Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

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

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

The willow is too close to the house.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

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

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

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

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Let there be snark.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Timely

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As I’ve said before… this is my happy place…

Also…

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Senate Impeachment Open Thread: Snapshots from Day One

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The Washington Post has a full spread of reports across the top of its webpage. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this would be a good time:

The first substantive day of President Trump’s impeachment trial opened Tuesday with unexpected internal GOP dissension over its structure, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was forced to revise his proposed rules at the last minute to accommodate a brewing rebellion in his ranks.

That abrupt reversal from Senate leadership began a deeply acrimonious day in the chamber, which dramatically escalated in its final hours when the House managers and the president’s attorneys engaged in language considered so toxic for the staid Senate that Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the trial, admonished both sides.

In the end, the final parameters of the third impeachment trial of a U.S. president was approved on strictly partisan lines, but the measure passed only after revisions that allowed both sides more time to present their cases, and for findings from the House impeachment probe to be automatically entered into evidence as part of the trial…

Now, both the Democratic impeachment managers and Trump’s defense team will have up to three days each to make their case, and evidence from the House will be entered automatically unless there is an objection. The changes were so last-minute that there were handwritten scribbles in the legislation marking the revisions.

The White House had initially requested condensing the opening arguments into two days for each side, according to several people familiar with the drafting. One senior administration official said it had done so while cautioning that the language could change depending on the needs of Trump and various senators, and that the number of days for opening arguments was a lower priority for the White House…

In a sign of fatigue, at least on the GOP side, McConnell (R-Ky.) halted the trial proceedings shortly before 9:30 p.m. in a bid to negotiate an end to the hours-long debate that seemed destined to go on for much longer. But after a brief recess that allowed for senators to talk, the two sides did not reach a deal to speed things up…

The Oval Office Occupant wants to trumpet his ‘exoneration’ at his State of the Union address in early February. His handlers are terrified that the longer the proceedings run, the more chance he’ll say something so disqualifying, there won’t be a State of the Union speech this year.

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Pandemic Paranoia Open Thread: Presenting the ‘New’ Wuhan Coronovirus

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To quote every single article I’ve seen so far: And just in time for the mass migration during Lunar New Year, too!

(Mandatory disclosure: Yes, I am preternaturally interested in pandemics, so YMMV.)

CNN, this evening — “First US case of Wuhan coronavirus confirmed by CDC”:

The United States has its first confirmed case of a new virus that appeared in Wuhan, China, last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. The coronavirus has already sickened hundreds and killed six people in Asia…

The patient, who is not being named, is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He is in his 30s and lives in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. He had recently returned from Wuhan.

He arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, before any health screenings for the Wuhan coronavirus began at US airports. He sought medical care on January 19. The CDC and Washington state are now tracing the people he was in contact with to see if he might have spread the disease to someone else…

The patient became ill four days after arriving in the United States and sought care. Based on the patient’s symptoms and travel history, doctors suspected the novel Wuhan coronavirus and sent specimens to the CDC in Atlanta, where tests Monday confirmed the virus.

The patient is faring well but is still being kept in isolation out of an abundance of caution, health officials said.

Soon, passengers from Wuhan to the United States, whether on direct or indirect flights, will only be allowed to land at one of the five US airports doing health screenings. Screenings include a temperature check and observation for symptoms such as a cough and trouble breathing.

Last weekend, the CDC started health screenings for Wuhan passengers arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport. Starting this week, Wuhan passengers will also be screened at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport…

This is actually good news — authorities *have* learned from previous scares, and sensible precautions are being slotted into place with due speed.

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Information Security Is Essential!

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The Guardian has now reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’s cell phone, which is what many of us who work in the information warfare area of national security had assessed shortly after The National Enquirer ran their hit piece on him. What we got in today’s reporting, however, were important and disturbing details! (emphasis mine)

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.

This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.

The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

WhatsApp is notoriously insecure and should not be used! It is now owned by Facebook and there are serious concerns about what Facebook may be doing with the data from the app, including the personally identifying information (PII), of its users. Another security flaw is that the app itself isn’t encrypted, just the information while it is in transit from device (user) to device (user). So any spyware, on either the device on the sending or receiving end of the transmission, can pick up what is being sent and/or received.

The larger issue here is that WhatsApp is very popular. We know from reporting that Jared Kushner uses it to communicate with Muhammed bin Salman, as well as others. From the late Congressman Cummings’ March 2019 letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone:

During this period the Committee obtained additional information raising even more concerns about the use of private email and messaging apps by Jared Kushner and other White House officials.

For example, during a meeting with Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging app WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders.

Jared isn’t the only US official using WhatsApp.

Multiple Trump administration officials are known to have used WhatsApp to carry out sensitive conversations, raising the prospect that their communications have been intercepted.

Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in in the administration’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit the president, communicated with other US diplomats about the effort over WhatsApp. During Trump’s run for the presidency campaign chairman Paul Manafort regularly sent polling data to a Russian associate via the app.

The problem isn’t isolated just to Jared and other US officials.

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.

Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Many of the nations are U.S. allies, they said

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas were also using WhatsApp!

WhatsApp messages from Parnas to Giuliani and Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde are included in the evidence.

Let’s see what the President’s Cybersecurity Advisor and the First Name in Cybersecurity has to say:

Ruh Roh!

Anyone and everyone who has messaged Muhammed bin Salman using WhatsApp have likely had their phones or tablets compromised. And there is no telling what he collected, who he collected it from, and what he intends to do with it. Though we can be pretty sure it isn’t anything good. WhatsApp is not a secure form of communication. You should not be using it. More importantly, US government officials – from political appointees to civil servants to uniformed personnel to contractors – should not be using it either. Not for personal communications and certainly not for official and work related communication. That the President’s advisors, both those in the White House like his son in law Jared Kushner and those outside of it like Rudy Giuliani, and his other political appointees like Gordon Sondland are using WhatsApp means that over three years worth of official US communications have been compromised. And Muhammad bin Salman is not the only one whose intelligence and security services have compromised WhatsApp. Both the Israelis and the Russians have compromised WhatsApp, So have the Chinese.

Whatever information that Muhammed bin Salman or the Israelis or Putin or Xi have managed to pull off of the phones of US officials, as well as those of other governments, that use WhatsApp is a ticking political warfare information bomb. We don’t know when this information will be used. We don’t know how it will be used. But we do know that it will be used. It may be used subtly to try to force US officials to do something they ordinarily wouldn’t. Or it might be used, as was the case with Bezos’s data, in an almost brutish assault. But it will eventually be used.

Does anyone really want to contemplate what Mark Zuckerberg might do with the information transmitted via WhatsApp, which he owns? Zuckerberg has the ability to blackmail and extort everyone who uses his social media products because those products are designed to suck up everyone’s information and data so that Zuckerberg can monetize it. That is not a good thing.

Every one of these government officials that are using WhatsApp, from Jared Kushner to Ambassador Sondland to those we don’t even know about should have their security clearances suspended pending a full counterintelligence investigation. They have made themselves into insider threats by refusing to follow best information and operational security practices. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have a security clearance to suspend, but he and his associates who have been using WhatsApp all need to be subjected to a full counterintelligence investigation as well given Giuliani’s pro-bono work as the President’ private attorney and all the activity he has been up to in Ukraine and other parts of Europe.

Open thread!

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Annals Of Lawlessness

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This is the new normal in Trump’s America:

An Iranian student planning to attend Northeastern University was removed from the country overnight Monday in defiance of a court order, his lawyer said, and a federal judge said Tuesday there was nothing that he could immediately do.

And in case you are wondering exactly what threat the fearsome Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, 24 years old, posed to the United States…consider this:

According to the legal filing, Hossein Abadi was admitted to Northeastern for the 2018-2019 academic year and submitted his visa application in 2018. After a background check that took nearly a year, the State Department issued Hossein Abadi a student visa last week, the petition says.

HE HAD A VISA.

The US State Department, not exactly a hotbed of radical Islamic activism, granted him one after an exhaustive inquiry.  And still, CBP agents stopped him at Logan, and then defied a federal judge’s order not to deport him until a hearing could be held. They lied to the judge about the deportation, asserting that he was being kept in the country when he was already on an Air France flight to Paris.

Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said Hossein Abadi had been put on an Air France flight out of Logan late Monday night. It was not immediately clear why he Hossein Abadi was removed in spite of the judge’s emergency order that he be detained here and brought to court Tuesday morning.

It’s pretty fucking clear, I’d say: CBP agents, operating under the accepted lawlessness that flows to and through their organization from the Oval Office on down, don’t see themselves as bound by anything so 2016ish as the rule of law.

What adds to my fury is this:

“There seems to be some history of CBP ignoring district court orders, which should concern the court,” Doyle said during the hearing. She asked that Hossein Abadi be returned to the US, but the judge said there was little he could do now that the student was gone.

“I don’t think they’re going to listen to me,” Stearns said.

How about starting by holding every agent involved, and their supervisors, in contempt. Throw them in jail. Fine the shit out of them. I’m sure that Barr’s “Justice” Department will pry them loose fast enough, but put at least a little bit of consequences into the equation.

Annals Of Lawlessness

This is why Trump — and every Republican in elected office everywhere in this country — needs to go. The spectacular corruption and egregious crimes grab the headlines, but it’s the daily acts of cruelty, and the brick-by-brick destruction of US governance in every domain that will leave us bereft.

Salt their fields.

Image: Unknown artist, Shoki (The Extermination of Evil), 12th century.

 

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Election Year Open Thread: Joe Biden’s Gift

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He likes people, actual individual humans… and they like him, in response. This is rarer than seems reasonable, even among long-term successful politicians.

The campaign staff of Trump’s preferred opponent reacted as expected:

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A Little More Bite and a Little Less Bark

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Has anyone ever gotten more press for less?

In an email to constituents, Sen Mitt Romney said Monday he will oppose efforts to decide on witnesses and evidence before opening arguments in the Senate trial of President Donald Trump.The Utah Republican said he is sticking to the plan outlined in a resolution the Senate will debate Tuesday. Opening arguments in the impeachment trial are anticipated Wednesday.

The plan modeled after the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton compresses the proceeding into several days and leaves open the unlikely possibility of a motion to dismiss. It also requires a Senate vote to admit material from House impeachment proceedings.

Romney is among a small group of senators who want the ability to call witnesses following opening arguments and questions by senators to the prosecution and defense teams.

“The organizing resolution released tonight includes this step, and overall, it aligns closely with the rules package approved 100-0 during the Clinton trial,” Romney wrote. “If attempts are made to vote on witnesses prior to opening arguments, I would oppose those efforts.”

I have nothing clever to say about this–he really is the most disgusting toadying coward in our current politics.

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