Hullabaloo

Friday, April 05, 2019

 
Friday Night Soother

by digby

Chaze, Cardie, Marlee and Chipper, as seen from left to right, graduate into the "Beagle Brigade" and wear their uniforms for the first time.

Meet America's newest, and cutest, federal officers: a band of rescued beagles known as Chipper, Marlee, Chaze and Cardie.

Starting next week, these four will begin their careers at two of America's busiest airports, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago's O'Hare. They will join the hundreds of beagles already at work at ports of entry in the US and abroad.

Their mission: to sniff out bags carrying meat and plant products. Why? Because meats and plants can carry pests that could seriously hurt the economy.

Chipper gives his trainer a celebratory kiss at the graduation ceremony.

Joseph Chopko, who helped train these dogs, explains it this way: You can't bring in fruits, such as apples or oranges, because they can carry fruit flies. And Mediterranean fruit flies, an invasive pest, can devastate the citrus industry.

"There wouldn't be enough natural predators to keep them in check," said Chopko, a training specialist with the US Agriculture Department. "And the way they multiply, the devastation that happens on the fruit is dangerous."

Another example is pork, which can carry African swine fever, Chopko said.

"If that meat gets into the United States, that could devastate the whole pork industry. We're talking billions of dollars, not just in lost revenue, but also in lost jobs and eradication efforts."

Cardie (middle) hugs her handler's leg just before graduation.

Enter the beagle brigade.

This breed of dogs is picked for the task because their sense of smell is incredible. They also have a natural charisma.

"No one minds that a beagle is running around," said Aaron Beaumont, a training specialist supervisor at the US Agriculture Department.

"They're not intimidating, which makes them unobtrusive when inspecting traveling passengers."
Only the most qualified pups pass the test to become officers.

Chipper

Chipper, Marlee, Chaze and Cardie were selected from nearly 200 candidates, Beaumont said. All four came from animal shelters.

"So many shelters are kill shelters, and the dogs might not get a second chance. We try to utilize the dogs that are out there and are already looking for a home and a job," said Marguerite Stetson, who works for Customs and Border Patrol and who trained Chaze.

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digby 4/05/2019 05:00:00 PM

 
He's just waiting for the right woman to come along ...

by digby





I had a whole lot of progressives tell me in 2016 that they yearned to vote for the first woman president but they were just waiting for the right one to come along. It was about hewing to the right progressive issues, nothing personal. And there was certainly no sexism involved.

So why isn't Elizabeth Warren doing better?

Here's the latest of a long string of aggressively progressive plans and policies she's laid out already:

Elizabeth Warren is calling to end the legislative filibuster, the first major presidential candidate to explicitly endorse ending the Senate's longstanding 60-vote threshold.

The Massachusetts Democrat is set to make the announcement at the National Action Network on Friday, just two days after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) invoked the unilateral "nuclear option" to shave off debate time of presidential nominees. Now Warren says it's time to "fight back."

"I’m not running for President just to talk about making real, structural change. I’m serious about getting it done. And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate," Warren will say. "So let me be as clear as I can. When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: we’re done with two sets of rules — one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.

She added: "That means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster."

Of all the people running, she has been the boldest and the most detailed on issues and they are all unabashedly progressive.

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digby 4/05/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Someday, one of these nuts is going to succeed

by digby

Jeff Flake, the mild-mannered critic of President Trump who voted with his the vast majority of the time, describes what happens when you buck Dear Leader:

Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator for Arizona and a vocal critic of the Trump administration, has revealed he received a number of threats from supporters of the president before he left office this year.

In an interview with the Guardian, Flake described several examples of threatening messages and behaviour made against him and his family that he said were currently being investigated by law enforcement agencies in Arizona and Washington DC.

“I would have liked to have done one more term in the Senate, that’s probably all,” Flake said. “But its been at a heavy cost to my family. The sacrifices they’ve been [made to make], what they had to endure …”

Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, both as a candidate for office and as president, has often targeted Flake. The former senator had called for Trump to abandon his bid for the White House in 2016 after the release of a tape showing the reality star bragging about groping women’s genitals.

Last week, a man in Chicago pleaded guilty to a federal retaliation chargeafter leaving a threatening voicemail for an unidentified US senator after the hearings for Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Flake confirmed to the Guardian the message had been left for him after he delayed Kavanaugh’s hearing by pressing for a short FBI investigation into allegations the judge had sexually assaulted a number of women as a teenager.

The defendant, 58-year-old James Dean Blevins Jr, said on the voicemail: “I am tired of him interrupting our president, and I am coming down there to take him and his family out,” according to prosecutors.

But, said Flake: “That’s only one of several threats.”

Flake revealed that an unidentified man carrying a rifle scope had recently arrived at three locations in Arizona associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, looking for the former senator, a devout Mormon.

According to Flake: “It was a man living out of his car. He told someone he had just attended a Trump rally.” He added: “He showed up at another event two weeks ago.”

The Mesa police department in Arizona confirmed they had been assisting Flake and his family during an investigation that was being handled by federal authorities. The US Capitol police declined to answer questions.

Flake also said his family had received “several” other threats that “haven’t been tracked down yet”.

“Threats where they list my kids and their addresses, links to beheading videos,” Flake said.

Flake announced in 2017 he would not recontest his seat in the US Senate, partially citing the inflammatory rhetoric and discriminatory policy of the Trump administration.

Flake is just one of a number of high-profile critics of Trump to receive threats or other forms of violence from his supporters.

In March, Cesar Sayoc Jr, a fanatical supporter of Trump, pleaded guilty to 65 felony counts after mailing pipe bombs to a dozen Trump critics, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Trump's nuttier followers take him very seriously. His reckless rhetoric eggs them on.

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digby 4/05/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
Fun and fascism, FTW

by digby

Trump calls on Congress to "get rid of the whole asylum system" because "it doesn't work."

"Frankly, we should get rid of judges," he adds. pic.twitter.com/5s8kI9mbHR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2019

Trump says it's fun for him to joke about Joe Biden even though he brags about grabbing women by the pussy. Because he's an inveterate asshole.

Also, he wants to "get rid of judges." Because he's an instinctive fascist.

Update:

Oy.

Biden joked about it today too. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

These old guys are just ... past it, I'm afraid.

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digby 4/05/2019 12:30:00 PM

 
Going in a "tougher direction" on immigration

by digby



This is odd:

The White House on Thursday withdrew the nomination of a longtime border official to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration grapples with a massive increase in Southern border crossings that are straining the system with no easy solution, according to people with knowledge of the move.

The paperwork on Ron Vitiello was sent to members of Congress Thursday, the people said, and the decision was unexpected and met with confusion. Vitiello had been scheduled to travel with President Donald Trump to the border on Friday, but was no longer going, one official said. He will still remain acting director, they said.

One Homeland Security official insisted it was nothing but a paperwork error that had later been corrected. But other, higher-level officials said the move did not appear to be a mistake, even though they were not informed ahead of time.

The people had direct knowledge of the letter but were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Vitiello was nominated to lead ICE, the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law in the interior of the U.S., after more than 30 years in law enforcement, starting in 1985 with the U.S. Border Patrol. He was previously Border Patrol chief and deputy commissioner U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the patrol.

Trump obviously has something up his sleeve but as I write this, we don't know what it is. He said at his press avail on the lawn this morning that he's "going in a tougher direction." Maybe it will be Kris Kobach who has been mentioned as a new "immigration Czar."

I don't know who would be "tougher" but maybe Richard Spencer is available?

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digby 4/05/2019 10:30:00 AM

 
A president being "manipulated" and then abusing his power to cover it up isn't ok either

by digby



My Salon column this morning:

Despite the fact that William Barr had made public comments denigrating the Mueller investigation and clearly auditioned for the job with a spurious memo suggesting that it was almost impossible for a president to obstruct justice, he was confirmed as Donald Trump's new attorney general with little difficulty. After what had happened with Jeff Sessions, it was understood that Trump would never again stand for an AG recusing himself from any investigation of the president. So everyone knew that Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election would be in the hands of someone who was unlikely to be an honest broker.

Nonetheless, most of us gave Barr the benefit of the doubt. I wrote about Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had been a conservative supporter of Richard Nixon. He was coerced into taking the job by White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, who told him, "We need you, Leon" -- assuming he would be loyal to the president. When Jaworski saw the evidence against Nixon, however, he was appalled and moved forward with the investigation. I thought maybe that could happen with Barr too.

I should have known better. Barr was a very political attorney general during George H.W. Bush's administration, recommending pardons for all the guilty players in the Iran-Contra case, showing that he wasn't going to be one of those weaklings who saw the Nixon pardon as setting a bad example for the country. I should have realized that this wasn't a case of someone who'd spent too much time watching Sean Hannity and was slightly out of it. Barr's been a rock-solid right-winger for decades.

I characterized Barr's initial four-page summary of the Mueller report as an elegant little political document and it was. It elicited exactly the response he and the White House wanted. He validated Trump's slogan, "No Collusion, No Obstruction" while cleverly obscuring the fact that there is obviously much more to that story. After a couple of weeks of careful parsing and reconsideration of the implications by the press and various experts, Barr has now lost control of the storyline. He is promising to deliver the full report after he redacts whatever he deems necessary, but because of the game he's been playing, there is no longer much trust that he's acting in good faith.

Unlike Ken Starr's investigations of the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, the Mueller team didn't use friendly members of the press to pressure witnesses and try their cases in the court of public opinion. In fact they said nothing at all outside the courtroom. But now that the investigation is over and the attorney general has taken it upon himself to summarize their conclusions they have reportedly begin to express their distress about how he's handled that.

Numerous news outlets have confirmed that members of Mueller's team say that Barr has mischaracterized the evidence of obstruction of justice, which by all accounts is substantial.

They have also told associates that they carefully prepared summaries for different sections of the report, assuming they would be released to the public. Those summaries should not require all this concern from Barr about redactions. This certainly comports with many experts' assumptions about how such a report would be organized. While Barr and the Justice Department are now saying that the summaries are labeled as containing grand jury and other confidential information, therefore requiring careful review and redactions, many professionals have suggested that's just pro forma.

I think we all knew that the question of obstruction was going to be a problem for President Trump, simply because so much of it was happening right out in the open. But according to NBC News, it's not just that issue that has the Mueller team agitated. The "collusion" case is also being somewhat misrepresented. The special counsel decided not to charge Trump or his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government in its election interference, but that is far from the whole story. Members of the team say that "the findings paint a picture of a campaign whose members were manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation."

I have long been willing to believe that Trump and his minions were simply so unethical, corrupt and uninformed that they were easy marks for the Russian election sabotage campaign. We know that they behaved idiotically when Russians approached them. Donald Trump Jr. writing an emails saying, "if it's what you say, I love it!" upon hearing that Russian emissaries want to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump" is not the language of a sophisticated conspirator. It's almost as if they were testing to see if Junior was even sentient. But that doesn't get him or Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort or Donald Trump himself off the hook. This isn't a game. Trump is president of the United States.

Trump and his team were almost certainly compromised by the lies they told about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations. Trump knew that could be revealed at any time and his obsequious behavior toward Vladimir Putin the could easily be interpreted as bowing to an unspoken threat. Trump is conversant in blackmail threats, as we all know. We also know that he pays up when he deems it necessary.

Mueller found that none of this was prosecutable and it is vital we find out why he reached that conclusion. But to say that there was nothing there amounts to sweeping some of the worst judgment calls in the history of presidential campaigns under the carpet. And that's really saying something.

These were outrageous decisions regardless of the criminal liability or lack thereof. I'm not sure if rank stupidity and reckless greed qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors but we should probably know the whole story before deciding about that. Even if Trump and his close advisers were suckered by the "Russian election interference activities" it's quite clear that once Trump realized that the FBI and the intelligence community thought he might have done something illegal, he tried to cover it up. If that's so, it's not William Barr's place to make the decision about criminal obstruction of justice. If the Department of Justice has concluded that it cannot charge a sitting president with a crime, it cannot clear one of wrongdoing either. It's up to the Congress to decide what to do about Donald Trump. It seems as though the Mueller investigators agree.

digby 4/05/2019 09:00:00 AM

 

Requiem for the downward-mobile

by Tom Sullivan

An Aspen Institute report on the human impacts of the next wave of automation adds to the anxieties already roiling these dis-United States. The Aspen Institute (AI) warns that artificial intelligence (also AI) will have a far more disruptive effect than the last wave of automation from which displaced workers never really recovered.

Against the backdrop of continued jobs growth, this threat is all but invisible. Yet, Axios reports:

Already, Aspen's Alastair Fitzpayne tells Axios, workers displaced in prior technological cycles "have experienced profound downward mobility" in new jobs at much lower pay and benefits.

Job retraining and other federal supports for displaced workers were so much cold comfort to people retraining for work that paid less and left them worse off than before. The report's executive summary warns, "Artificial intelligence and other new technologies may lead to deeper, faster, broader, and more disruptive automation" that retraining programs may mitigate even less.

Aspen warns that the next wave may not follow the historical script. Fewer jobs may be created than destroyed:

• In an interview, Fitzpayne, a co-author of the Aspen report, said no one knows how many new jobs will be produced, where they will be created, or how much they will pay.


• The points are important because most studies play down the real possibility that the automation age could go very wrong, for an extended period, for large swaths of workers and their communities.


• Workers who lost their jobs in the wave of manufacturing layoffs in the early 1980s, for instance, were still earning 15%-20% less in their new work 20 years later, according to the Aspen report.

But "technology is not destiny," Aspen cheerfully offers. With the right policy choices, we can choose to create an economy that works for everybody, etc., etc. For example, by encouraging employers to adopt a more "human-centric approach" to delivering the bottom line. And by supporting displaced workers through "retraining, reemployment services, and Unemployment Insurance to help displaced workers transition to new jobs and careers." It's in employers' best interest "to grow and retain the best workers," Adam Roston, CEO of BlueCrew staffing tells Axios.

Forgive my skepticism.

Progressive rock star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests new technology might be liberating, but with a caveat:

“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” Ocasio-Cortez said, putting the anti-1-percenter firmly on the side of the optimistic 52 percent of technologists.

But something else she said got less attention, and spoke more to the pressing issue: The “reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

A more durable one than our devices, sadly. The question in the adoption of any new technology, including the legal technology underlying shareholder capitalism is, as Humpty Dumpty said of words, “which is to be master—that's all.” We are just too busy buying the newest shiny thing to ask it or to consider the human costs.

The cultural stigma attached to job loss is also profound, and change-resistant. Conservatives are not about to celebrate jobless people having more time to create art and enjoy the world we live in.

The yawning wealth gap between the Haves and the Have-nots is not healthy for any society. That we must adopt new technology or die is not a human-centric impulse, but an economic one reflective of homo corporatus not homo sapiens.

The merciless logic of shareholder capitalism and acceptance of the inevitability of technological change means — for all the bluster about free markets and freedom — humans are just along for the ride and no longer in control. Not really. Efficiency is more important. Like freedom reduced to an abstraction, it's not efficiency in service to human beings, just efficiency for efficiency's sake.

Comedian John Mulaney's “Horse Loose In A Hospital” bit dropped into my lap this week about two years late. A commentary on how out of control the Trump era feels to normal people, it is a comedic triumph.

One joke reflects how people unconsciously value efficiency in the abstract:

Sometimes, if you make fun of the horse, people will get upset. These are the people that open the door for the horse ... I go, "Hey, how come you open the door for the horse?" And they go, "Well, the hospital was inefficient!"

It's Friday. After that, you'll need a good laugh:



Update: [h/t Tarkloon for corrected obvious typo]


Undercover Blue 4/05/2019 06:00:00 AM

Thursday, April 04, 2019

 
A clever reason to get Trump's taxes

by digby



I've been hard on Richard Neal for dragging his feet on the tax return question but I think I was unfair. This is actually very clever. He's wrapped his request for the returns around Trump's fatuous insistence that he's being audited, apparently for every year since the beginning of time, so he can't release them:

But being under audit does not preclude Trump from releasing his tax returns — he could go ahead and release them anyway. There’s also precedent for a president releasing his tax returns while under audit — Richard Nixon did it. What’s more, part of what Democrats are looking to do in requesting Trump’s tax returns is find out if the IRS is properly vetting them.

The IRS’s administrative manual lays out guidance for processing the tax returns of the president and vice president and says they are subject to “mandatory examinations” by the agency. The IRS isn’t legally bound to audit the returns but is supposed to. What we don’t know is if it’s ignoring that guidance, or probing the returns the sufficient amount.

Neal pointed that out in his letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on Wednesday, explaining that one of the purposes of his request is to conduct oversight of “the extent to which the IRS audits and enforces the Federal tax laws against a President.”

“The IRS has a policy of auditing the tax returns of all sitting presidents and vice-presidents, yet little is known about the effectiveness of the law,” Neal said in a statement about the request.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s pre-presidential tax returns are being audited, and his claims that they are could be fake. But the 2017 and 2018 returns, if the IRS is following its own procedures, are supposed to be audited.

An IRS spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment on Neal’s request.
We already kind of know what the IRS commissioner thinks about Trump’s tax returns

The IRS commissioner is a presidential appointee, meaning Trump tapped Rettig for the job he has right now. Part of what Democrats want to find out is whether, as a political appointee, he’s unbiased in doing his job.

“Is the IRS capable of auditing the president is a legitimate question,” Joseph Thorndike, a tax historian and director of the Tax History Project, told me when discussing the process for requesting Trump’s tax returns earlier this year.

We actually have some insight into what Rettig thinks of Trump’s tax returns, including whether he should release them while under audit. The longtime tax attorney wrote for Forbes in 2016 that he wouldn’t advise Trump to release his returns.

“Is there any legal impediment to Trump publicly releasing his tax returns? Absolutely not,” Rettig wrote. “Would any experienced tax lawyer representing Trump in an IRS audit advise him to publicly release his tax returns during the audit? Absolutely not.”

We don’t know if Trump is actually under audit — the IRS could not be reviewing his presidential tax returns, and he could be lying about his pre-presidential tax returns being audited. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, in a hearing before Congress in February said he didn’t believe Trump was being audited. In fact, Cohen said that what made Trump nervous was the idea that releasing his returns like previous candidates would prompt extra scrutiny from the IRS.

“What he didn’t want is to have an entire group of think tanks that are tax experts run through his tax return and start ripping it to pieces, and then he’ll end up in an audit and he’ll ultimately have taxable consequences, penalties, and so on,” Cohen said.

If Trump’s returns are indeed under audit — whether those from before his term began or after— they’re likely being probed by the IRS’s “Wealth Squad,” a specialized group that is supposed to conduct audits on very rich taxpayers, which Trump claims to be. At Forbes, Rettig laid out the process the Wealth Squad follows in its work, meaning that theoretically, if Trump’s returns are being audited, he knows what to do. He also hypothesized what might be in the returns:

So, what is in Trump’s Returns? Likely information prepared by many very well-qualified tax professionals who were quite aware the general public might be looking at the returns at some future date. It’s unlikely an accurate overall financial picture will surface by simply reviewing his returns. He likely pays taxes at a lesser rate than many of us given the nature of his real estate and similar investments being subjected to lower tax rates than salaries earned by the rest of us. Certainly, his tax professionals have not advised him to overpay his taxes.

The IRS could be conducting a fair, complete audit of Trump’s tax returns while he’s president, before he was president, or not at all. That’s part of what Democrats are trying to find out. So when the White House gives the excuse that it’s not releasing Trump’s tax returns because of the audit, it might be inadvertently helping Democrats build their case.

It should be pretty easy to get an answer to this question. As far as we know, there's no reason a person can't release his tax returns if they are under audit. Richard Nixon's taxes were under audit when he reluctantly agreed to release his under threat of the congress obtaining them. It ended up costing him half a million dollars in back taxes and fines. And that is obviously what Trump is afraid of.

As for finding out if the "wealth squad" is auditing the president's returns as the IRS is required to do, keep in mind that the main reason the law was written back in 1924 was because there were suspicions that the IRS was doing Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon favors.

Turns out Neal is very well prepared to take this case to court if he has to. The parallels are obvious.

Update:

President Trump earlier this year asked Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to prioritize a confirmation vote for his nominee to be the chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, indicating that it was a higher priority than voting on the nomination of William P. Barr as attorney general, a person familiar with the conversation said.

White House aides insisted for months that the confirmation of the nominee, Michael J. Desmond, a tax lawyer from Santa Barbara, Calif., was a top priority after passage of the tax bill in 2017.

But the request by Mr. Trump, made to Mr. McConnell on Feb. 5, raised questions about whether the president had other motivations. For months, the president has seethed over vows by congressional Democrats that they would move to obtain his tax returns from the I.R.S. And this week, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, formally asked the I.R.S. for six years of the returns, using an obscure provision in the tax code to do so.

On Thursday, asked if he would direct the I.R.S. not to disclose his tax returns, Mr. Trump said Democrats would have to talk to his lawyers.

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digby 4/04/2019 06:00:00 PM

 
Good old principled Rand Paul

by digby



Covering for Trump and flogging "lock her up." And unlike Lindsey Graham, he isn't even running for re-election:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked a resolution calling for special counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia probe be made public, marking the fifth time Republicans have blocked the House-passed measure.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for unanimous consent on Thursday to pass the resolution, which cleared the House in a 420-0 vote earlier this year.

"What we're talking about is basic transparency, let's make sure the full Mueller report is released to Congress … and then let's make sure the American people see as much of this report as possible," Warner said from the Senate floor.

He added that to warn future campaigns and candidates about potential election interference "we need to fully understand what the Russians were trying to do."

Under Senate rules, any one senator can request that any bill or resolution be passed. But because it requires the signoff of every senator, any one senator can also block their request.

Paul objected because Warner wouldn't agree to amend the nonbinding House-passed resolution to include provisions calling for the public release of communications between several Obama-era officials including former President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.

Paul argued that Congress still needs to figure out the "entire story" including the origins of the investigation into President Trump's campaign and a controversial research dossier compiled against then-candidate Trump.

"I think it's very important that we not turn our country into this back and forth where each successive party tries to use the apparatus of government to investigate the previous president," Paul said.

"What we don't know is was President Obama told that the evidence to get this investigation started was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign? We need to know that," Paul continued.

Paul has warned that he would block the resolution backing the Mueller report's release unless information about the opposition research dossier compiled against Trump was also released. He first blocked the House-passed resolution last week.

"It was so scandalous and so unverified and has turned out to be untrue, and yet this was the basis for the beginning of the investigation. This was the basis for doing something extraordinary," Paul added on Thursday of the dossier. 

A 2018 memo from the House Intelligence Committee, which was controlled at the time by Republicans, found that the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump campaign officials had improper contacts with Russia was triggered by information the bureau obtained about George Papadopoulos, a former adviser to the campaign.

All these principled libertarians, supposedly suspicious of government power, backing the President of the most powerful nation on earth's self-serving corruption, betrayal and abuse of power either out of  hatred for Democrats or blindly clinging to the idea that "deep state" intelligence and law enforcement are, by definition, evil players in all circumstances.  It's ridiculous. Trump has massive power and he's using in ways that are just a threatening to individual freedom as the IC.

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digby 4/04/2019 05:00:00 PM

 
So nuclear energy in the hands of Iran is a nightmare, in the hands of Saudi Arabia, it's ok?

by digby



I get that we are talking about one country that is friendly to the US and on that isn't, but honestly --- more nukes in the Middle East? Really??

Saudi Arabia is within months of completing its first nuclear reactor, new satellite images show, but it has yet to show any readiness to abide by safeguards that would prevent it making a bomb.

The reactor site is in the King Abdulaziz city for science and technology on the outskirts of Riyadh. The site was identified by Robert Kelley, a former director for nuclear inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who said it was very small 30-kilowatt research reactor, not far from completion.

“I would guess they could have it all done, with the roof in place and the electricity turned on, within a year,” said Kelley, who worked for more than three decades in research and engineering in the US nuclear weapons complex.

The satellite photos show that a 10-metre high steel tubular vessel, which will contain the nuclear fuel, has been erected, and construction work is under way on the surrounding concrete building.

Kelley said the main practical purpose of the research reactor would be to train nuclear technicians, but it also marked the crossing of a nuclear threshold. Before inserting nuclear fuel into the reactor, Saudi Arabia would have to implement a comprehensive set of rules and procedures, including IAEA inspections, designed to ensure no fissile material was diverted for use in weapons – something it has so far avoided.

The reactor has been designed by an Argentinian state-owned company, Invap SE.

“This reactor should be operational by the end of the year roughly,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, Argentina’s envoy to the IAEA, confirmed. “It depends on a number of factors. Invap is in charge of design. They are directing all the operations. But the local engineering is being done by the Saudis.”

The emergence of the satellite images, first published by Bloomberg, comes in the midst of a struggle between the Trump White House and Congress over the sale of nuclear technology to Riyadh, after it emerged that the US department of energy had granted seven permits for the transfer of sensitive nuclear information by US businesses to the Saudi government.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the energy secretary, Rick Perry, have both stonewalled congressional committees demanding to know what the authorisations were for, and which companies were involved.

On Tuesday, the head of the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kristine Svinicki, and her fellow commissioners remained silent when repeatedly asked by Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, whether the commission had been consulted on the nuclear permits.

I just can't imagine this will end well. We know Israel has nukes and that's not the greatest idea in the world either. But putting more nuclear technology in the Middle East ratchets up the danger exponentially. This new Saudi regime is not exactly ... dependable.



The Washington POst's article here.

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digby 4/04/2019 03:30:00 PM

 
Summary Judgment

by digby




Marcy Wheeler's take on the NYT article reporting "concerns" among Mueller's investigators is typically perspicacious. She begins by pointing out that the NYT is too credulous about Barr's apparent "surprise" at being accused of being political and then goes to the heart of the matter:

But I want to look at the actual news detail in the story: that Mueller’s team wrote multiple summaries. The article uses the word four times (plus a caption) including these three references:

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter. 

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

The detail is useful because it tells Jerry Nadler and FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold precisely what they’re looking for: Mueller’s own summaries of their findings (which in fact may be parallel summaries, addressing multiple questions).

But it’s also significant that NYT’s sources used that term — summary. As I’ve noted, Barr’s original memo claimed he was “summarize[ing] the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation.”  Two things: The principal conclusions and the results.

Then after Jerry Nadler scoffed that Barr had released a four page summary (note, one of the journalists on this story, Nicholas Fandos, spent his morning covering the House Judiciary Committee voting to subpoena the report), Barr pretended he hadn’t claimed to be summarizing the investigation and claimed he wouldn’t dream of summarizing the report.

I am aware of some media reports and other public statements mischaracterizing my March 24, 2019 supplemental notification as a “summary” of the Special Counsel’s investigation and report. For example, Chairman Nadler’s March 25 letter refers to my supplemental notification as a “four-page summary of the Special Counsel’s review.” My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report. As my letter made clear, my notification to Congress and the public provided, pending release of the report, a summary of its “principal conclusions” [sic] — that is, its bottom line.
[snip]
I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the report or release it in serial fashion.

We now learn, only after Barr pretended he hadn’t claimed to write a summary, that Mueller’s team wrote not just one but multiple summaries (possibly customized to each of several audiences for the report).

And now Barr is offering dubious excuses about why the summaries that tax payers have already paid for couldn’t be released.

My guess is Barr’s claim, which he backtracked off of, to have summarized even “the principal conclusions” of the Mueller report — much less the “results of his investigation” — is going to really come back to embarrass him, if he’s still capable of embarrassment.

I think it already has ...

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digby 4/04/2019 02:00:00 PM

 
Whistleblowers in the White House

by digby




The Deep State is now using the whistleblower statute to destroy that poor Donald Trump, who's only trying to make the world safe:

Tricia Newbold set an important mark when she became the first official currently serving in Donald Trump’s White House to take accusations of wrongdoing to Congress—and to put her name publicly behind them.

But Democrats on Capitol Hill say that beyond Newbold, a small army of whistle-blowers from across the government has been working in secret with the House Oversight Committee to report alleged malfeasance inside the Trump administration. Lawmakers and aides are reluctant to discuss information they have gleaned from anonymous government tipsters in detail. But the list of whistle-blowers who either currently or previously worked in the Trump administration, or who worked closely with the administration, numbers in the “dozens,” according to a senior aide from the committee now led by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland.

The Oversight Committee, like many committees in Congress, has a long history of working with federal whistle-blowers regardless of which party is in charge. Though some come forward publicly, most provide information or leak documents anonymously, helping to lead to investigations and, sometimes, hearings. “It’s entirely proper, and it’s really the point of what the Oversight Committee does,” says former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a Republican who headed the panel during the mid-2000s. When he was the chairman of the committee, many whistle-blowers’ reports led nowhere, he says, as they frequently came from “disgruntled employees” or others whose complaints were frivolous. But that was not always the case. Davis recalled, for example, that whistle-blowers were crucial to the investigation that exposed the military’s cover-up of the 2004 friendly-fire incident that killed Army Corporal Pat Tillman, a former NFL star who died fighting in Afghanistan.

Committee veterans told me, however, that the number of whistle-blowers who’ve come forward since Trump became president is far higher than the number who cooperated with the panel during previous administrations. “The biggest difference wasn’t necessarily us switching to the majority; the biggest difference was Donald Trump being elected president,” said the Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the committee’s investigative work. Democrats began hearing from whistle-blowers almost immediately after Trump was sworn in, the aide said, beginning with a report that then–National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been exchanging text messages with his business partner during the inauguration.

Of the dozens of whistle-blowers Democrats said they are working with, they have publicly confirmed that a handful work in the White House. All but Newbold, however, have come forward on the condition that they remain anonymous. Newbold spoke to the committee as part of its investigation of White House security clearances, and she’s not the only whistle-blower involved in that matter, the panel confirmed in a memo describing her testimony. “Committee staff have spoken with other whistle-blowers who corroborated Ms. Newbold’s account, but they were too afraid about the risk to their careers to come forward publicly,” the memo reads. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

I suspect many of them are afraid of more than losing their careers. Newbold said openly that she's afraid of Republicans and Mark Meadows had to reassure her that they weren't going to do something to her.

Newbold has accused her superiors of repeatedly retaliating against her after she began raising concerns about the clearance process. In October, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that her boss, Carl Kline, would move security files to a higher shelf that she could not reach. (Newbold has a form of dwarfism.) And in January, she was suspended without pay for two weeks soon after NBC News reported that Kline had approved a security clearance for Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, after it was denied by two career security specialists. The NBC story mentioned Newbold’s complaint to the EEOC.

Legislation passed in 1970 and expanded numerous times since protects government whistle-blowers from retaliation. But Democrats say the charges from Trump allies of a “deep state” conspiracy against the president within the federal government—along with reports, including one from an unnamed whistle-blower, that the administration planned to purge the State Department of career civil-service officers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump—have created a climate of fear among potential whistle-blowers.

“I’ve never seen this many whistle-blowers reporting waste, fraud, and abuse, and just general concern,” the senior Oversight Committee aide told me. “On the flip side of that, I’ve also never seen whistle-blowers so afraid of what could happen to them if somebody finds out who they are.”

At a public committee meeting on Tuesday, Cummings defended his handling of Newbold’s testimony, which he said was taken on a Saturday on short notice at her request because she feared further retaliation at the White House if her planned deposition became public in advance. “I will protect whistle-blowers. Period,” the chairman declared.

Connolly told me that Democrats have more power in the majority to protect whistle-blowers and to ensure that their reports “won’t fall on barren ground.” But, in a nod to the fears that potential whistle-blowers confront, he added this warning: “Nothing’s foolproof, and there’s always a risk.”

Yes. With these people, it's very risky. It's not as if they play by the rules or follow the law ...

There have been more leaks out of this White House than any I can ever remember. Some of it is palace intrigue, people jockeying for power within this bizarre administration. But it stands to reason that some people, like Newbold, have come to congress to seek some kind of serious oversight and simply aren't willing to become targets of the Trump cult. That's understandable.

You'll notice that the Republicans don't give a damn about this either. All hail Trump.

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digby 4/04/2019 12:30:00 PM

 
Trump again rails against ... courts

by digby


He also doesn't care if the congress approves his "new" NAFTA. This would be because he plans to just keep slapping tariffs on anyone he wants to under his bogus theory of "national emergency." So far, he's used this rationale on China and he's threatened the EU.

REPORTER: Can you get the USMCA passed by Congress?

TRUMP: "Whatever." pic.twitter.com/hIDQkKOCJw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 4, 2019

In this 70 second video clip, Trump says the word "deal" at least 14 times pic.twitter.com/h6jLZIkhk9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 4, 2019

He honestly belives that asymum seekers deserve no due process. In fact,"courts" in general are just supposed to rubber stamp whatever he wants.

He's now saying that he'll slap tariffs on cars a year from now if Mexico doesn't stop Central American immigrants from coming to the US border and if that doesn't work he'll close the border. That would only hurt American car makers, but he's fine with that too, I'm sure. I suspect he was talked out of his temper tantrum threat to close the border this week by Arizona and Texas Republicans who managed him by saying it would hurt his re-election chances. That's all he cares about. After all, he needs to win in order to run out the statute of limitations on his crimes.

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digby 4/04/2019 10:30:00 AM

 
It's only Thursday

by digby




It's not going well for him:

The Democrats have formally requested six years of his tax returns, and are ready to formally subpoena the full Mueller report. And after nearly two years of work without a single leak Robert Mueller’s team is making it known they are frustrated with Attorney General Barr’s apparently misleading 4-page summary of the Special Counsel’s investigation, and believe Trump is not as innocent as Barr suggests. Federal investigators have launched an investigation into how foreign governments may be using Mar-a-Lago to target Trump, which will likely uncover the pay-for-access natureof his golf club. And under Trump more than two dozen administration officials and others were granted security clearances despite being rejected by career civil servants– at the top of that list is Jared Kushner.

I don't think it's going to get any better for him.


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digby 4/04/2019 09:30:00 AM

 

Sneaky little bastages

by Tom Sullivan

Still image from Johnny Dangerously (1984)

"You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead," USA Today warns. Thousands upon thousands of bills introduced each year bear traces of "model" bills written by industry groups and promoted by special-interest lobbyists. USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity spent two years examining the issue and found at least 10,000 bills introduced across the country over the last eight years "almost entirely copied" from model legislation. More than 2,100 became law:

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.

Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters.

With deceptive names that hide their true purpose and traveling "experts" paid to promote them to legislatures, copycat bills have proliferated. They sometimes arrive in state capitols to override the will of voters who passed local legislation opposed by industry or well-funded interest groups. The bulk of such bills, the study found, reflect the interests of industry and conservative groups.

"One that passed in Wisconsin limited pain-and-suffering compensation for injured nursing-home residents, restricting payouts to lost wages, which the elderly residents don’t have," the report adds.

Naturally, the American Legislative Exchange Council gets name-checked more than once:

“This work proves what many people have suspected, which is just how much of the democratic process has been outsourced to special interests,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of Documented, which probes corporate manipulation of public policy. “It is both astonishing and disappointing to see how widespread ... it is. Good lord, it’s an amazing thing to see.”

It's a stunning read, though not earth-shattering news. Given recent history, next thing you know hostile countries will be phoning it in. And our own lawmakers will help them.


Undercover Blue 4/04/2019 06:00:00 AM

Wednesday, April 03, 2019

 
Ways and Means stops dragging its feet and demands those tax returns!

by digby



I wrote about this for Salon just this morning and lookee here. (I get results!)

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal has formally requested President Donald Trump's tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service, likely launching a battle with the administration that could stretch months or even years in the courts and could shed light on the President's finances.

In a letter to the IRS sent Wednesday and first obtained by CNN, Neal cites a little known IRS code in his request for six years of Trump's personal tax returns from 2013 to 2018. He also requested the tax returns of eight of Trump's business entities, a nod to escalating pressure from liberals in the caucus who have argued that Trump's personal returns wouldn't sufficiently paint a picture of the President's financial history.

While the move will largely be seen by Republicans as a political escalation, Neal explained in the letter the request is part of his oversight role. Neal wrote that the committee needed Trump's tax returns to consider legislation related to the IRS's practice of auditing sitting presidents.

"Under the Internal Revenue Manual, individual income tax returns of a President are subject to mandatory examination, but this practice is IRS policy and not codified in the Federal tax laws," Neal wrote in a letter to the IRS. "It is necessary for the committee to determine the scope of any such examination and whether it includes a review of underlying business activities required to be reported on the individual income tax return."

In a statement to CNN, Neal stressed that the committee's request was about "policy, not politics."
"My preparations were made on my own track and timeline, entirely independent of other activities in Congress and the administration," Neal said. "My actions reflect an abiding reverence for our democracy and our institutions, and are in no way based on emotion of the moment or partisanship. I trust that in this spirit, the IRS will comply with federal law and furnish me with the requested documents in a timely manner."

Neal has given the IRS until April 10 to comply with the request.

Yeah baby.

I'd look for a Trump tweet-tantrum of epic-proportions over this. he's going to explode like Mt Vesuvius.

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digby 4/03/2019 04:30:00 PM

 
Keeping the report under wraps is simply not optional

by digby

"Russia if you're listening ..."

Brian Beutler makes the case for why this Mueller Report simply must be released. It's way beyond politics:

The House Judiciary Committee has authorized chairman Jerrold Nadler to subpoena Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, unredacted report on Russian election interference, and unless Attorney General William Barr reverses his opposition to providing Congress the report voluntarily, it is critical that Nadler deploy the subpoena unreluctantly.

When Barr remains defiant, or President Trump intervenes to conceal the report, the ensuing battle will be waged in the lofty language of precedent and checks and balances and separation of powers. But those terms will paper over the underlying question that makes this particular fight a matter of enormous public interest: What are they hiding?

That question has fairly obvious and crass political force, but in this case it’s one that needs to be answered, not just asked, because without at least a complete accounting of what happened in 2016, and a credible response from the government, the basic trust that allows our political system to function with legitimacy will be shattered.

After briefly pretending to support complete transparency, based on a dishonest assertion that Mueller had exonerated him, Trump has backpedaled almost all the way. He has even suggested that the Justice Department should shelve the Mueller report, and ignore congressional demands for any further disclosure.

But even partial concealment from Congress would cause permanent damage, and not just to the institutions of Congress or the Justice Department.

The way things have shaken out since Mueller completed his investigation has left the country deeply vulnerable. For reasons that won’t be entirely clear until his report becomes public, Mueller was not able to establish that the ways the Trump campaign worked knowingly and in tandem with the Russian government throughout the 2016 election amounted to a criminal conspiracy. Between that conclusion, and Barr’s subsequent intervention to declare Trump should not be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice, the full weight of the Justice Department now rests behind the view that presidential campaigns can partner tacitly with hostile foreign intelligence services to sabotage their opponents, then try to conceal the relationship, and face no legal consequences for it.

What that really means in practice is that Trump and future Republican candidates, contemptuous of the rule-based international order, can undermine U.S. sovereignty to get themselves elected by encouraging authoritarian regimes to play in our campaigns, and do so with complete impunity. Nobody will have any recourse.

Plenty of Republicans would be satisfied with that outcome—as House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff memorably scolded his Republican colleagues, “You might say that’s just what you need to do to win.” But it’s not acceptable, and most people in the country won’t abide by it.

Congress thus needs the full Mueller report for two reasons. First, to instl confidence that the redacted report the government issues for public consumption (to protect intelligence equities and ongoing investigations) has been redacted in good faith—and that what remains accurately conveys the thrust of the full document.

Second, so that Congress itself can take appropriate steps to safeguard American elections, from this president and future ones based on the complete set of facts.

More at the link.

I agree with this 100%. If Trump has done anything he's persuaded Republicans that they have license to win by any means necessary. Allowing this to go unopposed will mean they are right.



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digby 4/03/2019 03:00:00 PM

 
The meme war

by digby




Mother Jones takes a look at one of the little discussed right wing propaganda techniques:

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Memes are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump president.
Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into the power of memes early on, monitoring obscure meme sites and boosting pro-Trump images and videos onto mainstream platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms favor images and videos over more nuanced text posts or links to news articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went viral. During the campaign, memes also helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at a DC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016 campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitator Mike Cernovich to organize MAGA3X, a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography. They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry.”

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to Washington media fame for a while, until he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the Independent Journal Review after being accused of plagiarism. He seems to have found his calling with Turning Point USA, the conservative campus activist group that sponsored the student convention in Palm Beach and is itself something of a meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained, noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations. “In your lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video, Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

I hate to brag.

I just took the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.

[Story soon] pic.twitter.com/W6LwXJtGBm

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 5, 2018

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers. Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his audience. “When memes take life.”

The article goes on to point out that Democrats lag badly at this sort of thing. (Late night TV is not enough ...)

But Republicans have always been better at being snotty little assholes. It's one of their great talents. Even St Reagan was king of low blow insults:

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”

Still, Democrats should be more aware of the power of these memes. If you look at Pinterest or Instagram they are everywhere. Trump fans love them and they make the right looks dominating even when they aren't.

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digby 4/03/2019 01:30:00 PM

 
QOTD: AOC

by digby

On Jared's little security problems:

.@RepAOC @AOC: "Every day that we go on without getting to the bottom of this matter is a day that we are putting hundreds if not potentially thousands of Americans at risk. I mean, really, what is next, putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs?!? This is ridiculous." pic.twitter.com/EkTPWbwIn4

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 2, 2019

I think it's important that we refocus what is at stake here in this investigation, in this matter. We are getting reports from press and from a wide variety of sources ... folks are suggesting that we are conducting foreign relations with folks with security clearances via WhatsApp. I mean, every day that we go on without getting to the bottom of this matter is a day that we are putting hundreds, if not potentially thousands, of Americans at risk. I mean, really, what is next, putting nuclear codes in Instagram DMs?

Don Jr and Roger Stone were communicating with Russian hackers and Wikileaks on twitter DM so this isn't farfetched.

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digby 4/03/2019 12:00:00 PM

 
Bring on the health care debate

by digby




New polling on "The Party of Health Care" :

The poll shows that any health care battle will be fought on Democrats’ turf. Asked whom they trust when it comes to health care, 45 percent of voters pick Democrats in Congress, while 35 percent choose Republicans in Congress. A majority of voters, 54 percent, have “a lot” or “some” trust in congressional Democrats to protect the health care system or make improvements to it — significantly more than have those levels of trust in congressional Republicans (41 percent) or Trump (41 percent) on the issue.

A 59 percent majority of voters say they don’t have much trust or any trust at all in Trump on health care.

“As health care is pushed to the forefront of the 2020 agenda, our polling suggests President Trump may struggle to attract voters with his promise of a new plan,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “While over eight in 10 Republicans (82 percent) have ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ trust in the president to overhaul the U.S. health care system, independents and Democrats trust the president ‘not much’ or ‘not at all’ on this issue (65 and 93 percent, respectively).”

Republicans have zero credibility on this issue. Donald Trump even less. Sure his cult followers will believe anything he says but they represent 40% of the country.

Mitch McConnell persuaded Trump to pull back from his plan to win the lawsuit that repeals Obamacare and then force the House Democrats to the table to pass his bill because people would terrified and dying all over the country so they'd vote for anything. Apparently that was too nihilistic even for McConnell and that's saying something.

Trump is now saying that running on his "great plan" will give incentives to vote Republican and Trump in 2020. Sadly for them, they have no credibility.

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digby 4/03/2019 11:00:00 AM

 

Get those tax returns fergawdsakes

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

There were plenty of scandals among the presidencies before Richard Nixon and Watergate, but probably the most serious was the Teapot Dome scandal in 1924. It was a bribery scheme involving government officials taking payoffs to lease oil on public land. One of the ancillary scandals that emerged from that investigation was the suspicion that Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who did not divest himself of his vast private holdings, was benefiting from his position. Congress was rightly concerned that the tax legislation Mellon was proposing was designed to benefit his personal interests So it demanded to see Mellon's tax returns and also determine if the IRS had given him special treatment.

Presidents had long had the right to access any citizen's tax returns, but as these scandals unfolded, Congress realized that this allowed for a cover-up. This led to the passage of a law that allows the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation the ability to demand any tax returns from the Treasury Department. The idea was to equally match the power the executive branch had to access this information. There were some slight modifications to the law two years later but other than that it has remained on the books ever since.

The most significant use was during Watergate when the Joint Committee investigated Nixon's taxes and released them to the public. He had been suspected of substantially underpaying by wrongfully claiming charitable deductions after the law had been changed. The press turned up more suspicious tax evasion schemes as the months went on, with questions over whether he'd paid capital gains taxes on a land deal. Finally, the Providence Journal-Bulletin got hold of Nixon's returns for 1970 and 1971, which showed he had barely paid any federal taxes at all.

Knowing that Congress was going to evoke the law and obtain the rest of his tax returns, Nixon voluntarily turned them over and asked the Joint Committee to audit them and tell him how much he owed. He ended up paying back $465,000 in 1974. Failure to pay taxes was one of the two articles of impeachment against Nixon that didn't pass out of committee after nine Democratic members voted against it.

Since the Watergate investigations had revealed the president grossly abusing his power with the IRS, shortly after Nixon's resignation Congress passed a law that severely limited the president's access to IRS information and barred him from disclosing it to the public. But it left the 1924 law untouched.

All presidents and major party nominees since Nixon have released their tax returns. That is, until now. President Trump has still not released his, sporadically claiming that he will do it as soon as the IRS is finished "auditing" them. This is, of course, nonsense. Every year would not be under audit and, in any case, there is no law against releasing a tax return that's being audited. It's very likely that Trump is lying about this, since he lies about everything.

All presidents should be required to release their returns, but especially one who claims to be vastly wealthy and has refused to divest himself of his private family business. It's an outrage that he has refused to do it and for any number of reasons, it's in the public interest that they be released.

Trump's overseas financial dealings have such clear appearances of conflicts of interest that they could be compromising regardless of whether they actually are. The Moscow Trump Tower deal alone raises alarms that Trump is still secretly involved in business deals in places that put him at risk of being leveraged. The national security threat of a president hiding foreign financial business from the public is obvious.

There are numerous reports of possible money laundering and other nefarious financial dealings with organized crime. He is currently benefiting from the profits of his company despite the constitutional prohibition against the acceptance of foreign emoluments. And the blockbuster New York Times exposé of the Trump family's decades-long tax evasion scheme downright requires that his current taxes be reviewed. If there has ever been a case where oversight was more necessary, I haven't heard of it.

So why aren't the Democrats moving on this? I think most people who voted them into the majority last fall expected it would be one of the first things they did. They have the power to do it. Certainly, Trump's financial shenanigans are no less suspicious that Nixon's were. And Republicans demanded confidential IRS information during the Obama years in their quest to prove bias against conservative groups -- and they got it, even releasing some portions to the public.


So far, there has been no movement from the House Ways and Means Committee under its new chair, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass. According to Politico, Neal is worried about exercising this congressional prerogative without a firm legal rationale and has asked numerous committees to provide one. Evidently he's very concerned about the fact that the Trump administration will fight the release so he's slow-walking it, telling people that it might not be done until after the 2020 election.

This is nuts. As the Center for American Progress points out, there is no legal recourse for the administration. The law is clear. George K. Yin, professor of law and taxation at the University of Virginia and a former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, says that the committees can review the returns and -- if they deem it in the public interest -- can release them to the House and Senate, which would be tantamount to making them public. Neal's excuses make little sense.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post observed that this may be a case of Neal being intimidated by the ambiguous conclusion of the Mueller report and falling for the absurd narrative being pushed by the Republicans that it's time to "move on." That would be sadly typical but, as Sargent says, it's the opposite of what must happen. Indeed, other House committees are moving forward at a brisk pace, knowing that oversight has been nonexistent for the last two years.

I also suspect that Neal, and the leadership that's letting him drag his feet, are concerned that whenever Republicans are back in the majority they will use this power to release the tax returns of Democratic lawmakers and wealthy donors. (This is the same lame logic that compels Democrats to defend the filibuster despite the ongoing bad faith of the Republicans.)

If that's so, it just makes the argument for people to be transparent and lawful with their finances. All public officials should release their tax returns, not just the president. And who knows? Maybe forcing wealthy donors to be transparent with their finances might be the best way to get big money out of politics.

There is no excuse for this delay. If Richard Neal won't do the job, Nancy Pelosi should find someone who will.

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digby 4/03/2019 09:00:00 AM