“The volume of questions about Kushner in their interviews surprised some witnesses.” https://t.co/Ok8eTOJIbK
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 3, 2017
Another excellent story from @CarolLeonnig. This is the best account of the Mueller operation as an operation I have yet read: https://t.co/QGLYAbn1nf
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 2, 2017
.
No matter how many tantrums Lord Smallgloves throws, or how anxious the rest of us, it doesn’t seem like Mr. Mueller is gonna be finished by the end of 2017:
… With his stealth morning arrival Thursday, White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II became the latest in a string of high-level witnesses to enter the secretive nerve center of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Twenty hours later, Mueller and his team emerged into public view to rattle Washington with the dramatic announcement that former national security adviser Michael Flynn would plead guilty to lying to the FBI.
The ensnaring of Flynn, the second former aide to President Trump to cooperate with the inquiry, serves as the latest indication that Mueller’s operation is rapidly pursuing an expansive mission, drilling deeper into Trump’s inner circle.
In the past two months, Mueller and his deputies have received private debriefs from two dozen current and former Trump advisers, each of whom has made the trek to the special counsel’s secure office suite…
The special counsel has continued to make ongoing requests for records from associates of the Trump campaign, according to two people familiar with the requests. The campaign associates aren’t expected to finish producing these documents by the end of the year. Mueller’s team is also newly scrutinizing an Alexandria-based office and advisers who worked there on foreign policy for the campaign.
In the past several weeks, Mueller’s operation has reached out to new witnesses in Trump’s circle, telling them they may be asked to come in for an interview. One person who was recently contacted said it is hard to find a lawyer available for advice on how to interact with the special counsel because so many Trump aides have already hired attorneys…
People familiar with the Mueller team said they convey a sense of calm that is unsettling.
“These guys are confident, impressive, pretty friendly — joking a little, even,” one lawyer said. When prosecutors strike that kind of tone, he said, defense lawyers tend to think: “Uh oh, my guy is in a heap of trouble.”
MattF
Hey, actual professionals. And the kerfuffle over a Mueller staffer who made an anti-Trump remark on social media? Same difference. Do your jobs, folks– let the peanut gallery do the snark.
jeffreyw
Let’s hope it’s the calm before the storm.
clay
Then those are naive witnesses.
Raoul
Interesting that McGahn was questioned 24 hours before the Flynn plea was announced. Not that those two events are linked, but that he was brought in by Mueller on November 30th. And then over the weekend, this insane “I wrote the confession tweet” thing got rolling.
WTH is going on? I mean, chaos, obviously. This WH is reflecting the central incompetence of it’s deranged and terrified boss. But, still. Really, mister lawyer? You want us to believe you phoned in a tweet and the WH comms team composed it and sent it out more or less admitting collusion in covering up Flynn’s lies?
OzarkHillbilly
And Kushner rolls on trump in 3…2…1…
Raoul
I’ll quibble with the framing of this “Trump’s Democratic opponents hope the investigation will uncover more crimes and ultimately force the president’s removal from office.”
Trump’s Democratic opponents hope the investigation will uncover the truth and ultimately force the president’s removal from office. Crimes, yes that too. But even a partial return to reality-based America is urgently needed.
Really, it’s more than his Dem opponents, too. Plenty of good gov’t folks, some GOP never-Trumpers, and even conservative activists like Steve Schmidt I believe want the Mueller probe to do it’s work and reveal the depths of Russian influence.
KithKanan
@Raoul: I’m beginning to suspect that Trump subscribes to the philosophy that “When the going gets tough, you don’t want a criminal lawyer. You want a CRIMINAL lawyer.”
Elizabelle
Thank you, Anne.
I am so sick of the disaster porn stuff here. Not in denial that we’re in troubled waters, but …. reading about some ethical and professional investigators sounds like a plan. I may slap whomever shows up first to Chicken Little that oh noes! Mueller is about to be fired. We will never have elections again.
KS in MA
@Raoul: This.
Feebog
Kushner is obviously the next step up the ladder. I have long surmised it would be Donnie Jr.’s indictment that pushes Trumpov over the edge, but given the tweets over the weekend, Kushner may do it. And by over the edge I mean attempting to fire Mueller and premature pardons.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
So Mueller and his team are doing a thorough job, looks like they’re crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and have got the goods on all of them. Then what?
TaMara (HFG)
@Elizabelle: You are my people. :-)
Major Major Major Major
Well, that’s comforting.
@Elizabelle: right?
Roger Moore
@Raoul:
I think it’s shorthand for saying the Democrats believe Trump committed crimes and they hope that Mueller’s investigation will reveal the truth of his crimes, forcing him from office.
Kay
My son will be happy. We all have different people we want them to get. My son loathes Kushner, my daughter wants Don Jr arrested and I want Sessions to resign in disgrace.
I feel like Don Jr isn’t important enough to worry about – although obviously he’s horrid :)
hitchhiker
Josh Marshall has an interesting piece up that frames events during the transition as a race between the Trump people and the investigators in the press & the FBI.
He tells a story of how the Trumpers were hell bent on getting into Putin’s good graces, whatever it took. End the Obama sanctions that retaliated for election misdeeds. End the Obama sanctions that retaliated for the Crimea. Reshape the whole international order in such a way that Russia took a much bigger role in things.
On the other side, the press, the FBI (and lots of us!) were looking to figure out what the hell Putin had been up to for all of 2016, and what if anything the Trump people had done to make it easier for them.
Josh’s point is that you can see how they thought all the lying about meeting with Russians during Nov and Dec wouldn’t matter if they could just get to Jan 20 while it was still secret — because after that they’d be in charge & they could stuff any story they didn’t like.
The obvious question is why… why was it so critical that Russia be our new best friend, immediately after the election? What was the hurry? Obviously most of them were rank amateurs in governing, foreign policy, and dressing themselves every morning, but that doesn’t answer what it was that made THIS particular thing so critical.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/taking-stock-pt-1-the-race-for-russia
NeenerNeener
Wow, there are a lot of trolls and/or delusional Trump fans in the comments section for that article.
PsiFighter37
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Then we see how many Republicans are actually patriots vs. how many are party-before-country Republicans. We already know the answer to this.
Mike in DC
For the record, I’m not a “chicken little”, but I do like to be prepared to deal with plausibly likely scenarios, rather than simply reacting after the fact.
Lapassionara
@Raoul: Yes. They should not even frame those hoping as “Trump’s opponents.” Those hoping are all US citizens who want their democracy back.
The law governing business relies on the concept of “good faith,” which means something like “honesty in fact” and absence of bad intent. There used to be an implied concept of “good faith” and “fair dealing” in politics, but Republicans have left those ideas by the wayside. This is why Dems are always at a disadvantage. They play by the old rules, while R’s play TEGWAR.
BTW, does anyone else remember when T spent some time alone with Putin and Putin’s interpreter? Like on his first trip abroad?
BroD
“Kushner is obviously the next step up the ladder.”
I’m beginning to think he’s the big kahuna: DT is just a tool.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@PsiFighter37:
My point is since we know who they are, and that they’ll do nothing. Then what?
Spanky
@Kay: This is so great, everyone is rooting for their own special criminal! Fun for the whole family!
And it brought to mind a new board game, where your little Monopoly-like icon rides a tumbrel through the streets according to the roll of the dice. First one to reach the square with the guillotine “wins!”
glory b
@NeenerNeener: I know, right?
But I smell bots, given the weird misspellings and syntax in the comments.
Matt McIrvin
@Mike in DC: I’ve been thinking about this divide, the way Elizabelle and schrodingers_cat get so annoyed when TenguPhule or I or somebody else games out a doomy scenario, and I think people just come to these discussions with different aims in mind. I’ve always been a pessimist at heart, I think in part because I grew up with a powerful flinch/startle reflex that made me a target for bullies, and trying to emotionally anticipate and game out the next hit I was going to take was important both to keep that under control and to figure out how to respond. If the hit didn’t come–well, I would be pleasantly surprised! I find that I have a bit more emotional equilibrium than some people do when something terrible actually happens. And I get pleasantly surprised a lot.
But, in practice, dwelling on this stuff is often not very practically useful, especially when the scenarios get really violent-baroque. And there are also people who can easily get driven into a depressive fugue just by hearing about the really bad possibilities. I know I’ve occasionally had to pie the most depressive people just to keep that contagion out of my head.
The 2016 election was a really bad surprise, if you were trying to call it using the best available quantitative information. And it’s probably led to a lot of this sort of preemptive doom-anticipation. But I think it is worth keeping in mind the different reasons that people might be here.
eclare
@hitchhiker: Read that too, thought it was a good article. And I had the same question, the only think I can think of is to get some of that sweet petrocash for Jared’s 666 building. I think the debt is due next year?
ETA> According to Fortune magazine, $1.2B is due in February of next year.
oatler.
Trump is getting nervous, and it’s ALL OUR FAULT. Shame on us!
tony in san diego
@Feebog: Who the hell is Kushner, anyway? Is is a government employee? What is his job title? He is supposed to fix the Middle East, solve the Opioid Crisis, and restructure the Federal Government. Fuck him.
MaxUtil
@Spanky: It’s Pokemon Oh No – Gotta Catch Em All!
Humdog
@Matt McIrvin: This is very insightful.
Feebog
@BroD:
Nah, Kushner is the bagman. Trumpov relied on him to establish the contacts and back channels the administration would use after January 20. The big question is whether Kushner will flip on Trump. Mueller may not need him now that Flynn is in his pocket, but wouldn’t that be interesting?
Kristine Smith
@TaMara (HFG): Me three.
MattF
@eclare: One of the people at the Thanksgiving dinner I went to was familiar with NYC real estate. He noted that, once upon a time, 666 5th Ave was a very A-list building, but then fell on hard times. So, the implication is that Kushner got talked into a deal where the main asset was seriously overvalued.
Feebog
@tony in san diego:
Kushner is on the payroll, so yes he is a government employee. He is also one of Trump’s closest advisors and confidants. I think he knows where almost all the bodies are buried.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin:
Odd that you would lump yourself in with TenguPhule and then say this.
Served
I’m having a great day just daydreaming the damage if, after the months of dogged investigation and questioning of associates, Mueller manages to get Trump in to ask questions he already knows the answers to.
Barbara
@hitchhiker:
1. Jared Kushner wanted a guaranteed investor to avoid the accelerating distress of his extremely poor Manhattan office building investment.
2. Putin has “something” on various people that would be damaging to Trump or others.
3. Trump is an idiot who loves authoritarian rulers.
4. All of the above.
My mind is still reeling at the “unfortunate lawyer tweet” that everyone is talking about. So Trump said that he fired Flynn because he lied to Pence, a bad idea but not illegal. Said tweet states that he was fired for lying to the FBI, and when it becomes clear how damaging that statement was because it throws Trump’s subsequent interactions with James Comey (e.g., asking him to let Flynn off) into stark relief as they might relate to an effort to obstruct justice, Dowd comes out and says that he wrote the tweet without really thinking about it, thus making Dowd a potential witness into Trump’s state of knowledge about Flynn as it might affect the investigation and possibly threatening waiver of A/C privilege. What’s wrong these people? It’s like having any interaction with Trump makes you completely stupid.
ETA: Dowd didn’t have to say anything!
MomSense
@Kay:
I want Pence to go down whimpering and begging for mother.
eclare
@MattF: I think he also bought in 2006, the height of the market just before the crash.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin:
Nice analysis. Due to severe home training, I too am inclined to game out possible outcomes and prepare for the worst. In the current political environment, however, there’s not much practical benefit for us as individuals to dwell on potential bad events and responses. IF Mueller is fired, we contact our legislators and take to the streets. Some organizations (Indivisible?) have already got a game plan for events like that and we’ll be notified.
In the meantime, our most productive activity is registering voters, supporting good candidates, opposing gerrymandering, and getting folks to the polls. Our power lies in the ballot box. Tumbrels and guillotines are fun fantasies, but they ain’t gonna happen. Turfing the bastards out, now that is true pleasure.
MattF
@Feebog: Kushner’s title is ‘Son-In-Law’. I know, it takes a little effort to get into the banana republic frame, but it’s where we are.
Yarrow
Tick tock, motherfuckers. Mueller isn’t playing around.
Leto
@Yarrow: “Uh oh, my guy is in a heap of trouble.”
Teddys Person
@Feebog: I thought Javanka are working without pay, which is why they claim all their rule breaking is no big deal.
Major Major Major Major
@Barbara:
It’s probably more likely that Trump’s voluntary associates simply are completely stupid, since this doesn’t happen to democrats or foreign leaders.
Jamey
@Raoul: Wait for it: Republicans and conservatives all will eventually fall into line, from the geriatric right-wing “I love our president, fake nooz!” crowd and their Alt-right enablers (yes, I see an ideological consistency, if not a moral/intellectual one) to the likes of David Frum, who will eventually come down on the side of “our republic can take only so much recrimination and self-flagellation; we need to decide how to move on with dignity” arguments.
Most will stay angry, but the more “moderate” factions on the right will come back to fold after they manufacture ways to look noble and civic-minded in doing so. All will go the full Tom Delay and blame “The Democrat Party” for politicizing politics and criminalizing criminal acts…
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: I’m way less doomy than him, but like him, I’ve gotten scolded by the first two people I’ve mentioned.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder what if any conflict there is between Papa trump and Papa Kushner, if Wee Jared isn’t going to come under pressure from his own family to protect their assets at the expense of his in-laws. I really, really hope so, cause I really really hate them all.
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa: There are also different cultures at other blogs. Some of the headliners at LGM are super doom mongers, for instance.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: but unlike with him, I don’t stop reading a thread when you join in the festivities. Just saying, difference in kind.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@hitchhiker:
So this Russia connected with white conservatives thing had been boiling for quite a while – you’ve got plenty of Duke and Spencer connections as well.
Here’s an interesting story of my own that I want to share:
There’s an old acquaintance in my Twitter followers list who uses his first initial, Germanic last name and 14 (and yeah, the jerk would select “14”, as in “14 words”). I’ve known the guy since high school. We had mutual friends (we all went to Louisville Catholic schools), and met through them. He came from a large family raised by a very weird set of parents. His dad was a WWII vet who lost a leg in the war, and was incredibly racist (as were his uncles on his mom’s side, all cops). He occasionally made antisemitic or racist statements, but in the 70s and early 80s it didn’t seem as weird, and he wasn’t nearly as bad.
He was the first of our group to get married, first to have kids. I wound up being in his wedding, stood godfather to his oldest daughter. His dad gave him a retail plant shop to manage, which he promptly managed into the ground by being lazy. He didn’t take care of his wife, didn’t take care of his kids, didn’t take care of business and prowled the early internet for random strange women.
After the inevitable crash of his marriage (in a torrent of domestic violence orders and contempt sanctions), he found the racist side of the web as he bounced from lousy job to lousy job in Kentucky and Florida, probably making less than 25K a year at each.
Somewhere along the way after most of us stopped talking to him over the racist and antisemitic nonsense, he’d called me with a random legal question that I forget and is unimportant. This was probably 10 years or so ago. Given the connection that I had through his daughter and given the fact that I handled Some legal work within his circle of siblings, I took the call. After the business side, he told me he was doing a lot on Stormfront and Natvan and AmRen, plus was doing a podcast on some white supremacist site. I came up with an excuse to abandon the call so I didn’t have to listen anymore.
Wind the clock forward – I don’t have much of anything to do with him at any point, and out of the blue, heard from him sometime in late 15 or early 16, as I remember. It was another call involving something unimportant he’d gotten into as a long haul contract trucker (not an owner-operator). I knew he’d had huge trouble keeping women, and had lost his corrections guard 2nd wife and a later Afrikaaner girlfriend by this point. He started telling me about how he had a Russian girlfriend in Russia and that he was going back and forth to Russia frequently. I found that surprising, since he never had two cents to rub together and had historically been so cheap that he’d squeeze a nickel until Jefferson crapped (since he was never one to exert himself nor plan ahead, and he never knew where his next nickel would come from). I know what airfares and Russian accommodations look like expensewise, and just don’t see it. He was talking about his plan of retiring to Russia in the Saint Petersburg area, and advised me (and I quote): “the United States is doomed. Russia is the future of the west and all the good things are happening there. You’ll start to see it soon.” As always with him, I mildly laughed it off and terminated the conversation, thinking “well, there’s another weird talk with him”.
Honestly, I can’t imagine that anybody would involve a life loser like him in something important, but given the timing of his weird warning and weirder living situation (as well as his apparent access to resources and future plans), it could well be that people like him have been heavily recruited. He’s not stupid – just lazy – and I could see that having voices of American malcontents spewing out messages massaged from some of the finer minds in places like Brighton Beach (there would be some folks who have a pretty good understanding of American sociology there) could have value to a massive propaganda operation.
I suspect he’s into some ugly, ugly stuff. I’m not personally inclined to dig out his archival material on websites (little stomach for it).
McNab took a look at him and was pretty appalled. I think funding has been rolling at him from some weird source.
Matt McIrvin
@O. Felix Culpa:
That’d do it too.
O. Felix Culpa
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. I’m a long-time lurker at LGM, but haven’t frequented the site as much recently, partly because of the doom mongering there. I also miss SEK.
germy
Whatever happened to Joseph Mifsud? Is he still missing?
oatler.
@Spanky: I had to look up “tumbrel’ in Wiki to find out what it was, and the article also mentioned a “cucking-stool”.
No Drought No More
Put yourself in the shoes of any of those people, and life must be looking awfully grim at the moment. I tend to think, for example, that the weekend attacks upon the Mueller team’s credibility by the father of Sarah Hucklebilly Sanders on TV was made with true fear in his heart for his daughter’s future. I could see it in his eyes. “Oh what a wicked web we weave..”. I know if I was on the hook, I’d bark like a dog for Mueller’s team, or cluck like a chicken, or stick my finger in an electric pencil sharpener to avoid prison. Or even wear a wire. In fact, I tend to wonder at this point if Mueller’s acoustic experts are having trouble with static from all the recording devices people are currently wearing on the job at the White House.
eclare
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Bizarre. Who is McNab?
d58826
from David Frum’s twitter feed to FSM’ ears (at least metaphorically)
https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/937690188653903872
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
Hope I don’t inspire a similar reaction. I get gloomy sometimes when stuff like Tax Deform Bill pass
bemused
@MattF:
Didn’t Kushner buy it in 2007 at a very high price? Funny how Kushner missed the real estate bubble ready to burst. It’s not as if there weren’t a lot of economists and media trying to warn everyone.
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: JJ MacNab, expert on the violent far right. Her twitter is worth seeking out.
Kay
@MomSense:
Hah! Pence! good for you- he’s a less obvious choice but a lot of value :)
jl
@Barbara: Like an idiot Br’er Rabbit that throws itself into the brier patch, with no plan. Now it’s trying to get out.
I for one am glad that John Dowd, Esq. set all of us, and Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison straight, that we now know that the president can by definition never obstruct justice, and therefore never be corrupt. The president is his own justice, thank you very much. And that, my friends is the essence of their ‘rule of law’.
Interesting case of Adam’s maxim about how extreme populist democracy can ‘rebound’ to authoritarianism and dictatorship.
Thanks, John Dowd, Esq for setting us all straight this morning. The ignorance and arrogance of Madison is obvious, Why did we ever listen to him?
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay: I want the Big Kahuna – DJT his very own bloated self.
Kay
@MomSense:
This could be worse. Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio coulda won and we’d have the exact same policy with a lot less hope of indictments and they would be more popular.
From a purely political standpoint Trump is the best of bad options- best as in worst :)
d58826
@Kay: I don’t know, surely there is an ice flow in the Arctic small enough for all of them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@bemused:
I’ve seen it said that it was the highest price ever paid for a building in Manhattan, but I don’t know how that’s broken down in terms of square footage or inflation adjustment or whatever. There was a long NYT report on the Kushner finances in Dec of 2016. Lots of Russian and Chinese loans and IIRC a family investment fund, managed byJared’s younger brother, I think the one who attended the Women’s March in DC, worth about $500 million. In my hate-fueled speculation, that’s Ivanka’s port in the storm, and why I think/hope she wouldn’t put up too much of a fight if Jared wants to flip
Matt McIrvin
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve been mentally putting together a lot of puzzle pieces here. The revelation that the NRA is in deep with the Russians–of course they are, of course, but I never knew or suspected that.
I remember, early on, reading an essay by the late Leo Frankowski, a right-wing creep who was a science-fiction writer. It was about how, now that the Cold War was over, American men needed to give up on hairy-legged American feminists and go to Russia to claim a Russian bride, because Russian women knew how to please a man. He had some elaborate, highly stupid demographic/Darwinist explanation for why this was so, but trying to remember it would kill too many brain cells I need. The important thing was that un-feminist Russian babes were the American man’s rightful prize for Cold War victory.
Now.. that seems to connect to a lot of other things.
Amir Khalid
@Feebog:
You can’t put someone on staff and not write them paycheques. Jared and Ivanka claim they don’t cash theirs, but have they ever offered any proof?
Spanky
@oatler.: What??? Do you have Villago Delenda Est pied, or something?
piratedan
is in the Pokemon group theory, would love to catch them all, no matter where it leads. If its the entire family, fine, if some were just willing tools and auxiliaries, that’s fine too. I think we’re at the point where a lesson needs to be made, no more soft pedaling of this treasonous crap or else all we’re doing is building yet another “lost cause” for the idiots to romanticize. For fucks sake, we still got people out there thinking that Nixon was unjustly impeached, time to drive a stake through the heart of this cultural vampire.
jl
@Matt McIrvin: Money channel may be through NRA. Josh Marshall twitter on this over weekend. Lost of mystery money went through NRA to GOP GOTV.
Kay
Aaand right on time here come the phony “deficit hawks’:
Just take your ill-gotten giant tax cut and scram, billionaires. No one wants to hear your bullshit again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: to their credit, Simpson and Bowles did publish an op-ed against the TaxScam, but mysteriously enough, they are no longer the high priests of Village Conventional Wisdom
catclub
@Amir Khalid:
If you are on staff you HAVE TO fill out direct deposit forms. They are just lying. The Government does not send paper checks.
bemused
OT but I just saw an ad on msnbc for the second time that was mentioned here before. I glanced at the tv because there was no sound. It was white letters on black background that I believe said “1 THINK TRUMP”. Anyone know what this is?
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
The disaster stuff is not fun to read.
But. You knew there would be a but.
The way you prepare for a disaster is discuss it, dream up possibilities, no matter how unthinkably improbable and at least attempt to plan for them. Now very, very few of us are in much of a position to actually do anything with the plan but even if all we do is suggest one possible remedy out of dozens of possibilities of disaster, that may be the one that actually works. And this is a disaster that we do have some input in fixing.
Now sure the talk like we’ll never have elections ever again is right up there at the top of WTF but you have to plan for the extremely improbable possibilities as well as the much more likely.
The big problem here on the blog is we are usually skipping the part about having a plan and just WTFing about possibilities and extremely improbable possibilities. It does get old. But people do need to vent and leave room to actually think about this. It is after all our country. All of ours country. Our political class is mired in bullshit, one half making it and the other half pretty much having to wallow in that. It may actually be up to those of us who want it to be what it is supposed to be to fix it.
Kay
@d58826:
let’s list them, high to low value. Ivanka gets on my nerves but she doesn’t have any actual power – low value :)
JR
@d58826: English civil war not an ideal outcome (yes Charles got executed at the end, not ththe beginning, but there was another war down the pike)
bemused
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I groan when I hear Republicans revering business people as if they were omnipotent gods. They’re no smarter than general population, imo, particularly when they’re fueled by greed and a quick big sparkly profit is dangled in front of them.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
OMG, do you remember during Obama? They never shut up about the debt.
I am so, so sick of this bullshit. they don’t care about the debt! just admit it! I care more about the debt than they do!
Cacti
@catclub:
Correct. Federal employees haven’t had paper checks in years. Anyone on the payroll is on mandatory direct deposit.
Jeffro
Btw not sure if this might have already been mentioned, but Billy Bush of all people has a good op-ed in today’s NYT: Yes, Donald Trump, You Said That.
Not that many will care…but at least it’s out there.
MattF
@Cacti: So, Jared and Ivanka are pinky-promising not to spend the money?
cthulhu
@hitchhiker:
Lifting the sanctions will make Putin and his cronies far richer than they already are. I think it is entirely possible that they told Trump that, if he can lift the sanctions, there will be a LOT of money that can then be funneled to him via various means. Two things about Trump stand out. 1) He’s probably not worth nearly as much as he claims and/or is very leveraged. 2) He seems totally willing to break the law in all his grifting.
I am guessing that Putin does understand that there’s still plenty of resistance in Congress and the DOD to full rapprochement with Russia (even if we weren’t aware of the hacking) so the best bet for getting sanctions lifted was doing it quickly before the other power bases could slow or stop it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: John POdhoretz whined something on twitter the other day about how we didn’t hear so much about debt and deficit under Obama. He got a lot of pushback, but it’s just astounding anyone could say that with a straight face. I remember David Gregory (remember him?) all goggle-eyed sincerity talking about the Stimulus bill “What about this deficit?” Andrea Mitchell just a few weeks ago made a very sincere bleating sound about Paul Ryan as a deficit hawk
Ruckus
@MattF:
Imagine that, JK has the business sense of a toad. No wonder he’s dumpf’s fav. Birds of a feather.
Cacti
@MattF:
Basically.
PJ
@Kay: I sometimes think the same thing about GW Bush – if a more competent Republican had been President, we would now be involved in even more wars as part of the New American Century, because said (non-existing) intelligent Republican would have listened to the State Dept. (and would have read some history) and would have had a policy goal of safe, stable polities with rule of law in Afghanistan and Iraq and, as a result, would have sent in sufficient numbers of troops and civilian advisors with a strong cultural understanding (and no overriding agenda of “free market” privatization of valuable resources) to make that happen. As a result, successful wars and stable pro-American regimes in these countries would have encouraged us on to further military adventures. So even though Bush caused massive loss of human lives and property destruction, blew over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money, instated a policy of torture and abuse, and squandered irreplaceable international goodwill as well as American and international opportunities for peace and prosperity, the result could have been worse.
But this is a fantasy, because I can’t think of any Republican politician who would’ve done the right thing (particularly after successfully doing the wrong thing in advocating for invading a country that was in no way a threat to the US and had caused no injury to the US). Republican policies are stupid, cruel, and damaging, and anyone who advocates for them is going to do stupid, cruel, and damaging things. Would Jeb or Marco be as stupid or incompetent as Trump in their illegal behavior, and in covering it up? I admit, it’s hard to imagine that, but then I don’t think they could have been elected, because they wouldn’t have done the stupid things that Trump pursued to win. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Trump’s bad policies and bad and stupid behavior go hand in hand, and I’m not sure there is a genius among the Republicans who could have gotten elected by illegal means and successfully managed to cover it up as well.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: I like you!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Served: Question for our legal minds: We know Trump does not believe laws apply to him. So if he gets a subpoena from Mueller but ignores it, what happens then?
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
I think it’s simpler than that.
Some people simply want all speculation to end in a positive outcome for Democrats. It doesn’t matter what available evidence indicates.
But it’s all speculation, no matter how much anyone wants to insist that there is really any such thing as “the best available quantitative information.”
I don’t much care whether the speculation is positive or negative as long as the discussion about it sounds reasonable and interesting.
catclub
@bemused: New musical “The Twitter Man” sequel to “The Music Man”
Immanentize
Everyone may be way ahead of me on this small point, but on a local WGBH show, Charlie Senate of the Boston Globe said that the consensus understanding is that it was Kushner who leaked the “news” that Tillerson was leaving State and Pompeo was taking his place. Kushner did this because Tillerson was angry about Jared’s dangerous freelancing in the M.E.
Tick-Tock Motherfuckers.
Yarrow
I had a really busy weekend and haven’t kept up with all the news and I have limited time today. I want to call about the tax bill. Who are we calling today about the tax bill? What’s the latest on it from the House? Should we be calling Senators now? I caught that Collins apparently said she wasn’t a definite yes vote for the final bill.
Can someone give me an update? Thanks.
catclub
@PJ:
I am not sure there are that many troops and advisors and that many resources in existence.
Peale
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Mueller then visits the Capitoline hill anc consults and augur. If the crows fly east, Trump is declared an outlaw, we sacrifice an Ox and he either flees to the santuary of the temple, or we get to cast him into a fiery pit. I mean, we might as well revert to pagan justice since the system we currently have is so up in the air.
glory b
@MattF: I read that he bought it at the top of the real estate bubble, so yeah, seriously overvalued.
catclub
@Yarrow:
is your real name Charlie Brown? Cause I suspect Collins is just teasing.
Ruckus
@catclub:
Are you trying to tell us that there is gambling going on in this house of ill repute in DC?
Did I mix some metaphors in there?
Or change it to reflect the new reality?
Immanentize
@catclub:
O. Felix Culpa
@Yarrow: At this point, I think calls should go to the House, because the bill is referred to them for either a straight-up “yes” to the Senate version or for reconciliation. First step is to prevent the first option.
germy
cthulhu
@eclare:
Yes, his timing sucked which is somewhat understandable as he wasn’t the only one blinded-sided by the crash. BUT the building, despite its history, is not physically well-configured for what renters want these days and that was more obvious at the time (and why the previous owners were very happy to take Kushner’s money). Hence the hail mary plan to raze it and start over. But the other partners still think it might be somewhat profitable in the long run if they can restructure the debt rather than taking the risk of new construction.
Gravenstone
@Roger Moore: That’s how rational people see it. Republicans are all about framing and projection, so they assume everyone else has an agenda as well. As such, they expect the investigation is purely a “witch hunt” with no goal aside removing Trump from office, by whatever means are needed. After all, they know exactly how that sort of thing could work, having nearly demonstrated it themselves some 25 years ago.
catclub
@Cacti:
I wonder if Kushner’s bank is in Russia.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly:
I kinda hope he doesn’t, if only so I can enjoy watching him in his orange jumpsuit, scrubbing toilets, getting his head bashed in.
SFAW
@NeenerNeener:
You sure you read the article? I went through a few hundred comments, saw maybe ten supporting Shitgibbon, and those were slapped down pretty well. You’re talking about the Costa article, right?
Or do I need to read all 1600 comments to see some groundswell of trolls? That’s THREE TBogg units — who has time for that?
hitchhiker
@Kay:
I want Trump himself. I want him exposed like a turkey carcass before you throw the thing into a soup pot. I want him reduced to calling his own children liars on twitter. I want to witness his 3rd marital flameout when Melania realizes she’ll do better with book and movie deals than her prenup is worth. Take him apart, scatter his bones, and salt the earth from whence he came.
d58826
@Immanentize: Regardless of the leaks, isn’t there some financial agreement that Rex walks away with 10’s of millions of dollars if he leaves before 365 days from confirmation? or is it he has to stay just one year? So he might be planning on leaving on his own financial schedule
SFAW
@catclub:
They do! They DO! THEY DO!! I saw it in a movie!!!!!! So it must be true!
Ruckus
@Cacti:
Same with SS.
In the small print it says they will send a check if you don’t have a bank account but I think it takes a lot of hoops to jump through to get it done. Given the number of checks the feds would have to print, mail and handle on the back end, direct deposit has to save a couple of forests and tons of money every year.
Immanentize
@Spanky:
This, as they say, is what makes horse races.
Peale
@germy: All the important discussions at the White House now take place in a doctor’s examination room. You can now understand what at the last daily press briefing, Sanders kept holding her fingers over her mouth while she was talking so that the surveillance lip readers couldn’t figure out what she was saying.
PJ
@catclub: Prior to the invasion, Gen. Shinseki advocated sending several hundred thousand troops, and was shitcanned for it. In Bosnia, pacification worked with about 1 soldier for every 50 Bosnians, which would put the number of troops for Iraq at about 300,000. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/opinion/mills-truth-teller-iraq/index.html . But Bush and Rumsfeld were convinced they could pull off victory quickly and cheaply, and we see where that got us.
Brachiator
@PJ:
Maybe, but probably not. I find this kind of stuff as unconvincing as the insistence that Hillary Clinton would have been some kind of super pro military hawk.
There haven’t been that many truly successful wars and even fewer stable pro-American regimes. Most of them played the US for suckers by pretending that their countries were being infiltrated by communists (or terrorists). And too many Americans, conservatives and liberals, confuse a “stable pro-American regime” with authoritarian regimes which stifle internal dissent and end up amplifying anti-American sentiment.
People like bin Laden arose in part as a reaction to the existence of American puppet regimes in the region, and the US has yet to come up with a truly effective (and non-destructive) counter to this.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Listening to MSNBC discuss the Flynn lied to the FBI tweet. The trump story now is that Dowd dictated it to SCavino, who has access to trump’s account. These people are so fucking stupid and incompetent that they couldn’t even think to just blame it on Scavino, which is less unbelievable and doesn’t expose Dowd to losing his arty-client privilege, as I’ve seen some lawyers speculate about this
also, would Meuller be able to determine from which phone that was tweeted, his own or Scavino’s?
Gravenstone
@Served: Raises an interesting dilemma for Trump’s inner circle of support. Do they try to stonewall that Trump was not lying, endangering themselves for perjury and obstruction, or do they try the dodge that he’s simply too mentally infirm to have understood what was happening in his name? Because the latter path (even hinted at tangentially) leads straight to a formal psych evaluation. And won’t that be fun?
SFAW
@Immanentize:
“I got this horse’s rump,
It’s name is Donald Trump,
And there’s a guy who says
He’s an asshole chump”
Picture Stubby Kaye singing it.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
People have come up with effective non-destructive counters for US puppet regimes but the ideas get shot down every time. And I use that term shot down for a specific reason, all of those ideas didn’t involve the military, they involved actually helping the country in question. Building roads, water infrastructure, electrical grids. You know the same things that helped our country. China has done a lot of that work and is and will be rewarded handsomely for it.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: I think there’s a distinction between “Trump may fire Mueller, what are we going to do then?” (maybe useful) and “Trump will fire Mueller and nothing will happen, because the sheeple are fools” (I think Paul Campos was pushing that line).
rikyrah
People familiar with the Mueller team said they convey a sense of calm that is unsettling.
Love this.
Immanentize
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
A subpoena to the President would be way way down the list of what ifs. The first thing that would happen — like in the Valerie Plame investigation — would be a probably drawn out negotiation regarding the President sitting down with the prosecutors to clarify some issues. If the President just refuses, I suspect that there would be a request, at least, from the Senate investigation(s) for a sit-down. If that was refused, the question is where would a subpoena to the President most likely come from? History suggests it would be he Senate (the Legislative branch) rather than DOJ (the executive branch which Trump himself heads). So, if the Senate does not do that, no subpoena is my guess. If they do, then we are already into Nixon impeachment territory….
But procedurally, to answer your question directly, if the President refuses to honor a subpoena, the subpoenaing party would take the issue to a Federal Court and the President could there litigate his reasons for refusal. If the Court did not accept the reason, the President could be held in contempt and — harshest remedy — jailed until he purged himself of contempt (by honoring the subpoena) or until either the Congress that subpoenaed him were dissolved (after the next election of the House) or after whatever Grand Jury that issued the original subpoena was disbanded (usually six months later). That type of contempt hearing is appealable, but the appellate courts rarely disagree with and overturn a contempt order.
Gelfling 545
@Major Major Major Major: It’s Trump’s insistance on being the smartest one in the room. It leaves him surrounded by those playing the game to suck up for their own purposes or those too clueless to cone in put of the rain.
Immanentize
@d58826: My understanding is that Tillerson gets a tax BREAK for staying in government for more that a year (366 days) because his change in financial circumstances can be spread over (at least) those two years, making his income taxable over that time at a rate far lower than it would be if he had to pay his usual income rate. BUT although I am a lawyer, IANATaxL
J R in WV
@NeenerNeener:
Yes, and BOTs, too. Or at least people who read a lot of bot-generated posts in other places. I guess that’s more likely, WaPo probably is better than your average blog / twitter / facebook at weeding bots out.
Twits and FaceBook don’t care, every post generates another $0.000072 in revenue.
Humdog
@Kay: I want Pence to be questioned solely by women on Mueller’s team. Alone in a windowless room…. who know what nervous babble may spring forth!
Immanentize
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Absofuckinlutely.
SATSQ
ETA But it doesn’t matter, both are Trump’s agents and the quote is under his face and name: “The Real Donald Trump.” Legally, Trump as good as wrote it and cannot clever his way out of it.
schrodingers_cat
@Ruckus:
We are not gaming possibilities here, all that is being said is how its ok if you are an R, you never pay a price. How Rs always win no matter what. Its a bath in negativity. All the fucking time.
rikyrah
@Kay:
why does the daughter want Don Jr?
I have four:
Dolt45
Race Bannon
Kushner
Attorney General White Citizens Council
anyone else is gravy
Wapiti
@Ruckus: In the late 1980s I was in Bolivia alongside about a couple hundred US Army engineers and support troops, doing ‘nation building’. Our stated mission was to cut away a hill to allow an airport to handle larger passenger planes (enhancing tourism). Our unstated mission was to be good partners with the local government and community to allow future missions. My boss collected newspaper clippings about “the American technicians”. We got glowing articles from even the leftist papers, as they saw our work as being for the betterment of the region. Nation building seemed to work.
Humdog
@Immanentize: And Tillerson slighted Ivanka and her trip to India to teach women there the secret to success as an entrepreneur, you know, fall out of a wealthy hoohah.
Immanentize
@rikyrah: I’ll take your four, flip the order (Sessions FIRST please), and replace Race Bannon with VP Dense.
Immanentize
@Humdog: True. Tillerson knows enough of the world to know free-lancing grifters when he sees them. The Kushners are nothing but horrible trouble for the good old US of A from Tillerson’s perch.
Wapiti
@rikyrah: My list is only
Trump
Pence
Sessions
Loser stink and howling creditors will take care of the spawn.
Felony charges for all of the courtiers would be gravy.
Suzanne
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I’m not sure if anyone is actively recruiting these people, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s going around on weird right-wing sites that Russia is where these kind of loser Americans should go, since they’re realistically not going to have decent lives here.
In the last year or so, I am coming to appreciate (well, maybe not appreciate, but understand) how many Americans really want all the rewards of hard work without the actual hard work. This attitude of entitlement is remarkably common among undereducated white dudes.
Silly me…..raised to work hard in school, get good grades, earn a college education, and throw myself into my career. Show up on time to work, and stay late. How quaint.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: I wonder if Jared will screw himself, lying until the last possible moment, counting on getting off easy if he cooperates at the last minute, only to find that he doesn’t have enough new information about Trump, goes to jail for a very long time anyway, and Trump gets nailed with or without him.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
This gets more complicated. Western influence includes the work of relief agencies and the establishment of refugee camps, which often distorts the local economy and is sadly, sometimes an impediment to the successful re-organization of a country.
The offer of economic assistance and infrastructure improvement is often and “which came first, the chicken or the eggs dilemma.” You cannot “help” a country without the permission of its rulers, and if the rulers are corrupt, money is easily diverted into their pockets.
China is sometimes condemned, especially by some African leaders, as being just another exploiter.
Mnemosyne
A song for the ongoing debate in this thread:
“Hope For The Best (Expect the Worst)”
As with most Mel Brooks movies, this one comes down on the side of, Life sucks, but good friends make it suck less.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@eclare:
JJ McNab, writes on sov cits and white supremacy. Covers the Bundy beat.
Dave
@Matt McIrvin: That’s my problem with quite a bit of the doomsayer conversation here. It starts with Trump may do this and ends with and then bad things win forever. Which of true makes doomsaying pointless and if it happens a bit selfufilling. As oppossed to ok what’s a bad series of events that could reasonably occur and what can he don’t do counter them.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah:
This makes me laugh every time.
J R in WV
@jl:
Br’er Rabbit desperately wanted the wolf to throw him into the Briar Patch, that’s the native habitat for rabbits, not wolves. Otherwise an interesting comment. Dowd must have already caught Trump’s Disease in the confines of the White House.
d58826
@Immanentize: ok. I remember reading about this and wasn’t sure if the tax break came by staying more than 366 or leaving before 365. Either way he might have a financial incentive (besides the incentive of no longer working for a moron) to leave in the next couple of months.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: I think that’s the other reason that the Rs found Obama unsettling.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Ruckus:
The Road and Belt initiative is going to build a century of goodwill.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl:
If there was a way to make sure that all of the Trumps, including Ivanka, end up penniless…..I would be all for it. I am already loving how the high society people don’t want them around.
J R in WV
@Matt McIrvin:
‘I remember, early on, reading an essay by the late Leo Frankowski, a right-wing creep who was a science-fiction writer. ‘
There’s your mistake right there: “reading an essay” by a science fiction writer. Many of those guys could turn out interesting fiction but their non-fiction ideas were more squirrely than the Sci-Fi fiction was.
Like Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, even Bob Heinlein, who’s weirdness was at least interesting.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
The people who write this are wrong. They also often don’t really know their history, or insist on getting stuck on Nixon and Atwater as being the fount of all Republican evil. It’s annoying, but it really should not be that big a deal.
jl
@J R in WV: OK. I hadn’t worked out the analogy fully. How about Br’re Rabbit throws himself in the cooking pot and then tries to talk his way out? That might be better.
Edit: Or…. this is a Trumpster Br’er Rabbit that is so incompetent that it can’t even find its way out of the brier patch. I think some kind of enlightening parallel there, but not suitable for a short comment. Needs too many assumptions.
Anyway, whatever was going on with the self-incriminating Trump tweet (now maybe several tweets, I don’t have time to keep up with his stream of horsedhit), the Trumpsters are now deep down the rabbit hole of patent absurdity, or incipient dictatorship if our society has become so decrepit that they can get away with such self-serving nonsense.
TenguPhule
@Immanentize:
And if a court accepts Trump’s bullshit reason, the remedy is?
/Yeah, I know it would be a SC question at some point, but relying on Kennedy to do the right thing is not an optimal solution
They’re packing the lower courts for a reason.
Matt McIrvin
@J R in WV: I think it was being linked to by James Nicoll in a “point and laugh” capacity. He does that a lot…
TenguPhule
@Suzanne:
The Republicans have spent decades building that attitude among their supporters. It accounts for much of what troubles us today, racism and sexism being the remaining bits.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Somebody on LGM just mentioned that, while it’s not 100%, there seems to be a gendered split on the left between the people organizing active political resistance (notably female) and the people snarking about how useless the Democratic Party is (markedly male).
J R in WV
@germy:
“Wires” are so 20th century. They all have cell phones, and while they are being interviewed by the FBI at Mueller’s HQ, those cell phones are being modified to transmit conversations overheard back to Bobby-ThreeStick’s HQ, probably voice activated.
No one wears a wire any more, they have a computer owned by the FBI which looks so turned off while it records conversations for later review by the FBI. They probably just lay it on the table after ostentatiously turning it off. Sorta. For varying degrees of Off, actually.
zhena gogolia
@No Drought No More:
Amusing comment. Thanks
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
I blame video games.
zhena gogolia
@Spanky:
Yeah, a word cloud of BJ over the past year would have a big fat TUMBREL right in the middle.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: The people I’m really of two minds about are Masha Gessen and Sarah Kendzior. On the one hand, they’re extremely insightful about the ways in which Trump and modern Republicanism embody a post-Soviet authoritarian style of governance (and in which it’s no coincidence that they’re directly collaborating with those guys). On the other hand, the Russia/Uzbekistan sort of analogies convey an overwhelming sense that democracy is already over, conventional political action like “campaigns” and “voting” is a useless joke, and we should be hunkering down for raw survival under a new century of murderous totalitarianism. And I’m not sure that isn’t a self-fulfilling prophecy.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, ignore that s–t.
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
I have four:
Dolt45
Race Bannon
Kushner
Attorney General White Citizens Council
anyone else is gravy
That’s a good list… I would add Pence to mess with the “who’s in charge” thing and Miller for being a racist anti-semite. Ryan and McConnell for being Russian stooges.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Tell it, Kay.
rikyrah
@cthulhu:
The Exxon Deal is worth $ 500 BILLION DOLLARS.
THAT, is why he wanted those sanctions gone.
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: I think they have Trump and his friends dead to rights. But they may not understand the rest of us.
rikyrah
@hitchhiker:
Hell muthaphuckin’ YES!!!
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
366 Days = $71 million dollar taxbreak for the Secretary of Exxon.
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
Race Bannon IS Pence….
(after the Cartoon Johnny Quest)
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Of course. We are doing disaster prep. Most of us don’t know that’s what we are doing but we are. Disasters come big and small, they come from different directions and in different strengths. Things that are disasters to some are not to others. Example, when I lived in OH my house was about 1/4 mile from a river and all the houses nearby were in a flood plane. My house was on higher ground and therefore not in a thousand yr flood area. 1/4 mile and 25 feet in elevation made all the difference in the world regarding my house flooding. Flooding was not a disaster that I had to be concerned with specifically. My neighbors 1/4 mile away? Oh yeah, every year they had to worry. One in ten they really, really had to worry.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, they affect a few or a lot of people, they can be tiny or they can be massive. You have to plan for the worst and hope for the best, be ready for the worst and rejoice at the least. But there will be disasters in anything and everything involving man, because we are flawed. We can’t see the future, a lot of us refuse to see/understand the past, we panic at just the wrong time, we trust that god will save us (but which god and will he save everyone or only his faithful?) we often think with our genitalia (which can be fun but often doesn’t serve us well in disasters) and we generally leave the heavy lifting to others. And only sometimes get what we deserve in response.
Yutsano
@Cacti: If you want a paper cheque you have to fill out a form and submit a justification why you can’t have a direct deposit. It’s a whole process and THEN you have to wait until official pay date. I have this weird feeling neither one of them bothered to do that.\
You also can’t work for the federal government for free.
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
For better and for worse, they both grew up in countries where democracy was a recent invention and lots of people remembered what it was like to live in that pre-democracy country. In a weird way, that’s our problem with minority voting rights — we have a lot of people who nostalgically remember the days before minorities were allowed to vote. However, our actual democracy is pretty robust, and I’m not sure that people like Gessen realize how many elections we have every year in every possible configuration from city to county to state to federal. If Trump “cancels elections,” how does that affect elections for the Los Angeles City Council that have already been scheduled and the ballots prepared? Does the federal government even have the power to cancel state elections since all of the power of running those belongs to the states per the Constitution? What if California refuses to cancel their local and state elections?
catclub
@TenguPhule:
and no matter what else happens, they are packing in as many Judges as they can do.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
As IANAL I can’t really discuss the ongoing drumpf cartel with any connection to reality. But I have posted here many times possible ways to fix the issues of what allowed this disaster. None of them are easy, none of them are probable. I’m not alone in posting this type of stuff.
But really I have to ask, what is this blog really about?
How to fix the world?
How to better live in it?
How to get through the day?
I think the last is closest to reality. We talk about our pets, our cooking, our writing, our day to day lives, where we went on vacation, where we’d like to go on vacation, knitting, our operations, our cancers, our hopes, our kids, our photos, where we are from, politics, our parents, our houses, becoming citizens………
This is the modern back yard fence, an international coffee klatch, the corner bar. Right now the talk is far more important than normal, the threat to normal life bigger, mainly because we seem to be losing what little safety net we have to survive. Everyone is tense all the time. And really the only thing that is going to save us is that prosecutor in DC and time. All the solutions that have been mentioned are thing that can be done in the future to possibly keep this from happening again. It is a frightful time for all. Me for example, I can’t work a lot longer, at least not at a job that does much more for me than pass the time and at that point I’m almost totally dependent on SS and the VA. Two things that ryan just promised to “fix.”
They want to kill us, they just don’t want to do it directly.
It’s not the government they want to drown in a bathtub, it’s us, the washed millions.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
I blame Game Genies and other cheats which took all the work out of winning.
Ruckus
@Wapiti:
There were things done that were positive. There were many more that were not. The peace corp for example, a positive still exists. But those things that helped? The Chinese have done far more of them than we have been doing and often in places we wouldn’t go because of skin color or something. And look at it from the perspective of the rest of the world. Our military budget outstrips the rest of the world by far. We waste more than many spend. What is that used for? If I lived in another part of the world I’d wonder who/where is next.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
True. But how different is that from us?
But they are still building the infrastructure that we aren’t in many places. Maybe those places didn’t want our help at the societal costs we were/are willing to do it for. Or maybe we weren’t willing to do it at any cost. We don’t seem to be willing to do it at any cost here in the good ole US of A.
PJ
@Matt McIrvin: I have read many of Gessen’s essays about Trump and Trumpism, and saw her in a discussion with Timothy Snyder, and I have the impression that she has little faith in democracy in the US (in part because so many people voted for Trump, but also because of what she has seen in Russia), and no faith in the justice system reaching Trump and other complicit Republicans – she seems to view that as some kind of liberal fantasy. My guess is that, as in immigrant, she never was indoctrinated with the “truth, justice, and the American way” stuff that idiots like myself were raised with.
Mnemosyne
@PJ:
It’s not even a matter of idealism or the lack of. It’s practicality. We’ve been running our cities and towns on a democratic model for over 200 years. How does she picture that changing overnight? Russia had, what, 10 or 15 years of actual democracy, tops? They had an existing model for how to organize and run things under an autocracy since they went straight from the Czars to the Communists. We don’t.
Matt McIrvin
@Mnemosyne: One thing that really helps for me is to think in terms of historical US models of authoritarianism and fascism, instead of German or Russian ones. Because we’ve got plenty, oh, boy, do we ever. And many of them were eventually beaten, or at least beaten down just enough to provide a space for contrary action.
What does anti-democratic authoritarianism look like in US terms? We all know what it looks like: Jim Crow. How do you fight Jim Crow? There’s a rich history to draw on.
The most hopeless, depressive essays I read on the current rise of US authoritarianism treat it as this novel alien thing. And they seem historically ignorant.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: I find her and Kendzior’s writing hyperbolic. There was a spontaneous grassroots push against the first travel ban. VA elections were a huge push back. And T and his party are in big trouble even though they hold all 3 branches of the government. Things may be bleak but all is not lost.
sukabi
@Barbara: pretty sure Drumpf collects and keeps dirt on anyone stupid enough to do business with him…stay associated with him long enough, Drumpf probably has enough leverage to “buy” any statement he wants.
Matt McIrvin
@PJ: I personally don’t think Trump will be impeached and convicted–I don’t see the political mechanism for that; I think we will have to beat him in an election (and even if he is removed, we will have to beat his successor in an election). But the worse things get for him, the more likely that becomes, even with all the antidemocratic strikes against us. And the more likely it is that many other Republicans get beat. Gerrymandering can do a lot in districted legislatures, but because it involves deliberately weakening the margins in your own side’s districts, it renders you vulnerable to a massive wave election.
SgrAstar
@BroD: The big kahuna(s) are the Mercers, Adelson, etc. It doesn’t appear that they are at risk. The entire blotus administration are the tools of some very bad men; the oligarchs will sacrifice their useful idiots before they’re implicated. Bring the trumpistas down (Please!) but expect something equally bad to pop back up, like the Dragon’s teeth soldiers. In order to win this existential battle, we have to rip out the entire rwnj infrastructure and destroy it. Burn their cities to the ground, salt their fields, rejoice in the lamentations of their women. Cartago delenda est….
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Of course, one of the things Gessen warned us about was not to be reassured by any little day-to-day signs of normalcy–that’s just the authoritarian system trying to trick us into thinking things are OK.
But what we have is not quite that. It’s not as if Trump appears to be behaving normally; everything about him is abnormal. It’s that there actually seems to be a functioning counterforce, part of it institutional and part not.