Trump Official Resigns In Frustration

Excerpt from an article in The Washington Post:

The director of the Office of Personnel Management resigned in protest with no notice after five months on the job, leaving the agency that oversees workplace policy for 2.1 million civil servants with no leader. “Dale Cabaniss resigned in frustration following months of tension with the White House budget office and more recently with its newly configured staffing office and a political appointee the office installed at OPM in the last month,” Lisa Rein reports. “Cabaniss thought that she was being micromanaged and that her authority was not respected … As human resources manager of the federal workforce, Cabaniss was unable to communicate clear, timely messages to agency managers on how they should respond to the growing public health threat … Guidance to managers on when they should send their staffs home to telework was often vague and came weeks after U.S. health officials urged Americans to work from home and minimize contact with others. Even now, managers say privately they have not received clear instruction from the Trump administration on how to manage their workforce during the crisis."

Skydiving Without A Parachute

Here's a video of a guy who jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. It's been done before -- a long, long time ago -- but that guy wore a parachute harness, and he was passed a front-mounted reserve in freefall which clipped onto his harness and was deployed in the regular manner. Nothing really dangerous about that, if the skydivers are skilled. I understand there was a second guy also carrying a spare reserve parachute in case something went wrong with the first transfer. They had plenty of altitude and accomplished the transfer with thousands of feet to spare, and the guy deployed at 2,000 feet as normal. (When I say "nothing dangerous," the only dangerous part is you've only got one parachute and no backup in case the first one malfunctions, so that's dangerous.)

This one's different. The guy isn't wearing a harness -- nothing but shorts and sneakers. The guy he's jumping with takes an alarmingly long time messing around with what must be some harness-like piece of equipment our hero is wearing around his waist, so that the two guys are holding onto each other as the single parachute is deployed. (Poor explanation, but watch for yourself):



Here's another web page, entitled "How To Survive Falling From A Plane Without A Parachute! DEBUNKED":

Museums: A Virtual Tour

Click here for an article at USA Today entitled "Take a virtual tour of these 12 amazing museums closed because of coronavirus," by Maria Puente.

Included are National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; American Museum of Natural History, New York City; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, N.M.

Boost Your Laptop WiFi Reception

Click here for a Bob Rankin article entitled "Here's How to Boost Laptop Wifi Reception." There are inexpensive boosters available for your laptop and for your router that significantly increase your wireless range.

Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

These are copied from an article by Bob Rankin:

Shortcuts for Cursor Positioning

Press the Ctrl key all by itself (once or several times) and a circular indicator will appear on the screen where the mouse cursor is positioned. I use this ALL THE TIME, because I'm always losing track of the mouse curcor. If this doesn't work, see this page to enable this feature.

Ctrl+right-arrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the next word in a document
Ctrl+left-arrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the previous word in a document
Ctrl+down-arrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the next paragraph
Ctrl+up-arrow moves the cursor to the beginning of the previous paragraph

Shortcuts for Selecting Items

Ctrl+Shift with an arrow key selects a block of text one word at a time
Shift with an arrow key lets you select individual items at random
Delete key or Ctrl+D deletes the selected item(s) to the Recycle Bin
Shift+Delete deletes the selected item(s) without moving them to the Recycle Bin

Shortcuts for Undo and Redo

Ctrl+Z: undoes the last action
Ctrl+Y: redoes the last undone action


Shortcuts for Function Keys

F1: displays context-sensitive Help files and opens the Search Help dialogue box.
F2: renames the current item
F3: opens the Search dialogue to find a file or folder


Miscellaneous Useful Shortcuts

Alt+Tab: cycles through the open applications
Alt+Enter: displays the Properties of a selected item
Alt+F4: closes the current application or window
Alt+Spacebar: opens the shortcut menu for the active window, i. e., Restore, Minimize, Close...
Ctrl+Shift+Esc: opens the Windows Task Manager
Ctrl+Mouse Wheel: changes the zoom level


Windows Logo Key Shortcuts

Few users know the function of the Windows Logo key (also called the Start button), which bears the four-part Windows logo. It actually activates a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts:

Windows key opens the Start menu
Windows key + A: open the Action Center.
Windows key + D: displays the desktop
Windows key + E: opens File Explorer
Windows key + I: Open the Settings menu.
Windows key + L: locks your computer or lets you switch users
Windows key + M: minimizes all open windows
Windows key + Shift + M: restores all minimized windows
Windows key + Ctrl + M: open the Magnifier app
Windows key + R: open the Run dialogue box
Windows key + U: open the Ease Of Access Center
Windows key + V: open the Clipboard app
Windows key + X: open the secret Start menu. (Try it!)
Windows key + .: open the Emojis window
Windows key + Up Arrow: maximize selected window.
Windows key + Down Arrow: minimize selected window.
Windows key + Pause key: display the System Properties dialogue box
Windows key + PrtScn: take a screenshot
Windows key + Shift + S: open the Snip and Sketch tool

Pandumbic!

Copy this into your address bar, and play a 1.5-minute clip from Trevor Noah's "The Daily Show" ("The deadly coronavirus is spreading -- and the man in charge is the dumbest person alive.")

https://twitter.com/i/status/1237519854204342273

Right-Wing Federal Courts

Click here for an article at Slate by By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, entitled "A Federal Judge Condemned the 'Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.’ It’s About Time."

U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman criticizes the five conservative justices on the Roberts Supreme Court in an upcoming Harvard Law & Policy review article. The article begins, brutally:

By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball “umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes” was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Roberts’ misleading testimony inevitably comes to mind when one considers the course of decision-making by the Court over which he presides. This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.

The article says:

[Adelman's] article brings into clear relief the court’s systemic attack on voting rights for minority and other marginalized communities, by way of striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, as well as repeated blessing of voter suppression and decisions not to adjudicate political gerrymandering. He notes that the court privileges the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the public. He lays out in detail the rise of the conservative legal movement, starting with the infamous 1971 Lewis Powell memo that served as a right-wing call to arms and tracing its progress through the current well-funded effort to reverse the New Deal in the courts. The article ultimately portrays the slow movement of the Supreme Court to the right—and then the far right—through a long line of cases that reversed the Warren court’s protections for minority groups and poor and working-class Americans. It shows how the court has undermined unions and boosted corporate interests. The court, he notes, has greatly contributed to income inequality, health care inequality, and the hollowing out of the American middle class.

Adelman says:

We are thus in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile, and it is even more so when government eschews policies that benefit all classes of Americans. We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.

The article continues:

Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has assumed the role of robed Fox News commentator. He disparages women who get abortions, as well as judges who uphold their right to do so. He claims that we can stop mass shootings by shielding police from lawsuits when they accidentally murder innocent people. He intentionally misgenders transgender litigants—as does his colleague, Kyle Duncan, a fellow Trump appointee. Another judge on the 5th Circuit, Edith Brown Clement (a George W. Bush appointee), penned a partisan attack on her colleagues. And, under the influence of Trump’s judges, the 5th Circuit as a whole has begun defying Supreme Court precedent in a series of blatantly political decisions.

A startling number of Trump judges appear to believe that, like Ho, their job is mainly to own the libs in print. Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics. On the same morning that South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman expressed his outrage at Adelman’s article, Rao issued yet another dissent that would protect Trump, this time by denying the House of Representatives access to the unredacted Mueller report. Rao’s position is so extreme that Thomas Griffith, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, penned a separate concurrence just to shred it. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Rao keeps running interference for the Trump administration, making arguments that are promptly shunned. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that her lengthy, contorted dissents begin with the proposition that Trump must triumph and work backward from there.

The U.S. courts have been steadily drifting to the right since Lewis Powell's memo in 1971, and in recent years the drift has become much stronger. The nightmare scenario is Trump somehow being reelected; it's possible, if that were to happen, that Trump would get to replace a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices, presenting the country with a 7-2 conservative majority: disaster.

One-Liners

Copied from a post on Quora:

The first computer dates back to Adam and Eve. It was an Apple with limited memory, just one byte. And then everything crashed.

I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for freedom until they are flashing behind you.

Alcohol is a perfect solvent: It dissolves marriages, families and careers.

What is the best thing about living in Switzerland? Well, the flag is a big plus.

My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We'll see about that.

A recent study has found that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it.

I was born to be a pessimist - my blood type is B Negative.

Louie Gohmert + Steve King = Stupidity Magnified

Here we go again: another vicious and baseless right-wing conspiracy.

On February 21, sheriff's deputies discovered the body of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) employee in a roadside pull-over area. Cause of death was determined to be a gunshot wound that was "self-inflicted." Unsurprisingly, deranged right-wing conspiracy theorists pounced on this incident as being a murder committed by "Deep State operatives" in order to silence explosive information Haney had been about to reveal about the Obama administration. It's been alleged that Haney wore a thumb drive around his neck that was filled with incriminating information.

Basis for these allegations? Zero. It's just a poisonous idea, another diseased product of the right-wing fever swamps that target the dead, who are unable to confirm or deny allegations about them (do a Google search for "Seth Rich").

In speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives on February 28, speeches by Louie Gohmert (R-IA, the stupidest member of Congress) and racist Steve King (R-TX) brought these dark and unsupported allegations into the mainstream of political thought.

“I’m standing on the floor here saying, Madame Speaker, I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide,” King said. “I expect that we’re going to get a thorough investigation. The evidence that is coming to me indicates that he was murdered.”

Haney had briefly become a right-wing personality in the last years of the Obama administration, appearing on Fox News and Glenn Beck’s radio show to push his allegations that the government was ignoring radical Muslim groups. More recently, he’d claimed to be on a mysterious “special covert assignment” against Muslim-American politician Keith Ellison, now Minnesota’s attorney general.

In a nearly 30-minute speech, Gohmert claimed he had a pact with Haney to reveal unspecified secrets about the government in case either of them was murdered in a crime posed as a suicide. Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”

I like a tweet on the subject from commenter Paula Duffy:

"Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”

We already have that. It's called the Mueller Report.

Erik Prince + Project Veritas = Dirty Tricks Magnified

Click here for a story at The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman entitled "Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups."

Erik Prince [of Blackwater fame], the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.

For example:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

Democratic Candidates' "Debate"?

Conan O'Brien parodied the closed captioning of the tumultuous Democratic debate:

Frightening Video Graphic: Coronavirus vs. Other Epidemics

I can't seem to save this video graphic. You'll have to copy and paste the following into your address bar:

https://twitter.com/WelshGasDoc/status/1232208118899257344

I'd recommend when you play it that you stop it, make it full screen, mute the sound (it's just annoying music), and restart it to play from the beginning. Keep your eye on the turquoise Coronavirus line.

The graphic starts with Day 4 Since Outbreak, and tracks the spread of Coronavirus compared to SARS (Asia, 2003), Swine Flu (Mexico, 2009), MERS (Middle East, 2012), and Ebola (West Africa, 2014.

Skydive! Seoul Olympics, 1988

Opening ceremonies, Seoul, Korea, 1988 (an old friend of mine, Mike Zahar, is one of the jumpers):

Trump: Copied From The Young Turks

People with empathy and humane values are disgusted by trump. And here’s why...

Direct Quotes from trump...

”Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt anybody anymore."

“If you don't support me, you're going to be so god-damn poor.”

"Knock the crap out of them."

"Maybe he should have been roughed up."

"He should be carried out on a stretcher."

“Any guy that can do a body slam...he’s my guy.”

"The audience should hit people. That's what we need a little bit more of."

"I'd like to punch them in the face."

"In the good old days this doesn't happen because they used to treat them very, very rough."

"If you hurt him, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it."

"I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will."

“Hundreds and hundreds of buses full of illegal immigrants were shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.” (to skew the election)

“They are going to take away everything. They are going to take away your guns. They are going to take away your wealth. They are going to take away everything.”

Trump said that “Jewish people who vote for democrats are either ignorant or disloyal.” (note: approximately 79% of Jews vote Democratic)

Trump has used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. -USA Today

“The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too Bad!”

"I did try to f*ck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily...like a bitch. She’s got the big phony tits and everything. I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. I just start kissing them. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p*ssy. You can do anything.”

While speaking to a crowd in Florida, Trump asked how to stop migrants from coming to America. A woman in the crowd yelled “Shoot them!” Trump laughed...then said, “Only in the Panhandle, you can get away with that. Only in the Panhandle!”

“I don’t do coverups.” But he is on tape impersonating at least 3 different people to inflate his wealth to newspapers: John Barron, John Miller, and David Dennison (all fakes)

“I have the support of bikers and the tough people...but they don’t play it tough until they get pushed to a certain point...and then it gets bad...very bad."

“I’m an extremely stable genius.” 05/23/19

“I know words, I have the best words.” 12/30/15

“I have great and unmatched wisdom." 09/10/19

“I am The Chosen One.” 08/21/19

“Justin Trudeau (prime minister of Canada) is two-faced.”

“Emmanuel Macron (prime minister of France) is very nasty.”

“The mayor of London reminds me of our very dumb Mayor of NYC...but he’s only half his height. He’s a stone cold loser.”

Trump said that four black congresswomen should "go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." However, the Congresswomen are Americans and all but one were born in America.

“Where’s My African American.”

“I am very rich. I’m funding my own campaign.” (His campaign was funded by several billionaire donors)

His Disgraceful Rhetoric:

Lyin Ted, Low Energy Jeb, Low-Life Amarosa, Little Rocket Man, Psycho Joe, Little Marco, Low IQ Maxine, Dumb As A Rock Mika, Pocahontas, Sloppy Steve, Crazy Megyn, Al Frankenstein, Wacky Wilson, Jeff Flakey, Dicky Durbin, Liddle Bob, Da Nang Dick, Moonbeam Brown, Slimeball Comey, Puppet Jones, Lamb the Sham, Deranged Omarosa, McMuffin McMullin, Fat Jerry, Wacky Jackie, Mr Peepers, Pencil Neck Schiff, Shifty Schiff, Mr Magoo Sessions, Dumb Southerner, Dumb As A Rock Tillerson, No Talent Samantha, Flunky Begala, Sloppy Carl, Marbles Brokaw, Nut Job Coulter, Sour Lemon, The Dumbest Man On TV, Shorty Bloomberg, Minnie Mike, and dozens more...

Donald inherited $413 Million in cash, assets, and an established business from his father...plus rental income from his father’s buildings. All Donald had to do was slap his gold-plated name on buildings and pretend he earned it...and low-info #Foxwashed consumers would believe it. Meanwhile, he piled up 6 bankruptcies...but he still collects rental income from his father’s business...while no other banks (except Deutsche) will loan him a penny. He owes Deutsche Bank over $300 Million.

“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the emails that are missing."

“The media is the enemy of the people.”

“I prefer soldiers who don’t get captured.” (Referring to John McCain)

“I love the poorly educated.”

Flopping and flailing around, mocking a disabled person: “Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

He called a woman “Horseface” after it was revealed that he paid her hush-money (for sex after his 5th child was born from his 3rd wife) 3 weeks before the election...AND...after the election...AND...as ‘president’.

“She had blood coming out of her eyes....and blood coming out of her whatever.” (Assuming a woman on television was menstruating)

“What you are hearing and seeing is not what’s happening.”

“She wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although, for the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”

He sent a violent tweet (video) with one of his golf balls hitting the former Secretary of State in the back.

"If we have so many nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?"

“She is a fat ugly slob.” (Referring to a successful actor)

When accused by the 22nd woman of sexual assault or rape, he said “She’s not my type".

“We have a representative in Congress who has been here a long time. I call her Pocahontas.” (Referring to a Senator who has some proof-positive Native American heritage)

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

“3,000 people did not die by the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico.” [they did]

“I call her Maxine ‘Low-IQ’ Waters’.

“Be prepared for violence in the streets, if we don’t win the midterms.”

"If the Democrats are successful in removing me from office, it will cause a Civil War in this Nation from which our Country will never heal."

“I don’t like people who say ‘I pray for you.’”

Since she spoke out about corruption, “Marie Yovanovitch (American Ambassador to the Ukraine) is going to go through some things.”

He denied knowing Lev Parnas. Then an audio surfaced with Trump telling Parnas to "take her out"...in reference to former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

🚩”I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody...and I wouldn't lose voters."

ps...trump said EVERY SINGLE ONE of these vulgar rotten comments...verbatim🤦🏻‍♂️ ps...An amoral leader has a way of revealing the character of his supporters while dragging them into the deepest furrow of the inferno

Flynn's New MAGA Lawyer - Sidney Powell

Click here for an article at Politico by Keith Kloor entitled "The #MAGA Lawyer Behind Michael Flynn's Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy."

"Flynn fired his team at Covington & Burling [a well-respected world-class law firm] and hired Powell as his lead attorney. It was a striking turnabout: Flynn went from seeming to take the high road, by cooperating with the Mueller investigation, to seeking legal counsel from a Fox News pundit who thought Mueller was the perpetrator and Flynn the victim."

Flynn seemed to be meekly cooperating, and Mueller recommended that he receive no prison time because of the substantial help he had provided to the prosecutors.

"In August, she moved to have Flynn’s case dismissed for what she called “pernicious” prosecutorial misconduct, and requested that Emmet Sullivan, the presiding District Court judge, hold prosecutors in contempt for allegedly hiding FBI documents and communications that she said proved Flynn was pressured to plead guilty. In a court brief filed in October, she asserted that Flynn had been “deliberately targeted for destruction” by the intelligence community. The government countered that it had already relinquished any relevant material and that Powell was advancing “conspiracy theories” to fish for evidence that did not exist."

“'I don’t know how, but I can read the way these particular government lawyers say things to know that they are lying and hiding things,' she explained, referring to the prosecutors in the Flynn case. 'And I knew as soon as I started hearing and seeing what was going on with General Flynn that he had been set up'"

She wasn't initially successful: "Sullivan unequivocally rejected Powell’s requests for additional government documents and for the case to be dismissed. He also spurned her argument that Flynn had been framed, writing in an icy 92-page opinion that the retired general’s false statements to the FBI were 'undisputed.' Sullivan set January 28 as Flynn’s new sentencing date. Shortly afterward, government prosecutors recommended that Flynn receive up to six months in prison -- a reversal of the earlier recommendation that he not be incarcerated. 'Maybe Hiring Sidney Powell Was a Huge, Monstrous Mistake for Michael Flynn,' one headline suggested."

Powell is more than just a right-wing crank: She was a successful federal prosecutor for years, working in the Western District of Texas at the height of the drug wars, when judges were being assassinated and federal prosecutors wore bullet-proof vests, accompanied by armed guards. She went on her own and had good success as a defense lawyer, culminating in nearly a decade of work on the Enron case. She felt that Enron had been victimized:

"Powell, for her part, came away from the experience believing the prosecutors had bent the law to unfairly prosecute her clients and were never held to account for their actions. She became convinced that “prosecutorial misconduct,” in the form of suppression of evidence favorable to the defense, was a widespread problem in the judicial system."

She started crusading against prosecutorial overreach, and in 2014 she self-published a book entitled "License to Lie -- Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice." The book, Powell says, "'reveals the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power to the highest halls of our government.'"

Largely apolitical, she eagerly jumped on the Trump train in 2016. Her book, which had received very little attention, caught fire in sales when the Mueller team appointed to his prosecutorial team a number of people Powell had mentioned in her book. She tweeted that Mueller was "hiring out of my book!" Conservatives like Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity started to take notice, and "Powell rode her sudden wave of celebrity to political relevance and began appearing on the shows that had previously ignored her, embracing Trumpian talking points about not only the Mueller report but other issues, too. On Dobbs’ show, to take one example, Powell suggested that 'the continued invasion of this country' by immigrants might be the cause of 'diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio-like paralysis of our children.'”

One of her supporters and fundraisers, John B. Wells, "... appeared on Alex Jones’ show, 'Infowars,' in 2013 and talked about how 'it’s been pretty much established that the CIA and al Qaeda are almost one.' In his opening remarks at 'Operation Classified [a fundraising event he put on],' he spoke of the 'criminal cabal we refer to as government,' and he praised QAnon, the conspiracy movement that seems to believe a global gang of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the media, Hollywood and the political establishment is secretly running the world. 'Q is a real thing,' Wells said to cheers in the audience."

She thought she had found a kindred spirit in the judge on the case: "Sullivan actually is known for bringing the hammer down on overreaching prosecutors, as in the trial of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. 'Emmet G. Sullivan is one judge who knows a cover-up when he sees one,' she wrote in a 2014 Observer column. 'I love this man!' Powell has exclaimed in some of her public talks."

"Her conviction was bolstered by the release, in early December, of the long-awaited report by the inspector general for the Justice Department, which found that the FBI’s initial investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump campaign officials (the precursor to the Mueller probe) was marred by sloppy and improper methods. Powell felt that the IG findings lent weight to a key component of her argument: that FBI agents manipulated the notes from their interview with Flynn to make him look guilty.

But in mid-December, Sullivan rejected the idea that the original FBI counterintelligence investigation of former Trump officials—Flynn included—was a deep state plot against Trump, and that Flynn had been tricked into his perjury by unscrupulous FBI agents. At the close of his ruling, Sullivan wrote: 'the Court summarily disposes of Mr. Flynn’s arguments that the FBI conducted an ambush interview for the purpose of trapping him into making false statements and that the government pressured him to enter a guilty plea. The record proves otherwise.'”

Yes, They Really Were Watching You

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by Greg Miller, entitled "The intelligence coup of the century," subtitled "For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries."

The CIA, in partnership with the BND (West German spy agency), ran a company called Crypto AG which had its roots in programs similar to Enigma. Crypto got its start encoding transmissions by U.S. troops in WWII. Secretly taken over by the CIA, it spent decades selling encryption hardware, software, and techniques to foreign governments and businesses. Then the CIA and the BND sat back and read what everybody was saying -- secretly, they thought. "... the United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets."

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

"They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco."

Consider Trump's bumbling release of intelligence secrets: "Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan."

"The German spy agency, the BND, came to believe the risk of exposure was too great and left the operation in the early 1990s. But the CIA bought the Germans’ stake and simply kept going, wringing Crypto for all its espionage worth until 2018, when the agency sold off the company’s assets, according to current and former officials."

"The company’s importance to the global security market had fallen by then, squeezed by the spread of online encryption technology. Once the province of governments and major corporations, strong encryption is now as ubiquitous as apps on cellphones."

Who Are You, And What Have You Done With Marco Rubio?

Excerpts from an interview of Marco Rubio by Jake Tapper, Mar 13, 2016:

Look, I think people have to make up their minds -- I can tell you this, no matter what happens in this election for years to come there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well one way or the other. He's going to be the nominee and he's going to lose. Or he'll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period of and that's unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government, free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divide or it splits apart, it will be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of the government until we can bring the party back together.

*****

You see images of Americans now at -- literally at each other's throats, pointing fingers in each other's face. Look, some of these protesters that you saw in Chicago apparently, obviously, were organized, maybe even paid to disrupt an event, so I'm not excusing their behavior.

But this not just the protesters in Chicago. These is now multiple rallies where people are assaulted and beat up, where a guy gets sucker-punched by one of the Trump supporters. And then, instead of condemning it, Trump is silent. When the guy is released from jail, he says, the next time, we -- maybe we should kill the protester against -- again, there is silence.

Then he goes on stage and makes -- just makes things up. He keeps telling the story about general -- a general who dipped bullets in the pig blood and shot a bunch of prisoners of -- Muslim prisoners up. Not only is it outrageous. It's a lie. And then he claims that the guy that stormed the stage was linked to ISIS.

He has turned the most important election in a generation into a circus, into a complete fiasco and a carnival. And it's -- this country deserves better. I mean, we -- at some point, people have to wake up here. This is really going to do damage to America.

*****

Here is the bottom line. He has said to people, why don't we basically beat up the protesters and beat up the hecklers, and I will pay your legal bills?

And here is what people have to understand. Maybe you think it's a joke, but there are people out there that are not balanced. There are people out there that -- that are not completely in control of themselves. And they hear something like this from a leader, you don't know what they're going to do next.

And when someone is seeking a position of leadership and is already in a position of influence, you speak responsibly. This notion that a president can just say anything they want, or even a presidential candidate can say anything they want, whatever comes to mind, it's just not true, and it's reckless, and it's dangerous.

And I -- look, I hope people wake up on time and realize what's happening here, because, if we reach a point in this country where we can't have a debate about politics without it getting to levels of violence and anger, where people think that just because you're angry, you can say and almost do anything you want, we're going to lose our republic.

*****

But, look, this is an ongoing thing, OK? So, every day, something new comes up, and I try not to escalate things, because you don't want to exaggerate them, and you don't want to make something bigger than it really is.

But just in the last, you know, five days, we he have had stories about the guy getting sucker-punched at the Trump rally. You have supporters basically -- you have a campaign employee now allegedly assaulted a reporter at an event.

So, every day, it's something new. And so there comes a point here where there's a tipping point, right? And you look at it and say enough is enough. So, I think, at the end of the day, we should all examine our behavior moving -- over the last year on this issue. We should all examine whether we have been quick enough.

*****

I'm very concerned. We don't know what's going to happen next here. I know that we have reached the point now where people in American politics have decided that, if they don't agree with you, that they can get angry at you, that you're a bad and evil person, that they can say anything they want about you.

I think that the -- all the gates of civility have been blown apart, and we have now reached a point where, on both sides, everyone is just saying or doing whatever they want. And, you know, you can't just say or do whatever you want. This is not about political correctness. This is about rules of civility and a way a society talks to each other.

And let me ask everybody this. Do we really want to live a -- in a country where everybody hates each other, where everybody is at each other's throat, where, because we disagree on the role of government or the tax rate or Obamacare or foreign policy, we now in this nation cannot have a discourse or agree on any other issue and end up hating each other?

Because that's what it feels like. It feels like we're reaching a point now where, in America, everyone hates each other. I'm so tired of arguing and fighting with other Americans.

Yes, we have serious disagreements, and let's debate those through our republic, but we have reached a point now where, if I don't agree with you on something, it's not just that you're wrong, but you're a bad person, you're an evil person, you deserve nothing.

I mean, we -- all the gates of -- all the rules that once governed our discourse have been blown away. And we're headed in a very dangerous direction. And, yes, there are people out there that are unbalanced. There are people out there that do not have control of themselves. We don't know what they will do.

*****

You know, he's running for president so no matter what he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles which I don't anticipate it will. But yes, here's what happens in many countries around the world. You have a leader that emerges and basically says, don't put your faith in yourselves. Don't put your faith in society. Put your faith in me, I'm a strong leader, and I'm going to make things better all by myself.

This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It's basically the argument that he's making that he single handedly is going to turn the country around. We've never been that kind of country. We have a president.

The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitutions and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people. Not the people for the president.

And if you listen to the way he describes himself of what he's going to do he's going to single handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it's legal or not. Ah, poor little Marco. When Romney lost in 2012 and Reince Preibus led the Republicans in thsir inward-gazing, self-described "autopsy" which determined that to win the presidency in the future, the Republican party would have to be more inclusive -- more friendly to women and minorities -- poor little Marco thught he had a good thing going, and as a fresh new Latino face, he would ride the wave to the presidency by championing and spearheading a drive to liberalize the Republican approach to immigration. He sponsored such a bill in the Senate which won widespread bipartisan approval -- and then it went to the House, which had been captured by the Tea Party, and defeated the liberal bill in a humiliating defeat for young Marco, who has never really recovered his rising-star status with Republicans. *****

Character And Decency? No: Trump.

Click here for another article by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, entitled "This vulgar man has squandered our decency."

“Character is the only secure foundation of the state.”

— President Calvin Coolidge, addressing the National Republican Club in New York, 1924.

“It was all bullshit.”

— President Trump, addressing Republicans in the White House and a national television audience on Thursday after his acquittal.

Trump Speaks, Post Impeachment

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank entitled "Trump learned his lesson. He’s going to be even more vulgar."

The morning after his acquittal in the Senate, Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast, where political opponents have always set aside their differences. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urged the assembled to “raise our voices in prayer as one.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) prayed for his colleagues, including Pelosi, and said God couldn’t have “picked a better day to bring us all together.”

And then there was Trump. He complained that he was “put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people.”

Referring to Mitt Romney, the lone Republican to support impeachment, Trump said, “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.” Referring to Pelosi, just a few feet away, he added: “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you’ when they know that’s not so.”

Later, in a gathering of his strongest supporters at the White House:

He described his political opponents and government bureaucrats as “bad,” “dirty,” “horrible,” “evil,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “scum,” “leakers,” “liars,” “vicious,” “mean,” “lowlifes,” “non-people,” “stone-cold crazy” and “the crookedest, most dishonest, dirtiest people I’ve ever seen.”

In what was billed as an address to the nation, Trump declared to every American man, woman and child: “It was all bullshit.”

The Republicans laughed.

Trump: How Low Can You Go?

Click here for an article at Slate by William Saletan entitled "Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity," chronicling Trump's offenses.

Ridiculous Rudy

Click here for an article in The New York Times Magazine, by Jonathan Mahler, entitled "The Fog of Rudy," subtitled "Did he change -- or did America?"

It's a longish article trying to untangle the mess that is Rudy Giuliani, just as the impeachment trial is about to start.

George Will: "Mea Culpa"

Here is an article at CNN, dated June 26, 2016, by Daniella Diaz, entitled "George Will: Trump's judge comments prompted exit from GOP":

George Will, the conservative commentator and columnist, said Sunday that he changed his voter registration to "unaffiliated" 23 days ago and has left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump.

"After Trump went after the 'Mexican' judge from northern Indiana then (House Speaker) Paul Ryan endorsed him, I decided that in fact this was not my party anymore," Will said on "Fox News Sunday."

Trump attacked Will on Twitter over his decision to leave the GOP Sunday morning, writing: "George Will, one of the most overrated political pundits (who lost his way long ago), has left the Republican Party. He's made many bad calls."

Will responded on "Fox News Sunday," saying: "He has an advantage on me, because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can't."

He said he'd joined the Republican Party in 1964, inspired by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a founder of the conservative movement and a key figure in the party then.

"I joined it because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative," Will said. "The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' " he said.

Will first announced his decision to leave the GOP at a Federalist Society luncheon Friday. He told the audience: "This is not my party," according to PJ Media, a conservative news website.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner confirmed to PJM in an interview after his speech that he had left the party and was now "an unaffiliated voter in the state of Maryland" before switching the subject.

PJM reported that Will cited Ryan's endorsement of Trump is one of the reasons why he decided to leave the party. Will didn't say whether he'd vote for either Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton or a third-party candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Will, who worked on President Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, also said at the luncheon that Trump as president with "no opposition" from a Republican-led Congress would be worse than Clinton as president with a Republican-led Congress. When asked by PJ Media about his message to conservatives regarding Trump, Will responded, "Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House."

Steve Schmidt: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article in Rolling Stone magazine by Andy Kroll, entitled "Ex-Republican Operative Steve Schmidt: ‘The Party of Trump Must Be Obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed.’" It's an old article, dated June 26, 2018.

The article begins:

Steve Schmidt has worked at the highest levels of Republican politics. He helped run George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign and oversaw the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He led Sen. John McCain’s ’08 presidential bid and helped introduce Sarah Palin to the world. The American Association of Political Consultants once named him its “GOP Campaign Manager of the Year.”

But today, Schmidt is finished with the Republican Party. He renounced his membership last week in a series of withering tweets that quickly went viral. Under Trump, he wrote, the party had become “corrupt, indecent, and immoral.” With the exception of a select few, the GOP was “filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders.” He pointed to the Trump administration’s family separation policy and use of detention centers for young immigrant children – “internment camps for babies” – and the refusal of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to repudiate the president.

Here's the rest of the article, in its entirety:

Why did you finally decide to leave the Republican Party?
I think it’s fair to say I’ve been estranged from the party on a number of issues going back to my advocacy and support for marriage equality in 2009 and then my opposition to the populism and the nationalism that we’ve seen. The reality that I’ve come to is that the party stands at an hour at which it is irredeemable, where it has died and bled out because of the cowardice and fecklessness of its leaders.

When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The Republican Party had every chance to put a check on his vile personal conduct, his administration’s outlandish corruption, his fetishizing and affinity for autocrats around the world and his undermining of the western alliance.

How did it get to this point?
I think it’s important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

The Republican Party remained the party of the North and the West culturally in this country until the Civil Rights Act. On the day that LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, he says, “I feel like I’ve lost the South.” Over time, beginning with Richard Nixon in ’68, with the Southern Strategy and the appeal to white working-class Southerners, the Republican Party is uprooted from the North and the West. That is the party I was born into.

This present strain of know-nothingism has long been in the party’s DNA.
This cancer has always been there. This dormant cancer. But it has become fully embraced in this moment. We’re seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like “invade” and “infest.” The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces – the “deep state.” And the fifth thing is the assertion that “I am the law, that I am above it.” He just said immigrants don’t get a hearing; they don’t get a court representation.

So the party’s evolution is as much cultural as it is political or ideological.
The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

What you’ve seen is this rapid devolution over the last 18 months of the Republican Party becoming a white ethno-nationalist party, a blood-and-soil party that is protectionist, isolationist, that is rooted in resentment and grievance.

The Republican Party isn’t going to die because of Trump. It’s going to die because of Ryan and McConnell. You’re now left with one political party in support of liberal democracy.

Would these same forces have reared their heads if we’d had a Marco Rubio or a Hillary Clinton presidency?
It’s always been there. It’s been there from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1840s. The effect of Trump is the justification it gives to people who are angered by Trump to act more like Trump. To debase themselves into opposition. If you want to oppose Trump, the first thing you should do is say, “I’m not going to do one thing that makes it worse.” Because making it worse helps Trump. Part of the damage of this era is his debasement and his purposeful divisions. That’s unique in all of history.

President Obama said he draws a straight line from McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate to Trump’s election. You helped McCain pick Palin in 2008. Did she usher in the Trump era?
I think people miss the point on Sarah Palin. She’s not the cause. She’s a symptom. The sickness is how people reacted to her after you knew what she was. There’s never been an era absent of demagogues. What there hasn’t been is an ability of those demagogues to gain actual power – certainly not at a national level. We threw the ball down the field [by picking Palin] and it didn’t work. I had no idea what she was and didn’t know until a couple days after we picked her. But by the time the race ends, everybody knows. Yet what happens? Palin gets a million-dollar TV contract on Fox.

Can the Republican Party be saved?
If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed. And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that.

I don’t view it so much differently than I view a forest fire. A forest fire is part of a natural cycle of the forest. The forest burns, and through its burning and destruction, it is regenerated and made healthy again. For the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with its rot, its corruption, its indecency … before there can be any talk of restoration, there must be a season of burning.

Max Boot: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article by David Corn, entitled "'We Need to Destroy the Republican Party': A Conservative Luminary Calls for a Clean Start (In which Max Boot says the GOP is racist, the Iraq War was wrong, and Trumpism is a cancer)."

Corn kicks things off as follows:

David Corn: You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. You joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1994 at 24. You were the op-ed editor four years later. You became a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a blogger for Commentary. You were in neocon heaven—a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. You were one of the major voices in favor of the Iraq War. And in your forthcoming book, you write with great introspection and humility, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” I mean, Max, this is almost, maybe it is, an apology. What brought you to that point?

Corn quotes Boot as saying:

“I am now convinced that coded racial appeals—those dog whistles—had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Repub­lican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-­intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades while accusing the Republican Party of racism. I never believed them. Now I do.”

How did he fail to see what was going on with the Republican party, right under his nose? Boot says:

I was in my conservative bunker, and I thought this was a gross libel against the Republican Party to claim that we were catering to racism, or that it was a libel on America to claim that America was a pervasively racist society. And then Trump came along and I realized, “Wait a second. There is a much larger constituency for racism and xenophobia than I had realized.” And it made me think, “Oh, my goodness. This is why a lot of people were voting Republican.” It wasn’t because they loved supply-side economics. It wasn’t because they supported NATO. It was because they were looking for a candidate who would champion the interests of white people. And Donald Trump did that more unabashedly and more unapologetically than previous Republican candidates had done. That was a wake-up call.

And: "It makes me realize how much of American politics is tribal and how little of it has to do with principles or ideas. The reason why so many people are Republicans is because they hate Democrats; the actual substance of what Republicans stand for almost doesn’t matter. And that’s been a shocking realization."

Later in the article, he says: "Within the grassroots, a lot of people really love the Trump message, the racism, the xenophobia, the nonstop insults against liberals. That’s actually what they like most about him."

When Boot started to become more skeptical, he saw racist treatment of African Americans by police officers differently, and the injustices of the male establishment towards women: “Hey, feminists have a point when they talk about the abuses of patriarchal society and the suffering that women endure in America.”

On the subject of race, Boot says:

I can talk about my own blindness. I thought, “I’m not racist. And I’m a Republican. So it seems like a gross libel to accuse Republicans and conservatives of being racist if I personally am not racist.” And what I’ve realized is there are a lot of racists that the Republican Party is appealing to. There’s also been a disconnect between what Republicans do in office and what they do on the campaign trail. Because going back to 1964, when the parties basically switched positions on civil rights, Republicans have been appealing for white votes with coded racial appeals. Whether it was Nixon’s Southern strategy, or in 1980 Ronald Reagan kicking off his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or the Willie Horton ad from George H.W. Bush.

He adds this tidbit: "Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe."

What is wrong with the leaders of the party? "These people that I used to admire have sold out their principles. Nobody’s more shocked and surprised than I am. This is a movement to which I dedicated my whole life. And now I realize, what the hell was that about? Who were these people? They’re not who I thought they were."

Again, how did he fail to see what liberals saw, what was becoming of the Republican party? He says:

I think it’s crazy that Republicans are opposed to all gun control when we have such a rampant problem with gun violence. But I just never tackled it. Or when Republicans deny climate change, which is a scientific fact, I didn’t deal with it. I just stayed in my lane, foreign policy and national security policy, and ignored the craziness all around me. I went with the tribe. I took the path of least resistance, and now it’s making me realize, no, I’ve got to think for myself, and that’s something very few people do, because being part of one of these political tribes, as much as anything, is a substitute for thought.

What can be done to change the party? Boot says:

"... my hope is that the Republican Party will suffer massive and repeated drubbings at the ballot box. That’s why I urge everybody to vote straight-ticket Democratic even though I have a lot of disagreements with Democrats. I’m not a Democrat; I’m an independent. But for the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party. We need congressional oversight of Donald Trump, which you’re never going to get out of Republicans. I think you need to punish the Republicans for taking these appalling positions, abusing minorities, championing white nationalism, isolationism, protectionism. The only way to wean them from that is to punish them electorally."

How does he feel about the future?

"I am a lot less optimistic or, if you like, Pollyannaish about the future of America than I used to be. I was this immigrant kid who came here in 1976 from the Soviet Union, and I’ve always believed in America and the goodness and greatness of America, and that’s really been my greatest faith. And that faith has been battered. This is a country that could elect Donald Trump. People like me kind of arrogantly assumed it can’t happen here, that there’s something in the water in America that renders us immune from this kind of threat to our democracy. And lo and behold, we’re not immune. We could easily go the way of countries that are backsliding from their democracy."

Notable Quotes From 2019

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Aaron Blake entitled "37 quotes that defined American politics in 2019." Here are my favorites: 4. “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go. If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.” -Former White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert in September on Trump’s theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, might have interfered in the 2016 election. Trump has since been impeached over the push for the probes.

8. “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero.” -Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to the Atlantic. Giuliani added: “Anything I did should be praised.”

12. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.” -Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, in his testimony to Congress.

16. “So, I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals.” -Former defense secretary Jim Mattis, responding to Trump calling him overrated. Mattis noted Trump had also called Streep overrated. Mattis departed over Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from Syria.

23. “It’s never a tough vote for me when I’m standing on principle.” -Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim, explaining his opposition to Trump using a national emergency declaration to fund his border wall. Tillis, though, wound up voting to support the decision in the face of a conservative backlash back home.

29. “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.” -White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who often channels her boss in her public comments, on former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly’s criticisms of Trump.

31. “He sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.” -Trump, when asked to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete.” Trump apparently thought Putin was referring to liberal politicians in the western United States, rather than the Western world’s belief in the freedom of the individual.

An Argument Against Congressional Term Limits

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Joan McCarter entitled "https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/1/1905279/-No-Tom-Steyer-term-limits-aren-t-the-solution-for-fixing-Congress." She says:

Now we've got another wealthy businessman running for president while calling himself a reformer and, of course, pushing the old, tired, and simplistic notion that kicking the bums out on a rotating basis is the answer. Tom Steyer has an op-ed in Newsweek arguing just that. "I've been proposing congressional term limits of 12 years in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. If we want bold change, we need new and different people in charge," he writes. He says that term limits "reorient incentives away from campaign donations and toward the actual work of governing." He also argues that term limits would mean "lobbyists must now make their arguments on the strength of their merits, rather than on relationships alone." He says "We need new ideas, new people, new approaches to hard problems—and term limits deliver those incentives."

Sure, that all sounds great, and like every simple solution posed to a complex problem, it's woefully ill-informed. Does he really imagine that only getting 12 years in federal office would keep opportunists and fortune-seekers out? That they wouldn't get in, steal everything that's not nailed down in those 12 years, and get out to go right to a lobbying firm so they can keep on grifting? If so, he hasn't truly been paying attention. His ideas about lobbyists and how lobbying works are embarrassingly naive. He thinks they'll have less influence because they'll have to use their ideas instead of their friendship (and money)? Lobbyists will roll over newcomers because they'll know how to do it, since they'll know how it all works.

This applies not just to lobbyists, but also staff. The only way continual churn wouldn't destroy Congress would be having essentially permanent committee staff that stays in place.

And:

This anodyne and simplistic thinking is a distraction from the kind of reforms that would really solve the problem of an increasingly corrupt and partisan Congress: public financing of campaigns and real campaign finance reform. Start with new laws to overturn the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, and just keep on going. If you want to get rid of the nefarious influence of big money in politics, get rid of the big money. Then start on the structural reforms that will fix the workings of Congress, like restoring the function of the committees in the legislative process.

Seth Meyers on Donald Trump

So Donald Trump has been impeached. You know, the serial racist criminal who has already cheated in one election, obstructed justice in the investigation of that election, used his office to enrich himself, solicited bribes, inflicted human rights abuses on migrant families, been accused of sexual assault, had six close associates indicted or jailed -- do you remember that guy? You know, the guy who almost definitely committed tax fraud, admitted he broke the law by misusing his personal charity to help his campaign, began his presidency by settling a fraud lawsuit over his scam university, orchestrated an extortion scheme to cheat in the 2020 election, tried to cover it up, got caught, obstructed congress, directed an illegal scheme to pay hush money to cover up an affair, and drove his golf cart onto the green.

Unfairness Of U.S. Senate Distribution

Interesting ... rounded off, the populations of the five boroughs of New York City -- Staten Island, The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn -- total about 7.4 million people.

The populations of the nine least populous states -- Wyoming, Vermont, District of Columbia, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Manhattan -- total about ... wait for it ... 7.4 million people.

The inequity of representation in the U.S. Senate is staggering. The 7.4 million in the nine least populous states have 18 Senators. The same number of people in the five boroughs of New York City have between them less than a one-third share of 2 Senators.

Staten Island 0.4 M      Wyoming     0.6 M
Bronx            1.2 M      Vermont       0.6 M
Manhattan     1.5 M      D.C.             0.7 M
Queens          2.0 M      Alaska          0.7 M
Brooklyn       2.3 M      N. Dakota     0.8 M
Total              7.4 M      S. Dakota      0.9 M
                                     Delaware       1.0 M
                                     Rhode Island 1.0 M
                                     Montana        1.1 M
                                     Total              7.4 M

New York State, 19.5 M; 2 Senators
9 least populous states, 7.4 M; 18 Senators

Trump's Letter To Nancy Pelosi On Impeachment Eve

Click here for the rambling, unhinged letter from Trump to Nancy Pelosi the evening before his expected impeachment.

The New York Times fact-checked it and found 19 instances of lies or exaggerations.

This will be a document that will live in history -- but it won't have the effect Trump was hoping for. It will be held up by historians and future generations with the ridicule and contempt it deserves.

Ukraine Involvement in U.S. 2016 Election - and the Fox News Version

Click here for a Politico article entitled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire," by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern.

Brian Stelter, in one of his "Reliable Sources" articles, has a piece subtitled "The right-wing roots of impeachment," in which he argues that Hannity and others embellished and blew the Politico article up out of all proportion, using it as the basis for their specious claims that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that meddled in the U.S. election -- with the intention of helping Hillary to defeat Trump.

Stelter says:

How did we get here? How did Trump wind up on the verge of impeachment? Well, his sources of information led him astray. He was misinformed by the shows and sites he was watching and reading.

To be clear: His choices, what Trump did with the information — the withholding of aid money, the alleged shakedown of the Ukrainian president, the claims that it was a "perfect" phone call — that's all his own doing. Trump is responsible for what he did. But what he was hearing from right-wing media was crucial. The conspiratorial bent of his favorite talk shows was critical.

--> Re: Ukraine and 2016: Sean Hannity and other Trump backers took tiny bits of true information from a January 2017 Politico story titled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire" and blew it way, way out of proportion, to the point that some viewers thought Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. Hannity leaned on the Politico story for months and months — in fact, he's still talking about it, as of Sunday -- so it's no wonder why Trump harbored a grudge against Ukraine.

--> Re: the Bidens and Burisma: Enter John Solomon, the right-wing columnist for The Hill who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to light the fuse of the Ukraine scandal. Trump was watching when Solomon went on Hannity in March and described a Ukrainian effort to "try to influence the United States election in favor of Hillary Clinton." We know he was watching because he tweeted about the segment. Solomon rolled out an anti-Biden conspiracy theory... the feedback loop kept looping... and it ultimately ensnared Trump.

--> Re: the aid money for Ukraine, according to WaPo, Trump saw an article from the right-leaning Washington Examiner titled "Pentagon to send $250M in weapons to Ukraine" and started to ask Q's about the $$.

Here's the thing: The pro-Trump media bubble did not actually help Trump. To the contrary, it led him to the brink of impeachment...

Click here for more at the Stelter "Reliable Sources" piece.

The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report

Click here for "The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report" by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Here's the first paragraph:

The impeachment inquiry into Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election. As described in this executive summary and the report that follows, President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign. The President demanded that the newly-elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly announce investigations into a political rival that he apparently feared the most, former Vice President Joe Biden, and into a discredited theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election. To compel the Ukrainian President to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.

Here's Digby's take on it:

As promised, the House Intelligence Committee released its report on the Ukraine investigation on Tuesday. It was another of those days when everyone on TV was madly reading a pile of documents trying to find any nuggets of new information while at the same time attempting to give the public a sense of the larger narrative. This time there was no William Barr on hand to spin things in favor of the president, so the media managed to tell the real story. It is actually more devastating than anticipated.

...

It also makes a strong case that the president and his henchmen obstructed Congress, intimidated witnesses, became the first administration in history to thoroughly stonewall obstruct an impeachment inquiry, and quite likely lied about that "I want nothing" phone call. It unravels all the byzantine relationships between Fox News lawyers, right-wing journalists and various Ukrainian political figures with their own axes to grind.

Family Reunion

Paste this into the address bar of your browser: https://twitter.com/i/status/1199897223993155584

Taylor Testifies - Trump Lashes Out

Bill Taylor, the chargé d'affaires at the Ukrainian embassy in Kiev, gave a closed-door deposition before the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees on Tuesday, October 22. He's the one who early this year, responding to the Trump/Zelensky phone call when Trump said "I would like you to do us a favor though" while withholding desperately needed military assistance (already voted for by Congress) in connection with Trump's insistence that Ukraine investigate Joe and Hunter Biden's involvement with Burisma, a Ukraine energy company, and his and Giuliani's pursuit of a debunked Internet conspiracy theory about CrowdStrike, the DNC server, and purported Ukrainian interference on Clinton's behalf in the 2016 election, tweeted "I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign."

Apparently the prospect of his testimony has Trump worried. The president* tweeted the following:

So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here - a lynching.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded:

“This is a lynching in every sense. This is un-American. I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime as a lawyer where somebody is accused of a major misconduct who cannot confront the accuser, call witnesses on their behalf and have the discussion in the light of day so the public can judge,” he said.

Graham is lying through his teeth. As a lawyer -- the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, no less -- he knows perfectly well that what is taking place right now is not a trial but an investigation, and secrecy is the normal process. During the Benghazi investigation, 103 witnesses -- in fact, every witness called who was not named Clinton -- testified behind closed doors. 164 African-Americans were lynched in Senator Graham's state.

Responding to the president*'s tweet, Graham said, “I think that’s pretty well accurate. I think lynching is being seen as somebody taking the law in their own hands and out to get somebody for no good reason,” he said.

Hogan Gidley, the principal deputy White House press secretary, made the ridiculous statment that "The president was not equating the impeachment inquiry with the brutal killing during Jim Crow." [HUH?]

"The president is not comparing what's happened to him with one of our darkest moments in American history," Gidley told reporters on the White House driveway. "What he is explaining clearly is the way he has been treated by the media since he announced for president."

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, condemned Mr. Trump for his tweet comparing the impeachment inquiry to a "lynching."

"Thousands of African Americans were slaughtered during the lynching epidemic in this country for no reason other than the color of their skin. The president should not compare a constitutionally mandated impeachment inquiry to such a dangerous and dark chapter of American history," Jeffries said. "I hope that he will apologize."

Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, who has introduced a bill to make lynching a hate crime, called on Mr. Trump to delete the tweet.

"You think this impeachment is a LYNCHING? What the hell is wrong with you?" Rush said, quoting Mr. Trump's tweet. "Do you know how many people who look like me have been lynched, since the inception of this country, by people who look like you. Delete this tweet."

Greetings From The Lunatic Fringe!

Here's our old friend Alex Jones, foretelling The Apocalypse:

Trump Tweets

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber. He wrote down and read terrible things, then said it was from the mouth of the President of the United States. I want Schiff questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.....

....If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews (re-tweeted by Trump)

Emotional, Fact-Free Tweet From Jon Voight

"War. This is war against truth." Click here for 2 minutes, 14 seconds of pro-Trump propaganda from the Midnight Cowboy. "This is a war against the highest noble man who has defended our country and made us safe and great again." Trump? "The highest noble man"? Get a grip, Jon.

Click here for a video clip of Rudy Giuliani on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News melting down and yelling at Chris Hahn, a Democrat who I guess appears from time to time on Fox. I got the clip from a post by Frances Langum on Crooks & Liars. Her description starts:

On Tuesday evening's Ingraham Angle, Rudy Giuliani had an insane meltdown and erupted on a Democratic guest for questioning his crazy Ukraine story.

“Shut up, moron! Shut up! Shut Up! You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what you’re talking about, idiot!” Rudy screamed throughout.

At one point, Hahn says that at one time he had a lot of respect for Giuliani, but:

What I see you doing now saddens me and it saddens most New Yorkers because you are ruining your reputation -- take a step back and stop going on like this," Hahn said.

Tracking Migratory Birds

Click here for a video representation of the flight paths of migratory birds in Europe.

Boeing 737 Max - Part Deux

Click here for another article about the 737 Max -- like the other one, dated September 18, 2019 -- by Maureen Tkacik in The New Republic -- and this one kicks the crap out of Boeing.

Boeing 737 Max

Click here for a really interesting article, dated September 18, 2019, entitled "What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?" by William Langewiesche in The New York Times Magazine.

Business Roundtable Moves In A New Direction

Click here for an article at Inc.Com by Peter Gasca, entitled "In This Single Statement, CEOs From the Largest U.S. Corporations Just Changed the Purpose of Business," subtitled "The influential Business Roundtable issued a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, and businesses everywhere should pay attention."

Wikipedia: The Business Roundtable (BRT) is a non-profit association based in Washington, D.C., whose [192] members are chief executive officers of major U.S. companies. Unlike the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members are entire businesses, BRT members are exclusively CEOs. [The current BRT chairman is Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.]

On August 19, 2019, the BRT issued a 300-word statement:

Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment, and economic opportunity for all.

Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation, and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications, and other services that underpin economic growth.

While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or ­exceeding customer expectations.

Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity, and respect.

Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.

Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.

Generating long-term value for shareholders. [They] provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow, and innovate. We are ­committed to trans­parency and effective engagement with shareholders.

Each of our stake­holders is essential. W­e commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.

I enrolled in a business and economics course back in 1970 with the aim of receiving a business degree. Unfortunately, that was at a time when economic thought in the Western world was undergoing a sea change, from the principles espoused by John Maynard Keynes to those of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, and I found myself in immediate and profound disagreement with my professors and the new wave of economic thought.

In 1970, Friedman wrote what came to be known as the Friedman doctrine, saying "There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits ..."

For years, this philosophy has been espoused by most businesses based in capitalist economies, and it is indicterined [sic] in every newly-minted MBA ... In 1997, ... the Business Roundtable formalized this philosophy with a definition of corporate purpose as 'The paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation's stockholders. The interests of other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to stockholders.'

In other words, the number one rule of business is to increase shareholder wealth.

The BRT's statement, if put into practice, signals a very significant turn in corporate direction:

In the statement, the BRT mentions creating value for customers, investing in employees, fostering divers ity and inclusion, dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers, supporting the communities in which we work, protect the environment -- all before ever mentioning "shareholders," which does not happen until the last paragraph.

Unfortunately for my academic career, I was entering university at exactly the beginning of a 50-year interregnum when economic thought was dominated by right-wing conservatives. If this is the beginning of a pendulum starting to swing in the reverse direction, I'm all for it.

Click here for another article along these lines at The Washington Post, written by David Ignatius and entitled "Corporate panic about capitalism could be a turning point."

Dimon had warned earlier this year in his annual letter to his company’s shareholders that the American Dream was “fraying for many” because of stagnant wages and income inequality.

Numerous other indications of a change in the direction of economic thought are mentioned in this article. Interestingly, Ignatius writes that FDR considered "the right-wing demagogue, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who had routed the Bonus Army from its camps," to be the most dangerous man in America. “Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you," Roosevelt wrote.

Click here for an article in The Week, by Windsor Mann, entitled "The false prophet in the White House."

People believe Trump because they want to be deceived. In her book The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time, Maria Konnikova writes, "The true con artist doesn't force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn't steal. We give. He doesn't have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us."

An evangelical told me that God put Trump in the White House "for a reason." Maybe the reason is to teach us a lesson: Don't ever do this again.

Joy Reid at MSNBC tweeted: "This might be the truest article I’ve read about the Cult of Donald Trump, whose supporters really do say (and have told me) he was sent to Washington by God."

Arnie's Message: "Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause."

"Believe me, I knew the original Nazis."

Click here for an article at The Week, by Peter Weber, entitled "Arnold Schwarzenegger, who grew up around 'broken' and defeated Nazis, has some blunt advice for the alt-right (and Trump)."

Schwarzenegger had a message for "the neo-Nazis and to the white supremacists and to the neo-Confederates," which began: "Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause. Believe me, I knew the original Nazis." He explained that he was born in Austria in 1947, right after World War II, and growing up he "was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from the war filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology. And I can tell you that these ghosts that you idolize spent the rest of their lives living in shame. And right now, they're resting in hell." He said it isn't too late to change course, and he wasn't buying Trump's "fine people" excuse for the Charlottesville marchers.

"If you say 'Arnold, hey, I was just at the march, don't call me a Nazi, I have nothing to do with Nazis at all,'" Schwarzenegger said, "let me help you: Don't hang around people who carry Nazi flags, give Nazi salutes, or shout Nazi slogans. Go home. Or better yet, tell them they are wrong to celebrate an ideology that murdered millions of people. And then go home."

Rebuttal to Tucker Carlson's "White Supremacy Is A Hoax" Segment

Click here for an excellent rebuttal to Tucker Carlson's dimwitted segment I discussed in my post below, ""Tucker Carlson: White Supremacy Is a ‘Hoax’ and ‘Not a Real Problem in America.'"

The link is to The Atlantic, and an article by Conor Friedersdorf, entitled "Dismantling Tucker Carlson’s White-Supremacy Argument," subtitled "The Fox News host’s recent segment was among the most poorly reasoned ever."

QAnon!

Feel up to watching a nice little conspiracy-theory video about a sinister plan on behalf of the criminal elites to dominate the world for their evil purposes? Great! Here it is:



According to Q theory, the Mueller report was to bring everything to a head: Mueller would reveal the existence of a vast worldwide criminal cabal, run by the criminal elites -- especially the Bushes, the Clintons, and Barack Obama -- resulting in those evildoers, along with large numbers of Hollywood stars, business magnates, and of course Democrats -- being seized and rushed off to Guantanamo in chains. But it didn't happen! There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but the Q theory lives on.

Click here for a great companion article, explaining the QAnon nonsense in some depth, by Will Sommer at the Daily Beast, entitled "What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained."

Review Of Steve Bannon's Film, "American Dharma"

Click here for the review, at ScreenDaily, by Lee Marshall. The film's been out there for a year, but no one wanted to give Bannon's rancid worldview any publicity. Director Erroll Morris grapples with Bannon's ideology and methodology and suggests that ignoring the political strategist is more dangerous than engaging him.

If you can’t convey the attraction, the director seems to be saying, you can’t convey the danger.

This is the issue with taking on a subject as media-savvy as Breitbart News co-founder Bannon: a man who is used to playing others, and controlling the message, was always going to be hard to play. Morris faced a similar challenge in The Unknown Known, his last cinematic sparring match with one of liberal America’s chief bogeymen, Donald Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld was also, like The Fog of War’s Robert McNamara, a consummate politician unable to resist the cut and thrust of a debate on strategy. Bannon, for all the abyss that divides the two men’s views and styles, is a weaver of narratives, creator of images and editor of the truth, just like Morris, and simply goes quiet when asked questions he finds uncomfortable.

The result is a fascinating but also in some ways frustrating film, a game of tag that looks resoundingly cinematic but feels like more of a cable or VOD prospect - not least because it lacks the killer punch, the Bannon stumble or revelation that would make American Dharma newsworthy.

"The Hunt," A Film From Universal Studios -- Will It Ever Air?

Here's a trailer for a Universal film scheduled for a September release -- though it may not ever be shown. Called "The Hunt," it shows wealthy liberal patrons of "The Manor," a luxurious hunting camp -- where the game being hunted is MAGA supporters.

"Did anyone see what our ratfucker-in-chief just did?" one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: "At least The Hunt's coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables."

The script for The Hunt features the red-state characters wearing trucker hats and cowboy shirts, with one bragging about owning seven guns because it's his constitutional right. The blue-state characters — some equally adept with firearms — explain that they picked their targets because they expressed anti-choice positions or used the N-word on Twitter. "War is war," says one character after shoving a stiletto heel through the eye of a denim-clad hillbilly.

How will a film like this go over after the national trauma of the El Paso/Dayton weekend? A Universal executive says the movie "is meant to show what a stupid, crazy world we live in," adding, "It might even be more powerful now." [The film, scheduled for release in September 2019, was released on March 20, 2020.]