...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
AOC taking on the DCCC
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE: Apparently, we can. 7:20pm eastern:
Why make sense when you can stir up a shitstorm?
The United States is cutting off aid to the "Northern Triangle," otherwise known as the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the State Department told CNN Saturday, one day after President Donald Trump said they had "set up" migrant caravans for entry into the United States.
CNN
Or, via Fox:
I guess she feels like a fool now. (She is one.)
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Smart people at Fox
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
Fox News never should have happened.
Judge blocks Trump EO on drilling
"Exceeds the presiden'ts authority": words we need to hear more often.A federal judge on Friday ruled President Trump’s executive order seeking to revoke an Obama-era ban on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans was unlawful.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason said in a ruling that the Obama administration’s leasing withdrawals of about 120 million acres of the waters "will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress."
Gleason wrote that Trump’s 2017 order revoking the drilling ban "is unlawful, as it exceeded the president’s authority."
The Hill
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Sears screws its retirees so its CEOs can have more
In February, the roughly 40,000 people still employed at Sears learned they continue to have jobs, at least for awhile, after a bankruptcy judge approved Eddie Lampert's bid to buy what remains of the retailer out of bankruptcy. But this month, an undisclosed number of Sears' 90,000 retirees learned the retailer had ended their life insurance benefits.
[...]
The notices were sent to "people in their 80s that had had [life insurance coverage for] a long time," said John Freeman, who retired from the retailer in 2002 and leads the retirees' association chapter in upstate New York. Sears had already shaved employee benefits during its decades of financial turmoil, including major cuts to life insurance coverage in the late 1990s. But it still covered life insurance polices worth at least $5,000 for eligible retirees, with most policies ranging from $8,000 to $10,000.
CBS
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.The move comes months after a U.S. bankruptcy court approved Sears's request to pay as much as $25.3 million in bonuses to the company’s top executives and high-ranking employees in December.
The Hill
It's Sunday
LOL. It's like a game. Are you faster than the Pope?
Oooooooookaaaay? Has he done this before? Surely this isn't the first time people have tried to kiss the ring.Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said that Francis was concerned about hygiene when, after greeting dozens of people in a lengthy receiving line, he began pulling his hand away to discourage people from kissing his ring.
[...]
“The Holy Father told me that the motivation was very simple: hygiene,” Gisotti told reporters. “He wants to avoid the risk of contagion for the people, not for him.”
Guardian
Oooooookaaaay.Gisotti said Francis was more than happy to receive the ring-kiss in small groups, where the spread of germs would be more contained, as he did on Wednesday when a handful of people lined up at the end of his general audience to greet him.
[...]
Francis is known for gleefully embracing babies given to him to kiss, and sipping from mate gourds offered to him by strangers when he’s out and about on his popemobile.
On Wednesday the pope allowed nuns and priests to kiss his papal ring during his weekly audience in St Peter’s Square.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
The Bezos affair
The Saudis had access to Jeff Bezos' phone.In January, the National Enquirer published a special edition that revealed an intimate relationship Bezos was having. He asked me to learn who provided his private texts to the Enquirer, and why. My office quickly identified the person whom the Enquirer had paid as a source: a man named Michael Sanchez, the now-estranged brother of Lauren Sanchez, whom Bezos was dating. What was unusual, very unusual, was how hard AMI people worked to publicly reveal their source’s identity. First through strong hints they gave to me, and later through direct statements, AMI practically pinned a “kick me” sign on Michael Sanchez.
“It was not the White House, it was not Saudi Arabia,” a company lawyer said on national television.
[...]
AMI has repeatedly insisted they had only one source on their Bezos story, but the [Wall Street] Journal reports that when the Enquirer began conversations with Michael Sanchez, they had “already been investigating whether Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez were having an affair.” Michael Sanchez has since confirmed to Page Six that when the Enquirer contacted him back in July, they had already “seen text exchanges” between the couple. If accurate, the WSJ and Page Six stories would mean, clearly and obviously, that the initial information came from other channels—another source or method.
[...]
Why did AMI’s people work so hard to identify a source, and insist to the New York Times and others that he was their sole source for everything?
My best answer is contained in what happened next: AMI threatened to publish embarrassing photos of Jeff Bezos unless certain conditions were met.
[...]
An eight-page contract AMI sent for me and Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.”
[...]
They also wanted me to say our investigation had concluded that their Bezos story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.” External forces? Such a strange phrase.
[...]
The contract further held that if Bezos or I were ever in our lives to “state, suggest or allude to” anything contrary to what AMI wanted said about electronic eavesdropping and hacking, then they could publish the embarrassing photos.
I’m writing this today because it’s exactly what the Enquirer scheme was intended to prevent me from doing. Their contract also contained terms that would have inhibited both me and Bezos from initiating a report to law enforcement.
[...]
When the terms for avoiding publication of personal photos were presented to Jeff Bezos, he responded immediately: “No thank you.” Within hours, he wrote an essay describing his reasons for rejecting AMI’s threatening proposal. Then he posted it all on Medium, including AMI’s actual emails and their salacious descriptions of private photos.
[...]
Next, Bezos directed me to “spend whatever is needed” to learn who may have been complicit in the scheme, and why they did it.
That investigation is now complete. As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:
Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.
The Daily Beast
Jeff Bezos, hated by Trump. Saudi's MbS, bff of Jared Kushner. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
I wonder which federal officials have the results of the investigation.
Trump's caddy will deny he said this in 3..2..1..
<He cheats at everything.“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,'” writes Rick Reilly in the new book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump” (Hachette Book Group), out Tuesday. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf … if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”
That's awesome.Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist who has played with Trump in the past, spoke to dozens of players — both amateur and professional — to recount some of the president’s worst cons on the course, starting with his declared handicap of 2.8.
In layman’s terms, the lower the handicap, the better the player. Jack Nicklaus, winner of a record 18 major golf titles and generally considered the greatest golfer in the history of the game, has a handicap of 3.4.
[...]
Shortly after he became president, Trump played with Tiger Woods, the current world No. 1 Dustin Johnson and the veteran PGA Tour pro Brad Faxon. Given the quality and profile of his companions, you might have thought Trump would have been on his best behavior. Not so.
On one hole, Trump dunked a shot into the lake, but as his opponents weren’t looking he simply dropped another ball — and then hit that into the water, too.
Jesus wept.“So he drives up and drops where he should’ve dropped the first time and hits it on the green,” recalls Faxon.
The actor Samuel L. Jackson has also witnessed the underhanded methods Trump employs, according to Reilly.
“We clearly saw him hook a ball into a lake at Trump National [Bedminster, New Jersey],” he says, “and his caddy told him he found it!”
The boxer Oscar De La Hoya and rocker Alice Cooper have also seen the same shenanigans first hand, while LPGA player Suzann Pettersen, another victim, thinks it’s all down to his caddy “since no matter how far into the woods he hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”
Or even not sweaty. What would pulling off a cap do to that weirdly sculpted mess?Even Trump’s golf courses lie. As the owner of 14 golf clubs and with his name on another five, Trump has, according to Reilly, been known to wildly exaggerate their standing in course rankings, overvalue them and even play fast and loose with their locations.
At Trump Washington at Lowes Island, there’s a Civil War monument (bearing Trump’s name, obviously) between the 14th and 15th holes, reminding golfers of how many soldiers, from North and South, died at that very spot.
It’s a nice touch, even though several Civil War historians have confirmed that no battle took place anywhere near the memorial.
[...]
In a game where etiquette is everything, Reilly reports that Trump never takes his cap off for the end-of-round handshake, nor does he remove it in the clubhouse afterward, presumably for fear of what damage a sweaty round might have done to that hairstyle.
Very good is never enough for Trump as he exhibits every time he exaggerates a number, which is every time he says a number.Quite why Trump cheats is another matter. He is, by all accounts, a very good golfer for his age (even Tiger Woods was impressed) but seems incapable of playing by the rules.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE:
“A caddy tells Reilly that Trump’s golf cart once contained a can of red spray paint, and that Trump marked trees his balls hit with a red ‘X,’” Curtis writes. “The trees were removed the next day.”
[...]
Trump, like many other people with more money than actual worth, is the sort of person who would cheat at golf. He’s also nothing more than that, and whether his greatest lies and worst crimes undo him or not, it’s the little lies—the ones he tells because he can’t handle even the small sting of truth inherent in a duffed approach shot—that show his towering smallness most clearly. Every stupid story rephrases the same obvious truth, and reveals the same essential thing. The man at the center of it, lying and hacking and zooming away in his whining little cart, is too small for a grand critique.
Deadspin
Why Russiagate has been a disservice
I get that it's important we take up the task of keeping foreign interests from influencing our elections, but Matt Taibbi (and others) is right that blaming Russia for Trump being president is dangerously missing the mark.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Forget about the gift the end of Russiagate might give Trump by allowing him to spend 2020 peeing from a great height on the national press corps. The more serious issue has to be the failure to face the reality of why he won last time, because we still haven’t done that.
In the fall of 2015, when I first started covering Trump’s campaign, a few themes popped up:
First, like any good hustler, Trump knew how to work a room. At times, he recalled a comedian trying out new material. If he felt a murmur in the crowd in one speech, he’d hit it harder the next time out.
[...]
As time went on, he made the traveling press part of his act. The standard campaign setup was perfect for him. We were like zoo animals, standing on risers with ropes around us to keep the un-credentialed masses out.
Even that small symbol of VIP-ism Trump turned to his advantage.
[...]
Trump, the billionaire, denounced us as the elitists in the room. He’d call us “bloodsuckers,” “dishonest,” and in one line that produced laughs considering who was saying it, “highly-paid.”
He also did something that I immediately recognized as brilliant (or diabolical, depending on how you look at it). He dared cameramen to turn their cameras to show the size of his crowds.
They usually wouldn’t – hey, we don’t work for the guy – which thrilled Trump, who would then say something to the effect of, “See! They’re very dishonest people.” Audiences would turn toward us, and boo and hiss, and even throw little bits of paper and other things our way. This was unpleasant, but it was hard not to see its effectiveness: he’d re-imagined the lifeless, poll-tested format of the stump speech, turning it into menacing, personal, WWE-style theater.
Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats.
[...]
On the same day he did the “Cruz is a pussy” routine, he told a story about how Jeb Bush said, (here he put on a Thurston Howell III-artistocrat voice) “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tone.” This was right after claiming Hillary Clinton said the exact same thing. In the same mock-aristocrat voice, he’d done a Hillary impersonation: “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tone.”
The message was clear: Jeb and Hillary were the same political animal, snobs and elite phonies. This dovetailed with his general pitch, which claimed most Americans were struggling because both parties were feeding from the same campaign-finance teat, pimping themselves out to huge job-exporting corporate donors. Which, let’s face it, is more than a little true.
[...]
Like a con man who can lift a wallet in the middle of a melee, Trump thrived amid the chaos. He drank in the condemnation when he denounced McCain for being “captured,” or when he doubled down on absurd claims he’d seen Muslims dancing in New Jersey after 9/11.
Most politicians come crawling to the press begging forgiveness after they say dumb things. Trump did the opposite and went on the offensive. It took a while to grasp that what he was really selling was the image of an outraged political establishment. He wanted his voters to see how much he was getting to “us.”
[...]
If Trump insulted an innocent person like Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who is disabled, his goal wasn’t to try to win a popularity contest. He was after the thing that always came next: the endless “scornful rebukes” from press and celebrities.
[...]
Trump would push right up until he caught the press having too much fun with something outrageous he’d done (the Washington Post running “Donald Trump’s ‘Schlonged’: A linguistic investigation” was an infamous example), at which point he’d declare victory and move on to the next outrage.
[...]
My first feature on candidate Trump was called “How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable.” The key section read:
[...]
It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.[...]
And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.
Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them.
His story of essentially buying the attendance of the Clintons at his wedding – no matter what you think of it – resonated powerfully with voters. He sneered at Hillary as the worst kind of aristocrat, a member of a family with title and no money. She and Bill were second-tier gentry, the kind who had to work.
[...]
Trump’s chances increased when pundits ignored polls and insisted he had no shot at the nomination. The universality of this take reeked of the same kind of single-track, orthodox official-think that later plagued the Russia story.
[...]
It isn’t just that wizards of prognostication were wrong. The bigger issue was why they were so confident. A common take was the political establishment just wouldn’t allow it.
[...]
Nate Cohn of The New York Times wrote Trump had “just about no shot of winning the nomination no matter how well he is doing in the early polls.” He prefaced this by saying it is “the party elites who traditionally decide nomination contests.”
[...]
In this case, just by saying out loud the idea that the people who mattered would never let Trump win, probably helped Trump win. It validated his talk about “elites.”
[...]
In one of the worst mistakes of my career, I ended up changing my mind about “free-falling” Trump’s chances, spending the stretch run predicting doom for Republicans. I read too many polls and ignored what I was seeing, i.e. that even the post-Access Hollywood Trump was still packing stadiums.
[...]
Right up until the networks called Florida for him on election night, few major American media figures outside of Michael Moore – who incidentally was also right about WMDs and ridiculed for it – believed a Trump win possible.
The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump’s poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.
Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation.
[...]
Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump’s troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.
Worse, the “walls are closing in” theme — two years old now — was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what they wanted to happen with what was happening. The story was always more complicated than was being represented.
[...]
There are a lot of mysteries left with this affair, and none of them will be cleared up anytime soon. We still don’t even understand the beginning of this story.
Matt Taibbi
We're in a whole new world for political campaigns
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway
UPDATE:
Yep.
In for it? Why, he's positively counting on it. He loves a trash-talk fight.
Friday, March 29, 2019
Assume if Trump said it, it's a lie
He's just counting on the people at his rallies to not to know the facts. I think it's a safe bet.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
And he thinks he might be president one day, too
But how smart am I? I was so taken by the fact that he doesn't know they give Pulitzers for fiction that I didn't notice the other error until this next tweet reply to Baby Don:
I actually snorted on that one, Kathy Young.
Counterpoint
Absolutely Jerry Nadler should have the full, unredacted report. Nadler is the chair of the Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment proceedings would begin. Nadler WILL get it. Barr is stalling. Why?
UPDATE:
UPDATE:
Devin Nunes is an ass
And probably a criminal in the Trump campaign's corruption who will never be charged with any crime.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Buttigieg criticism
Not having heard the interview, I wonder if Buttigieg may have been clearer than these tweets make it seem. But, if they're accurate and there's nothing to mitigate or clarify the statements, then yes, he should have been much more precise (which is why I have some doubts that this is really accurate - he seems careful and thoughtful).
"Coastal elitism" is a catchall stereotype as much as "Trump supporter". There are an awful lot of Trump supporters in California as well as New York. Most of California, I would say, is as conservative as any state in the middle of the country. But when we talk about the coasts, we tend to imagine New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, maybe DC. Weird that we do that.
As I've said before, Buttigieg is going to start getting a lot of criticism as his popularity grows. He'll need to be very watchful of what he says.
Of course, the interview was in San Francisco, so he could have been referring specifically to people in that community, and "coastal elitism" might not even been something he uttered.
Barr's new letter
Because, why? Barr is the head lawyer at the DOJ. The March 29 letter.The special counsel’s report on the investigation into Russia’s election interference will be made public by mid-April, Attorney General William P. Barr told lawmakers on Friday, adding that the White House would not see the document before he sent it to Congress. [Barr's] declaration on Sunday, two days after the report was delivered to him, that Mr. Trump had not illegally obstructed justice drew swift condemnation from Democrats. They accused him of stepping in where Mr. Mueller had declined to make a prosecutorial decision.
[...]
[In his second letter, written today, Barr] said the report — which covers Moscow’s campaign to sabotage the 2016 presidential race, whether any Trump associates conspired and whether the president obstructed the inquiry — was nearly 400 pages, plus supplements. He said he planned to testify on Capitol Hill in early May, shortly after the report’s release, to discuss it with lawmakers.
[...]
Mr. Barr reiterated that Mr. Trump had publicly stated that he would defer to the Justice Department, “although the president would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report,” the attorney general wrote.
“Accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review,” Mr. Barr added.However, it remains an open question whether Justice Department lawyers themselves will excise material they believe could be privileged before sending the report to Congress.
NYT
Yes, I especially like this part of the letter:
Barr knows full well that summarizing the "principal conclusions" would be interpreted by most people as tantamount to summarizing the whole thing. He intended people to think that. And that summary was no more in the public interest than would be summarizing the full report or releasing it piecemeal. Nobody said it was purported to be "exhaustive", and it was not "mischaracterizing" his letter to say it was a summary of the Mueller report. That's what he intended everyone to see it as. He's being just as disingenuous in this letter as he was in that one.
Full March 29 letter:
Absolutely Jerry Nadler should have the full, unredacted report. Nadler is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, where any impeachment proceedings would begin. By the Constitution, the House has the power to impeach, and they cannot be expected to wield that power without full disclosure of the evidence. He WILL end up getting it.
UPDATE:
UPDATE:
I think that's a pretty safe bet.
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