Trump

Day 691 Wednesday November 28, 2018     900 Days to Go

Late breaking news last night pointed out to me the very tough job Robert Mueller has and how life imitates art and vice versa. 

Back in the days of black and white TV there was a show called “The Outer Limits.” It conceptually ripped off the much better Sci-Fi show called “The Twilight Zone,” and because of that I rarely watched it. However, there was one episode that was very clever and I remember to this day. It starred Andy Devine who had the best and most outrageous kids/adult Saturday morning TV show. According to Imdb the episode was called “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby” and the teleplay was written by Rod Sterling, creator of the Twilight Zone! (No wonder it was so good.) The Imdb write up says, “A rural gas station attendant given to telling tall tales about himself is kidnapped by aliens who believe him to be one of Earth’s leading intellects.”

 Exactly right. So Andy as Somerset Frisby has been telling tall tales all his life. The aliens have been monitoring the humans and take what he says as true and therefore decide to take him back to their planet because he’s the most accomplished human they have studied. They abduct him. He’s in their space craft about to blast off when Frisby pulls out his harmonica and starts playing it. The music drives the aliens crazy. They can’t stand it and Frisby escapes. The space ship takes off and our rural hero walks back into town to be greeted by a huge birthday celebration. He says to them, “You aren’t going to believe this but …” 

They all laugh, slap him on the back, and say that story is the best one yet.

So now we have a bunch of little tidbits that seem to be related and we have a block buster piece of evidence that shows the Trump campaign was colluding. But here is Mueller’s problem, the one I think he has been working on for some time – “How do you figure out what is true and what is not when you are dealing with serial liars?”

Imagine the case with Somerset Frisby was one of a crime and you as the prosecutor had to depend on what he said to convict whomever was guilty. 

Okay, so here we are. Drum roll please. Let’s introduce the cast of characters and the parts they play, the actions they have taken, and the things they’ve said (and not said, and denied …):

Jerome Corsi – a man who makes his living by alleging that we didn’t land on the moon, that Barrack Obama was not born in this country, and the list goes on and on. He is politely referred to as a conspiracy theorist.

Roger Stone – a Republican political hack and liar who is friends with Donald Trump, the madam of a new York sex ring and scandal and, my favorite, a former rising star in the party until it was discovered he published pictures of himself advertising in a swingers magazine.

Julian Assange – Wikileaks founder, who sold out to the Russians turning over the digital keys to his kingdom to them. He’s been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years avoiding prosecution. He dumped a lot of DNC emails just before the election. It is known that he got the emails from the Russian military intelligence unit the GRU. (The most amazing thing about the dump of the emails was how bland they actually were. There was no dirt. It was all routine kind of political stuff that any political campaign might have, yet here we are still talking about them as if there was something nefarious in them.)

Paul Manafort – Campaign manager for Donald Trump; friend, business associate, and political pal of Roger Stone. Paul has run a number of slimy campaigns for the dictator of Ukraine. He has been shown to have laundered money from said dictator and others. He is also in hock to at least one Russian oligarch tied to Putin, and is currently in jail facing sentencing on a bunch of tax evasion, and false financial claims. He agreed to a plea deal with Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office.

Okay so what happened yesterday?

Robert Mueller has said Paul Manafort broke the terms of his plea deal and therefore the deal is withdrawn. The reason? Lying.

James Corsi was given a plea deal which he says he turned down. That paperwork got released to the press.

The Guardian in London reported that Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy shortly before the release of any emails. 

Furthermore, there is evidence that Corsi was asked by Stone to find out what emails Assange had. Corsi got a local London guy to make the inquiry and fed that information back to Corsi who told Stone who told Manafort who told Trump.

Naturally, everybody denies everything.

Imagine if you are Mueller and you have to figure out if the liars are telling the truth?

If this all turns out to be true then we have the first definite link between the Russians and the Trump campaign. The above chain of who told who is subject to speculation on my part as you get further down the list to Trump, but it seems hard to believe that if Manafort knew something that he didn’t tell Trump.

Why?

Well besides the logic there is also Manafort’s reputation and manner. Manafort liked to boast about his connections, about what he could do, who he knew. One person on the other day said he had a meeting with Manafort and it was the most surreal meeting he had ever had, because of this “I know a guy” stuff. The “guys” he mentioned were these dictators in Eastern Europe. The fellow reporting this said it felt like he was in a meeting with a mob boss and he couldn’t get away fast enough.

It turns out that the probable reason Manafort was booted out of the cooperating witness agreement was that he was reporting what he knew to Trump. It would explain how Giuliani knew so many little details of the Mueller investigation. So Manafort was then being a double agent: acting like a cooperating witness to Mueller, yet working for Trump with the possibility of getting a pardon.

These are not normal times. Some make the mistake of thinking that we are and that things will go the way they should or are supposed to, don’t be fooled this is an international criminal conspiracy that will test our democratic principles to their core.

900 Days to Go

Oh yeah, surprise, the racist won in Mississippi, just what we need in the Senate.

PS Great Job!  

Day 690 Tuesday November 27, 2018    901 Days to Go

Let’s get to it.

Paul Manafort has lost his plea agreement because the Special Prosecutor says he lied and continues to lie. Manafort’s lawyers say that’s not the case and both parties want to go ahead with sentencing. What? Speculation is running high that Manafort is holding out for a pardon. There is also news that Manafort met with Julian Assange in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy before the release of the Hillary emails. Shockingly, both sides deny this claim. 

The election is going on in Mississippi for the Senate seat there. Trump went down to stump for the segregationist, racist, “I want to sit in the front row of a public hanging” and “I’m sorry if my comments offended anyone”, Republican candidate seen in photos in Confederate soldier garb. Her opponent is a black man, well known in the state because of his family’s long history in the state of helping black people and creating businesses that catered to black people and gave them opportunity where none existed before. Mr. Trump was, of course, unaware of any of this. The race is a toss up, and probably leans toward the racist.

What else? The U.S. fired tear gas into Mexico. Can you imagine what would happen if they did that to us?

Trump said the people seeking asylum got violent. The pictures tell a different story.

But here is the most interesting tidbit. A woman on a morning news show asked the question, What would happen if Mueller exonerated Trump? She went on. If Trump thought himself truly innocent the only man who could exonerate him is Robert Mueller. Therefore, if he were truly innocent he would want Mueller to continue so as to exonerate him. The fact that Trump is not doing that shows he is guilty and knows it.

Jim Comey said today that Mat Whitaker “is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

GM is closing a bunch of U.S. plants and giving up on several vehicles including the Chevy Volt. Trump is pissed. Why is he pissed? He was told that the China tariffs would hurt GM and he didn’t care then. Now that GM is forced to close plants in the U.S. he wants to punish them for what they told him would happen if he went through with the China steel tariffs. 

Also, revealed:

The creator of SpongeBob SquarePants has died.

The Siberian Unicorn died due to climate change. (That happened a while ago, like several thousands of years.)

The White House is going to hold a press briefing. (Whoo – who, we get the truth from Sarah Sanders!)

Melania Trumps 2018 Christmas decorations are unveiled and are described as “a horror meme yet again.”

Some thought they were straight out of The Shining. I thought more like The Handmaid’s Tale, but then again maybe that was a meme with the white hats inserted on top of the red trees. 

Remember the good old days when the far right was yelling that Obama wore a brown suit?

Don’t you kinda wish for those times to return?

Oh yeah, Mexico, immigrants, the border and all that. Why don’t we have our ambassador to Mexico handle the situation? What? We don’t have one? Oh. Carry on.

901 Days to Go

PS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank god I’m here to document this.

 

Day 689 Monday November 26, 2018  902 Days to Go

Let’s talk Nancy Pelosi for a second.

Dave Brat loved to say, “the radical agenda of Nancy Pelosi and the limousine liberals.”

But let’s be clear, Nancy Pelosi grew up in Baltimore. 

Her name was D’Alesandro then.

Her father was a five term Congressman and Mayor of Baltimore.

Her brother was Mayor of Baltimore.

She grew up in Baltimore’s Little Italy.

The house was always full of people needing a meal, a job, a favor; it’s in her blood to help people.

She has been the most effective Speaker of the House in the modern era. She is the one who got the ACA through Congress. Health care is something the Democrats have been trying to provide for people since the end of WWII. She did it.

Aside from that here are the political items Wikipedia lists for her:

4 Political positions

4.1 China

4.2 Colombia

4.3 Cuba

4.4 North Korea

4.5 Iran

4.6 Turkey

4.7 Russia

4.8 Use of government aircraft

4.9 Abortion

4.10 Gun laws

4.11 Infrastructure

4.12 Fiscal/monetary policy

4.13 Civil liberties

4.14 Confederate monuments

4.15 Contraception

4.16 Disaster relief

4.17 Education

4.18 Environment

4.19 Health care

4.20 Immigration

4.21 Iraq War

4.22 Israel

4.23 First Gulf War

4.24 LGBT rights

4.25 Marijuana legalization

4.26 Military draft

4.27 PRISM

4.28 Syria

4.29 Waterboarding

4.30 Donald Trump

Yeah, she’s actually done something and she’s taken positions and expressed them. She is also the one that stopped the effort to impeach W after the Iraq War fiasco.

Would I like to see some new fresh faces? You bet. I hope Nancy will train them.

She is unpopular among conservatives because she is effective and stopped them from carrying out their more heinous agendas. She’s unpopular among progressives because they want her to go farther left, and she’s unpopular generally because the right wing media machine has been relentlessly attacking her with vague smears, much like they did Hillary.

This got me to thinking about civilization and myth. (Huh? What? Hang on.)

Civilizations are built on a set of ideas. Those ideas are grounded in myth. By that I mean, eventually you get to the point that you really can’t explain what or why, but you are asked to accept it. The western world is founded on various religious traditions and Greek/Roman ideas and science.

Our country is founded on that background and on the ideas of deists (ie people who believe in a creator), as well as men who wanted to avoid mistakes in forming a government they had seen in the past.

What makes a civilization go away? Here are a few reasons: force, disease, inferior technology, inability of the governing system to continue to work effectively under changing conditions, ideas that no longer work.

What erodes a civilization? The abandonment of a particular set of myths, ideals, ideas, and methods of governance.

I am not trying to say this is an exhaustive list, but it’s enough to illustrate my point about Nancy Pelosi.

Why is she unpopular?

Because there has been a constant drumbeat from the right and the left against her. Eventually, that becomes part of the story, part of the myth, and people believe – rightly or wrongly – in the statements that have repeatedly been made negatively about her.

But let me ask this, if you wanted to get something passed in the House of Representatives who would you want to head up that effort?

It comes down to that simple question. No one, and I mean no one, has been more effective in the modern era than Nancy Pelosi.

902 Days to Go

PS 

1 – Russia seized three Ukrainian boats. Trump has been silent.

2 – We used tear gas on migrants at the border, after we closed the border.

3 – Photo – Kite Cover  by Tiezo Hashimoto 

Day 687 Saturday November 24, 2018 904 Days to Go

Stacking Logs of Deceit
and
The Defective Personality of Politicians

So much has happened since I’ve been able to sit down and write I’m afraid some will slide off the edge of the table. The best I can do is to list. As I was thinking about all the items I got to ruminating about how many politicians and leaders in many walks of like seem to be lacking in some personality trait. Is this what drives them? I think in some part yes. The teaser for the show “The Good Doctor” has the lead actor asking the question, “I have autism, does that mean I can’t be a good doctor?” In another teaser he says, “I have autism, which makes it hard for me to show empathy.”
My understanding of people with autism is that they don’t understand empathy, guilt, and emotional pain at a basic gut level. They can recognize the emotional pain that others are having and conclude, “Oh, that person must be feeling emotional hurt” but they don’t experience it themselves. And so it is with Donald Trump, he doesn’t understand many basic human emotions. He has demonstrated on numerous occasions, in many different situations his lack of understanding. People say he doesn’t get it, and it’s true; he doesn’t. He is, I am convinced, incapable of understanding a range of human emotion and reaction that most of us take for granted. This leads to his not only being inappropriate, but also to his following up with a comment or comments that demonstrate no remorse (because he is incapable of it) or understanding of why he should be (remorseful, sorry for someone’s plight,, etc.) I am sure a person who studies body language could draw conclusions by his frequent pose of both arms wrapped tightly around his waist. It strikes me as child like and defensive.
Many leaders seem to be lacking in some core personality trait. They are portrayed as slightly autistic or psychopathic. There have been many books written about Hitler in regard to lacking a balanced personality, Nixon too. There are the traits associated with a sociopath or a psychopath which many leaders possess. Nixon seems to have had a chip on his shoulder having grown up poor and not gone to a big name college. It seemed he always felt inferior and needed to not only prove himself, but to guarantee at all costs the outcome he desired.
I have heard it said about Nixon that he played people much like one plays pool, watching the way one ball caroms off another. He didn’t seem to care whether what he was saying was true or not, but rather did it have the effect he was seeking?
Rachel Maddow had a show about Nixon and his run for the presidency in 1968. What she reported by and large isn’t new, the detail is. Nixon committed treason before he became President, plain and simple. The evidence is there for all to see. There is no question about that. Nixon lied about it. He lied to then President Johnson saying he knew nothing about it and that what Johnson was telling him would be terrible for the country if it were true, and it was true. In public, Nixon bashed the current administration for not ending the war in Vietnam; in private, he sent a secret emissary to tell the South Vietnamese not to come to the peace table until he was president. He was duplicitous. This was a thing Nixon seemed to have done his whole career. Hence, the moniker “Tricky Dick,” because he was.
Nixon knew, it seems to me, what he was doing and he knew the consequences and the results if any or all of his misdeeds came to light, and he went ahead anyway – fully knowledgeable. Trump is another matter. He doesn’t seem to really understand. Maybe he does, but if so, it is deeply buried. The only time he seemed to get a glimmer was when the U.N. General Assembly laughed to his face. In that moment, he had a smile that seemed to say, “okay, you caught me.”
The problem with aiding and abetting a person in doing their dirty work is that you are now unable to work for anyone else, and you become dependent on that person for your survival. They on the other hand don’t want to get caught and if it looks like they might will do everything they can to avoid you or, if need be, throw you under the bus. The examples of Nixon and Trump doing this are many.
In the case of Nixon and the treason he committed, he used a woman named Anne Chenault to deliver messages to the South Vietnamese. His message was don’t go to the negotiating table until after the ’68 presidential election. This was treason. What was Chenault hoping to get out of doing this? Probably an ambassadorship or some sort of recognizable high profile job. Nixon distanced himself from her immediately after the election. Why would he want anything to do with her? She could expose him.
Nixon did a similar thing with Agnew. Once it was clear that Nixon could not save Agnew from the FBI investigation that had Agnew dead to rights; Nixon turned on Agnew, to the point that Agnew feared Nixon would have him killed.
I wonder how the fifteen men who carried out the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi feel right now? Five are indicted in Saudi Arabia and facing death penalties. What did they do? (Aside from strangling, murdering, and dismembering a man?) They carried out the orders of the Crown Prince. Do you think the Crown Prince would have them executed if it meant they couldn’t link him to the death of that journalist?

Ah me, let’s stack logs:
Log 1: A few days ago I took a walk and listened to Chris Hayes’ podcast, “Why is This Happening?” The episode talked about the attempt by Wilbur Ross to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form. BTW Chris does a good job on his show, but if this podcast is any example of the rest of them, he is even better here.
In this podcast Hayes had on a lawyer from the ACLU who was suing Ross and the government over the inclusion of citizenship on the Census form. The back story is this. The Constitution specifies that “every person” shall be counted every ten years in the U.S. It’s a big undertaking. I know because I was tangentially involved in the 1980 Census, when I was an Account Executive for AT&T on the Department of Commerce account. The Census is under the umbrella of the Commerce Department. We had one sales rep whose only job was to make sure the communication lines and numbers would be ready and installed when the Census began. This was two years before the Census started.
Wilbur Ross, as Secretary of Commerce, wanted to add the question, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” to the form. Seems innocuous, but it’s not. Not at all, it was shown in this podcast that Ross’ purpose was to scare people from being counted, mainly immigrants and people here illegally. They don’t want to answer questions from the government. They are under the threat of deportation. They have seen what the government in their country of origin is like and they don’t want to talk with anyone from the government. Ross knows this and wants to use it to keep them from being reported so that people in rural areas that support Republicans will get more money because they will be over represented because the immigrants will be under represented. This is clear because when Census workers found that they could get better more accurate information from other sources they were turned down. Ross has lied to Congress about his intention. He said that he was doing this because the Justice Department asked for the question to help with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. He left out the little tiny detail that he asked the Justice Department to ask Census for this question. There is also the little detail that the Trump administration has not brought one case under The Voting Rights Act. Ross and his cronies skirted all the apparatus that Census has in designing the Census form, and when they were shown that they could get the data they wanted in a cheaper way that would be more accurate they refused to even have a meeting to discuss it.

Log 2: Ivanka has been using a private email server for government business. Hundreds, maybe thousands of emails are involved, just like Hillary. Her excuse? She didn’t really understand that she shouldn’t be doing that. What did Daddy say? It’s totally different than Hillary. See Hillary had a server in her house. What?

Log 3: The CIA has concluded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia ordered the murder of Jamal Khasoggi.

Log 4: Donald Trump sided with Saudi Arabia over our intelligence community’s assessment. The excuse we’ve heard before: “Could have been anybody. We don’t know.”

Log 5: Trump says he stands with Saudi Arabia in defiance of our own intelligence community assessment, because of the great amount of money they are spending to buy arms from us, and because this will create thousands of new jobs. None of this is true. The president continues to cling to false facts and half truths, despite having the best facts and information at his fingertips. Who says a 72 year old man can’t change? I do; I do.
This is not new behavior on the president’s part. He’s been doing it most of his life.

Log 6: I’ve started reading “The Apprentice” by Greg Miller, a reporter and specialist on the intelligence community. I highly recommend this book. In 2014, the Dutch secret service CIA type organization had penetrated the Russian hacker building’s computers. They had access to the cameras that were at the doors. By looking at the pictures that were taken of people entering the building they were able to link the names of the people working in the building with the faces. They did this 2014 and knew that the Russians were hacking election systems. They passed the information on to NSA, which passed it on to the FBI. The FBI warned the Democratic Committee that they had been hacked, but it tool eight months for the FBI to get past the front desk of the DNC. It had been a low level matter and the DNC folks had not seen any evidence of hacking and thought it was a hoax caller.
I repeat. The Dutch knew we were being hacked in 2014. It took over two years before anything was done.

Log 7: Trump went to California to see the devastation by the wildfires out there, and once again displayed a complete lack of empathy or knowledge. He topped it off by man-splaining what California had done wrong in regard to preparing to prevent the fire. According to Trump, they should have raked the forest floor. He said he heard this from the President of Finland. The Finnish chief said, “It wasn’t me.” This leaves a few questions like what would you do with the debris you raked up from the 76 million acres of forest? It also leaves open the question of “how would raking the forest help when the damage wasn’t done in the forest?”
Ryan Zinke; our give away Federal lands to oil, gas, and timber interests; Interior Secretary said the problem was environmentalists won’t cut down a tree. Okay Ryan, show us which tree.
This kind of “blame the victim” is standard in the Trump playbook and Mr. Zinke is learning well from the master.
I looked at the pictures of Gavin Newsome and Jerry Brown standing near Trump as Trump expounded. I had to wonder what was going through Jerry Brown’s head as he listened to Trump say such stupid, foolish, and insensitive things.

Log 8: More details are emerging about Mat Whitaker. Turns out he got paid $1.2 Million from FACT. The organization set up to give Matty-Boy something to put under his name while spouting off on Fox News. We don’t know who’s behind this group because the contributions are secret. Mat also got a ton of money from the invention scam business and from some other secret donors.
But the thing that got me most about Mat was this little tidbit. He was a prosecutor in Iowa. He had it out for drug offenders, 83% of the time asking for the most extreme penalties possible. These were over and above the maximum penalty in the sentencing guidelines. He was even rebuked by his peers and judges. In one case he gave a woman, a mother of five, who was caught on a drug offense for the third time, this choice – goto trial and risk life in prison or accept the deal of 21 to 27 years in jail. She took the deal and after eleven years Obama commuted her sentence. For this I say, and I said it involuntarily as soon as I heard the report, “Mat Whitaker is a worthless piece of shit.”

Log 9: Speaking of Mat Whitaker, there’s a novel twist to any case he touches. The thinking goes like this, “Because Mat Whitaker has not been confirmed by the Senate for any principal job, he can not serve in a principal job, as defined in the Constitution, because he is serving in that capacity, anything he does is invalid.” So if he can’t end the Mueller investigation, he could rub his hands all over it, and thus open the door for the whole business to be thrown out.

Log 10: It appears the Dems will have won forty seats in the House of Representatives. The largest win since Watergate.

Log 11: In Mississippi there is a run-off election for Senator. The white woman Republican said she’d like to sit in the front row for a public hanging. The meaning and intent are perfectly clear to any black person living in the south. She says she’s sorry if her words offended anyone. What? Many say she’s not sorry at all. She was sending a deliberate message to her base. She leads in the polls.

Log 12: Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments wrote an article that showed that despite thoughts to the contrary, according to the data from the elections – Republicans are the party of the poor, and Democrats are the party of the rich. He points to the data that the poorest states are Republican, and the richest are Democratic. I keep looking at the issue of why this happens, mainly on the poor side. What is it that motivates someone to vote for people who by thought, and deed are out to screw you over?

Log 13: There has been some cost estimates of the ripping kids out of the arms of their parents and of the sending of troops to our southern border. I think the figure for the jailing of kids is at a cost of $150M to the end of the year, and the troops was $200M. For what? For political theater.

Log 14: The wildfires in California are the worst in the state’s history. The cause is climate change (or not raking the forest, and not cutting down a tree because you’re an environmentalist). Rain is coming and now mud slides are feared.

Log 15: Exxon knew about the dangers of climate change over fifty years ago. They decided to bury that information and to attack people who espoused those ideas. They hired some of the same people and firms the tobacco lobby hired. It’s no wonder then that similar tactics were employed.

Log 17: I won’t speak for anyone else economically, but my investments were up 48% under Obama, under Trump they are down 6%. Granted I invest more aggressively than most people and I therefore expect more volatility, but to those who think Trump is good for the economy, I say, “Bull.”

Log 18: Let’s not forget the idea that Trump is a great businessman. This is based, it seems, on his show The Apprentice. There is more than ample evidence to now show he’s a terrible business person and that part of the family business model is lying and fraud.

Log 19: Let’s not let DT grab all the news. John Kasich the gosh gee-whiz governor of Ohio has been working tirelessly to not let women have a say in what they can do with their bodies. He’s worked for years to restrict abortion in his state. He like Mike Pence have employed some pretty sneaky underhanded tactics to get extreme measures passed to restrict abortion in his state. His latest law is to say no abortion after six weeks. It’s unsafe to have abortions before six weeks and most pregnancies don’t show up until six weeks. Nice work John! Yeah, he and Mike Pence the gosh golly mean spirited hiding behind geniality midwestern look are both odious.

Log 20 Trump had a busy busy day the other day. Officially, his schedule was greeting the White House Christmas Tree and lunch with Mike Pence. That was it. He and Melania came out of the White House, walked around a Clydesdale pulled wagon that had the Christmas tree on the back and he swatted on of the horses on the flank and walked back in the White House to have lunch with Mike. What a loser. Which one? Both of them.
You want to see a Christmas tree? I’ll show you a Christmas tree.

I’m tired of chopping. Enough logs for now.

904 Days to Go

PS The 2006 Rockefeller Christmas Tree being delivered and how it stood on our sideyard next to the house I grew up in.