Archives for July 2018

Day 556 Sunday July 29, 2018 1,022 Days to Go

Putting together some sporadic pieces today.

There was a mime going around a few days ago that purported to be one of Trump’s professors at Wharton. The man said Trump was one of the dumbest students he ever had. I think dumb is different than stupid. Stupid suggests a physical inability to learn and understand, while dumb may also suggest that one has no interest in learning – even if one has the capacity, a certain incuriousness, call it a laziness.
I recently saw a video clip of a professor of linguistics being interviewed about Trump’s manner of speaking. What he said was Trump only has an informal way of speaking, which is on the level of an adolescent, someone who never developed the skill and polish of formal speech. He and the interviewer mentioned a number of items that fit into this pattern. The use of “tags” at the end of a sentence, such as” “Believe me,” which are oral place holders like “you know.” Also the use of visual or audio tells, such as, “People don’t know,” or “A lot of people don’t know.” This translates to “I just learned.” However, it couches the speech so as to project the alpha-male one-step ahead mentality. The linguist also said Trump is dismissive and belittling rather than building and decorating. He is numb to the artful. He talks in this way most likely because he has little to say, because he has few insights, yet he keeps talking and he needs words and phrases to fill the time. This is in line with the definition of a narcissist who talks all the time.
Trump himself has admitted that he never studied in school because he thought he didn’t have to because “he had a good brain.” Talk about dismissive!
So what can we conclude from this? The man is without artifice. He is uneducated and likes it that way.
The linguist also brought up the point that since the 60s we have been going through a process of being more informal. However, there’s a time he said to “put on your Sunday best speech,” like when you’re president of the United States.

This tracks back to something I have mentioned many times, the idea of good manners and etiquette. Many people turn their noses up at etiquette. “We don’t need all that fancy stuff,” is the usual reasoning. Likewise with manners the argument is a little cruder, especially around table manners, “what difference does it make, the food all ends up in the same place.” Both arguments miss the point. Etiquette allows one to have a blueprint for what to do in a given situation (“Where do I sit at a wedding if I’m a guest of the bride?”) Manners make life more pleasant. (No one wants to see little Johnny swirling his food around in his mouth or being elbowed by him because he fist grabbed the fork, lowers his head toward the plate and shovels the food in.) However, in the 60s we, my generation, rebelled. We rebelled against the war, the establishment, and all the norms our parents had tried to teach us. If you grew up in the sixties your parents grew up in World War II and the Depression. Their grandparents grew up in the Victorian Age. We rebelled against much of the Victorian norms.
But can that go too far?
Absolutely. We see it in Trump. We see it in ourselves and our children.
We need a return to civility, to good manners, to the idea of fair play. All that has been washed away. It needs to come back. If for no other reason than it makes our world a more pleasant place.
I’m tired of the bullies, the churlish, the greedy, the uninformed, the caustic, the mean.
It’s time for them to go.

1,022 Days to go

PS Edvard Munch “Madonna”

Day 555 Saturday July 28, 2018 1,023 Days to Go

Did Trump lie?

Legal commentators when asked what the purpose of having this stuff about Michael Cohen’s assertions that Trump knew about the Trump Jr meeting that was going to take place with Russians before the meeting took place and then that Trump got filled in about it by his son have commented that it’s weird to be having this play out in the media. It seems to not serve either Trump or Cohen. The only explanation that any of them gave that makes a bit of sense is that sometimes a person who is being tried in the court of public opinion lashes out and speaks their mind. This could be what both Trump and Cohen are doing.
Did Trump lie about the meeting with the Russians that his son had? Yes? He’s already shown that he’s lied about it. The question now is – is he lying more than before? Some say they don’t know. Let me clear that up for you. Yes, he lied more.
In a funny (sad) aside Rudy Giuliani has said Cohen is a liar and has always been a liar. Trump has said similar things. What makes this funny is that the news shows run videos from as recently as last April where both of those men are saying what a fine upstanding person Michael Cohen is. We can debate whether Cohen lied, but clearly both Giuliani and Trump are lying because you can’t say someone is both upstanding and a liar. Is Cohen lying? He has lied, but is he about the Trump Tower meeting and Don Sr. knowing about it? No.
Here’s why. First, as I’ve said before, it is well known that Trump Sr. has his hands on everything going on in Trump Tower and his businesses.
Second here is an interesting timeline of events:
Early 2016 – Cohen goes to Prague, secretly, to pay off the Russian hackers. (This has not been confirmed, but I suspect will be sometime in the not too distant future.)
June 3, 2016 Trump Jr gets email from Goldstone (Russian intermediary) inquiring if the Trump campaign wants dirt on Hillary. Jr responds with “I love it.”
June 6, 2016 Trump Sr gives speech saying early next week he’ll be giving a speech about dirt on Hillary (and people will be very surprised. This by the way is the same line he used on sending people to Hawaii to dig up Obama’s birth certificate. He claimed people were going to be “very surprised by what they are finding.” Never heard more on what the people in Hawaii found.) Trump never gives speech. (What happened?)
June 8, 2016 DCLeaks is set up by Russian GRU to dump Hillary’s emails (when it is revealed it’s the Russians they switch to the cover of Guccifer 2.0, whom Roger Stone contacts.)
June 9, 2016 The Trump Tower meeting.
July 13, 2016 Trump says in a speech “Russia if you’re listening I hope you can find the 30,000 missing emails…”
July 13, 2016 GRU starts spearfishing attempts on over 300 Democratic operatives.

I’m an evidence based kind of guy.
There can be coincidence. There can be smoke and no fire. There can be two things that appear to be connected and aren’t.
But here we have a series of events that if they aren’t connected it’s really hard to explain.
The most likely scenario is that Trump Sr thought Jr was going to get dirt on Hillary on June 9th. He didn’t. So Trump Sr asked the Russians again on July 13th.

Anyone got a better explanation?

1,023 Days to Go

PS Working hard.

Day 554 Friday July 27, 2018 1,024 Days to Go

This morning I saw Rudy Giuliani talking about Michael Cohen. He asked, “Which lie do you want to believe? The first one? The second one? The third one?” Be careful what you wish for Mr. Mayor.
I instead would like to flip the question and ask which truth do you want to believe? One or all of them?

Let’s start with hacking, and more than likely Russian hacking. There have been reports recently that it is more than likely that someone got into the voting machines in 2016 and changed votes. Why do I say this? There is a new report in the news fringe (typically this is where such things of this type are first reported than a few months later CNN or MSNBC or some other entity has a big BREAKING NEWS headline of this sort of thing.) The new report says there was a hack-a-thon and one of the hacks was a test to see if anyone could get into the voting machines used in U.S. elections. Not only did they get in, they got into everyone they tried. In some cases the states (Georgia was singled out as an example) the state keeps no paper record, therefore no audit is possible. Also, one particular kind of voting machine has an easily hackable password and it is the same for every one of their voting machines. One of the hackers was a teenager and he used Windows, a mouse, and a Word file to get into the voting machines. So I ask you, “What’s the possibility that a sophisticated Russian military operation could get into voting machines in the U.S. and do what they wanted?” Let’s put a number on it. Is it 0%, 10%, 99%, or 100%?
It turns out that our intelligence community knew about certain states being hacked and didn’t tell them until months after the election. To which I say WTF?
Last week there was evidence that hackers had gotten into computers that control our electric grid. Claire McCasgill has reported that Russian hackers tried to get into her computers this week. If they are trying to get into her computers, who else are they trying to hack into?

Let’s move onto Truth #2 – corruption. A Federal judge in Maryland has ruled on emoluments, specifically what they are, and surprise surprise, it’s what the dictionary defines them to mean. What does this mean for Donald Trump and his businesses? Well, it means that a lot of stuff falls under that category. In other words he’s in violation of the Constitution. Does it matter? Well, to be fair the right was jumping up and down about emoluments when Hillary Clinton had her picture taken with a donor to the Clinton Foundation and she was Secretary of State. So what if the guy was a head of state? Emoluments! The Constitution. Lock her up, etc. (Let’s not forget the shameful display of the Attorney General going along with the chant of Lock Her Up, by repeating it, earlier this week.)
So what’s Congress going to do? We’ll talk about that below, there’s more to get to here.

Michael Cohen – oh boy. Well, it turns out there aren’t a dozen tapes, there are hundreds. To corroborate the fact that Trump and Cohen discussed on the one tape released the payment method to the Playboy Bunny the Southern District prosecutors are pulling in Trump’s CFO. A man who has been with Trump since the 80s, and was with Trump’s father. He is reputed to know where all the money is and where it went. One commentator said today that when the cover is pulled back on Trump’s business dealings what we will find is decades of sleazy and possibly corrupt business practices.
Michael Cohen says he can link Trump Sr. to the infamous meeting that Trump Jr and son-in-law Jared and then Campaign Manager Manafort had with Russians in Trump Tower and that Sr. knew about it and approved of it before it happened. Why and how? Well, Michael says nothing went on in Trump Tower without Don Sr. knowing about it. Add to that that Trump Jr. reportedly runs and tells his dad everything. Sr. says he knew nothing about it because it was so unimportant that no one would bother telling him. Trump Jr. says that there’s nothing to tell because nothing came of it. That he forgot about it. When I heard that clip being replayed today it reminded me of the reporter who covered a wedding of a prominent family and didn’t file a report. When his editor asked him why he didn’t file a report the guy said the groom didn’t show up so there was nothing to report.

Truth #3 – What’s Congress doing? They’ve been busy. Yes sir. They filed impeachment papers against Rod Rosenstein. What happened to the concern about emoluments? What about presidential overreach? etc. etc. etc. All gone.
What about the Russians hacking our electric system, our election systems? No concern whatsoever.
What about the president being in league with or a pawn of the Russians? So what?

Meanwhile the Parkland kids are going around the country to districts that are represented by as they say “Sellouts to the NRA” and working to get more young people registered to vote.

Will it make a difference? I hope so. But it won’t if the Russians are hacking our voting machines and switching votes.

Hopefully, folks are getting pissed off and are willing to pay attention and stop trusting that “he has a plan.”
It’s way past time to get rid of this guy and his band of imbeciles, grifters, Russian agents, and crooks.

In other news one of Betsy DeVos’ family yachts was set adrift. It’s one of ten they own. It’s worth $40M. Damage was estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars. Thank god her family got that big tax break so they can repair that sucker.

1,024 Days to Go

PS Me with author Nancy MacLean who wrote Democracy in Chains that outlines the plan of the Koch brothers and others on the far right to enslave our democracy.