Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Wait, what?

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

We still have time to mess this up!

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

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Archives for 2020

Open Thread: New Hampshire Winnows the Field, Slightly

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I’m sure Bennet is a fine Senator, and may even become president in some less fraught year, assuming we survive this one. And Andrew Yang… meant well. But with a better signal-to-noise ratio, maybe Kamala Harris and/or Cory Booker and/or Julian Castro are still in the race right now. So my sympathy for these guys is limited.

Take a hint, Deval Patrick. Maybe Mike Bloomberg will offer you a cabinet position, if you drop out and endorse him before Super Tuesday.

Hardly worth complaining about Tom ThStheyer, because only the threat of violence or a big on-camera french kiss from Bernie could get him to go away now, and I’m not sure about the first one.

NOT DEAD YET:

Reminder: NH Is for Ratfvckers –

Horse-race touts, of course, are lovin’ it.

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Open Thread – New Hampshire Polls Closing And More Antics At Justice Department

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The New Hampshire polls have just closed. Here’s a thread to keep track of the media’s hysterics and perhaps real results.

Also, too: The uproar in and around the Department of Justice continues. Trump just pulled the nomination of former U.S. attorney for D.C. Jessie Liu to serve as the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial crimes. Hard to say if this is connected to today’s resignations of the prosecutors in Roger Stone’s case, or if it’s just Trump rampaging because he can.

Open thread!

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Thinking About Nuclear Deterrence

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I have always been suspicious of arguments about nuclear deterrence. After the Soviet Union broke up, it seemed to me that those arguments needed to be redrawn, since they had been based on the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nobody’s done that.

Back in the 1960s, Robert McNamara recognized that nuclear deterrence could easily deteriorate into a comparison of weapons. That’s what’s happened in the justifications for the lower-yield nuclear weapons introduced to nuclear submarines. That’s all the justification that’s been made. That’s not deterrence.

So I wrote a piece about that, and Foreign Policy published it. There’s another little piece that didn’t quite fit, that Inkstick Media published. All the talk about “restoring deterrence” vis-à-vis Iran is nonsense.

So please read those two.

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Courage at Justice?

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A lead prosecutor on the Roger Stone case, Aaron Zelinsky, abruptly resigned from the case after the DOJ said it would claw back a sentence recommendation issued yesterday. NBC:

The lead prosecutor in longtime self-described political dirty trickster Roger Stone’s criminal case abruptly resigned on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for the longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department pulled back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

“The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and will clarify its position later today,” a senior department official confirmed to NBC News.

Good for him. Barr is openly corrupting the DOJ to protect Trump and his criminal cronies. Career DOJ people will have to stand up for the integrity of the organization if they truly believe it’s worth defending.

ETA: Another resignation:

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Adult Diversion

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The Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, have collaborated on a story about Crypto AG. It’s a true-life spying success story:

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

Bobby Ray Inman, former NSA director, is quoted in the story as saying, basically, “fuck yeah we did that, good for us”. I never liked that guy.

As an older software guy, I remember how much of a pain in the ass crypto was in the 80’s and 90’s, compared to the relative ease of using crypto today. (For example, this page was served to you over an encrypted connection, which is absolutely commonplace today, but it would have been a big deal back then.) Part of that pain was the NSA’s effort to impose their versions of cryptographic algorithms onto the market, which at that point included export controls which treated strong crypto like munitions. A lot of us assumed this effort was because they wanted to be able to break messages coded in NSA-approved algorithms quickly. This article makes that supposition seem much more reasonable.

That all said, you don’t need to know much about cryptography to understand the story.

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Election Year Open Thread: Klobuchar-mentum!

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She’s not my dream candidate, but it wouldn’t give me pause to vote for her. (I would particularly enjoy a Warren / Klobuchar, Cagney-Lacy ticket, but we all know why that’s not gonna happen.) She’d also be great as a VP candidate — someone on twitter referred to her ‘powerful Vice Principal energy, which I both respect and fear.’

That may actually be her best position, as the race stands right now: VOTE CANDIDATE X — DON’T MAKE AMY COME AFTER YOU. On the other hand, it’s early to suggest that she should settle for second place, correct?

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Breaking rocks in the hot sun…

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It sucks that so many criminals associated with the 2016 election heist either evaded punishment altogether or got absurdly light sentences. That includes Trump, who remains in office despite the House Dems making an airtight case against him on two articles of impeachment.

We can and must work toward extracting a political toll on Trump and his Republican enablers in the upcoming election, and impeachment was an important part of that. But the lack of accountability under the law is disturbing regardless. Looks like Roger Stone may not be so lucky. Via TPM:

In a court filing Monday evening, prosecutors recommended to a federal judge that former Trump associate Roger Stone serves seven to nine years in prison for lying to Congress and witness tampering during the Russia probe.

“Roger Stone obstructed Congress’ investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, lied under oath, and tampered with a witness,” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “And when his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this Court and the rule of law. For that, he should be punished in accord with the advisory Guidelines.”

Prosecutors argued in the filing that given how “Stone’s actions were not a one-off mistake” and that his false statements were not “made in the heat of the moment,” a prison sentence of  87 to 108 months — which is equivalent to around seven to nine years — is “appropriate.”

Not sure that’s enough time considering the gravity of the offense, but it’s not nothing either. Stone has tried the patience of Judge Amy Berman Jackson a thousand times with his bizarre antics during the trial. I hope it comes back to bite him on the ass later this month and that the perp walk is televised.

PS: I looked up Stone’s age to figure out if 7-9 years would amount to a life sentence in his case and was surprised to learn he’s 67. Since he looks like an indifferently drawn cartoon villain, it’s hard to guess his age from his appearance, but I figured he was pushing 80 because he’s been a boil on the butt of American democracy since I was a small child. Stone must have been a ratfuck prodigy.

ETA: I’ve been avoiding Trump’s Twitter feed for health reasons, but he weighed in on Stone’s sentence recommendation during the wee hours this morning:

This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!

Trump also retweeted some wingnut who said the proposed sentence would be “an unhinged miscarriage of justice.”

ETA2: Velveeta Voldemort gets mad, and Barr scurries to make it go away.

Out-fucking-rageous.

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