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Hey folks!
As I sit here writing this, we need to raise $2,828 by Wednesday.
That's totally doable. It's only about $700 a day — a tall order, but we've done it before and we can do it again.
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— Jeff T. (Paypal's mysterious Trevor)
The main reason (besides the grinding repetition) why I can’t bear to watch comedians do their self-congratulatory Donald Trump shtick is that their phony indignation is based on the premise that this guy is somehow unworthy of being our president, which is ludicrous. Trump is not only worthy of being president, he’s perfect for it.
Consider: The U.S. is, first and foremost, a nation of dedicated consumers. The world knows this, we know this, and Trump knows this. Indeed, there’s nothing we Americans won’t consume if it's properly advertised and promoted. And say what you will about Trump, but the man is, first and foremost, an accomplished salesman and promoter.
Consider: We Americans don’t form long queues outside of poetry or literature readings. There’s no shame in that. We simply aren’t a nation of poetry lovers. But we do form long queues outside of Best Buy, beginning at midnight, waiting for the store to open so we can purchase the newest technology. That’s because we’re a nation addicted to buying stuff on sale. And Trump is a brilliant salesman.
The question is no longer whether there are grounds to impeach Donald Trump. It is when enough Republicans will put their loyalty to America ahead of their loyalty to their party.
Trump’s statements last week about his firing of former FBI director James Comey provide ample evidence that Trump engaged in an obstruction of justice – a major charge in impeachment proceedings brought against Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton.
It’s worth recalling that the illegality underlying Nixon’s impeachment was a burglary at the Watergate complex, while the illegality underlying Clinton’s was lying to a grand jury about sex with an intern in the White House.
One Good Thing Donald Trump’s Presidency Has Done: Improved Journalism
When I first started thinking about this column, I was going to write about the testimony of former acting attorney general Sally Yates and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, Jr. before the Senate on Monday, May 8, 2017. I was going to discuss the details of Ms. Yates’s reports to White House counsel Don McGhan about the activities of Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security chief until ousted as a liar based on the information given to the White House. Ms. Yates’s testimony focused public attention on the office of White House counsel, given that it took 18 days and a public leak to remove the Russian “compromised” Mr. Flynn. It raised important questions and issues, but they were quickly covered by The New York Times.
But these days news moves fast. On Tuesday, May 9, 2017, as everyone was digesting the dramatic testimony of Sally Yates, new news broke that Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. Indeed, Comey himself would learn of his firing from news accounts from CNN, on a television screen at the FBI’s field office in Los Angeles, announcing his removal as he was about to give a speech to FBI recruits.
Let's you and I take a moment to square a few dented circles before we get so far down the rabbit hole that we start seeing invisible cats smiling at us in the dark. The corporate "news" media loves to create false narratives if doing so allows them to avoid working for a living, and the current "This is just like Watergate!" milieu we are enduring after the firing of FBI Director James Comey is a perfect example of the phenomenon. This is nothing like Watergate; it is its own pan-dimensional thing and must be dealt with on its own very specific terms, lest we veer off into a gibberish festival where potato is Fred because a vest has no sleeves.
Nail this to your wall and festoon it with bunting: James Comey is no Archibald Cox. Archie Cox was a civil servant the likes of whom comes along perhaps once in a generation, a man of integrity who was never sick at sea, a true professional, patriot and role model for the ages. Richard Nixon's presidency ended the moment he had Cox fired. Biographer Ken Gormley, in Conscience of a Nation, his indispensable examination of Watergate from the perspective of the special prosecutor, wrote, "The explosion of public sentiment after the Saturday night firing of Archibald Cox was as fierce and instantaneous as the day Pearl Harbor had been attacked, or the day John F. Kennedy had been assassinated."
As families around the country prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day, thousands of mothers are sitting in jails before even having been convicted of a crime. Now Black-led groups are working together to bring these mothers home so they, too, can celebrate with their families.
These mothers are victims of the money bail system. The way it works is simple: if you are arrested, you have to come up with cash to be bailed out. But this isn’t simple for mothers living in the margins.
Mothers who are low-income, queer, trans, undocumented, or who are sex workers, all face conditions that make it more difficult to navigate a justice system that targets them for arrest in the first place.
Yesterday, Fox News host Chris Wallace expressed both certainty about, and bafflement at, the wretched phenomenon known as Trump: "Every step he’s taken this week has cut into the credibility of this White House, the trust of the people inside the White House, and clearly I think the trust that the American people pay to this President and to his White House staff…. I just don’t understand the game that they’re playing."
Lyndon Johnson recognized that he had lost the America people when he lost Walter Cronkite, who reigned in a saner age of mostly agreed-upon facts, on-air authoritative voices, and generally accepted expertise. The question now is: In losing Chris Wallace, will Trump lose a significant portion of his base? (Trump never lost the confidence of the majority of the American people; he never had it.) Or rather, will an army of Chris Wallaces cost Trump sizable segments of his base, since no one voice any longer carries national or even conservative authority, facts are playthings to the right, and expertise is scoffed at by anti-intellectual reactionary thugs?
Here’s a true story. Many years ago, in the mid-1990s, I was involved in a tech start-up company. The founder brought in a venture capital guy to seek funding. Mr. Venture Cap once spent a long afternoon regaling us with the story of how he & his pals secretly laundered millions of dollars in foreign money, through Liechtenstein, for the 1992 Bush campaign. (Yes, money from foreign states and companies flowing in covertly to influence a US election; imagine that!) He made it clear this was just routine procedure; he wasn’t bragging about the act of smuggling foreign cash into the electoral process itself – the boast was how MUCH he’d brought in, how good he was at it.
Of course, anyone interested can read of similar efforts throughout modern US history. The well-documented, far-reaching efforts by the UK in 1940, for example, to skew the field for pro-British, anti-isolationist candidates (not just with money, spying & media manipulation, but also with several notorious “honey traps” for leading US officials); or efforts to influence elections and policies by Nazi Germany, including big cash payments to some US Senators and passing money & intelligence through stateside corporate allies. The covert electoral interventions by Turkey, Israel, the Saudis, the old-time “China Lobby,” among others, are likewise well-attested.
President Trump keeps showing he can’t keep quiet when it comes to political fights. The latest evidence is his admission that firing FBI director James Comey was really about his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Trump and the FBI’s ongoing Trump campaign-Russia investigation—not Comey’s mishandling of Hillary Clinton’s classified emails.
“Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election,” he tweeted Friday. "The Fake Media is working overtime today!"
But Trump did something else Friday; not saying much, but instead pointing to a letter written by his longtime lawyers, showing that when the focus turns to Trump’s business deals and investment partners, he knows it’s better to have others play defense for him.
I’ve been in Moscow some days now and have yet to meet an oligarch (although perhaps they don’t identify themselves). I have met an entrepreneur named Andrei Davidovich. He’s started several companies since his first in 1998, including a software company, a marketing agency, a publishing company, etc. He says it takes 5 days to create a new company in Russia.
He gives U.S. friends thanks for technology, research, and knowledge. He tells the U.S. government thanks for nothing.
Davidovich has been in touch for years with the U.S.-based Center for Citizen Initiatives, the excellent organization that can bring you to Russia to learn all about it, and that brought some 6,000 Russian businessmen and women, including Davidovich, to the U.S. during the previous cold war.
I suppose the list is lengthy and includes dancing, comedy, karaoke singing, vodka drinking, monument building, diplomacy, novel writing, and thousands of other fields of human endeavor, in some of which Americans can teach Russians as well. But what I’m struck by at the moment in Russia is the skill of honest political self-reflection, as found in Germany, Japan, and many other nations to a great degree as well. I think the unexamined political life is not worth sustaining, but it is all we have back home in the not so united states.
Here, as a tourist in Moscow, not only friends and random people will point out the good and the bad, but hired tour guides will do the same.
“Here on the left is the parliament where they make all of those laws. We disagree with many of them, you know.”
Where is Stanley Kubrick when we need him? If he hadn’t died in 1999, he would be the perfect director to transform today’s hysteria over Russia into a theater-of-the-absurd movie reprising his Cold War classic, “Dr. Strangelove,” which savagely satirized the madness of nuclear brinksmanship and the crazed ideology behind it.
To prove my point, The Washington Post on Thursday published a lengthy story entitled in the print editions “Alarm at Russian in White House” about a Russian photographer who was allowed into the Oval Office to photograph President Trump’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Hi folks!
I know we can do this, because we've done it before.
$588 every day for five days. Totally doable. All it takes is you.
If you haven't yet chipped in — if you're one of our regular donors who likes to wait until the last minute — this is your cue.
Five dollars, one dollar -- no amount is too small, and every donation pushes us that much closer to our goal.
Thanks in advance!
For the past 112 days–yes, I am counting the days: aren’t we all?–I’ve lived under the pretense that Donald Trump is my president. I didn’t vote for him, but James Comey elected him fair and square, and from Jan. 20 on, the point was settled. We don’t have to agree with the man to respect the presidency he represents.
Early on after that I heard my son say, “Not my president.” I rebuked him, saying we can disagree with Trump but not question his legitimacy, even if he’d spent several years before his victory questioning the legitimacy and religion of his predecessor, even if he’d wasted no time as president continuing to question the legitimacy of anything and anyone who disagreed with him–the press, the judiciary, union leaders, 175 million Muslims or so, Stephen Colbert, and so on.
I spoke too soon. Trump made the last four months no less a horror show than he had his campaign. This past week we endured the vomitory of his worst impulses. The presidency hasn’t elevated him. It hasn’t inspired him or given us, as his apologists assured us, a team of professionals to blunt his more dangerous convulsions. It has amplified them, along with his and their incompetence. It isn’t the rest of us who are de-legitimizing his presidency. It’s him. Every day, sometimes every hour, thanks to his finger on his nuclear Twitter. He’s exploiting the presidency rather than fulfilling it, and exploiting it as if it were still his corner office in Trump Tower from where he could vilify, fire, humiliate and throw tantrums without damaging more than his circle-jerk of sycophants. Now he’s doing it at the cost of the presidency and what’s left of the nation’s reputation, and more critically, its security, and therefore yours and mine.
As a presidential candidate last year, Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” He didn’t shoot anyone, but proved that he could say whatever he wanted and still become president, without apology or explanation.
This week, when he suddenly fired FBI Director James Comey, Trump made a version of the same boast. The administration said publicly that Trump fired him for his handling of Clinton’s e-mails. But everybody understood that what he was really saying was, “I can fire the head of the FBI, give a ludicrous reason, and nothing will happen.” The ludicrousness of the reason was not a mistake on his part — it is an essential part of the power play.
Trump doesn’t lie the way that other American politicians lie. This is the insight of Masha Gessen, a Russian and American journalist who is bringing her decades of studying the Kremlin to bear on modern American politics.
Trump warning to former FBI Director James Comey against leaking anything negative about him – tweeting “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” – is deeply troubling.
The core issue here is not whether Trump is secretly recording his meetings or telephone calls (Trump and his White House aides refuse to say whether he tapes his visitors, something he was suspected of doing when he was in business in New York).
The real issues are these:
(1) The illegality of a President of the United States seeking to intimidate a potential witness in a congressional investigation.
Donald Trump knows all the things. He knows them better than the so-called “experts” because he’s “like, a smart person.” His brilliance bends and breaks the rules of space and time. That’s how Trump, who is 70 years old, was able to develop an economic theory created eight years before he was born.
That or he’s lying.
Since he fired Comey, Trump has been on a disastrous press jaunt, taking his fragile ego and paranoia on a tour of the country’s most prominent news outlets. He sat down for an interview with the Economist, in which he tried to take credit for inventing a common Keynesian expression:
Earlier this week, we wrote about a pending deal between Sinclair Broadcasting and Tribune Media. Sinclair hopes to buy Tribune, a move that will allow the company to broadcast news to 70 percent of Americans.
But the deal has raised eyebrows. The company is notoriously close with Trump, and also favored George W. Bush when he was president. The company’s DC office produces conservative commentary and news segments that paint Republicans in a favorable light, and distributes them to local stations around the country. Some worry that Sinclair hopes to create a competitor to Fox News, operating out of local television stations across America.
Quinnipiac's latest numbers are stunning.
Overall, Trump's approval rating is a miserable 36 percent (Gallup has him at 38), which shouldn't surprise. What's astonishing, though, is the seeming disintegration of Trump's base. As Quinnipiac reports: "Critical are big losses among white voters with no college degree, white men and independent voters."
The breakdown (in more than one sense of the word): college-less white voters are now split on Trump, with 47 percent approving and 46 percent disapproving; white men are also split, with 48 percent approving, 46 percent not; and among independent voters, Trump plunges to a net negative of 34 points — with a mere 29 percent approving.
Josh Elliott is fed up with overpaid CEOs. As the owner of a Connecticut natural foods market with 40 employees, he says he could never justify pocketing hundreds of times more pay than his employees.
“I’m very much a capitalist,” Elliott told me in an interview. “But there need to be limits.”
Skyrocketing CEO pay and inequality last year motivated this 32-year-old businessman to launch a successful bid for a seat in the Connecticut General Assembly. Elliott hit back hard on the campaign trail against right-wing claims about high taxes driving wealthy job creators out of his state.
Tough Guy Attorney General Jeff Session has announced that federal prosecutors will charge low-level drug offenders and others with the most serious crimes possible, despite overwhelming evidence and a bipartisan agreement that this approach is racially discriminatory and counterproductive.
The Sessions approach will throw thousands of people – especially Americans from communities of color or with low-incomes – into prison needlessly, sabotaging their life chances and increase post-release criminality. It is shameful and stupid. Shameful because there is overwhelming empirical evidence that this approach unfairly targets and damages young people of color. And stupid because there is, equally, overwhelming empirical evidence that it will create a cycle of crime.
Donald Trump's business partners have included Russian oligarchs and convicted mobsters, which could make the president guilty of criminal racketeering charges.
That's one of the eyebrow-raising takeaways from a 45-minute Dutch documentary that aired last week, titled The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump, Part 1: The Russians. The first installment of the investigative reporting series, produced by Zembla, does what no American TV network has yet dared to do—take a deep look at the organized crime links and corrupt international business strategies used by Trump and his partners in his properties.
It starts with Trump's luxury tower in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of Soho, where his partner in building that highrise was Bayrock LLC, whose primary investor was a Russian mining oligarch and another major investor was a convicted Russian mobster named Felix Sater.
Kris Kobach was spooning down vanilla ice cream when I showed him the thick pages of evidence documenting his detailed plan to rig the presidential election of 2016. The Kansas secretary of state, sucking up carbs at a Republican Party fundraiser, recognized the documents and ran for it while still trying to wolf down the last spoonful.
That was 2015 (yes, the ballot heist started way back). Today this same man, Kris Kobach, is Donald Trump’s choice to head the new “Voter Integrity Commission.”
It’s like appointing Al Capone to investigate the mob.
How did Kobach mess with the 2016 vote? Let me count the ways—as I have over the past three years of hunting down Kobach’s ballot-box gaming. Just two of Kobach’s vote-bending tricks undoubtedly won Michigan for Trump and contributed to his “wins” in Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.
Some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats want to take over the Los Angeles school system but Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and feisty school board member, is in their way. So they’ve hired Nick Melvoin to get rid of him. No, he’s not a hired assassin like the kind on “The Sopranos.” He’s a lawyer who the billionaires picked to defeat Zimmer.
The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin — funded by big oil, big tobacco, Walmart, Enron, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires — has included astonishingly ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer.
This morning (Friday) the Los Angeles Times reported that “Outside spending for Melvoin (and against Zimmer) has surpassed $4.65 million.” Why? Because he doesn’t agree with the corporatization of our public schools. Some of their donations have gone directly to Melvoin’s campaign, but much of it has been funneled through a corporate front group called the California Charter School Association.
There’s no proof that Russia hacked the US elections.
There’s no proof that Russian officials or Russian agents colluded with members of the Trump campaign.
There’s no proof that Russia provided material support of any kind for the Trump campaign or that Russian agents hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails or that Russian officials provided Wikileaks with emails that were intended to sabotage Hillary’s chances to win the election.
So far, no one in any of the 17 US intelligence agencies has stepped forward and verified the claims of Russian meddling or produced a scintilla of hard evidence that Russia was in anyway involved in the 2016 elections.