Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Good lord, these people are nuts.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Let me file that under fuck it.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

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Archives for 2018

Late Night Nasties Open Thread: The Darkness Lures Them Out

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Russiagate Open Thread: Never Trust Turks Bearing Gifts

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Just yesterday, the Turkish government was bragging that the Trump administration was about to extradite Gulen. (Trump’s agents have denied this, at least once news of the Kian indictment broke.)

Granted that Fethullah Gulen may be a cult leader and a very bad person (although foreign policy experts say not responsible for that coup), but it’s never a good idea for the titular head of the American government to give other countries the impression that extraditions are available if the right ‘fixers’ are employed.

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Open Thread: If Only the Butterflies Didn’t Have to Die for the GOP’s Sins…

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… I’m a lifelong Republican who voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016. I want our immigration laws to be enforced, and I don’t want open borders. But Mission is not a dangerous place. I’ve lived here all my life. Here at the National Butterfly Center, 6,000 schoolchildren visit each year. Girl Scouts come here when they camp overnight just a mile or so from the Rio Grande. When the president says there’s a crisis at the border that requires an action as drastic as building a massive concrete wall, he either knows that it’s not true or he’s living in an alternate reality.

Before this controversy, I voted, and sometimes I expressed my political views on Facebook, but this issue got me involved in activism for the first time. I had never gone to a protest in my entire life, but last year, I helped organize one: a four-mile march to the La Lomita Chapel, a historic church on U.S. soil that the wall will block. I also joined a group that succeeded in lobbying the Mission City Council to pass an anti-wall resolution. This is a mostly Democratic area, so these experiences were a little uncomfortable for me. Most of the people I worked alongside were anti-Trump from the start. I mostly kept quiet about my party affiliation and my vote in 2016…

… As I followed the news [last week], I was amazed to find myself agreeing with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who called the project “immoral, ineffective and expensive.” Here was a Democrat telling a Republican that a policy would cost too much…

 
And yet, the pundits cry: Fewer, but purer, Republicans!… Trump is the political equivalent of Kaposi’s sarcoma. If the GOP wasn’t suffering from a fatally compromised immune system, his campaign wouldn’t have been able to get traction even *with* Russia’s assistance.

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Everything Trump Touches Dyes (Open Thread)

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There’s nothing wrong with dyeing one’s hair. I do it occasionally, and my daughter used to dye her hair a different color every week. There is something wrong with ridiculing people for their appearance, but with egregiously awful human beings such as these, the normal rules of civility are more difficult to follow, so I hope you’ll let it slide.

And besides, Padma Lakshmi started it…

…and then she replied to MY tweet about HER tweet…

…so now I am deceased, obviously. Go ahead and criticize a dead woman for hair-shaming, if that makes you feel better.

Open thread!

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Reconsidering The Steele Dossier

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It’s time to reconsider the Steele dossier. Not necessarily to show how much Christopher Steele got right or wrong, but because it is a relatively compact collection of information about how the Donald Trump campaign may have worked with the Russians. Looking at it can help to organize the torrent of information coming at us.

Lawfare has posted an excellent summary, in narrative form, of recent evidence in court filings that supports the material in the dossier. It also gives a good background summary of what the dossier is.

The narrative form tends to impose a particular organization on the material. The dossier is a raw compilation of human intelligence, with no evaluation. The court documents now available do not point to one single scenario; in fact, much of their material is redacted, so we know that there is much more to the story.

I’ve seen people more informally claim that the dossier is supported, but they seem to be referring to a general sense that a story that can be elicited from the dossier are similar to what is in the news. This is often correct, but when I have checked some of these claims with my breakdown of the dossier, the correlation is often cloudy.

My breakdown of the dossier is a listing of its claims, in the order in which they are presented in the dossier. In this post, I’ll state the claim and add evidence for or against it. I may have missed some things; there’s a lot out there.

In this post, the claims are in italics, often shortened from the wording in the dossier. They are identified by the numbers in my breakdown, along with the Company Intelligence Report (CIR) number and date of the document in the dossier. I have included a broader selection of relevant evidence than do the Lawfare authors. The summaries of information may be verbatim from sources or shortened. If you want to do detailed analysis, refer to the linked sources.

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Today’s Big Read: Russia’s Comprehensive Disinformation Campaign

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Pushing ten thousand comments on the Post’s online story, as of 6am:

… The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel hasn’t said whether it endorses the findings. It plans to release it publicly along with another study later this week.

The research — by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm — offers new details of how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November’s midterm elections.

“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”…

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