Ooopsie!!!!
Documents point to illegal campaign coordination between Trump and the NRA https://t.co/UJynmZis2E pic.twitter.com/LfRLNKX1eA
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 6, 2018
Taking a quick glance at Jon Ferrell and he pops up everywhere involving illegal coordination including Hawleys campaign in Missouri https://t.co/dirTb7BtGO pic.twitter.com/529Bb1gYE5
— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) December 6, 2018
The appropriately named Mike Spies at Mother Jones has the details (emphasis mine):
The National Rifle Association spent $30 million to help elect Donald Trump—more than any other independent conservative group. Most of that sum went toward television advertising, but a political message loses its power if it fails to reach the right audience at the right time. For the complex and consequential task of placing ads in key markets across the nation in 2016, the NRA turned to a media strategy firm called Red Eagle Media.
One element of Red Eagle’s work for the NRA involved purchasing a slate of 52 ad slots on WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, in late October 2016. The ads targeted adults aged 35 to 64 and aired on local news programs and syndicated shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. In paperwork filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Red Eagle described them as “anti-Hillary” and “pro-Trump.”
The Trump campaign pursued a strikingly similar advertising strategy. Shortly after the Red Eagle purchase, as Election Day loomed, it bought 33 ads on the same station, set to air during the same week. The ads, which the campaign purchased through a firm called American Media & Advocacy Group (AMAG), were aimed at precisely the same demographic as the NRA spots, and often ran during the same shows, bombarding Norfolk viewers with complementary messages.
The two purchases may have looked coincidental; Red Eagle and AMAG appear at first glance to be separate firms. But each is closely connected to a major conservative media-consulting firm called National Media Research, Planning and Placement. In fact, the three outfits are so intertwined that both the NRA’s and the Trump campaign’s ad buys were authorized by the same person: National Media’s chief financial officer, Jon Ferrell.
When an outside group and a candidate use the same vendor, staffers working for either client are prevented by law from sharing information with each other. Typically, such vendors make staffers sign a company “firewall” policy, which functions as a pledge not to coordinate and an acknowledgment that there are civil and criminal penalties for doing so. Under the law, National Media staffers working for Trump should have been siloed from those working for the NRA. Documents suggest, instead, a synchronized effort.
We identified at least four current or former National Media employees, including CFO Jon Ferrell, who are named in FCC filings as representatives of both the Trump campaign and the NRA during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election.
The FEC has the authority to launch investigations and seek civil penalties, but it’s unlikely that the NRA or the Trump campaign will face any official action. The FEC’s four commissioners—it is supposed to have six—have been deadlocked for years in an ideological split, making the unanimous vote required for significant investigations almost impossible to achieve.
Much more at the link!
If you’re wondering who broke the FEC, the answer is Don McGahn. And how did he get on the FEC, the answer to that is his partner in judicial nominations Mitch McConnell (emphasis mine).
Before McGahn joined the Trump White House in January 2017—after serving as Trump’s campaign lawyer—he was appointed by George W. Bush to the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2013. While there, critics say McGahn single-handedly presided over the destruction of one of the two US agencies responsible for insuring that the US’s elections remain truly democratic.
McGahn was handpicked by then Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell for the FEC, recalls Ann M. Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017. Once there, he quickly whipped Republicans into a solid voting bloc that nearly always opposed additional regulation, oversight, or even investigation. Because the FEC needs four of six commissioner votes to take any action, the net result was a completely broken agency, incapable of enforcing any election laws.
“His entire tenure at the FEC was to decimate the ability of the commission to fulfill its job,” Ravel said. Adav Noti, the FEC’s former associate general counsel, said McGahn may have been the most influential FEC commissioner of the century.
What an amazing coincidence!!!!!!
And remember, we’re still not sure what Russia’s connection to the NRA actually entailed. Though we’re going to find out soon!
Russian agent Maria Butina and prosecutors just canceled the rest of her pre-trial motions with the DC district court.
It looks like she will be cooperating soon.#TrumpRussia https://t.co/9SpbMlLlvN
— Grant Stern (@grantstern) December 6, 2018
Also, is there no one who works for the President who isn’t directly related to someone involved in organized crime?!?!?
And everytime McGahn comes up I love to remind people his uncle ‘Paddy’ McGahn was Trumps lawyer in the 80s and helped arrange a deal between Trump and the mob and of course Kellyanne’s grandfather was also involved w the mob. Perfect fit for Trump https://t.co/denVK2Jj3C
— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) December 6, 2018
Stay on target!
Open thread!
Major Major Major Major
It just never ends with these people.
Unrelated, my name is on Mars!
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Sure your name is…
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: you know I got receipts!
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: You sent your cat to a farm upstate. We know exactly who you are!
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
Anybody heard about the bomb threat at CNN? Lemon says he had to evacuate during his live show?
Cheryl Rofer
The strands are being connected…
This should help uncover how Carter Page and George Papadopoulos got named as foreign policy advisors.
Adam L Silverman
Executive time tomorrow is going to be lit!
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Here you go:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/06/us/cnn-new-york-bomb-threat-evacuation/index.html
Cheryl Rofer
At about the same time Trump tweeted an all-caps FAKE NEWS! The two are probably not precisely related, but others are recalling the last spate of bomb deliveries, which explicitly were aimed at Trump’s targets.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Vus Muuz end Skvirel!
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: If we’re lucky, tomorrow will be a day that will live in infamy for Trump and his coconspirators.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: why, I just took a well-documented trip to visit that cat!
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Sure you did.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Mike in NC
This gang of fuckers make Tony Soprano and his people look like Boy Scouts. Lock them all up!
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: easy now.
ETA save it for DeviantArt *snicker* sorry
dmsilev
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: As if anyone would believe that Trump could shoot any popgun without blowing a hole in his own knee, let alone something like a Desert Eagle.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: I told my Mother two hours before the Flynn sentencing memo was filed by the Special Counsel, when she asked what I thought was going to happen, that if I was Mueller, I’d redact as much as I could. Specifically because it would cause the other targets and subjects, both true subjects and subjects who may yet become targets, of the investigation, as well as other in the network being surveilled as part of the counterintelligence investigation to act out of fear that they didn’t have any real information from the filing. This is what Mueller did. I fully expect that Mueller will do the same thing tomorrow.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I don’t believe the President actually tweeted that.
Sab
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Sorry I am rudely off topic since I am elsewhere reading about Ohio dialects and accents: Goku, near Youngstown do you have tree lawns or devils-strips?
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Here it is:
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: It’s an obvious tactic, and the fact that it seems to both work and come as a surprise to Trumpworld is another in a long long list of indicators that these are, by and large, deeply stupid people.
rikyrah
Uh huh ??
Can’t wait until tomorrow??
Gretchen
@Sab: I grew up in Toledo and they were tree-lawns. Here is Kansas City I’m not even sure there is a word for them. I can’t think. Of it right now if there is one.
hilts
@Mike in NC:
Donald Trump lacks the gravitas of Tony Soprano.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: Yep and yep. It’s like playing “got your nose” with a toddler.
Adam L Silverman
@Sab: Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_verge
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Sab:
Neither? I’ve never heard of either of those terms. I didn’t know they actually had names. I just call it landscaping or something like that. I’m not the best source since I’m not plugged into the community too deeply.
Adam L Silverman
@Gretchen: Here you go too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_verge
Adam L Silverman
@hilts: How’s he compare in terms of mass and relative density?
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Go, right now, and ask your neighbors. They won’t mind at this hour. Tell them its for SCIENCE!!!
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@dmsilev:
It’s still for the rubes. He’d take pictures while holding the DE in his hand, pointing it at Mueller and Rosenstein’s heads, both on their knees and looking black and blue.
He’d have a lackey do the deed for him.
/If Trump were a comic book villain going off the deep end he’d try this.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
Ugh. I’m never going to live that down.
Another Scott
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1070879369432850433
There still isn’t a federal budget for some large fraction of the federal government. The House and Senate passed a 2 week extension, but as seen from the link above, Donnie and his Minions are still making noises about wanting their precious Wall money.
GovExex:
I hope Nancy holds firm, or at least makes him give up something important for more fence-fixing money.
Cheers,
Scott.
JanieM
@Sab: You didn’t ask me, but I grew up in Ashtabula (an hour’s drive or so north of Youngstown, an hour’s drive east of Cleveland) and they were tree lawns. I don’t remember ever hearing of a “devil’s strip.”
Also we drank pop, not soda or tonic, in case you were wondering.
hervevillechaislounge
@Adam L Silverman:
I had to read the tweet a few times before I decided it was probably—but not definitely—fake.
Trump isn’t tweeting openly about the tribe yet but that time will come. Who wants to take bets on the first anti-Semitic slur he’ll use: Heeb? Yid? Kike? Maybe he’ll throw the evangelicals a bone with Christ-killer—nothing’s off the table these days.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
Could someone rescue my comment from moderation in the Thursday night open thread?
Stuart Frasier
Red Eagle? That’s a bit on-the-nose.
Sab
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Thanks. Devils strip is what Akronites call the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, because the city has an easement and can plant anything there. I think the term was imported by West Virginian migrants to here.
Anyway, we are proud of our own linguistic anomoly, and I was shocked to learn we shared it with Youngstown ( we aren’t unique?) By the way, I like Youngstown. My grandfather was from Newcastle PA and his mother was from Poland OH.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: His hands aren’t big enough for a Deagle. He has to use two hands for a 1/4 liter bottle of water. The lightest Deagle, the Baby Dessert Eagle, weighs 2.375 lbs. The full size range between 3 lbs, 11 ounces for the lightest full size aluminum frame to 4 lbs, 5.8 ounces for the heaviest full size steel framed one. Even the lightest of the 1911 variant of the Deagle, which really isn’t a Dessert Eagle, its an Officer sized 1911 (3 inch barrel, micro-compact) with “Dessert Eagle” roll marked on the slide, weighs in at 1 lbs, 6.1 ounces.
Here’s the President fighting a water bottle:
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM:
You’ve obviously never been to your more upscale and innovative personal grooming salons…//
Adam L Silverman
@hervevillechaislounge: I think Gohmert had that shift today:
JanieM
@Adam L Silverman: And thank the FSM for that. ;-)
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: It’s free. I’m going to start charging you all.
Mary G
@Another Scott: Nancy will eat his lunch. The Republican House candidates ran against her and lost anyway. She knows the people are on her side – the wall is unpopular in every poll taken.
This is shaping up to be the best Infrastructure Week so far!
eemom
Too. Please. That is all I ask.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
“China’s been pretty oppressive for a while.”
Uh, more like it’s entire history, including it’s “Republican” period. Chiang was just another warlord.
Also, Varney should have called Gohmert out for that shit.
Roger Moore
@hervevillechaislounge:
Hasn’t he already spent a lot of time complaining about globalists? It’s a new one, but it’s clearly an anti-Jewish slur.
Adam L Silverman
This is just SCIENCE!
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: Glad you took that in the spirit it was intended!
Mary G
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: I’m sure Susan Collins would deeply furrow her brow and express her grave concerns before voting aye.
PJ
Adam, your headline got me hoping that McGahn had done something blatantly illegal that implicated himself in the collusion or the cover-up, but it seems he is still savvy enough to use only legal means to subvert democracy.
Platonailedit
So much open corruption & blatant collusion at so many levels. And it falls on one man and his small crew to bring down these corrupt thugs? The ‘checks & balances’ system is so fubar.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Sab:
Lordstown is closing down and this place sucks. After this year’s election, I’ve decided to get out of this benighted state and move to Pittsburgh in the next few years.
Adam L Silverman
@eemom: I actually checked first. One to many refers to the relationship between two entities, which is describes McGahn’s connections to both the President’s campaign and the NRA.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Someone up the chain at Fox actually made Varney publicly apologize for Gohmert’s remarks and distance the network from them in the next hour of Varney’s show.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: He also refers to Jews as sleepy eyed, which is also an anti-Semitic slur for Jews. He’s used this on both Adam Schiff and Chuck Todd.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: Och aye!
Adam L Silverman
@PJ: My guess is he’s going to be spending a lot of time, starting in January, answering Congressman Nadler’s questions.
Schlemazel
@Adam L Silverman:
Exactly right & not the least bit unexpected given the quality work coming out of that unit!
Just saw some BS on Twitter saying Pense gets indicted tomorrow based on “a leak from the Mueller team”
Like there has ever been a leak from there. People are guessing & putting out pure unadulterated bullshit to pretend they have connections. RMIII is a real pro and he is not doing anything by accident or until the time is right. People need to calm the fuck down & let this stuff work its way through the process.
Robert Mueller, we will indict no individual before its time.
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: Exactly. As I’ve written here before, the only people who know what the Special Counsel is doing are the Special Counsel and the people working for him and, when necessary, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, the US Attorneys in the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and when in court the judge and/or juries.
Schlemazel
@Adam L Silverman:
Someone complained about his use of “Jews” in his Hanukkah tweet. I snarked that it took him 4 attempts before he didn’t use the K word. That seemed to make a lot of people agree. He is one prayer session with Kissinger away from it
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Was there even a shred of truth to what Gohmert was saying about Soros?
PJ
@Adam L Silverman: I hope so, but he’s got a lot of defenses (attorney-client privilege, then, if the NRA or Trump waives that, or points the finger at him, “oh, I was never asked to advise on that”, “oh, I told them not to do that, but you know how much Trump listens to counsel”, etc.), unless they have external evidence. Which, if the IC was monitoring NRA communications b/c of the Russian connection, may be the case. But from the way he handled himself as White House counsel, and his willingness to talk to Mueller, it seems self-preservation is more important to him than going down in flames to advance the right-wing cause (live to fight another day, etc.) Whereas Stone, Manafort, and Trump’s cronies seem like the kind of people who have been getting away with this stuff for so long that they never considered following the law.
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: I’m still trying to figure that one out. Whether the problem was that he put it in there and it wasn’t necessary to have it in there or whether it wasn’t modified by American.
PJ
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Every single thing Gohmert said was false.
smike
@hervevillechaislounge: I don’t know, is Kike a term used much in NY? I’d normally go with that, but I really like christ-killer. Right down dotus’ alley.
Mnemosyne
In 2016, the NRA was rolling in dough and bankrolled many candidates, especially Trump.
In 2018, they’re pleading poverty and on the verge of bankruptcy.
As I’ve been saying, I think someone inside the Deep State managed to quietly turn off the spigot of cash that was flowing between Russia and the NRA. The timing is a little too neat.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
Trump needs two hands to hold a 250ml bottle of water? I haz a puzzled. Where does he find the room to put both hands on a bottle that small?
sukabi
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Not believable as a drumpf tweet…no weird capitalization or punctuation. Also no misspelled or incorrected words. And the big tell, no third person reference.
Got to up your game.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: He did live in Hungary during the Holocaust. Other than that, no. Soros was 14 when the NAZIs took over Hungary. His father, who was quite wealthy before WW II, before he was shipped off to the camps, fostered him to another man in order to save his life. That man’s, who was Soros’s caretaker, job included going to document the property of Jews that the NAZIs had been deported. One on occasion he brought Soros with him. Soros did recount this during his 60 minutes interview.
Here’s a full debunking:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/05/30/unpacking-the-george-soros-was-a-jew-killing-nazi-conspiracy-theory-that-roseanne-barr-spreads/?utm_term=.0d6ff4eaf38f
This is where Gohmert most likely got the Soros material, though it has been peddled by Glenn Beck (for over a decade), Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Alex Jones.
Here’s the full 60 minutes interview:
Adam L Silverman
@PJ: My guess is he cut a deal with Mueller and told him everything to protect himself. Which is, perhaps, why Butina and Erickson are in so much trouble.
smike
@eemom:
Thank you. At first glance, I had to stop and figure that out.
Schlemazel
@smike: Grew up near a Jewish neighborhood and had friends there enough that I learned a bunch of Yiddish (see my nym) but also heard how people talked about them in my predominantly Catholic block. That was the most common slur there. But honestly just the tone when some of them said “Jew” made it a slur.
‘Funny’ Story. When I was very young there was a rag & bone man that drove his horse and cart down the allies & picked out stuff he could recycle. He was like a thousand years old & the horse was older. My dad always called him “The Sheeny” and would say “Leave that out back for the sheeny. I assumed that was his job title. I made the mistake of using that term around a couple of friends. What the hell did I know? I learn that was not a job title. Oddly though I have never heard it used anywhere else even among all those other slurs.
Steeplejack
@Adam L Silverman:
More precise (and less ambiguous) to say, “Servant to many masters” and leave “one to[o] many” out of it entirely.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I think there’s a lot of stuff that’s been shut down because Trump’s election brought it to the attention of people who had the power to do something about it. The biggest example is his money laundering business- no sane person wants to launder money with a guy whose personal finances are being investigated by a special counsel- but the Russian money funnel to the right wing may be another casualty. It’s an inherent problem with covert action: success risks blowing your cover.
Sister Golden Bear
@Adam L Silverman: Careful with those exclamation points, you don’t want to run out of them before Mueller time. //
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
That YouTube channel totally stole their avatar from Dragon Ball. That’s the Red Ribbon Army logo.
Also, that’s incredibly disgusting to spear a Holocaust survivor like that.
smike
@Adam L Silverman:
Okay, I just hit your response. Accepted, but disconcerting.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: He’s got very small hands. He’s very self concious about it.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Yep. The Republicans seemed to mysteriously have a lot less money to spend in 2018 and were going around to their donors to beg for more.
I am starting to suspect that a lot of the Koch and Mercer money was actually Russian money that they were laundering. Rich penny-pinching assholes would jump at the chance to be seen as kingmakers while not having to spend their own money.
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: It is not a widely used term. And even less so as the 20th century wore on.
Adam L Silverman
@Sister Golden Bear: I’ve got a cache of them.
oatler.
@smike: So much so that Tobias Funke in prison misheard it and replied, “it’s been a long time since anyone called me a tyke…”
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
This is absolute horseshit. What possible reasoning could the, I presume, Republican FEC commissioners have that would prevent them from voting to launch investigations into the NRA and the Trump campaign, aside from the nakedly partisan? I’d like to hear it straight from their mouths.
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Or smear him for that matter. The thing about it is that Bibi Netanyahu, self declared leader of the world’s Jews, is perfectly okay with it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/07/13/anti-semitism-doesnt-bother-benjamin-netanyahu-if-it-comes-from-his-political-allies/?utm_term=.e7cfa0bd5e13
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-hungary-soros/israel-backs-hungary-says-financier-soros-is-a-threat-idUSKBN19V1J4
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-israel-soros/jewish-leader-israeli-backing-to-orbans-anti-soros-campaign-disappointing-idUSKBN1A42IS
And give this thread a read:
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
*smear*
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: Speaking of which, oy vey…
Adam L Silverman
@smike: I was shooting for acceptable, but disconcerting. I may put that on my business cards.//
Schlemazel
@Adam L Silverman:
The odd thing to me is I don’t think my dad meant harm, he never had a bad word for the Jewish neighbors and worked in politics with them, saw them as friends. I think it was just careless and thoughtless on his part. I should have asked him but was too embarrassed about it.
edit, that was 195x so maybe it was just ingrained in his vocabulary but damn the war was not that far back to ignore what it meant
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
What I got out of that is that Poland, Hungary, and Israel are due for some regime change. Would that be a bad idea? What would the consequences be if the US and EU allies did that? I’m only half-serious, I’m so disgusted.
Schlemazel
@Adam L Silverman: “Almost like how you can’t kill off cockroaches” he added
Gawd he is so dense and incapable of human communications
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: That was most likely the case.
smike
@Schlemazel:
“The Sheeny”
Never heard that one in my life – and I’m old. Not that I have any insights on the subject, though.
Sister Golden Bear
@Adam L Silverman: In that case, I look forward to a future post of yours composed entirely of exclamation points.
Double dog dare ya. ?
Adam L Silverman
@Schlemazel: I think these responses to that tweet sum it up well:
Schlemazel
eh, I’m done. Good night you jakals of New England, you snowflakes of Maine
Adam L Silverman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: The current governments in all three states are, at best, problematic.
Adam L Silverman
@Sister Golden Bear: Speaking of double dogs, I’ve got doggie bellies to rub.
Catch everyone on the flip.
Chetan Murthy
@smike: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/263251b7-bad8-4ba8-8f28-4a8b661ee7a0
The only place I’ve ever heard it was in Miller’s Crossing
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Orban has made it clear he wants to destroy the liberal world order from the inside. He needs to be stopped. I’m not saying it should be through military intervention, which would spectacularly backfire I’m sure, but he needs to be stopped.
smike
@Adam L Silverman:
Winner!
Chetan Murthy
@hervevillechaislounge: I lost a bet that he’d use the “c**t” word before the election. But then, he’s 2yr older now, and descending fast ….
Steeplejack
Gold Diggers of 1933 is on TCM right now. I’m going to bed, but I had to stay up to catch some of the snappy dialogue and hear that one guy say in rehearsal: “I’ve been a juvenile for 18 years, and you’re gonna tell me how to sing a song?!” Never gets old.
Plus Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” in pig Latin!
ETA: Might have to go to bed before Warren William makes his dissolute entrance.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemazel:
I found an interesting blog post from the folks who do the Oxford dictionaries about that word. For obvious reasons, tracking down the origin of a slur is difficult, and there are several competing theories:
https://blog.oup.com/2009/07/sheeny/
After a while, some people probably did start to use it to refer to any trash picker or junk man and didn’t realize what the origins of the word were.
Mnemosyne
@Steeplejack:
The big finale of “Remember My Forgotten Man” is the best part, but it’s on YouTube if you can’t stay awake.
Procopius
Whoops! I see the FEC has a brand new headquarters. The famous British savant, C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out that government bureaus invariable get lavish new headquarters built for them when they are moribund. My copy of Parkinson’s Law was lost many years ago so I can’t check it, but I believe the Colonial Offices both got a huge new headquarters and reached the largest number of employees they ever had just before they were absorbed into the Foreign Office because there were no more colonies to administer.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
I’ve seen it so many times I could probably direct the remake, but it’s always a treat to see it. Lots of pre-Code lingerie and loungewear. Me likey! Plus my man Warren William.
I did stay up, and Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahon are just putting the hooks into Warren William and his companion Peabody.
Procopius
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
I can’t help you with that, but here’s an interesting read from another source. It looks like the Democratic members are not a whole lot better than the Republicans. Several of them give examples of their reasoning at various times. I recently saw a quote attributed to Einstein, “Only two things are infinite — the Universe and stupidity. I am not entirely sure about the Universe.”
jl
Thanks for the informative post.
Looking forward to developments on the Russian-NRA money channel. And I have to wonder if a few other countries chipped in too. The NRA hasn’t said much about the allegations. Their responses so far have been silence, non-denial denials, and a few non-denial non-denial bafflegabs full of half-baked accounting jargon. So, it don’t look good for them, huh?
I think the vague outlines of what went on have been clear for months, especially after the NRA was caught red handed. IANAL, but I figure from one of the tweets at the top and some comments, when the Butina camp saw the news, they realized the jig was up, packed it in, and started planning to cooperate with Mueller. Butina seems like one of the more intelligent and competent operatives involved in this mess, so probably she decided not to fool around with Manaforting herself. Of course, we are not sure what threats Manafort has to deal with, might be more than just legal.
Mnemosyne
@Procopius:
Oh, look, Dmitri’s here. You’re a little off-schedule today, comrade — it’s already 10:30 in Moscow.
jl
Again, IANAL, so maybe I don’t understand some nuances, but a lot of what these goons are going to get caught red handed on seems so stupid and unnecessary.
Why didn’t the NRA and the GOP silo their efforts? Why did they need to privately and illegally coordinate much of anything? As I understand it, the big crucial role the NRA played was GOTV money and organizing, after the Trumpsters showed they were too incompetent to do anything. Seems like good old-school traditional standard nod-and-wink evasion of the law (rather than direct violation) would have been sufficient for the NRA to know where to spend the NRA money. They could see the polling where Dems were weak and had a hard time holding a lead, they could monitor the social media social engineering, they could watch what the GOP publicly signaled should be done, right? What don’t I understand?
Mary G
@jl: They are entitled, lazy, stupid, and believe that laws only apply to the little people.
trollhattan
@Adam L Silverman:
Looks like Maggie needs a “Both sides Jew it” Tweet soon. It’s in her contract, let me tell you.
jl
@Mary G: I try to be a scientific type of guy, so look for simple explanations. Sometimes Trump’s razor gets unexpectedly complicated. They’d have to be really entitle, really lazy and really really really stupid for that explanation to work. Is anyone in this mess that stupid, except for the Trumpsters themselves. But, maybe so. I guess maybe so, we have documentation on how well Butina’s ridiculous dog and pony show worked on the NRA fools.
Emma
@jl: You don’t take into consideration, being a normal person with higher than average reasoning abilities and a functioning conscience, that their stupidity has combined with their delusions of superiority to form a toxic sludge that is slowly poisoning their frontal lobes.
jl
@trollhattan: Some of the bigoted oldsters in my family never used the usual racial and ethnic slurs, but they could do a huge amount of bigotry with just the tone. The old school bigots always said ‘Jew’. but the way they said it, I have a hard time using the word at all. I go for Jewish or find some other way to avoid it. Man, their tone left a mark on me. Same with ‘Mexican’ and a few other words used to inflict bigotry..
joel hanes
@Sab:
tree lawns or devils-strips
Iowa : Parking strip, or just “the parking”
California: in post-WWII suburbs, if there is sidewalk, it is frequently directly adjacent to the street.
joel hanes
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
I’m never going to live that down.
Best chance is to not respond to or acknowledge any mention of it.
I made an unfortunate remark in the comment section of a blog once, and finally had to quit reading that blog for two years or so before coming back: there were people there who might have remembered, but they never mentioned it again.
Sister Golden Bear
@jl: Josh Marshall’s Trump Razor:
has a had remarkable predictive power.
sm*t cl*de
@Sab:
You crazy mixed-up kids. Those are berms.
Mnemosyne
@sm*t cl*de:
This is starting to remind me of the time I told my husband to turn onto the frontage road in our rental car. Despite the fact that we both grew up in the Chicago area, he had no idea WTF I was talking about.
sm*t cl*de
@Adam L Silverman:
Is that with one scoop or two?
joel hanes
@smike:
sheeny
I’ve seen it written; I think in dialogue in a WW II novel.
As for the other slur, this is the splendid climax of a splendidly-written short story:
Martin
@JanieM:
It’s a drinking game. Squi can teach you how to play.
joel hanes
@jl:
What don’t I understand?
That their experience of privilege and their contempt for others and for the law had convinced them that they didn’t need to make the slightest effort to hide what they were doing, because no one would ever challenge it, and if someone did, of course they would get away with it, because privilege.
Like the guy doing the absentee-ballot ratfucking in North Carolina.
Or like those who lynched black men during Jim Crow.
Shalimar
The shocking part to me is that they are so inept at covering up illegality. If it is against the law to do two separate jobs simultaneously, at least have the basic competence to come up with a fake name when you sign off on one of them.
sm*t cl*de
@joel hanes:
There are other Dorothy Sayers readers here who will recall that she has her characters use the word – in “Whose Body” and (IIRC) “Unnatural Death” – as a signifier of vulgar English antisemitism.
Planetjanet
Has anyone on Etsy made a Muellermas Ascent calendar? I would like to pick some up as stocking stuffers.
JR
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: it would be a war crime to start with
SFAW
@Schlemazel:
In a similar vein: when I was around age 10, my friends used to refer to Cadillacs as “canoes.” [Back when having a Cadillac actually meant something.] I thought it was because they were big and boat-like, and shared the initial “ca” in the words. One evening, I used the term “canoe” in front of my parents, who explained to me that it was a shortened form of “Jew canoe.” I don’t think my jaw dropped, but I sure-as-shit never used the term again.
Glad there’s no more anti-Semitism in the world. Just like there’s no more racism in America
SFAW
@Mnemosyne:
Sounds like something William Powell and Mischa Auer would do well in.
SFAW
@joel hanes:
Being a progressive state, they just want to make it easier for wayward drivers to do target practice with pedestrians.