Where do you all get your seeds? I am going to start planting my starter packs for the spring in a couple weeks and want to make sure I am ready.
Heads Up: Partisan Disinformation Incoming
Apparently Congressman Nunes, or folks working for/with him on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, have produced a four page memo alleging significant abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the Obama Administration, specifically the Department of Justice and the FBI, against Republicans. The memo is supposedly classified. This has led to the creation of a release the memo hashtag (click at your own risk of sanity). This would seem to explain Sean Hannity’s opening tease on Fox News tonight:
Hannity announces Mueller probe is over in message to Mueller. pic.twitter.com/sb1mLhElSi
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 19, 2018
Two of Florida’s GOP Congressmen, DeSantis and Gaetz, are having a public bout of high dudgeon on twitter over it:
While the report is classified as Top Secret, I believe the select committee should, pursuant to House rules, vote to make the report publicly available as soon as possible. This is a matter of national significance and the American people deserve the truth.
— Ron DeSantis (@RepDeSantis) January 18, 2018
You guys he’s trying to get it all out to us. pic.twitter.com/0Aawtl3QYI
— American Lady ? (@xgold1x) January 18, 2018
The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice…There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy.https://t.co/CgC0qEqlSp
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) January 18, 2018
As is New York GOP Congressman Lee Zeldin:
Releasing this classified info doesn't compromise good sources & methods. It reveals the feds' reliance on bad sources & methods.
— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) January 18, 2018
It is hard to get decent info at this point, but if I’m following all this correctly the memo being referred to is the result of Congressman Nunes’ monomania regarding lawful unmasking by the Obama Administration in 2015 and 2016 and the attempt to create a controversy and scandal over FISA violations as reported by the chronically wrong and easily duped John Solomon at The Hill, as well as his equally odious, one sided, and misleading reporting on the text messages between two FBI officials during the campaign.
Wikileaks has, of course, gotten in on the action and is offering a bounty.
All of this is an attempt to further dirty up the FBI and by extension Special Counselor Mueller. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released the transcripts of their interviews with FUSION GPS head Glenn Simpson. Which, as was the case with the one released by Senator Feinstein, basically knocks down and rebuts all of the GOP talking points about what is going on with the Mueller investigation. The 8 November 2017 transcript is here.
And the 14 November 2017 transcript is here.
Since these basically shoot everything Congressman Nunes, Congressman Gaetz, Congressman DeSantis, Congressman Jordan, and several other GOP members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Oversight, Justice, or other committees have been saying about the Special Counsel and his investigation and the FBI’s role in the counterintelligence investigation pertaining to the President that was begun in July 2016, they needed to do something to change the narrative. Enter the four page classified memo supposedly alleging that the Obama Administration, the DOJ, the FBI, and other parts of the US Intel Community were all conspiring against Republicans and conservatives in general and the President, his businesses, and his campaign in specific. Leaked to Fox News and teed up for Sean Hannity’s diatribe for an audience of one this evening. Given what happened the last time that Congressman Nunes tried to get creative in screening fire for the President, I fully expect that if this memo is ever declassified it won’t survive first contact with the actual subject matter experts the news media brings in to consult on it. Except, of course, for Fox News, talk radio, the alt-right news media (Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, etc) and social media crowd, Wikileaks, RT, and Sputnik. They’ll all, amazingly, have the exact same talking points. As will the White House, the President on twitter, and the aforementioned GOP members of Congress. This amount of coincidence takes a lot of work!
As Senator Burr said about Congressman Nunes’ unmasking obsession:
“The unmasking thing was all created by Devin Nunes,” Burr said, “and I’ll wait to go through our full evaluation to see if there was anything improper that happened. But clearly there were individuals unmasked. Some of that became public which it’s not supposed to, and our business is to understand that, and explain it.”
I expect a similar conclusion to be reached about his new four page memo if it ever sees the light of day. But it will consume a lot of news media oxygen that could be better spent focused on other things. Like the Congressional GOP’s appropriations woes, the lack of progress on relief for those previously covered by the DACA executive order, the use of CHIP as a hostage, and, of course, Stormy Daniels spanking the President with Forbes magazine.
ETA at 12:55 AM EST
What I’ve delineated above is my best estimate at this time because the Fox News write up was big on hyperbolic comments from GOP members of the House and light on actual factual information. Clicking through to the hashtag just led me to all sorts of incoherent crazy. And I’m NOT watching Hannity!
Stay frosty or warm.
Open thread!
Heads Up: Partisan Disinformation IncomingPost + Comments (67)
Late Night Open Thread: On the Lighter Side…
Some people just make a farewell phone call to their loved ones, but…
Pornhub traffic before, during, and after the Hawaiian Missile Crisis.
After notification of the error, "Hawaiians collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Those seeking further relief headed back to Pornhub where pageviews surged +48% above typical levels at 9:01am." pic.twitter.com/vrwzNdMamv
— Ian Frisch (@IanFrisch) January 17, 2018
Fun fact: #MissileWarning babies will be born around September 11, 2018
— Jennifer Victor (@jennifernvictor) January 18, 2018
.
And a reminder (via Josh Marshall) from one of this blog’s forgotten chew toys, someone so lightweight I suspect she needs to be securely tethered on windy days…
It seems to me that if you believe that men can be educated into not pursuing self-centered sex, you should also believe that abstinence education could be a very effective way to curb teen pregnancy.
— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) January 18, 2018
To save you reading her self-defence: As a devout Randroid, she still doesn’t understand the concept of consent. Best I can tell, McArgleBargle figures that all sexual contact is a matter of “self-interested exchange”… insert your own “free hand of the market” snark below…
Late Night Open Thread: On the Lighter Side…Post + Comments (39)
A Brief (Additional) Note On The Potential Shutdown
I’m not sure there’s really much more that can be said about the potential government shutdown, but I promised I’d do a post on it. I’m going to make this short and sweet because today was leg day at the gym and I presently feel like this:
(Friends don’t let friends skip leg day!)
Every time we approach a potential government shutdown every government agency, department, bureau, and office runs through the same drill: preparing for the shutdown. This includes checking and reverifying that the civilian servants and contractors identified as essential or emergency essential still need to be classified that way or if others do. All hiring actions get placed on hold – from scoring of applications all the way through to on-boarding and in-processing. Hiring actions for contractors and awards of new contracts get put on hold by contracting officers (CORs). This is all tremendously expensive in terms of resources – personnel hours and the money to pay for them that are diverted every time we approach a potential shutdown. Everyone one of these short term CR/potential shutdown fights is basically Congressionally created waste, fraud, and abuse.
By the way, one of the dirty little secrets of government contracting is that a lot of these contracts, at least in the Defense and Intel sectors, are written so that the company is still going to get paid even if all of the contractors are furloughed and regardless of whether backpay is ever ultimately authorized for the specific contractors deemed essential. The companies just pocket the money. Hence contracting officers unwillingness to move hiring actions or move forward on new contract awards when facing a potential shutdown. They don’t want to have their organizations on the hook for paying for work that isn’t going to get done. So here too contracting isn’t really saving anyone any money. Finally, in regards to the contractors, if they pass another short term contract the contracting officers will still not authorize hires and on-boarding in case the government shuts down when the short term CR expires. This has wreaked havoc on a lot of people’s careers, especially those at the top of the pay scale. I’ve personally lost two full time equivalent opportunities in the past three years because of contracting officers refusing to authorize hires as a result of short term CRs.
Every agency, department, bureau, and office will have some personnel still working during the shutdown. despite the vast majority of civil servants and contractors being furloughed and put on the equivalent of unpaid leave if the government does shut down. What we don’t know, as this would be the first shutdown under the current administration is just how much proper shutdown planning has been done. Almost every Federal agency, department, bureau, and office is still missing significant numbers of senior political appointees, not to mention almost the entire tranche of the middle and low level political appointees that would and should be making a lot of these budgetary decisions at the departmental level and then pushing guidance down. Given the dearth of political appointments – both made by the administration at the one year mark and/or confirmed by the Senate – we are once again in uncharted waters. Things might go okay, especially if the shutdown is relatively short, say between 3 and 5 days. Or they could go really badly when the senior executives and senior civil servants in far too many acting leadership positions are unwilling to assume a lot of risk in making decisions regarding how to manage the Federal workforce through a shutdown and, as a result, decisions that should be made and guidance that should be given by political appointees weren’t made and wasn’t given because they haven’t been appointed for whatever reason.
I can say that it is my understanding that the VA will remain open because their funding was secured through to Fiscal Year 19 as a result of legislation signed in 2017.
Stay frosty! Or, given the weather in much of the US, stay warm.
Open thread!
A Brief (Additional) Note On The Potential ShutdownPost + Comments (124)
The Government Shutdown Explained from the Perspective of Someone Who is Sick of This Fucking Bullshit
It’s almost impossible to understand what is going on in the shutdown debate because there are so many moving pieces and it has been so over complicated by throwing in DACA and SCHIP. So let’s break it down.
On the Republican side, you have multiple different groups.
1.) You have the crazy people and criminally uninformed like the President and Matt Gaetz.
2.) You have the certified sociopaths like the House Freedom Caucus and Ted Cruz.
3.) You have the racists like Steve King.
4.) You have the people who just like to hurt people like Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell.
5.) You have the people who like to pretend to govern and love an easy rub and tug from a foolish media, but if given the opportunity will join the previous four groups, like McCain, Graham, Collins, Flake, Sasse.
6.) You have the people who will just do whatever they think is best for them, but in the process do what actually hurts them the most, like Marco Rubio.
On the Democratic side, you have:
1.) the good governance/bipartisanship fetishists like Manchin, Heitkamp, etc.
2.) House Minority Leadership who is just trying to keep this shit together
3.) and the group I most relate to which is the “Fuck you Trump and Republicans I am going to hold you down and pummel you as hard and as often as I can I don’t trust a fucking thing you do and I am so over your fucking bullshit” like our beloved Great Aunt Maxine of the Immaculate Eyeroll.
Out of those groups, you have to somehow cobble together a spending bill. This should be no problem, but the Republicans want to pass a spending bill that is so awful that it will get no Democratic support, so they have to do it alone, but it is also not awful enough for the House Freedom Caucus and folks like Cotton and Cruz, and this is further complicated by the fact that no matter what they put together, Orange Julius Caesar is too fucking stupid to understand it and rnadomly spews nonsense on twitter, disrupting whatever progress the sociopaths are currently working on. It’s basically a bad heist movie where they should be able to get away with a clean steal, but are too busy tripping over each other’s dicks and it ends up like the end of Reservoir Dogs.
Further complicating matters are two issues that, if brought up by themselves, would pass with overwhelming support. Clean DACA and SCHIP bills would both pass tomorrow if introduced. But the Republicans won’t do that, because they know how awful their priorites are, so they have taken Dreamers and sick kids hostage because they think they can peel off some Democratic support. The problem is, part of the Republican heist team doesn’t care if the hostages live. So while they’ve got a gun to the head of kids and the dreamers and are backing out of the bank saying “don’t fuck with me or I’ll shoot,” the Steve King crowd and the House Freedom Caucus are trying to figure out a way to shoot the Dreamers and sick kids while still getting out of the building with the loot.
So that’s why we are where we are.
Ohhhhh, Internet, I Love it When You Give it to Me Good Like That
Just hold me and whisper this story into my ear baby:
Meet Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and current nobody at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The two-term Republican, who left office on Jan. 16, was blocked from a VIP entrance he had used for eight years, and directed to stand in Transportation Security Administration screening lines at Terminal B like anyone else, according to a person familiar with the incident.
The order came from police for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, according to the person, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about security matters. The Port Authority also operates the George Washington Bridge, the target of a plot by Christie aides and allies to tie up traffic for political punishment in 2013.
Christie, and the state trooper who accompanied him for his security detail, complied with the instructions, the person said.
The former governor used the entrance, reserved for some airport employees and flyers who need extra security, for his two terms. He spent more than half of 2015 out of New Jersey traveling and campaigning for his failed White House bid.
If I smoked I’d need a cigarette so instead I think I will just take a nap.
Ohhhhh, Internet, I Love it When You Give it to Me Good Like ThatPost + Comments (123)
Shut-Down Shit-Show
The Post put up a shut-down clock on the front page, which means we can expect hostage crisis-levels of government shut-down coverage now. The narrative appears to shift with each new set of headlines and hot takes.
If every single Republican in Congress weren’t a slimy, complicit, thieving treason-weasel, it would almost be possible to feel pity for them as they carefully cobble together agreements, only to have Rage Gramps shit all over them because he misunderstood some vapid twit on Fox & Friends or had an ill-timed racism attack.
Brian Beutler over at Crooked Media has a good piece up arguing that it’s now or never for Dreamers:
It’s been months since President Trump voluntarily terminated President Obama’s 2012 deferred action program for childhood arrivals. Every day, more and more DACA recipients are becoming subject to deportation; the protracted nature of this legislative fight has imposed real costs on their communities. Even if you wish away these ancillary harms, the view that Democrats shouldn’t maximize their leverage now is wrong because the alternative isn’t actually available. The choice isn’t between a shutdown fight now and a Dream Act fight later; it’s between the Dream Act now or not at all.
The Republican legislative strategy in the Trump era has leaned heavily on deception and bad faith. In the GOP’s telling, Obamacare repeal wouldn’t kick people off of their health insurance, and their corporate tax cut bonanza was driven by deep concern for middle-class interests.
The GOP position on Dreamers is no different.
He’s right. Trump and the Republicans have lied about everything, and they aren’t negotiating in good faith. It’s now or never for the Dreamers, and the Democrats shouldn’t budge, not one goddamned inch.