Brett Kavanaugh is an incredibly nice guy. That's the point. The entire point of Brett Kavanaugh is that he is extraordinarily generous to the people around him. It's all the people who aren't around him that are cut out of the bargain.
This week's featured posts are "Trump doesn't want skilled immigrants either", and "What kind of justice would Brett Kavanaugh be?".
This week everybody was talking about Brett Kavanaugh
who I discussed in one of the featured posts.
and the new indictment from the Mueller investigation
In contradiction to the pleading by Trump partisans that Mueller wrap things up quickly, his investigation continues to produce results at a consistent pace. Friday, Mueller's D.C. grand jury issued an indictment against 12 members of Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The indictment describes in some detail exactly how and when these specific Russians hacked into computers at the DNC, the DCCC, and the Clinton campaign, and then distributed information they stole. The account flies in the face of President Trump's repeated denials that anyone actually knows who did the hacking, as when he suggested the hack might be due to "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."
It was Russians, and not just any old Russians. It was the Russian military. This was information warfare.
The Trump administration is still resisting that message. Even after the indictments came out, with a full recitation of how Russian military intelligence did what they did, White House spokesperson Lindsay Walters referred to "the alleged hacking". And although the indictments had not yet been released, Trump had already been briefed on them when he said this Friday at a press conference in the UK:
I think we are being hurt very badly by the, I would call it the witch hunt, I would call it the rigged witch hunt. I think that really hurts our country and really hurts our relationship with Russia. I think we would have a chance to have a very good relationship with Russia and a very good relationship with President Putin.
He also blamed the Democrats for getting hacked and blamed Obama. He has still never blamed Putin.
The stories you heard about the 12 Russians yesterday took place during the Obama Administration, not the Trump Administration. Why didn’t they do something about it, especially when it was reported that President Obama was informed by the FBI in September, before the Election?
(Vice President Biden has claimed that Obama tried to get leaders of both parties to make a strong bipartisan statement before the election, but Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused, leaving Obama with the choice between soft-pedaling the Russian interference and appearing to be trying to sway the election himself by creating a fake partisan issue.)
The official White House response to the indictments was not to be outraged at Russia or to stand up for the United States, but to defend itself:
Today’s charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result. This is consistent with what we have been saying all along.
Imagine, for example, President Bush taking a similar stand after 9-11: worrying mainly about whether his administration could be blamed for something and regretting the impact of the incident on his relationship with Osama bin Laden.
Russia, of course, is not going to extradict these people -- and President Trump isn't going to demand they do so -- so they will never stand trial. So the main impact of the indictment is to get a collection of facts into the public record. Unlike, say, the Starr investigation of President Clinton or the many Republican congressional investigations of Benghazi or Hillary Clinton's emails, Mueller's team doesn't leak. So far, indictments have been its primary avenue for communicating with the public.
No Americans were subjects of this indictment, but the text contained hints that Americans were involved and may possibly be indicted later. People are speculating, but I'm content to wait and see.
There is a tantalizing coincidence in the indictment. On July 27, 2016, Trump said in the press conference:
Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing.
It's possible that somebody in Russia responded to that suggestion. The indictment says:
The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.
For a long time now I've been thinking of Trump's election as a perfect storm of things going wrong: Russian meddling, Comey's announcements, Hillary running a bad campaign, and so on. But what if at least two of those factors are connected?
On her Empty Wheel blog, Marcy Wheeler has been calling attention to one key detail in the indictment:
I have been saying forever that the easiest way to steal the election would be to steal Hillary’s analytics. The indictment reveals that,
In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test applications related to the DNC’s analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators gathered data by creating backups, or “snapshots,” of the DNC’s cloud-based systems using the cloud provider’s own technology.
The indictment is silent about what happened to this stolen analytics data.
She retweeted Jonathon Rubin's explanation of what could be done with that data:
What they could have done is used her analytics to figure out how they could target ads to fuck with turnout in a way where her model wouldn’t detect what was happening—an adversarial example attack in machine learning parlance. To expand a bit: you could run scenarios against her data to find situations where it would return the same results for different input. Brute-force detect edge cases where her model would fail. Like where to run ads in Wisconsin so that her model wouldn’t see support softening.
and Trump in Europe
Today he's in Helsinki reporting in to his GRU handler meeting with Russian President Putin. The administration has not explained the purpose of this meeting, though many speculate it has something to do with pulling US troops out of Syria and abandoning that country to the Putin-supported Assad regime.
For Putin, the purpose is obvious, even if he gets no freebies from Trump
All [Putin] really needs to make his meeting with Mr. Trump a success is for it to take place without any major friction — providing a symbolic end to Western efforts to isolate Russia over its actions against Ukraine in 2014, its meddling in the United States election in 2016 and other examples of what the United States Treasury Department has described as Russia’s “malign activity” around the world.
“If Trump says, ‘Let bygones be bygones because we have a world to run,’ that is essentially what Moscow needs from this,” said Vladimir Frolov, an independent foreign policy analyst in Moscow.
Before meeting Putin, Trump spent the NATO meetings in Brussels attacking our allies. Germany, he claimed is "totally controlled by Russia" because it gets much of its energy from Russia. He demanded that the other NATO leaders commit to increasing their defense spending faster than previously agreed to. CBS News reports Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group saying:
"Trump was very frustrated; he wasn't getting commitments from other leaders to spend more. Many of them said, 'Well, we have to ask our parliaments. We have a process; we can't just tell you we're going to spend more, we have a legal process.' Trump turns around to the Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, and says, 'Except for Erdogan over here. He does things the right way,' and then actually fist-bumps the Turkish president."
"The right way", of course, is to be a dictator.
Andrew Sullivan suspects that Trump may have unintentionally widened the sliver of a chance that Britain might undo Brexit. His basic thesis is that Trump has emboldened the "hard Brexit" crowd, which means that there may no longer be a Parliamentary majority behind Prime Minister May's "soft Brexit" proposal -- or any other Brexit proposal. And that means that when time runs out in nine months, Britain faces a crash exit instead: Connections with the EU end abruptly with no negotiated agreement to replace them.
Among the immediate doomsday possibilities the government itself is worried about in a crash exit are the effective, immediate collapse of the port of Dover — grinding trade to a halt — and the dispatch of thousands of electricity generators on barges in the Irish Sea to keep Northern Ireland’s lights on, because the province’s ability to share a single electricity market with the whole island of Ireland would end with an E.U. exit. Northern Ireland itself could explode in sectarian violence again if a hard border is erected between north and south, as it would have to be. Scotland would move toward independence. Critical shortages of food, fuel, and medicine would open up within two weeks, by the government’s own estimation. The military would have to be deployed to ensure transportation of essentials. Stocks and the pound would plummet. A steep recession at home, and maybe also abroad, could follow. It would be one of the most harmful things a democratic country ever did to itself, or to its neighbors.
With that disaster staring them in the face, Britain might decide to redo the referendum.
For a break over the weekend -- destroying the western alliance is hard work, after all -- Trump went to his golf resort in Scotland, turning the trip into what Norman Eisen at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calls "an infomercial for his properties" -- sponsored by the American taxpayer. Taxpayer money also goes directly into his pocket, as Secret Service agents and other members of his entourage are obliged to rent rooms from him.
Here we see the Angry Baby Trump balloon flying over the Winston Churchill statue in London's Parliament Square. Trump said he felt "unwelcome" and avoided London. If we fly some balloons in the US, do you think maybe he'll decide not to come back?
and families still separated
In every way possible, the Trump administration has been dragging its feet to delay giving back the children it stole. A federal judge is pushing them, but they are moving as slowly as they can.
Imagine how this would look if it were happening to you: You get arrested for some misdemeanor offense, like speeding or disturbing the peace or shoplifting some small item. (Crossing the border without a visa is a misdemeanor.) You might not even be guilty. (Some of the separated families did not try to sneak across, but presented themselves at an entry port and requested asylum. This is not illegal. Others tried to request asylum legally, but were left waiting on the border for days, until they gave up and crossed the border anyway.) But government has a new policy of zero tolerance for whatever it is you are supposed to have done, so you are imprisoned and denied bail.
Because you can't take care of your kids while you're in jail, the government takes custody of them and doesn't tell you where they are. When a court orders the government to give your kids back to you, the government demands that you prove you are really your kids' parent, and says that it can't give the kids back until it completes an investigation into your fitness as a parent. When the President is asked about your situation, he does not respond directly, but says only that people shouldn't do whatever it is you are supposed to have done, even if you didn't do it.
The people responsible for this, from Trump on down, are monsters. I can't think of any other way to describe them. Any moral person would resign rather than carry out these orders.
Jesuit Priest James Martin takes a Christian look at refugees and immigrants.
and Peter Strzok
The House Judiciary and Oversight Committees held a joint session Thursday in which the Republican majority presented the villain of their Russia-Witch-Hunt fantasy: FBI counter-intelligence agent Peter Strzok.
Hours and hours of this hearing were shown on TV. I can't guess how it played for the country as a whole. Switching back and forth between Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity Thursday night was like looking at two different worlds. Hannity showed long stretches of Republican congressman making speeches against Strzok, and clipped off his answers. Rachel focused on Strzok's answers, particularly the ones that made the questioners look ridiculous.
The one piece of useful information I gleaned from this hearing was Strzok's explanation for his infamous "No he won't. We'll stop it" text message to his paramour Lisa Page, who had been worried about Trump becoming president. His explanation is the one I had guessed: Strzok says the "we" in the text is the American people, not the FBI in general or some Strzok/Page deep-state cabal within the FBI. He added some context.
In terms of the texts that 'we will stop it,' you need to understand that was written late at night, off-the-cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero, and my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be President of the United States
In general, the debate over Strzok is similar to the one over Christopher Steele, author of the famous Steele dossier. In each case, someone with a long history in counter-intelligence against the Russians expressed alarm about the prospect of a Trump presidency and played a role in starting the Trump/Russia investigation. Two radically different explanatory scenarios have been put forward, one by Trump loyalists and the other by Strzok and Steele themselves.
- Trump scenario. Steele and Strzok were hostile to Trump for some mysterious reason, and that hostility led them to try to derail his candidacy by dreaming up a Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. If their invention of the conspiracy theory were ever exposed, it would wreck the credibility each had spent an entire career building, but that risk was worth it in order to satisfy their irrational hunger to destroy Donald Trump. For some other mysterious reason, though, each failed to publicize the invented conspiracy before the election, when it might have prevented Trump's victory. Neither has any current role in the Mueller investigation, which pursues Trump for some third mysterious reason.
- Strzok/Steele scenario. Two experts on Russian intelligence activities saw very real signs of Russian influence on the Trump campaign and of a Russian effort to get Trump elected. Each was freaked out by the possibility that an American president might take office while indebted to Russia or even under Russian control. In their professional roles, they began pushing for a broader investigation, while personally they hoped Trump would lose the election.
To me it's obvious that the second scenario fits the known facts and makes sense, while the first one doesn't.
But there's a more important point: None of it matters. Sooner or later, Bob Mueller will issue a report. That report will either find wrongdoing or it won't. The evidence it provides will either prove those points or not. At that point, how the investigation started will be irrelevant.
and Jim Jordan
So far Paul Ryan and his fellow Republicans are standing by Jim Jordan, in spite of the allegations against him.
About half a dozen former Ohio State wrestlers say Jordan had to have known young men were complaining about being fondled by the team doctor in the 1990s, when Jordan was an assistant coach.
His defenses amount to (1) the wrestlers are lying, and (2) it's a deep state conspiracy.
and you also might be interested in ...
Remember the Bundy militia yahoos who took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon? They were protesting the five-year sentences in the Hammond arson case, in which Dwight and Steven Hammond (father and son) set fires on federal land, apparently to cover up evidence of illegal deer hunting.
Well, Trump pardoned the Hammonds Tuesday. This administration has zero tolerance for refugees seeking asylum, and justifies that stance by invoking crime and terrorism. But people who have connections to actual terrorists, terrorists who attacked a federal government facility and held it by force of arms, they're OK.
NYT article on student debt: Debt per student is leveling off, but probably because students can't borrow any more. Parental debt is still growing, and there's evidence that students are scaling back their educational ambitions because of cost.
The War on Poverty is over and we won! At least that's what a new report from Trump's Council of Economic Advisors says.
Between 1961 and 2016, consumption-based poverty fell from 30 percent to 3 percent, amounting to a 90 percent decline (and it fell by 77 percent since 1980). This likely even understates the reduction in material hardship as it omits the consumption-value of increased public expenditure on healthcare and education for the poor. Based on historical standards of material wellbeing and the terms of engagement, our War on Poverty is largely over and a success
The key phrase here is consumption-based poverty. Typically we measure poverty by income, but even if your income crashes (because, say, you lost your job and can't find another one), your spending may stay at a non-poverty level for a while if you have savings, material goods you can sell, relatives willing to subsidize you, or a credit card that isn't maxed out yet.
Of course, there are still people who need Food Stamps, Medicaid, and various other government programs, but that's because welfare makes them lazy.
Today, many non-disabled working-age adults do not regularly work, particularly those living in low-income households. Such non-working adults may miss important pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits for themselves and their households, and can become reliant on welfare programs.
You might wonder how many of these unemployed adults are lying on the couch smoking dope and how many are chasing toddlers, but the report-writers aren't curious about stuff like that. And they have a solution: Put work requirements on all the assistance programs that don't already have them, like Food Stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid.
A question you always have to ask about plans like this is: "What happens the next time the economy crashes?" as it always does eventually. At precisely the moment when lots of people lose their incomes and jobs are scarce, the government says we can't help you unless you are working. Then you may become homeless and undernourished while you go off your meds, none of which is going to help you land one of those scarce jobs.
and let's close with some vicarious satisfaction
James Veitch responds to a common email scam, and keeps the exchange going until the scammers can't take it any more.
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