece at the Times, and the name "Mike Pence" was not mentioned a single time. That is a significant oversight.
The confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would tilt the balance of the nation's highest court, but, already, the president and the Senate have proved strikingly efficient at installing judges to lifetime appointments on appeals courts that handle far more cases.
The expected appeals court confirmation on Tuesday of Britt C. Grant, 40, a Georgia Supreme Court justice who was once a clerk for Judge Kavanaugh, would be Mr. Trump's 24th circuit court appointment — more than any other president had secured at this point in his presidency since the creation of the regional circuit court system in 1891, according to an analysis of judicial records by The New York Times.
...The judges will be leaving their mark on the court system long after Mr. Trump has left the White House. The average age of Mr. Trump's first-year circuit court nominees was 49, according to the Congressional Research Service, younger than the first-year nominees of Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The vast majority of the Trump nominees were white, and most were male.
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[Content Note: Wildfires; death] Alissa Greenberg and Jason Wilson at the Guardian: As California Burns, Many Fear the Future of Extreme Fire Has Arrived. "Recent California wildfires in California are notable for their ferocity. At least six people have died, including two firefighters, in the past month in fires that continue to blaze, and 44 died as a result of last year's wine country fires. The conflagrations have also spawned bizarre pyrotechnics, from firenados to towering pyrocumulus clouds that evoke a nuclear detonation. These events are not aberrations, say experts. They are California's future."
[CN: Guns] Doug Criss and Kimberly Berryman at CNN: More Than 1,000 People Have Already Downloaded Plans to 3-D Print an AR-15. "Under a court settlement, people aren't supposed to be able to legally download plans for 3-D printed guns until Wednesday. But because designs for the guns have already been posted online, by Sunday more than 1,000 people had already downloaded plans to print an AR-15-style semiautomatic assault rifle... Do-it-yourself firearms like The Liberator have been nicknamed 'Ghost Guns' because they don't have serial numbers and are untraceable. On the website run by Defense Distributed, people can download plans for building the Liberator, as well as files for an AR-15 lower receiver, a complete Beretta M9 handgun, and other firearms. Users also will be able to share their own designs for guns, magazines, and other accessories. The site on Monday showed more than 12,000 downloads of seven models of guns."
[CN: Misogyny] Stephanie Griffith at ThinkProgress: FEMA Official Hired Women Workers Based on Their Desirability for Sex. "Women applying to work at FEMA were hired by the former head of personnel based on their sexual desirability, the agency's head said following a sweeping investigation of alleged sex abuse and possible criminal misconduct. Brock Long, administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told The Washington Post that the former official is under investigation for creating a 'toxic' atmosphere that permitted widespread sexual harassment and a degrading work environment stretching back for years. The newspaper said that the official's name had been redacted from the documented, but later was confirmed to be Corey Coleman, who led FEMA's personnel department from 2011 until his resignation last month."
Melanie Sevcenko at the Guardian: How Legal Cannabis Actually Made Things Worse for Sick People in Oregon. "Oregon's medical marijuana market has been on a downward spiral since the state legalized cannabis for recreational use in 2014. The option of making big money inspired many medical businesses to go recreational, dramatically shifting the focus away from patients to consumers. In 2015, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) took over the recreational industry. Between 2016 and 2018, nine bills were passed that expanded consumer access to marijuana while changing regulatory procedures on growing, processing and packaging. In the shuffle, recreational marijuana turned into a million-dollar industry in Oregon, while the personalized patient-grower network of the medical program quietly dried up. Now, sick people are suffering."
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Discussion Thread: How Are You?
I am feeling very anxious about the state of the world at the moment. For all the obvious reasons.
I am also feeling frustrated by these ongoing health problems, which are driving me up one wall and down the other, not least of which because they're preventing me from swimming ughhhhhhh.
And I am, as always, fucking glad for this community, in this moment. Anyone who wants to join me in another enormous virtual group hug is welcome.
How are you?
Still Not Over It
[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]
Today, I read the news that U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee found "that U.S. government officials have been giving psychotropic medication to migrant children at a Texas facility without first seeking the consent of their parents or guardians, in violation of state child welfare laws."
That should be good news, but it isn't — because Gee subsequently "ordered the Trump administration to obtain consent or a court order before administering any psychotropic medications to migrant children, except in cases of dire emergencies." Children are still being detained, and the order was not "do not under any circumstances medicate them with psychotropic drugs."
The Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated its aggressive contempt for the law and its eminent willingness to lie. I have no faith whatsoever, nor should any reasonable person, that consent will be sought from the courts to drug children. To the absolute contrary, there is every reason to believe the Trump administration will simply invent a "dire emergency" to justify this continued abuse.
Every time I read another horror being committed against children by this vile president and his despicable party, I cannot help but think of Hillary Clinton — the president we could have, and should have, had.
I imagine that watching the Trump presidency is painful for Clinton for a whole lot of reasons, but chief among them must be having to witness the suffering of children, given her lifetime commitment to children's welfare.
We could have had a president who cares about children, but instead we have a president who has ordered infants to be imprisoned and traumatized children to be subjected to intense drugging, for the crime of having parents who love them enough to seek out a better life for them.
You're fucking right I still haven't "gotten over" the 2016 election, as I've often been sneeringly accused. I couldn't even if I wanted to, because Trump's dumpster fire of a presidency reminds me each day of the leadership we need and were meant to have.
How can I read about children being tortured and not think about the fact that three million more people voted for a woman who spent her life advocating for children? It hurts my heart.
My grief is treated like a punchline by glib fucks who don't have a shred of compassion for abused children. But we should all be grieving the the fact that, rather than a president with profound compassion for children, we have a president who cares about them only insofar as he can exploit their agony to rally support for his vile agenda.
I am still not over it, and I don't understand how anyone else ever could be.
Trump Is Brazenly Setting the Stage to Declare Elections Illegitimate
As I've been documenting under the label "The Russia Reversal" for about nine months, Donald Trump has been peddling the narrative that it was actually Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who colluded with Russia and/or who committed crimes during the last election and/or whom Vladimir Putin was trying to assist.
A week ago, four months out from the midterm election, and hours after headlines that the Democrats' odds to take back the House have improved, Trump tweeted: "I'm very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don't want Trump!"
This is patently absurd: Of course the Kremlin wants Trump in the White House, because he pursues foreign policy objectives that aid Russia — undermining NATO, taking a wrecking ball to long-standing postwar alliances, global destabilization, etc. — and of course the Kremlin wants Republicans in Congress, because they provide cover to Trump to continue to do the bidding of Putin without accountability, and further refuse to enact protections of our elections to prevent Russian interference.
The Democrats would not do any of that.
Trump, however, doesn't need to make a reasonable argument. He just needs to provide a talking point to his base, and to complicit media outlets and members of the press.
So, this morning, he made yet another attempt at laying the groundwork to declare the midterms "rigged" and thus null and void, because of Democratic collusion:
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018
Last Friday, BrianWS and I discussed a chilling but very possible scenario in which Russia interferes on behalf of unknowing Democrats, or even just a single Democrat, during the midterms to provide Trump with "evidence" of the Democratic collusion about which he is now routinely tweeting.
I noted: "The terrible thing is that they only need to do it on behalf of one Democrat to be able to keep this in their back pocket whenever they need it. They can intervene on behalf of every Republican in every district in every state with a Republican legislature, which can then destroy the evidence, and as long as there is 'discoverable' evidence of interference on behalf of a single Democrat, it gives them the leverage they need to 'both sides!' the entire thing out of existence. And our media is clearly not up to the task of greeting it with the skepticism it deserves."
Trump is replicating the same strategy he employed ahead of the 2016 election, constantly talking about "election rigging" in order to deflect scrutiny on his own collusion with a foreign adversary. We already know that he did it once. Now he's doing it again.
We have four months to go until the midterms. Is anyone empowered to stop him going to do anything about it?
At this point, the answer appears to be no. If that remains the case, then we have conceded our democracy to an authoritarian and his foreign masters.
