What a ridiculous twat

He's just found out.

Ranting about Ohr might not have been well-advised

Yet a third article showing how investigating Ohr actually exposes shit about Trump.

A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

[...]

It was not clear from Ohr’s interview whether Steele had been directly told that or had picked that up through his contacts, but the broader sentiment is echoed in Steele’s research dossier.

[...]

The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

[...]

Trump this month proposed stripping Ohr, who until this year had been largely anonymous during his decades-long Justice Department career, of his security clearance and has asked “how the hell” he remains employed.

[...]

Trump and some of his supporters in Congress have also accused the FBI of launching the entire Russia counterintelligence investigation based on the [Christopher Steele] dossier. But memos authored by Republicans and Democrats and declassified this year show the probe was triggered by information the U.S. government received earlier about the Russian contacts of then-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The FBI’s investigation was already under way by the time it received Steele’s dossier, and Ohr was not the original source of information from it.

[...]

In the interview, Ohr acknowledged that he had not told superiors in his office, including Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, about his meetings with Steele because he considered the information inflammatory raw source material.

He also provided new details about the department’s move to reassign him once his Steele ties were brought to light.

Ohr said he met in late December 2017 with two senior Justice Department officials, Scott Schools and James Crowell, who told him they were unhappy he had not proactively disclosed his meetings with Steele. They said he was being stripped of his associate deputy attorney post as part of a planned internal reorganization, people familiar with Ohr’s account say.

  A P

Denials of passports to American Latinos

It's just getting worse and worse. It's not going to stop as long as Trump is in office. And reversing so much is going to be a struggle.

When Juan, the former soldier, received a letter from the State Department telling him it wasn’t convinced that he was a U.S. citizen, it requested a range of obscure documents — evidence of his mother’s prenatal care, his baptismal certificate, rental agreements from when he was a baby.

He managed to find some of those documents but weeks later received another denial. In a letter, the government said the information “did not establish your birth in the United States.”

“I thought to myself, you know, I’m going to have to seek legal help,” said Juan, who earns $13 an hour as a prison guard and expects to pay several thousand dollars in legal fees.

[...]

Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

In a statement, the State Department said that it “has not changed policy or practice regarding the adjudication of passport applications,” adding that “the U.S.-Mexico border region happens to be an area of the country where there has been a significant incidence of citizenship fraud.”

But cases identified by The Washington Post and interviews with immigration attorneys suggest a dramatic shift in both passport issuance and immigration enforcement.

In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings. In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States.

[...]

For now, passport applicants who are able to afford the legal costs are suing the federal government over their passport denials. Typically, the applicants eventually win those cases, after government attorneys raise a series of sometimes bizarre questions about their birth.

“For a while, we had attorneys asking the same question: ‘Do you remember when you were born?’ ” Diez said. “I had to promise my clients that it wasn’t a trick question.”

[...]

The government alleges that from the 1950s through the 1990s, some midwives and physicians along the Texas-Mexico border provided U.S. birth certificates to babies who were actually born in Mexico. In a series of federal court cases in the 1990s, several birth attendants admitted to providing fraudulent documents.

Based on those suspicions, the State Department during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations denied passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.

[...]

A 2009 government settlement in a case litigated by the American Civil Liberties Union seemed to have mostly put an end to the passport denials.

[...]

But under President Trump, the passport denials and revocations appear to be surging, becoming part of a broader interrogation into the citizenship of people who have lived, voted and worked in the United States for their entire lives.

“We’re seeing these kind of cases skyrocketing,” said Jennifer Correro, an attorney in Houston who is defending dozens of people who have been denied passports.

[...]

The denials are happening at a time when Trump has been lobbying for stricter federal voter identification rules, which would presumably affect the same people who are now being denied passports — almost all of them Hispanic, living in a heavily Democratic sliver of Texas.

“That’s where it gets scary,” Diez said.

  WaPo

UPDATE:

Speaking of seizure of property...

In recent months, Bank of America has been accused of freezing or threatening to freeze customers’ accounts after asking about their legal status in the U.S.. In July, the Washington Post reported that multiple customers had been locked out of their accounts after Bank of America questioned whether the account holders were U.S. citizens or dual citizens.

[...]

Proof of citizenship is not required to open a bank account in the U.S., according to Stephanie Collins, a spokesperson for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that supervises branch banking. Banks are merely required to identify and report suspicious transactions and maintain and update customer information, she said. Banks have not received any new instructions to collect more information about customers.

[...]

Molina, the Bank of America spokesperson, said the new customer complaints may simply be a response to heightened sensitivities to the debate over immigration in the U.S.

  Sacramento Bee

Sounds nefarious to me.

Dan Hernandez, a Broward County native of Cuban heritage now working as a TV writer in Los Angeles, said he had his business account suspended by Bank of America in December 2016. When he asked why, he was told he was under suspicion of doing business with Cuba. His corporation was called Cuban Missile Inc.—”Cuban Missile” has been his nickname since childhood.

[...]

“I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, but it puts doubt in your mind. A bank can crush your life for arbitrary reasons and never tell you why.”

Yeah, well, I guess with a name like Bank of America, you have to live up to the name.

"Trade wars are easy"

High-stakes trade negotiations between Canada and the U.S. were dramatically upended on Friday morning by inflammatory secret remarks from President Donald Trump, after the remarks were obtained by the Toronto Star.

In remarks Trump wanted to be “off the record,” Trump told Bloomberg News reporters on Thursday, according to a source, that he is not making any compromises at all in the talks with Canada — but that he cannot say this publicly because “it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.”

[...]

He suggested he was scaring the Canadians into submission by repeatedly threatening to impose tariffs.

“Off the record, Canada’s working their ass off. And every time we have a problem with a point, I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala,” Trump said, according to the source. The Impala is produced at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ontario.

  Daniel Dale @ Toronto Star

He has zero self-control.

“Here’s the problem. If I say no — the answer’s no. If I say no, then you’re going to put that, and it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal ... I can’t kill these people,” he said of the Canadian government.

[...]

And the remarks immediately became a factor in the negotiations: Trudeau’s officials, who saw them as evidence for their previous suspicions that Trump’s team had not been bargaining in good faith, raised them at the beginning of a meeting with their U.S. counterparts on Friday morning, a U.S. source confirmed.

Would have loved to be there for that.

“If this was said, it was said in an off the record capacity. I understand you guys have obtained it; I’m not sure where you’ve obtained it from,” said White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters.

Wasn't said "off the record" to The Star.

On the record, Trump told Bloomberg that a deal was “close,” that it could happen by Friday but might take longer, and that Canada ultimately has “no choice” but to make a deal. Bloomberg quoted these remarks.

But then he said, “Off the record: totally on our terms. Totally.”

“Again off the record, they came knocking on our doors last night. ‘Let’s make a deal. Please,’” he said.

[...]

Trump, of course, is known for both dishonesty and for bragging about his own greatness, and he regularly makes dubious claims about how he is supposedly dominating the begging people on the other side of the bargaining table from him. When he claimed to have made no compromises, it is distinctly possible he was making a false claim to impress the Bloomberg journalists.

Regardless of their truthfulness, the president’s comments are significant for more than one reason.

As Trump said, his claim that he has not compromised at all could make it harder for Trudeau to sell the deal to Canadians as a win for both countries. But the disclosure of the claim could also make it harder for Trump to convince Americans that Canada is at fault for any impasse.

[...]

Trump’s team, meanwhile, publicly blamed Canada for the deadlock on Friday morning.

“There have been no concessions by Canada on agriculture,” a spokesperson for the Lighthizer told the Washington Post.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 1:45 EST:  He's just found out.

What a ridiculous twat.

They're not finished squeezing Manafort

Even though his trial is set for next month, the Feds are still getting information to put the screws on.

Sam Patten, a former associate of Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to illegally acting as a foreign agent and has agreed to cooperate with government prosecutors.

Patten pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, a federal law governing foreign lobbying, in federal court in D.C. on Friday.

[...]

He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, followed by supervised release for up to three years, and could be fined up to $250,000 for the offense.

As part of his plea agreement, Patten has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

[...]

Patten also is said to have ties to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian who Mueller indicted earlier this year along with Manafort for conspiring to obstruct justice and obstructing justice.

[...]

The judge released Patten on Friday morning shortly before noon but directed him to hand over his passports and report by phone weekly to the Pretrial Services Agency. He will also have to get the court’s permission to travel outside the greater Washington metro area.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Abandoning Palestinians

The Trump administration is planning to cut all remaining US funding for the main UN programme for Palestinian refugees, with potentially devastating impacts, and is lobbying other countries to follow suit.

The move, reported in several US media outlets, has been anticipated both by senior officials at the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other Washington insiders, who told the Guardian the defunding could be announced as early as next week.

Speculation about the future of US funding for the agency, which provides services to more than five million Palestinians in the occupied territories as well as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, comes as European and Arab countries pledged to protect the agency and Germany promised a significant increase in financial backing.

[...]

The US has long been the largest individual donor to UNRWA, pledging about one third of the agency’s $1.1bn annual budget, but earlier this year the administration cut a scheduled UNRWA payment of $130m to $65m, saying the agency needed to make unspecified reforms and calling on the Palestinians to renew peace talks.

The move has been widely interpreted in both Israel and Palestine as a blunt move by the US to unilaterally sweep aside one of the main sticking points in peace negotiations – the right of return of Palestinians.

[...]

The issue of Palestinian refugees, and whether those abroad would be allowed to return to a future Palestinian state or be compensated, is one of the three key issues at the heart of the Middle East peace process, along with the status of Jerusalem and the borders of that state.

Trump has already unilaterally intervened on the Jerusalem issue in Israel’s favour by recognising it as the Israeli capital.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

More on Trump's rage against DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr

Why go after Ohr, when many close observers assess that he was doing his duty by reporting Steele’s information to the FBI in late November 2017? Sitting on that information from the former British intelligence officer, who had his own track record helping the United States fight Russian organize crime, would have been a serious dereliction. And why does the president risk so much politically by even threatening to pull the security clearances of an active Justice Department official without any of the ordinary procedures for doing so?

[...]

Ohr has never criticized Trump as far as anyone is aware, and has worked at the Justice Department as an award-winning civil servant for nearly thirty years in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It has been noted that Ohr had ties to the notorious Christopher Steele dossier and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele, a former British agent, to investigate Trump. But there is quite likely another reason which could trouble Trump even more: Ohr’s job in the Justice Department involved facing off against Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich whose operatives have been using Trump branded properties to launder millions of dollars for more than three decades. [...] What the public should also understand is how Mogilevich has served as an agent for Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the United States and abroad.

[...]

Over the years, no fewer than 1,300 Trump-branded condos were sold in all cash purchases to anonymous shell companies—the two criteria that set off alarm bells among anti-money laundering authorities. In 2002, after Trump had gone belly up in Atlantic City, Bayrock, a real estate development company that allegedly had ties to Mogilevich, moved into Trump Tower and partnered with Trump—in the process bailing out the bankrupt real estate mogul and putting him in a position to eventually run for the presidency.

[...]

And Ohr is not the only Mogilevich specialist who has been the subject of Trump’s ire. Last September, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page was fired from her position on Mueller’s probe into the Trump-Russia scandal after anti-Trump text messages exchanged between her and Peter Strzok came to light. [...] However, little attention was paid to what may well be the most interesting item on Page’s resume—her considerable experience prosecuting money laundering cases involving Russian organized crime, including working with the FBI’s task force in Budapest to prosecute a money-laundering case against Dmitry Firtash, the Ukrainian oligarch who partnered with both Paul Manafort and Semion Mogilevich.

[...]

In sum, a key to understanding Trump’s relationships with Russia goes through organized criminal syndicates. As I report on all this information and more in House of Trump, House of Putin, unlike the American Mafia, Russian mobsters operate as de facto state actors, with high-ranking crime bosses like Mogilevich working with and at the behest of Putin. All of which raises the question of whether Trump, by coming down on Ohr and perhaps also Page, is trying to keep the real story behind his many ties to Mogilevich operatives from unraveling.

  Just Security

I'd say that's a certainty.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Aha

Trump's continuous vicious rants about agents Ohr and McCabe come into focus:

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

[...]

Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone.

[...]

“How the hell is Bruce Ohr still employed at the Justice Department?” Trump wrote on Thursday. “Disgraceful! Witch Hunt!”

[...]

Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect.

  The Atlantic

Oh, yeah. It's the money laundering and business criminality Trump's exercised about. The "NO COLLUSION!" shit is a red herring meant to keep his base looking in the wrong direction.

Trump’s fixation with seeing Ohr ousted from the Justice Department could be perceived as yet another attempt to undermine the credibility of the people who have investigated him. It could also be interpreted as an attack on someone with deep knowledge of the shady characters Trump and his cohort have been linked to, including Semion Mogilevich, the Russian mob boss, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Putin who did business with Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. [...] Ohr was involved in banning Deripaska from the U.S. in 2006, due to his alleged ties to organized crime and fear that he would try to launder money into American real estate.

I'm guessing he managed it.

And then there’s Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI who spent more than a decade investigating Russian organized crime and served as a supervisory special agent of a task force that scrutinized Eurasian crime syndicates. McCabe is a 21-year FBI veteran who handled aspects of the Russia investigation until Mueller was appointed last May, an appointment McCabe says he pushed for. He was fired [by AG Sessions] in March, just two days short of being eligible to receive his pension and other benefits from the bureau. The official reason was that he had lacked candor when describing his interactions with the press to the Office of the Inspector General.

[...]

One member of Mueller’s team, meanwhile, has provoked more ire from the president’s allies than others: Andrew Weissmann, a seasoned prosecutor who oversaw cases against high-ranking organized criminals on Wall Street in the early 1990s and, later, against 30 people implicated in the Enron fraud scandal. Trump has also villainized the former Mueller team member Lisa Page, a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s organized-crime section whose cases centered on international organized crime and money laundering. She has been targeted by the president and his allies for mocking Trump in text messages she exchanged with Peter Strzok, a Russian counterintelligence expert in the FBI, during a period in which both briefly worked on the Mueller investigation. Strzok was fired earlier this month for writing similarly caustic messages.

Page and Strzok knew better than anybody, that the President is a money laundering Russian mobster-linked sleazebag.

Russia’s criminal syndicates have become increasingly intertwined with its intelligence services, blurring the line between Mafia dons and spies. (As the Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in his book The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia, Putin’s Kremlin has consolidated power by “not simply taming, but absorbing, the underworld.”)

Which is exactly what's happening here if Trump stays in office. And this is how Putin and Trump are ultimately tied together.

[Trump's] links to Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the former Soviet Union have been documented: Millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s developments and casinos throughout the 1990s, as the journalist Craig Unger has documented, as oligarchs looked for a place to hide their money in the West. The Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was once known as a hot spot for Brooklyn mobsters associated with the Russian Mafia, and quickly became the “favorite East Coast destination” of the top Russian mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov, according to the 2000 book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. It was also repeatedly cited by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for having inadequate money-laundering controls.

[...]

Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov [is a] Russian mob leader who ran an entire gambling and money-laundering network out of Unit 63A in Trump Tower, just three floors below Trump’s own residence.(Tokhtakhounov was a VIP attendee at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow just seven months after the gambling ring was busted by the FBI.) Trump’s own sons have boasted of the Trump Organization’s dependence on Russian money. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008. “We don’t rely on American banks,” Eric Trump reportedly told a golfing buddy in 2014. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen—who pleaded guilty last week to tax fraud and campaign-finance violations, in which he implicated the president—once bragged that he was part of the Russian mob, according to The Wall Street Journal. Cohen’s uncle, with whom he was close, owned a Brooklyn catering hall called El Caribe, in which Cohen had a stake—a hall that “for decades was the scene of mob weddings and Christmas parties,” the Times reported, and housed the offices of “two of New York’s most notorious Russian mobsters.”

[...]

It’s not just Trump Tower or Trump Taj Mahal. NBC News reported in November that Trump’s Panama hotel had organized-crime ties, and a Russian state-owned bank under U.S. sanctions, whose CEO met with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in December 2016, helped finance the construction of the president’s 65-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Lame duck crisis

I really hadn't even considered how desperate and dangerous Trump will be in the three months between midterm elections in November and when the next Congress goes into session in January if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress. But I think this assessment is right:

The implication of recent reporting is that [Trump's steps to protect himself from Mueller] will include, at a minimum, pardoning Manafort and firing Sessions. We can see his intentions both in overt and behind-the-scenes steps he’s taken against McGahn and Sessions in recent days, and in reports that he has consulted with his personal, criminal lawyers about both pardoning Manafort, firing Sessions, and impeachment.

[...]

If Republicans do well in the elections, all this scheming will have proved unnecessary, and Trump will be given a free hand to obstruct any investigation he’d like. But if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress, the lame-duck period will be the critical window during which Trump can take corrupt steps to insulate himself from justice. By the time Democrats took control, their ability to set things right would be limited. They could conduct oversight, which would damage Republicans politically, but Republicans would at the very least have the power to block impeachment and the restoration of the Mueller investigation.

[...]

Trump’s best laid plans could come undone if Mueller secures more indictments between now and the election. But on the current course, a crisis appears inevitable.

  Crooked

On the other hand, even if he does manage to protect himself from Mueller, he's now facing other legal problems from the Trump Foundation corruption investigation in the Southern District of New York and from Stormy Daniels (and perhaps more similar cases). Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Mueller eventually (and particularly before Trump might have him fired) turns over money laundering and other personal criminal conduct cases against Himself and the whole Trump family to New York AGs.  I think he'll be saving those for last.

I hope he gets multi-millions, billions even

For two reasons:  1) they screwed him over; and 2) we know the kinds of good works he does with his money.

A very long string of lies

Daniel Dale tweeted Trump's recent lies.  Here are some:

Trump said that Dov Hikind, a NY legislator who has praised him, is such a staunch Democrat that he “probably never uttered the word Republican in his life” and “would never vote for a Republican.” Hikind endorsed Bush, McCain and Romney. He said he wrote in Paul Ryan in 2016.

Trump repeated his smear of former Democratic IT staffer Imran Awan, saying, “He had all the information on the Democrats...And they don't even have his computers and his servers...” The Justice Department explicitly cleared Awan of any crime related to politics or servers.

Truimp blasted Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown for voting against Neil Gorsuch: “How do you do that? First in his class at Harvard…” Gorsuch wasn’t even in the top 50 in his class at Harvard, Harvard told me.

Trump said of NY Gov. Cuomo: "Sues everybody. You know, you go into that state, you get sued; that's why people don't want to move in…But if you go to New York, you get sued, and people are afraid to go to New York. They don't want to go." This is, clearly, complete nonsense.

Trump said the FBI raid on Paul Manafort was especially egregious because it happened “on a weekend.” It happened on a Wednesday, news outlets have reported.

Trump took credit for the idea to let veterans facing VA waits see private doctors: “Oh, I had something so smart. I said, 'Listen, I have an idea. If they have to wait that long, why don't we send them to a doctor around the corner?’” This was approved in 2014 under Obama.

Trump claimed that he has persuaded big stores to start saying Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays: “You know, they're saying 'Christmas' again now, right?...They're all saying 'Merry Christmas' now. They're proud of it."

Trump said DeSantis was at “3” per cent in the primary polls before Trump gave his "full" endorsement: “He was a 3, and I gave him a nice shot and a nice little tweak, bing bing, and he went from 3 to like 20-something.” DeSantis was in the mid-teens in the polls at the time. There is no evidence of this.

Trump decried “the large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa. There is no such large-scale killing. SA agricultural industry group says there were 47 people killed on farms in 2017-2018 tracking year, a 19-year low; there are more than 17,000 total murders per year there.

Trump said Homeland Security employees are “building the border wall as we sit, and the wall is getting longer, and taller, and stronger each and every day.” Construction on the border wall has not started.

Trump said he has viewed data on Americans' approval of ICE, and it's overwhelming: "I don't mean like 51 per cent; I mean like 88 per cent, 93 per cent. I've seen numbers." It's nowhere close. In a July Pew poll, ICE had 44% favourable, 47% unfavourable.

Dale also has an article in the Toronto Star titled "Trump makes 67 false claims in 5th-most-dishonest week as president."

Democrats in a word: pathetic

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A smooth running machine with changing parts

Remember when he was forced to say, when pressed, that, no, the press is not the enemy of the people?*












Look in the mirror, and change that to all over the globe.



There was never any talk of firing Don McGahn until it became known that he had given hours and hours of testimony to Mueller.





If that.




Hilarious.

Here's a new one: labeling his Twitter policy rants as Statements from the White House.








Dear god.

UPDATE:

He must have just gotten off Fox and tuned in to CNN.



Don't leave us hanging.  Why did you fire him then?

Also...CNN responds:

There are real world, criminal and fatal consequences to this type of incitement:

Please put him out of our misery

He's been watching Fox News all day.  He's tweeted something on the hour every hour for the past four hours, culminating with this gem:



While we're all asking ourselves how the hell is he still at the White House?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Court rejects North Carolina's gerrmandered map

A federal court struck down North Carolina’s congressional map Monday, calling it an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and throwing the state’s House elections into uncertainty just 10 weeks before Election Day.

It is unusual for courts to throw out a political map so close to an election — but district court judges wrote that the case “presents unusual circumstances.” The Supreme Court vacated a similar decision earlier this year, ordering the district court to retry the case.

[...]

A three-judge panel ultimately returned the same decision, finding that Republican state legislators had violated the First Amendment and the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when they drew congressional lines that favored their party. Ten of the state’s 13 House districts are held by Republicans, despite the state's political competitiveness.

[...]

The court will appoint a “special master” to draw a remedial map — but it may also give the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw a “constitutionally compliant” plan, pending further submissions later this week. If so, the court gave the legislature a September 17 deadline to enact that plan.

[...]

North Carolina has already held its 2018 congressional primaries. The court raised the option of candidates running in general election districts that were different than the ones in which their primaries were held. But the judges also floated the possibility that the state could instead hold primaries on Nov. 6, Election Day, and then hold special general election contests at a later date to be determined.

[...]

Circuit Court Judge James Wynn wrote the opinion, and District Court Judge William Britt concurred. Wynn was appointed by former President Barack Obama and Britt was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter. District Court Judge William Osteen Jr., an appointee of former President George W. Bush, partially dissented from the decision.

[...]

Another uncertain factor is the Supreme Court. The court already prevented a redraw of North Carolina’s congressional map earlier this year, and it could act to set aside the latest decision. But that would require agreement by five of the eight justices currently on the Court, which is shorthanded since Anthony Kennedy retired earlier this summer.

  Politico

Yet another reason to be concerned about Kavanaugh.

This winter, Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court threw out another GOP-drawn congressional map, ruling that legislators violated the state constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections.

Republicans currently control 12 of Pennsylvania’s 18 House seats, but Democrats could have a majority in the delegation after midterm elections under a new court-drawn map, which broke up GOP-leaning districts in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs and the Lehigh Valley.

Down come the flags - again

"Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country and, in his honor, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment," Trump said in a statement released by the White House.

Trump said he has asked Vice President Pence to speak at a memorial service for McCain at the Capitol on Friday and approved military transportation to move the senator's body from Arizona to Washington, D.C.

[...]

Trump faced a backlash earlier Monday after flags over the White House returned to full-staff after having been lowered over the weekend for just over a day. The decision fueled complaints from Republicans and Democrats that Trump was not offering proper respect to McCain, who served more than three decades in the Senate after spending time as a prison of war in Vietnam.

U.S. law requires the flag to be lowered the day a member of Congress dies and the following day. But presidents routinely keep the flag at half-staff until the funeral.

[...]

Earlier in the day, Trump passed up multiple chances to personally comment on the death of McCain; he was asked four times to do so following an Oval Office announcement on trade but did not respond to questions.

[...]

Flags over Congress and some federal buildings remained at half-staff on Monday, and bipartisan leaders in the Senate released a statement calling on Trump to follow suit.

Veterans groups expressed outrage and disappointment over Trump's decision not to keep the U.S. flag at half-staff.

"On behalf of the American Legion's two million wartime veterans, I strongly urge you to make an appropriate presidential proclamation noting Senator McCain's death and legacy of service to our nation, and that our nation's flag be half-staffed throughout his internment," Denise Rohan, national commander of the American Legion, said in a statement earlier Monday.

[...]

The president's response generated more than 24 hours of controversy that officials in his own party said could have been avoided.

  The Hill

Nasty and petty, he thrives on it.

And his point has been made. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Manafort DC trial update

The federal judge overseeing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s upcoming trial in Washington granted a request by his defense attorneys for a one-week delay for opening statements, CNBC is reporting.

The ruling from Judge Amy Berman Jackson during a pretrial hearing Tuesday means opening arguments will be delayed until Sept. 24. Jury selection will still begin on Sept. 17.

[...]

Manafort faces seven charges in the Washington trial, including illegal foreign lobbying and conspiracy to launder money.

[...]

Jackson will also allow prosecutors to introduce evidence related to Manafort’s lobbying activities in the 1980s, while limiting the scope of the evidence.

[...]

Jackson said she would limit the evidence introduced by Mueller’s team to avoid a “trial within a trial” that could lead to the jury reviewing troves of documents.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Making fun of Melania

She's born to awkward photo ops. 

Number one:  she most certainly didn't plant anything.  She scooped up a little dirt and tossed it in a hole.

How much soil could you load on a shovel by that method?  I'll tell you how much:

They're picking on her for wearing a $4,000 skirt and stilletos to garden in.

It's a pretty skirt.  I don't know why it's worth $4,000.  But the shoes.  What did they cost, because she's never going to wear them again.  They're scratched up - ruined from walking in mulch.

Still, I would like to know how we can get away with making fun of her choice of gardening clothes when she's standing beside a man in pink pants and an ill-fitting suit jacket.

Be best.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The real John McCain & America's love of war

McCain was not, generally speaking, a man of strong beliefs. One of the most honest things he ever said was that he didn’t run for president to enact reforms or out of some “grand sense of patriotism,” but simply because “it had become my ambition to be president.” If anything, he often seemed bored by domestic issues, and was even famous after a fashion for “reaching across the aisle” on matters like campaign finance.

But he did have one unshakeable conviction: Wherever America had a foreign policy problem, the solution was always to bomb the fuck out of someone.

[...]

[H]e was the torchbearer for the purest bipartisan value that exists in Washington: military interventionism. He never saw an invasion he didn’t support, and it’s sadly fitting that the last piece of legislation to bear his name was a massive military spending hike that scored the rare trifecta of support from mainstream Democrats, Republicans and Donald Trump.

[...]

Between 1963 and 1974, we dropped two million tons of ordnance on Laos — not North Vietnam, but Laos — which works out to “a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours per day, for nine years.”

The death toll from that one country is said to be 70,000 (50,000 during the war, 20,000 who died later from unexploded bombs). Similar operations in North Vietnam are said to have killed 182,000 civilians, and estimates about bombing deaths in Cambodia range from 30,000 to 150,000.

Add another 400,000 maimed and an additional 500,000 gruesome birth defects chalked up to the use of Agent Orange, and you start to get a sense of the scale of civilian suffering caused by our invasion of Indochina.

I bring this up because the McCain view of what happened there — that we “lost” in Vietnam only because we were “limited” to, say, 2 million tons of bombs and 580,000 air missions in places like Laos — continues to this day to be a mainstream belief.

[...]

We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.

[...]

We’ve never gotten around to the view most of the rest of the world holds: America committed mass war crimes there, including “genocide, the use of forbidden weapons, maltreatment and killing of prisoners, violence and forceful movement of prisoners.”

McCain’s thinking never moved an inch in that direction. This is why he later refused to see the madness of entering a host of other countries, including Iraq.

[...]

In 2009, noting “we are not winning” in Afghanistan, McCain again said we needed to double down, not back out: “The scale of resources required to prevail will be enormous, and the timetable will be measured in years, not months.”

McCain’s famed solution for Iran was “that old Beach Boys song,” which he sang: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” He was also in favor of intervention in Libya, Nigeria, Kosovo and Bosnia, among others. His take on Syria: “The only realistic [solution]… is with foreign air power.”

[...]

More recently, McCain voted to block a deal to end American involvement in the increasingly genocidal Saudi-led campaign in Yemen. Just as the images of dead and maimed Vietnamese children never changed minds about that war, the similar scenes emanating from Yemen have not penetrated Washington thought processes today.

[...]

We can learn from the Vietnamese, and, in a spirit of forgiveness, stipulate that McCain was a family man and a respected colleague to those in the Senate.

What we can’t do is pretend that we don’t have a serious untreated addiction to war, one that survives McCain, who was maybe the ultimate symbol of the problem. The late senator was both a victim and a perpetuator of our national tragedy, which begins with an inability — still — to face our bloody past.

  Matt Taibbi

What would you expect?

Something most people don’t know about Michael Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, is that he’s also currently representing a Ukrainian oligarch whose name is often linked to one of the most powerful mobsters in the world.

  Rolling Stone

But it surely can't be a surprise. Everyone still standing in the affairs of Trump, Cohen, Manafort, et al., is bound to be attached to the same circle of mobsters. Who else would they trust with their information? And who else could they retain?

For the past four years, Davis — a 72-year-old former special counsel to former President Bill Clinton — has served as a registered foreign agent for Dmitry Firtash, who has been fighting to avoid extradition to Chicago, where he faces charges of international racketeering and money laundering. In registering with the Justice Department as Firtash’s foreign agent, Davis said his firm was being paid $80,000 a month — or about a million dollars a year — by a man described by prosecutors as an “upper-echelon” associate of Russian organized crime.

At least Davis registered.

“Mr. Firtash has denied any business or personal involvement with organized crime, in Russia or elsewhere,” Davis tells Rolling Stone. “Moreover, reports of such involvement have relied on innuendo and words such as ‘linked to’ or ‘associated with,’ not facts, or false allegations in a lawsuit filed many years ago in New York City that was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds and never re-filed.”

Yes, we know. You're all innocent.

Although Davis lists his past controversial clients in Africa and Honduras on his website, Firtash’s name is noticeably absent. Davis hardly ever talks about Firtash, at least not on the record, even though Justice Department filings make it clear that he and his colleagues at Davis, Goldberg & Galper frequently contact D.C. journalists about Firtash to pitch stories, issue statements and press releases, or to respond to questions.

[...]

In 2010, Davis was paid a million dollars a year to represent the brutally repressive dictatorship of oil-soaked Equatorial Guinea, and $100,000 a month to represent Ivory Coast, then on the brink of a civil war. “I took on a couple bad-guy countries that I thought I could make into good-guy countries,” Davis told the Post.

I hope the reporter didn't have food in his/her mouth at the time.

And what's this about Clinton?

In recent pieces, The Washington Post called Davis the “ultimate Clinton loyalist.”

You know how Clinton and Trump traded Russian puppet insults in the campaign? I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that the Clintons, who attended Trump's wedding to Melania, are also attached to Russian mobsters.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wackadoodle Giuliani's wife is divorcing him

His third wife, Judith Giuliani, recently filed for divorce.

According to a statement issued by her lawyer, Bernard Clair, Ms. Giuliani “prefers to maintain her silence about the reasons for her filing and the causes behind the behavioral changes of her husband that have become obvious to even his most ardent supporters.”

  NYT

Could be she's fed up.  Could also be, as was rumored about Trump Junior's recent divorce, it's to protect the fortune by assigning much of it to the divorced spouse, who presumably will still be amenable, and keep it from being used for inevitable legal costs.  Seems more likely in Junior's case, but who knows?

Anybody got a pool going on when His Lardship's wife divorces him? I'd like to see their pre-nup. And the NDA she no doubt signed. I'd also like to know what she was really in the hospital for recently, and what she's getting paid (or being threatened with) to show up in front of cameras as a loyal FLOTUS.

John S. Martin Jr., a former United States attorney who has criticized Mr. Giuliani in the past, said the former mayor had been “acting solely and exclusively” as Mr. Trump’s “public relations agent,” and mainly antagonizing Mr. Mueller.

“He’s not doing his client any good vis-à-vis the one person he should be concerned about — which is the special prosecutor,” Mr. Martin said.

[...]

Marc L. Mukasey, a prominent defense lawyer and Mr. Giuliani’s friend and former law partner, [...] the son of the former attorney general, said he was speaking only for himself and not his firm, Greenberg, which Mr. Giuliani left amid some awkwardness after he joined Mr. Trump’s team. In the end, he said, “What is Rudy going to do? Save his comments for the courtroom? There’s not going to be a courtroom.”

I'm guessing they've given up on Mueller and are doing what they're doing for public opinion.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There goes another one

The top federal official in charge of advocating for students dealing with student loan debt resigned Monday, reportedly accusing the Trump administration of abandoning protections for students.

Seth Frotman is the Student Loan Ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an office that was created under Dodd-Frank.

[...]

"Unfortunately, under your leadership, the bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting," Frotman wrote to the Office of Management and Budget's director Mick Mulvaney, according to NPR. "Instead, you have used the bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America."

[...]

"The truth is that the president’s consumer protection agenda is a dumpster fire,” said Christopher Peterson, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, in a statement. “The administration has seized control of an independent consumer watchdog, and is strangling one of the only agencies in Washington dedicated to looking out for the rights of ordinary Americans.”

  ABC

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's time for more farmer welfare

The federal government will spend up to $1.2 billion to buy products from farmers hurt by the retaliatory tariffs from China and other countries, and will provide almost $5 billion in payments to farmers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

The purchases and payments are part of an emergency temporary aid package for farmers that was announced in July to provide relief for producers who were hurt by the trade war with China and other countries. The government said it could spend up to $12 billion to offset the estimated damages from tariffs placed on U.S. goods as retaliation for tariffs President Donald Trump announced against China and other countries. The spending announced on Monday only represents the first phase of aid.

  ABC

Trade wars are easy to win.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The nuns of St. Joseph's

The horror stories from orphanages in days past are not new, but this article about St. Joseph's in Newport, Vermont, is. You may not want to read it.

Before 1980, [attorney Philip] White told me, social services typically steered child abuse victims away from court, because the process was thought to be too traumatic for the children and the cases were too hard to prove. White maintained that the fear of trauma had more to do with the adults’ discomfort than with the actual needs of the children. So he and some of his colleagues brought together social services, police, and probation officers and created a new set of protocols for how abuse should be addressed. White and his colleagues traveled around the state, and eventually the country, encouraging different agencies to work together, and educating mental health workers and teachers about how and why to report abuse. When prosecutors said they didn’t go after child sexual abuse because they couldn’t face the guilt of losing, White would reply, “If you don’t bring the case, how can you sleep?”

White’s team developed a way for children to testify on closed-circuit TV so they wouldn’t have to tell their story in front of their abuser. Whenever a young client testified, White threw a party, with cake and balloons and streamers. He told the children that regardless of how the case was decided, they had spoken their truth, and that was the victory.

When bearing witness to the most disturbing experiences of Vermont’s children became too much, White would find the steepest ski slope and fly down, screaming his head off all the way, until he felt calm enough to return to his work.

For all the cases he had worked on, however, he had never heard a story quite like Barquin’s.

  Buzzfeed

Continue reading.

I'll always remember the darling Irish ex-nun who lived next door to me in Galveston. More than once, she said, "Those nuns are bitches, honey."

Rigging an election - Part 2

In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”)

Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

  ProPublica

I hate it when people do this kind of shit. We really do have serious problems with our election systems, including the machines. Don't give people a way to dismiss that by phonying up something. Assholes.

I posted about this story from DefCon earlier, and I've updated it to include this correction.  The rest of that post about machine vulnerabilities to rigging still stands.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It wasn't a brown person who did the shooting

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Kilgore Trout ‏ @KT_So_It_Goes found that Trump favorable poll

Increasing abuse of office

As any bankster from the 2008 tanking of the economy can tell you, when you realize the shit is about to hit the fan, you start scrambling to get all you can before you're busted.

Voter fraud, and it's the Republicans doing it

Imagine that.

The alleged signature forgeries continue to pile up in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, where paid campaign staffers for Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) have now been credibly accused of forging at least four dead voters’ signatures, and dozens of others’, on petitions to get an independent candidate on the ballot.

The signature forgery scheme was an apparent effort to split the Democratic vote in half by getting the Democratic Party’s 2016 nominee for the district, Shaun Brown, on the ballot as an independent candidate beside the party’s 2018 nominee, former Navy commander Elaine Luria.

[...]

A special prosecutor is looking into potential criminal violations.

[...]

The [Virginian-Pilot] called voters whose purported signatures had been collected by Taylor staffers, asking if the signatures were valid. The staffers together collected nearly 600 signatures. Of the 115 voters the paper reached, 59 said their — or their relatives’ — signatures were fraudulent.

  TPM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 9/6:  Judge rules Taylor's name be removed from judge's district's ballot.

Is he talking to his piles now?

And who's been polling them?



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Aha!  Found it.
h/t Kilgore Trout twitter

UPDATE:

Dick in chief

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other White House aides advocated for an official statement that gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a “hero,” according to current and former White House aides, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The original statement was drafted before McCain died Saturday, and Sanders and others edited a final version this weekend that was ready for the president, the aides said.

But Trump told aides he wanted to post a brief tweet instead, and the statement praising McCain’s life was not released.

[...]

White House aides instead posted statements from officials other than the president praising McCain. By Sunday afternoon, the vice president, secretary of state, homeland security secretary, defense secretary, national security adviser, White House press secretary, counselor to the president, education secretary, interior secretary and others had posted statements lauding the former 2008 Republican presidential nominee. Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush issued glowing eulogies as well.

Other world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron, also released similar statements.

[...]

As tributes poured in, the president who said McCain was “not a war hero” spent much of Sunday at his golf course in Virginia and did not utter a word publicly. He returned to the White House in the afternoon, where the flags were lowered to half-staff for the deceased senator.

His Twitter feed was silent Sunday other than reprising screeds against the investigation into Russian election interference and boasting about a buoyant economy. “Fantastic numbers on consumer spending released on Friday!” Trump posted en route to the Virginia course Sunday morning. “Stock Market hits all time high!” Later Sunday, he accused the news media of giving Obama credit for his accomplishments, posting an excerpt of a weeks-old piece from the Washington Times.

[...]

The Arizona senator died at a time he saw as dark in the country’s history, said John Weaver, a former aide and a longtime friend.

[...]

“If we heard something today or tomorrow from Trump, we know it’d mean less than a degree from Trump University.”

  WaPo

UPDATE 8/27:

UPDATE 8/28:

Shamed into lowering the flag again.  He already made his point.

Another day...

...another mass shooting.

Neil Simon died today

Damned Hollywood liberal dying to rob John McCain of ALL the dead man attention.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trying to get through a Sunday of accolades for John McCain

Tweeting and retweeting self-priasing bullshit.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I'll chip in

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No penalty?

What's the point in a deadline?

A war hawk dies

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died on Saturday at age 81, will lie in state in the Capital Rotunda in Washington, D.C., and receive a full dress funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral.

[...]

McCain, who died following a battle with brain cancer, will also lie in state at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, a Republican official who is involved with planning told the newspaper. He will then be buried in Annapolis, Maryland.

[...]

Those close to McCain have informed the White House that they plan to have Vice President Pence attend the senator's funeral — but not President Trump.

  The Hill

Unnamed White House officials told The Washington Post that the president “does not want to comment on McCain before he dies,” following an announcement by McCain’s family that the longtime senator will no longer be seeking treatment for his brain cancer.

The White House did not issue a statement on the senator following the family’s announcement Friday, even as top Democratic and Republican figures spoke out in support.

Trump has long had a combative relationship with McCain, who is a frequent and harsh critic of the administration.

[...]

Shortly after announcing his presidential campaign, Trump mocked McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War, saying “he’s not a war hero” and that he “[likes] people who weren’t captured.”

The Post reported Saturday that Trump told people that he does not regret the comment.

[...]

The president has continued to take jabs at McCain for voting against a proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this month, he avoided saying McCain’s name while signing a defense bill named after him, and then again brought up the ObamaCare repeal vote just hours later.

  The Hill

Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush have been asked to give eulogies at Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) funeral, The New York Times reported Saturday night.

Two Republicans familiar with the funeral arrangements told the Times that, under initial plans, Vice President Pence has also been asked to attend, though President Trump has not.

  The Hill

Arizona GOP Senate candidate Kelli Ward suggested Saturday that the Friday statement issued by Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) family about ending medical treatment for brain cancer was intended to hurt her campaign.

McCain died Saturday hours after she made the suggestion on Facebook, The Arizona Republic reported.

"I think they wanted to have a particular narrative that they hope is negative to me,” Ward wrote.

[...]

Ward’s staffer wondered if the statement released by the senator’s family was “just a coincidence” or “if it was a plan to take media attention off her campaign?”

Are the narcissists coming out of the woodwork to go into politics now? He probably timed his death to bring out Republicans for the 2018 midterms.

Ward posted a follow-up comment on Facebook that appeared to blame the media.

"The media loves a narrative. I’ve said again and again to pray for Senator McCain & his family,” Ward commented. “These decisions are terrible to have to make. I feel compassion for him and his family as they go through this. It’s not the McCains creating a narrative - it’s the media making something out of nothing. The media, the left, and the Establishment have the agenda.

Yes, it's the media's fault.

There has been speculation Ducey would appoint McCain’s wife, Cindy, to his seat, according to Politico.

  The Hill

Please don't. I know that's sometimes done, but really, WTF?

Appointing a replacement in a timely manner could have a significant impact on one of the Senate’s most important upcoming votes: the confirmation of President Trump's Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh.

After McCain’s death, Republicans now have a 50-49 majority in the Senate, meaning one GOP defection could sink Kavanaugh's nomination if every Democrat votes no.

A replacement would shift the majority to 51-49, allowing Republicans to lose one GOP vote and have Vice President Pence cast the tie-breaking vote, which would likely go in Kavanaugh's favor.