From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
by Betty Cracker| 191 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes
From the still-ongoing Yates hearing (hearing-watching thread downstairs):
Sally Yates just shut down Ted Cruz on Constitutional Law. pic.twitter.com/ONlwEYm64D
— jordan ? (@JordanUhl) May 8, 2017
Thwack! Open thread!
by David Anderson| 348 Comments
This post is in: America, Foreign Affairs, Hail to the Hairpiece, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bring On The Meteor, Not Normal
Former Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates is due to testify at 2:30 PM EST on many things including what she told the Trump Administration about how the Russians had their hooks in deep (allegedly of course) into their National Security Adviser.
Open thread….
Here is the live stream:
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Foreign Affairs, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel, Not Normal
The Trump-Kushner family businesses are no longer a hypothetical conflict. https://t.co/a0goo5vuwi pic.twitter.com/sQ3b9zGPKa
— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 7, 2017
After furor in Beijing, Kushner slide showing Trump as EB-5 decisionmaker remains in Shanghai @keithbradsher reports https://t.co/ryaCGTJ9Hw
— Mike Forsythe ??? (@PekingMike) May 7, 2017
Despite considerable attention over the weekend, the Kushner family has yet to be dissuaded from shilling their high-level “access” to Chinese investors hoping for a Disney-style FastPass to the front of the visa line:
… Kushner Companies’ China roadshow, promoting $500,000 investments in New Jersey real estate as the path to a residency card in the United States, moved to Shanghai on Sunday after a similar pitch on Saturday in Beijing. Security was tighter in Shanghai than it had been in Beijing, where reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post briefly attended the event before being kicked out.
Mr. Kushner has said he has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of the family business. But government ethics filings show that he and Ivanka Trump, his wife and the president’s daughter, continue to benefit from their stake in Kushner Companies’ real estate business and other investments, which is worth as much as $600 million…
NYMag adds:
… Kushner is also no stranger to EB-5 visas, as he reportedly raised $50 million in loans using the program to help finance a Trump-branded 50-story apartment tower in Jersey City called Trump Bay Street. Kushner, who has done repeated business with Chinese firms, has become a primary adviser within the White House regarding matters related to the country. He has promised to recuse himself from any White House discussions on the future of the EB-5 program, but his family is clearly still looking to benefit from the program before any decisions are made by the Trump administration.
This is also not the first controversy involving Kushner Companies and China since Jared took on his multitasked role in the White House. The company’s recently abandoned effort to negotiate millions of dollars in equity for a Manhattan redevelopment project from China’s Anbang Insurance Group was widely criticized by American lawmakers and government ethics experts as a scenario in which China might be trying to gain favorable treatment from the Trump administration…
Kushners selling visas in exchange for investments in their properties will be a fun sub-bullet in impeachment docs https://t.co/Nv4SY7ABwk
— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 6, 2017
To be clear: Trump chokes off immigration while his son-in-law & chief adviser's gang literally SELLS visas. https://t.co/tcdzFVjCN3
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 6, 2017
In fairness visas are worth even more when you choke off immigration. Just good business sense! https://t.co/gkMLzNLgUV
— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) May 6, 2017
Open Thread: Still Grifting the “Golden Visas”Post + Comments (50)
by Betty Cracker| 129 Comments
This post is in: Dolt 45, Election 2016, Election 2018, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, DC Press Corpse, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
Someone sounds awfully worried about Sally Yates’ testimony before the senate today:
Yates will be questioned this afternoon about her warning to the Trump people regarding Flynn’s Russia problem. So Trump is preemptively intimidating her like a sub-literate mafia goon while simultaneously blaming the Obama administration for his own shitty personnel decisions.
President Obama FIRED Flynn before Trump picked him off the trash heap, wound him up and sent him on the “LOCK HER UP!” tour. And apparently Trump’s band of grifting idiots didn’t bother to vet the utterly compromised crackpot Flynn before sharing highly classified information with him as erstwhile NSA. But President “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here” can’t be bothered with such details.
What are we to conclude from this, aside from the obvious, which is that the person who occupies the Oval Office is a lying, irresponsible, addled dolt — which we already knew? He’s worried about this Russia thing, which just won’t go away. Should he be?
I hope very much that the Russia investigation turns up a bombshell that removes Trump from office, but I have zero faith it will. Comey is a preening hack who seems convinced that hostility from Republicans and Democrats validates his “last honest man in D.C.” conceit. The GOP controls congress, and they’ve already sold out the country to a demented demagogue, so they’ll hamstring every investigation that could endanger their hold on power.
But 2018 hasn’t happened yet, and there’s still time to prevent the next round of interference. The Democrats have their role to play to stop a hostile foreign power from undermining democracy. The FBI and intelligence communities have theirs. And the media has a responsibility here too.
This might sound like a crazy suggestion, but maybe media outlets like the NYT, etc., could use recent developments abroad as well as upcoming events like the Yates testimony as an excuse to reset the way they approach the gigantic elephant in the room: a hostile foreign power’s ongoing meddling in U.S. elections. The way their colleagues in France dealt with a similar attempt by the same outfits to sleaze a fascist into power might be instructive.
Yates’ testimony is expected to directly contradict what Spicer and Priebus told the media about Team Trump’s handling of Flynn. Trump, knowing the testimony is likely to be damaging, implied that Yates committed a crime in the above tweet. We know Trump lied about President Obama’s “wire tapp” — the mainstream press was surprisingly forthright in saying so. I guess there’s a slim chance they’ll treat Trump’s slander of Yates in a similar manner.
I understand that ironic detachment and profitable horse race babbling are tough addictions to overcome, but it’s no exaggeration to say democracy is on the line. And while the Beltway hacks like to pretend they don’t want to be part of the story, the opposite is true: they glory in a scenario that allows them to be players rather than merely covering the game.
Well, here’s your chance, hacks. The Trump administration has lied to you and vilified you for months. You’ve refused to engage in serious introspection about your 2016 political coverage, but here’s a flashing red neon scandal that doesn’t even require that: a recognition that this meddling isn’t going away, and a chance to do something about it. Go be little Murrows. Your country needs you, God help us.
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, C.R.E.A.M., Dolt 45, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel
Condoleezza Rice is unequivocal that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. #MarchForTruthhttps://t.co/5bd6nNdwyA pic.twitter.com/pzMUOdMfRY
— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) May 7, 2017
Who could have known? Politico, last night:
…After the White House’s biggest legislative victory yet with the House’s narrow passage Thursday of the American Health Care Act, momentum will slow as the Senate settles in to rework the bill — potentially from scratch. The White House is also heading for a political buzzsaw as Russia’s election interference takes center stage in congressional hearings.
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates heads to Capitol Hill on Monday to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador and her efforts to warn the Trump administration about Flynn’s changing story. The ex-adviser was already in the headlines after The Washington Post and Associated Press reported Friday that Flynn had been warned by transition officials about speaking to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Meanwhile, the health care bill that the White House spent the weekend celebrating appears destined for the trash can on the other side of the Capitol…
I came across Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1858 poem when I was nine or ten, reading a leftover late-1940s high school textbook. Per Wikipedia:
… In the poem, a fictional deacon crafts the titular wonderful one-hoss shay in such a logical way that it could not break down. The shay is constructed from the very best of materials so that each part is as strong as every other part. In Holmes’ humorous, yet “logical”, twist, the shay endures for a hundred years (amazingly to the precise moment of the 100th anniversary of the Lisbon earthquake shock) then it “went to pieces all at once, and nothing first, — just as bubbles do when they burst”. It was built in such a “logical way” that it ran for exactly one hundred years to the day.
In economics, the term “one-hoss shay” is used, following the scenario in Holmes’ poem, to describe a model of depreciation, in which a durable product delivers the same services throughout its lifetime before failing with zero scrap value…
In his cunning grasp of every bad American get-rich-quick scheme, the President-Asterisk seems to have constructed a 21st-century One-Horses-Arse Shay, a fractal creation where every bolt and join is forged in equal strength from lies, BS, and bad faith. May it collapse as abruptly and thoroughly as the two-wheeled conveyance in the original story…
***********
What’s on the agenda, as we start another week?
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Once again, Eric Trump says the quiet part out loud. https://t.co/L5bB8U7n6o
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) May 7, 2017
Eric Trump on how the Trump Organization got capital to finance its golf courses https://t.co/u5eDdOH8K5 pic.twitter.com/4o9tXO1lUS
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) May 7, 2017
and if Eric's admission was that summer, also about when MH17 was shot down. Which Trump has given Putin the benefit of the doubt on.
— Amateur Intel Pr0n (@ZeddRebel) May 7, 2017
Monday Morning Open Thread: Trump’s Version of the ‘Wonderful One-Hoss Shay’Post + Comments (162)
This post is in: Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Readership Capture
Tune in TONIGHT at 8 PM as Chris Matthews hosts special coverage of President Obama receiving The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. pic.twitter.com/PyqOgWgPGQ
— Hardball (@hardball) May 7, 2017
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Apart from that, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?
Sunday Evening Open Thread: Obamaniacs Programming NotePost + Comments (310)
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, Military, Science & Technology, Bring on the Brawndo!
I’ve got a piece in today’s Boston Globe that takes a kind of odd look at why Trump’s dalliance with destroying NATO was so pernicious.
Basically, I look at what goes into making an alliance or any complex collaboration function. Spoiler alert: it’s not the armchair strategist focus on troop numbers or budget levels. It is, rather, the infrastructure, in its material and especially social forms that determine whether joint shared action can succeed.
To get there I leap from the story of something as basic as agreeing on one common cartridge to be used across the alliance to an anecdote from the early days of the scientific revolution, when John Locke (yup, that Locke) left his borrowed rooms in a house in Essex to check the readings from the little weather station he’d set up at the suggestion of Robert Hooke.
A sample:
While this first step toward the standardization of the tools of science was a milestone, it took the development of a common process — shared habits, ways of working — to truly transform the eager curiosity of the 17th and 18th centuries into a revolutionary new approach to knowledge, the one we now call science. In 1705, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published an article by the philosopher John Locke. It was a modest work, just a weather diary: a series of daily observations of temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, cloud cover. He was a careful observer, working with the best available instruments, a set built by Tompion himself. On Sunday, Dec. 13, 1691, for example, Locke left his rooms just before 9 a.m. The temperature was 3.4 on Tompion’s scale — a little chilly, but not a hard frost. Atmospheric pressure had dropped slightly compared to the day before, 30 inches of mercury compared to 30.04. There was a mild east wind, 1 on Locke’s improvised scale, enough to “just move the leaves.” The cloud cover was thick and unbroken — which is to say it was an entirely unsurprising December day in the east of England: dull, damp, and raw.
The reasoning does, I think, more or less come together — and you might enjoy reading such a convoluted bit of historical argument.
In any event, posting this here lets me think thank our own Adam Silverman, who talked through some of the ideas with me and gave me other valuable help. Any errors you might find within the piece are all mine.
Image: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Nagamaya Yaichi Ducking Bullets, 1878.