Nothing he can’t do

I last posted about the impeachment trial a week ago. Of course it has continued. The Democratic House managers wrapped up their case. The nasty guy team didn’t use all three days to spread their lies. And today is the third day of questions from senators. I hear a vote on whether to call witnesses will be held tomorrow.

Most of my sources are Daily Kos, so I’ll leave that as the default source unless I say the source was a tweet.

I start with a tweet from Sarah Kendzior. It’s from a new episode of Gaslit Nation which I’ll probably discuss in full once a transcript is available. Here’s the tweet:

There is no presentation of evidence that will sway the GOP. We know this because Trump has openly committed and confessed to crimes. He gets out of crimes by declaring them not to be crimes, not by actually proving his innocence.

If actual confession of crimes won’t sway this jury, nothing will. And declaring them not to be crimes – his defense team has been following that lead.

In an email to me my friend and debate partner wrote:

One big catch 22... Trump tried to cheat on the 2020 election all right, and for his own narcissistic purposes, for sure, but also to benefit the Republican Party and maintain its power. No one other than Trump could possibly be the GOP Presidential nominee this year, so his corruption is being tried before a "jury" whose key members (vote #34 to keep Trump in office) have a deep conflict of interest. Of course, we could demand that the Republicans all recuse themselves as jurors because of this major conflict of interest, leaving just the Democratic "jurors"... Sure, in my dreams. Not what the Framers intended.

The only cameras allowed in the Senate chamber during the trial are those of C-SPAN and they are aimed only at the speaker’s podium. Because of the camera ban the New York Times sent sketch artist Art Lein to see things the camera won’t. This link is to the series of sketches he has made during the trial. You can check back each day for more sketches.

So, backing up a few days…

Mark Sumner posted that the closing arguments from lead House manager Adam Schiff was one for the ages. Schiff said:

If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. The framers could not protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter. And you know what he did was not right. That’s what they do in the old country, where Colonel Vindman’s father came from, the old country that my great-grandfather came from, or the old country that my ancestors came from, or maybe where you came from.

Because right matters. And the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.

On to the nasty guy’s defense.

Mark Sumner describes the defense teams efforts as “Poppycock, pettifogging, and foul calumny: Trump’s team tries it all in the Senate trial.” Their efforts continued as the New York Times released an excerpt of John Bolton’s book in which Bolton says the nasty guy committed the crime he is being accused of. Sumner concluded:

In any case, the real case on Monday wasn’t happening in front of Mitch McConnell’s carefully aimed camera. It was happening offscreen, where Republicans were trying desperately to calculate whether giving Trump the quick acquittal that he wants—a move that had seemed like a sure thing on Friday, despite a crackerjack case from the House managers—was still such a slam dunk. Republicans always knew that going along with Trump was going to make them part of the conspiracy. They just didn’t know it was going to be this damn obvious.

In more posts, after the defense team concluded their case, Sumner summarized it this way:

1. It’s not really a crime anyway.
2. Joe Biden had it coming.
3. There could have been reasons.
4. You can’t prove it.

And with this:

Not one of Trump’s attorneys could produce anything that looked like a closing argument. Because that first requires an argument.

About Joe Biden … This whole Ukraine scandal was about the nasty guy trying to get the president of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. They didn’t need for there to be an actual investigation. Simply announcing an investigation they hoped would be enough to derail the candidacy of the former vice president. The plot was exposed before it actually happened.

No problem. Kerry Eleveld reported that the smearing was done by the nasty guy’s defense team as part of this impeachment trial. One could wonder what one has to do with the other. But that’s irrelevant.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa was gleeful that Biden was smeared. Beaming with all the enthusiasm of a high school cheerleader she said:

Iowa caucuses are this next Monday evening. And I'm really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers. Will they be supporting Vice President Biden at this point? Not sure about that.

Eleveld responded:

Wow. Senate Republicans, supposedly weighing whether the nation's commander in chief tried to corrupt the 2020 elections with bogus investigations, are gleefully finishing the job Trump started.

Part of the defense was there was no actual crime. Hunter (no last name given) disputes this. It was bribery. Seeking something of personal value – an investigation into the Bidens to harm his elections chances – in exchange for performing an act as a public official is seeking a bribe.

It's bribery. Just say it. And every Republican senator either knows full well that Trump was soliciting a bribe or, by denying it, has indicated that they too are sufficiently corrupt to consider demanding precisely the same thing in exchange for doing their own official duties.

That is likely the case. It is evident, at this point, that nearly every Republican senator both stipulates that Trump did exactly what John Bolton claims to be an eyewitness to and is taking the official position that members of their party are indeed allowed to solicit such "favors" without repercussion or recourse. But it is unambiguously bribery, and each of them is now conspiring in that act.

And another crime: The nasty guy tweeted that “Shifty Adam Schiff” hasn’t yet paid the price for what he has done to our country. Joyce Alene, a federal prosecutor, responded:

What price are you suggesting he should pay?

It is a federal crime to threaten to assault a federal official in order to impede their performance of their duties, so if any Republicans still think impeachment requires a crime, I’ve got this one for you.

I read a bit of the liveblogging of the senators asking questions of the prosecution and defense teams. Some of those questions from the GOP side were designed to let the nasty guy defense repeat their favorite conspiracy theories or to smear Adam Schiff or Joe Biden.

These questions are written down and passed to Chief Justice Roberts to read. Which means he chose to read the questions about conspiracy theories. Sen. Rand Paul wrote a question that contained the name of the person presumed to be the whistleblower (the person who uncovered this whole mess) so the name would be said on TV. I’ve written before that all sorts of nasty guy fans would be delighted in bagging the kill. Which means Paul wanted to enable that killing to happen. Roberts, thankfully refused to read the question. In a huff, Paul left the Senate chamber (which he isn’t allowed to do with the trial in progress), to hold a press conference. He read is question in hopes the press will print the name. It looks like the press didn’t bite.

Sumner notes that GOP senators are no longer trying to say the nasty guy is not guilty. They are now saying, “So what?”

Republicans are aware that the case against Trump has been both overwhelming and compelling from the outset—which is why the “defense” of Trump was primarily focused not on proving his innocence, but on pretending that extorting foreign involvement in an election is a perfectly valid activity.
…
Republicans aren’t going to the “So what?” position because they feel it’s strong. They know it’s not strong. They’re going there because it is all they have left.

Kerry Eleveld says that the GOP is in a double bind on the subject of whether John Bolton should testify. If the vote tomorrow is against calling witnesses the GOP is ignoring 70% of the public and will pay the price at the ballot box. If they vote to call witnesses they open a Pandora’s box and lose control of the process. Either way the House has one final play of issuing a subpoena to Bolton to have him testify there.

Hunter reports the cost of the nasty guy’s defense team, expected to be in the millions of dollars, won’t be paid by the nasty guy. They will be mostly paid by the Republican National Committee. Which means they’re being paid by GOP donors. And because the money isn’t going to an actual campaign there are no campaign limits. There are a few government lawyers from the DoJ and the White House on the team – and we the taxpayers are paying for them.

Joan McCarter adds that Ken Starr and Robert Ray of the defense team have donated to Moscow Mitch’s campaign fund. Yeah, all that is corruption.

Laura Clawson reports that poll after poll shows that 66% to 80% of Americans, including substantial numbers of Republicans, want witnesses. Clawson concludes:

Senate Republicans don’t care what [Trump] did. They just want to stay in power, and they think Trump is their best bet for doing so. And even though voters have seen through their intent to cover up, they’re going through with it anyway, because apparently Republicans are convinced it’s better to have people know you’re covering something up than to have them knowing what lies under the covers.

Mark Sumner says the most damage was done by the answers given by nasty guy defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He claimed abuse of power isn’t impeachable. He claimed there is nothing the president can’t do in pursuit of reelection as long as the president believes his reelection would be for the good of the nation.

Of course, this particular occupant of the Oval Office believes whatever is good for himself is good for the nation.

Some of the things Dershowitz said a president could do include: Extort foreign governments. Threaten an ally. Investigate a political opponent (not just OK but desirable). Wrote Sumner:

He argued that daring to run against Trump painted a target on anyone’s back, and that Trump had all the power he needed to shoot at it.

If there was any doubt going into the evening, Dershowitz removed it: voting to acquit Trump means voting not just to dismiss this charge, but to embrace the idea that Trump trumps the law. He didn’t hint that Trump could do anything he wanted in pursuit of reelection; that was the core theme of his whole presentation. That was the point. That was what he said.

The Senate listened to a presentation from Trump’s legal team according to which there is nothing Trump can do in pursuit of reelection that isn’t justified. There is no limit to how Trump can use his power to persecute political opponents. According to the theory that was put forward on the floor of the Senate, Trump could simply lock up every Democratic opponent, or suspend elections indefinitely, and that would be just fine—not only an impeachable offense, but a good thing.

Republicans are going to vote for that. Republicans are going to press the button on not just a step toward autocracy, but a full-on embrace of it. They’re going to do it with a smile.

In a tweet Leah McElrath noted that bit about canceling the election.

That was last night. This morning, after a great deal of “concern” (except from GOP senators), Dershowitz claimed people were taking it the wrong way. Uh huh. We’re glad Moscow Mitch ordered the cameras remain on you the whole time you spoke.

Alexander Erin tweeted a long thread saying that the GOP has been moving towards authoritarian rule for some time now.

But Dershowitz is articulating the GOP's overall strategy as a legal theory governing impeachment and oversight, and that is a dangerous new wrinkle.

"If the president does it, it's not illegal" in defense of Low Poly Count Nixon, from a supposedly liberal supposed legal expert. We've got to repudiate this argument thoroughly, in the halls of Congress and beyond.

And we've got to recognize that this has been the GOP's game for decades. Concoct and spread a worldview in which Democrats are literally murdering babies. Cast them as anti-American. The GOP project is to cast mere policy differences by Democrats as a criminal attack on the continued existence of the country, and crimes by the GOP as mere policy differences.

People very reasonably responding to this with "But won't the GOP regret this precedent when the Democrats are in charge?", but the goal here is to prevent that. Make sure they hold power forever.

If, along the road to that level of autocratic control, they lose an election or two, they can count on the Democrats being far less ruthless in applying the power the GOP establishes, and far more susceptible to shaming and outcry over it.

When Norquist declared the beginning of a permanent conservative majority back in the 90s, he was asked "But what if the Democrats win an election?" and his answer was "It won't matter. We won't let them govern."

(Does that help put a lot of the past few decades in perspective?)

Here's some truth that Donald has always understood deep in his bones, perhaps better than anyone alive: it doesn't matter what the rules say, all that matters is if anyone will stop you. The rules as written are obstacles to slow lesser men.

Erin includes a tweet from Senator Chris Hayes:

Here's the ugly truth at the core of all of this: the president actually can do whatever he wants - rob, cheat, steal, murder - if he can hold 34 senate votes.

Back to Erin:

If Donald Trump is president at the end of the Senate trial (and this still strikes me as likely), he will be emboldened both by the acquittal and by the shiny argument gifted to him by Dershowitz. "I have an article II that says I can do whatever I want" and now this.

It's been ugly, neighbors, and it's going to get uglier. If he's acquitted, I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about "heads on pikes" and "getting tough" and "second amendment people" and "taking out".

That “heads on pikes” thing is from a nasty guy tweet. GOP senators were not upset the nasty guy tweeted it. They were upset that Schiff mentioned it.

Andrea Chalupa tweeted a map from The Economist with the quote:

More than a third of the world’s population still live under authoritarian rule.

The map shows much of Africa and Asia as being under authoritarian regimes. A few countries classify as hybrids, part democracy and part authoritarian. The US is shown as a flawed democracy.

That prompted several to respond with a link from BBC News in 2014 that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy.

I followed the link to The Economist. I couldn’t read the whole article because it is behind a paywall. However, their chart is in the open for all to see. It shows the democracy index for 167 countries (though you must run your mouse along the right edge to see them all) and for each year since 2006. Norway is at the top with a score of 9.87 out of 10 based on 60 indicators. North Korea is at the bottom with a score of 1.08. It shows that the US dropped from full democracy to flawed in 2016.

Master of the Universe, master of nothing

I’ve started reading Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, published in 1999. I say started because it is just over 600 pages (plus notes and index) and I’m on page 62.

I would usually wait until I’ve read the whole thing (which will take a while because it’s the book I keep in the car and read only while I’m waiting somewhere). However, it looks like the basic reasoning is in the introduction, the first 45 pages. The other 550 pages fill in the details. So I can summarize her thesis (or at least most of it) now and fill in the details at some later time.

There has been a lot of talk recently (well, actually over the last 50 years) about: What’s wrong with men? Why are they behaving the way they are? Is it something men are doing? Or is it something that is being done to them? Are they outlaws? Or castoffs?

There is a modern American perception that men must be at the controls and must feel in control. Men are told they must be at the helm.

It wasn’t always like this. Daniel Boone is now (thanks to that early TV show) portrayed as a lone fighter, taming the wilderness with rifle and knife. Yeah, he was – so that he could be a homesteader and bring family and society to the wilderness and be an integral part of it. A man was measured by his service to the community.

That changes in the 19th Century as heaps of dead pelts and a rags-to-riches drive and the corresponding image of a virile man could compensate for a loss of service to the community. There developed a tension between being socially engaged and useful and maintaining control and surviving.

Women felt the contours of the box society – men – put them in. They saw the forces that created the box and began to figure out how to get out of it.

Men feel the contours of the box, too, but they are told that the box is of their own manufacture, designed to their specification. Who are they to complain? The box is there to showcase the man, not to confine him. After all, didn’t he build it – and can’t he destroy it if he pleases, if he is a *man?* For men to say they feel boxed in is regarded not as laudable political protest but as childish and indecent whining. How dare the kings complain about their castles?

When men begin to look around for a solution there are a lot of voices to tell them the problem isn’t they are trying to control things they can’t or shouldn’t, the problem is they haven’t seized enough control. Have a problem with supremacy? Demand more supremacy!

During World War II there was a lot of reporting of both the “dogface” soldiers and the flyboys. Famous newspaper writer Ernie Pyle championed the soldiers. He reported that the men in the Army saw themselves as pieces of a larger whole. They formed a family with men caring for each other under the benevolent hand of the ranking officer. It wasn’t about dominance, but about cooperation and association. Soldiers said what they loved about their time in the Army was the absence of competition.

In America the decade before the war the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) developed the same things. President Franklin Roosevelt said in a 1932 speech that “The man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country.” But now was likely to be a danger as a help, a danger because the “lone wolf” doesn’t join in creating the public welfare.

Henry Wallace, who became Roosevelt’s Vice President, talked about the Common Man, one who shouldered responsibility of meeting the needs of the world, rather than wanting to dominate it. His focus was on the society he was a part of.

However, there was also Henry Luce promoting the American Century in which the average man could become grander by helping make the society he was a part of dominate the world through unapologetic force.

If Wallace’s manly ideal was all about parental care and nurturing, Luce’s was all about taking control – and, more importantly, displaying it.

Luce went so far as to imply failing to flex the national muscle was a loss of virility. Wallace replied that force without justice would make us into what we hated in the Nazis. Luce’s ideas prevailed.

The soldiers came home. They took advantage of the egalitarian GI Bill and its emphasis on education. They had children. And everything revolved around the sons. Fathers said this grand nation we built, we’re going to give it to you.

After the war a promise was made to these boys, one that had four parts: A frontier to be claimed – space. A clear and evil enemy to be crushed – Communism. To be a part of an institutional brotherhood for greater institutional glory – engineers, managers, and bureaucrats in places such as NASA. And a family to provide for and protect – with a wife at home.

Implicit in all this was a promise of loyalty, a guarantee to the new man of tomorrow this his company would never fire him, his wife would never leave him, and the team he rooted for would never pull up stakes.

But it all went wrong.

Russia beat us to space. And space is not a place to be colonized. Few men actually went.

The boys did get their own war, but it was Vietnam. In contrast to WWII there was no clear and visible enemy. The mission wasn’t clear. The victory wasn’t clear. And when the soldier came home, rather than proclaiming exploits of liberating oppressed people, he was labeled the oppressor. Sometime even by his wife.

Those institutions who had given him a desk job offered a job, not a vital role. And then these grand corporate institutions laid him off.

And his sports team packed up in the middle of the night and slipped away to another city with a better stadium deal.

He was promised he would be master of the universe. He ended up master of nothing. So who was the enemy he was promised he would fight? Who is to blame? That search for someone to blame resulted in several shooting incidents.

The earlier idea of manhood was to uphold and improve the community. Towards the end of the 20th century a new question arose. In the digital age what and where was his community? What was important in this digital age was display. The only field of battle was now vanity.

These men of WWII made promises to their sons, but fathers went to the office and abandoned their sons. The fathers didn’t pass on the skills needed to negotiate the promises and their lack in reality. Anger over this abandonment became part of the currency of glamour and display. This is a currency that women denounced as trivializing and dehumanizing. Men were left with the thing women rejected.

Faludi poses these questions:

Why, despite a crescendo of random tantrums, have [men] offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament? Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt? … [W]hen the whole deal turned out to be a crock and it was clear that they had been thoroughly stiffed, why did the sons do nothing?
…
The level of mockery, suspicion, and animosity directed at men who step out of line is profound, and men respond profoundly – with acquiescence. But that is not a wholly satisfying explanation either, for haven’t women, the object of such commercial and political manipulation, kicked over these traces successfully?

If men do not respond, then maybe it is because their society has proposed no route for them to venture down. Surely the culture has not offered an alternative vision of manhood.

Faludi says she answers those questions – somewhere in the next 550 pages.

Start with the truth

Cleaning out browser tabs…

George Lakoff, Professor Emeritus of UC Berkeley, tweeted how to disarm the nasty guy’s lies, which other news outlets tend to magnify as they “report” them. Do it with a truth sandwich:

Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the lie if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.

Alas, too many news outlets don’t point out the lies in what their interviewees are saying.



Jennifer Cohn, an election security advocate, asks:

Legal scholars: What will be the remedy if voter registration systems are hacked (again) and voters are wiped from the rolls? We already know they were hacked in 2016, & yet there was no talk of nullifying a fraudulent election & much remains unknown to the public. Rinse repeat?

Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos wrote about Taco Bell announcing they will test paying some of their restaurant managers a salary of $100,000. That’s a decent living. Higgins then turns to the workers, whose median pay is about $20,000, which is not a decent living. It’s not surprising that 52% of fast food workers use public assistance. She adds:

If one’s gut reaction to these numbers is “get a better job” or “do something more valuable,” it’s important to sit with the following statistics, too. According to a 2015 analysis, 25% of part-time college faculty use public assistance. Close to 50% of home-care workers do. That number is similar when you look at people who work in child care, coming in at 46%. These jobs—just like working in food service—require skills, forms of education, and seriously draining labor. Most families who receive SNAP benefits have at least one person working, though people who don’t (or can’t) work still deserve to survive.

I worked for several years as a part time college instructor. I could afford to do it because I had a pension from an auto industry career. I was paid classroom hours. But add in all the hours preparing and grading papers and the wage was well below minimum.



The NPR show Marketplace Tech has a conversation with the Chief Environmental Officer of Microsoft. The company is investing $1 billion to become not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative within ten years. Carbon negative means drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. They hope to do this partly through new tech, and partly the way nature does it now with photosynthesis.

So, all you other big companies – at least Google, Facebook, Amazon – let’s hear a corresponding pledge from you. With dollars to go with it.



Now that the Space Force proposed by the nasty guy is now a reality it is time to introduce the new Space Force uniform. Twitter had a lot of fun with this one – the basic cloth of the new uniforms is jungle camo. And there aren’t any jungles in space. There were lots of tweets of alternate materials: A wizard cape covered in stars. Child pajamas with flying saucers. Adult pajamas with planets and spaceships. A suit with Star Wars symbols. Sweat pants with brightly colored nebulas.



Kali Gross of The Root talked about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from royal duties. Yeah, part of this was Harry wanting to protect himself and his family from the fate his mother received from the swarming paparazzi. But Gross says another big factor was Markle and the historical legacy of black women’s resistance. She didn’t silently abide the torrents of racism from the press. She fought back, stunning both the royal family and the press. And she rejected exclusionary social institutions. In both of these Gross highlights black women who have done the same thing.



One advantage of living in the Detroit area is access to Canadian radio (I could get Canadian TV too if I watched TV). So most weekdays I catch the classical music hour of Shift, hosted by Tom Allen on CBC music. I’ve been fascinated by his survey of string quartets, which he began in September of 2018 with the first quartets of Franz Joseph Hayden. The survey is currently up to about 2002, so has a way to go.

I mention all this to explain why I have the next link. Allen tweeted out a CBC News report of the recent blizzard in Newfoundland. It looks like they got several feet of snow. Most of the three minute report isn’t about the amount of snow, its about how helpful neighbors were in digging each other out.

This is so boring

Impeachment trial update:

Adam Schiff and the House Democrats did a masterful job in laying out the evidence during the first of three 8-hour days.

The GOP members of the Senate claimed boredom – snacking, yawning, doing crossword puzzles, and perhaps even napping. Lots of empty seats, though the rules require them to stay. Which is strange because they claim to not have heard the evidence during House hearings.

And Chief Justice John Roberts is doing nothing to enforce the rules.

David Corn of Mother Jones tweeted:

Imagine if Chief Justice Roberts stated that he will not allow counsel for either side to get away with stating explicit and demonstrable lies. Just imagine that.

Feminist Next Door tweeted:

Biased process ✔️
Evidence ignored ✔️
Accuser demonized ✔️
Ulterior motives suggested ✔️
Witnesses intimidated ✔️
Friends lie for accused ✔️
Conduct defended as lawful ✔️

Is this an impeachment trial or a rape case?

Aaron Rupar tweeted:

Fox News has the optics of covering the #ImpeachmentTrial without actually covering it. They've been showing screen-in-screen video of the proceedings without audio. Instead, hosts are providing Trumpian spin. It's propaganda giving the illusion of journalism. Remarkable.

Do not dare call this “peaceful”

I suppose it was a good idea. This year it went really bad. The idea was to turn Martin Luther King Day into a “Lobby Day,” a day to talk to your state legislators. On its face this seems reasonable. But over the last few years it has been increasingly a gun lobby day. Using MLK Day – a day to honor a guy killed by a gun – to advocate for guns? This is beyond irony and into desecration. And this year that idea went over the top.

Virginia, with a state legislature now controlled by Democrats, appears to be close to passing a series of gun restrictions. I don’t know the whole package, though one piece is to limit sales to 1 gun a month. These restrictions are favored by about 80% of the citizens of the state.

So the gun people called for what they called a Boogaloo. Come to the state capitol in Richmond and show your support!

Governor Ralph Northan declared a state of emergency around the capitol building in Richmond (capitol of the Confederacy) and urged people to stay home. About 22,000 men (almost all men, almost all white) showed up, with all sorts of big guns strapped to their backs. Guns were banned from the actual event site, so most stayed just outside.

No shots were fired, so the Washington Post declared the event was “peaceful.” Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer says that view is “malarky.”

To the contrary, America — although we may be too frightened to even admit it — just witnessed arguably the most successful use of terrorism on U.S. soil in nearly a generation, even if this time was non-lethal.

Morgan Finkelstein tweeted that an armed militia shutting down a city is not “peaceful.” If it happened anywhere else in the world the *Washington Post* wouldn’t call it that.

Bunch again:

What really happened in Richmond was that men with enough firepower to defeat the Ukrainian army, with the very real threat of violence strapped to their backs, aimed to intimidate not just the state lawmakers just elected by the majority of Virginia voters on a gun-safety platform, but to scare away any citizens wishing to use their 1st Amendment rights to speak out against them.

And the shameful thing is that, on too many levels, it worked.

Terrorism? Yes. People were terrified. Businesses shuttered for the day. Those who live near the capitol evacuated for the day. Lee Carter, a legislator who advocates for the new laws, went to a safe house. Leaders of groups that considered counter protests strongly urged their followers to stay home. Americans were deprived of their right air their grievances of the government by a bullying, armed mob. Wrote Bunch:

Do not dare call this “peaceful.”

It could have been worse. Several leaders of white supremacist groups were arrested last week.

In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, the group calls itself The Base, which in Arabic would be ... al-Qaeda. The goals of those two groups are exactly the same: Fanatical religious and racial purity, enforced by wanton violence against innocent people.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

The “rally” happening today in Richmond, Virginia, isn’t about the Second Amendment.

It’s an effort to try to normalize armed shows of force by Trump supporters.

Trump has no intention of participating in a peaceful transition of power.

David Neiwert of Daily Kos agrees this wasn’t a one-time event. It was the beginning.

Neiwert noted that two months before the event the social media chatter by participants described their eagerness to begin a second civil war. Also disturbing is the large number of rural sheriffs, part of the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, that say they, not the courts, get to determine if a new law is constitutional.

I got an email from the youth of March for Our Lives. They geared up for Lobby Day and were ready to go. The police said it would not be safe for them to arrive Monday morning and hold a rally outside before speaking to legislators. They wrote:

So we didn’t go Monday morning. We slept on the floor in the Capitol Sunday night instead.

As hundreds of civilians wearing camo, body armor, and carrying deadly weapons surrounded the Capitol yesterday, we were safe inside lobbying our legislators for gun laws that would ensure our schools, homes, and streets would be safe from gun violence.

We met weapons with flowers. We met hate with love. And we met threats and fear tactics with peace and action.

Wonderful kids! They did it right!

Another group (I think Moms Demand Action) also was quite busy on Lobby Day. They set up phone banks and called from the safety of their homes.

Laying out the case

I’m not listening to the livestream of the impeachment trial in the Senate. I don’t enjoy listening to supremacists enforcing their supremacy. However, I have been reading a few summaries from progressive news sources.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discusses a few of the weird (the only kind?) arguments that the nasty guy’s legal team intends to use. With the Senate GOP solid backing of the nasty guy these arguments will only be meaningful as precedent. Some of those arguments:

* Because the US is a superpower and Ukraine is so weak the US president should be able to bully them.

* He can’t be guilty of extortion because Ukraine doesn’t have enough treasure to actually buy him off.

* Because the US is all grown up and a superpower then foreign entanglements just can’t happen. Therefore impeachment doesn’t exist anymore.

* The nasty guy has the authority to deny sending documents to the House. The House doesn’t have enough first-hand evidence to make the case to the Senate.



Rachel Bitecofer tweeted a thread about how many people in the nasty guy administration oversaw investigations into actions in which they were personally involved. That includes Sec. of State Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr, and ranking GOP member in the House hearings Devin Nunes. But don’t forget the vice nasty guy presides over the Senate and has guidance into how the Senate conducts the trial.



But wouldn’t the vice nasty guy jump at the chance of booting his boss and grabbing the plum job? Well, he is loyal (which is why he’s lasted so long). And the rest of the GOP is still backing the nasty guy. David Mastio, writing for USA Today, put it this way:

Trump is the only route to clinging to power.

Pence is viewed as weak tea in rallying the base. And after years of Trump, there’s not much hope on the right for reaching out to the middle in the coming presidential election. Blue-collar Democrats aren’t going to defect to Pence’s traditional brand of Republicanism and he can’t really fake populism with Trump’s verve. Without Trump winning at the top of the ticket, hopes for keeping a grip on the Senate are not high.

I don’t care how damaged Trump is by the Senate impeachment trial next week, there’s no hope his Republican backers will abandon him.

With the trial playing out as a cover-up the American people should be outraged! Why aren’t we surrounding the Capitol? Topcat108 tweeted:

We are trapped. Our healthcare is dependent on our jobs and we aren’t free to leave them. Everyone I know wants to take to the streets but feel trapped.

In a separate post Mark Sumner compares what the Republicans and Democrats did on the first day of the trial, the day for setting how the trial will proceed. Republicans had a series of talking points (see above) – and nothing else.

Democrats came prepared. They introduced ten amendments to the rules – requests for documents, requests for particular witnesses (John Bolton, Mick Mulvaney), and such. And for each amendment one of the seven House trial managers spent a good hour laying out the case for what had happened and why that particular witness or document would be necessary. They discussed particular conversations, critical meetings and specific events and explained why that fit their case. Over the ten hours the Democrats laid out their case, spelling out the players and their crimes. And they still have 24 hours to make their case.

After the sixth proposed amendment Moscow Mitch tried to force a delay that would lump the last four amendments into a single quick vote. Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, refused. And kept going.

Moscow Mitch and the nasty guy team were unprepared. All they could do was run through their talking points each time and shout insults. Democrats looked like they had practiced for weeks (Speaker Pelosi’s delay in turning over the Articles of Impeachment was put to good use).

Did the Dems win any of these amendment votes? No. But they won the evening and showed the GOP they will do everything they can to make sure the nasty guy’s crimes are broadcast to the public.

Given up on finding out the truth

Sean Illing of Vox commented that whatever evidence is produced at the impeachment trial about to begin in the Senate won’t change anyone’s mind. He suggests why that is:

We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment has done very little to move public opinion.

Moscow Mitch is making sure we find out as little as possible about what happens during that Senate trial. Extra security steps are being set up so reporters can’t take digital devices into the Senate chamber to properly capture the moment. Reporters won’t be allowed to wander the halls and ask pesky questions as senators walk to and from the chamber. The C-Span cameras could be turned off at critical moments.

Evidence against the nasty guy? What evidence?



As I’ve noted before Candidate Elizabeth Warren has put out several plans on how she intends to make big banks and other Wall Street companies to start serving the people rather than their own pockets. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on what the banks are now saying. I’m amused by the dryness of their comments:

“Closing tax loopholes, as Warren proposes, would ‘likely limit the size’ of the private equity industry,”

“Banning fracking would be ‘broadly negative’ for energy companies.”

Households affected by the plan to tax wealth over $50 million “would likely need to fund it by reducing their assets.”

Clawson concludes:

The private equity industry that’s drained so many companies of cash and forced them into bankruptcy limited in size? Energy companies having to pivot to clean energy or lose out? People with hundreds of millions of dollars forced to choose between a second yacht and a fifth mansion? The horror! The horror!

Want a really big favor?

The nasty guy’s business dealings since he cheated his way into the Oval Office have not been in the news or in released White House statements. But David Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post, have looked at the public evidence and says this company is not doing well.

Important properties are struggling. The brand has become toxic to an array of customers. The company has pushed out dozens of undocumented workers (after news reports of the workers being undocumented). There are numerous lawsuits about conflicts of interest.

Replacing undocumented workers with legal workers means increased costs (which is why undocumented workers were hired). That puts a strain on the company’s finances.

Trump Doral Resort profitability has dropped 69%. The profitability of his Chicago hotel has dropped 89%. The nasty guy’s political brand is driving customers away. And the lost customers are far greater than customers staying at his properties in hopes that he’ll notice and will look kindly on their petition (it’s called a bribe).

Hunter of Daily Kos notes the likely sale of his Washington hotel (close to the White House) offers an opportunity for even bigger corruption. The nasty guy is…

likely to become even more overt in squeezing whatever cash he can get from this nation, its wealthiest request-havers, and anyone else in the world needing a big government favor and willing to pay for one.

If you think the man can handle that sort of pressure without doing something astonishingly crooked and/or stupid, you haven't been paying attention.

Want a really big favor from the president of the United States? Buy his hotel from him for an inflated price.

Hide the coal mine with solar panels

Farm Policy tweeted out a map of the US showing the relative area of each type of land use. The biggest chunk is for “Cow pasture/range” with a moderate size block for growing livestock feed. Other large chunks are for timberland – public, private, and corporate. The land used for golf courses, growing flowers, growing tobacco, and trees for maple syrup and Christmas are all tiny.

Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, looked at that map and tweeted that the amount of land needed to supply the US with clean energy is comparable to what we currently use for maple syrup or golf – a square smaller than 120 miles on a side. This doesn’t mean replacing all those maple trees. In many places the land can do both farming and energy production.

Ramez Naam, who writes about clean energy, puts some numbers behind what Hayhoe wrote. The whole world could be powered by solar using less than 1% of the earth’s land area. Others complain using that much area for solar panels can threaten ecosystems and endangered species. Naam replies, true for some places, but the threat is considerably less than for fossil fuels. In addition, there are places we could put solar panels that would not be a problem and could be an advantage: over parking lots (to provide a shade for your car); on the roofs of existing buildings, especially warehouses and big box stores; and on abandoned coal mines.

Savings for whom?

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports on the effect of work requirements on those who need food assistance.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has had a work requirement since 1996. The law says an able-bodied person must work or be in job training at least 20 hours a week. States have waived those restrictions for communities in economic distress.

The nasty guy administration says, in McCarter’s words, “force lazy good-for-nothings who could work but refuse to get jobs.” The GOP in West Virginia reinstated the restriction for nine poor counties and we can see the results. Forcing the poor into jobs is *not* what happened.

The change in policy did nothing to create jobs. Because of the poverty jobs don’t come to these areas. The poor residents can’t get to jobs outside these areas. Yeah, they’re able-bodied, but they can’t get to jobs 40 miles away. Employment growth in these counties slowed while it doubled elsewhere in West Virginia.

The result: People rely on charity or go hungry. Huntington City Mission went from serving 8,700 meals a month to 12,300.

GOP delegate Tom Fast says he wants to apply the restrictions to the whole state because the change has created a “significant savings.” Savings for whom? Certainly not the charities. Or the poor.



Lots of news in the last few days that the federal deficit for 2019 was $1.02 trillion dollars. Hunter of Daily Kos says that means the big 2017 tax law didn’t bring in close to the amount of money the GOP said it would – and that’s not an accident. Also no accident is that many news outlets reporting the story are not calling on the GOP to fix it.

Hunter says about this trillion dollar deficit:

It will be met, when Republicans next lose the presidency, with Republican demands that something is done about this outrage that somehow happened under Republican watch, according to the Republican plan, as a result of Republican legislation forced through via reconciliation measures so that Republicans could best steamroll over the other party. Conservatives will then demand we spend less on fixing the roads, and less on feeding the poor, and that Social Security is either gutted or at the very least given to Wall Street as seed money for whatever new gambling effort the markets will next invent.

And then they will propose another corporate tax cut. And again, the Paul Ryans of the party will lie, outright, to claim that the next one will fix all this up for sure.

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on a new study that says money can buy happiness. Clawson summarized:

90% of people earning more than $500,000 a year say they are “completely” or “very” satisfied with their lives. By contrast, just 44% of people earning less than $35,000 a year are completely or very satisfied.

The rich …

don’t worry about paying medical bills or going hungry. They know that even if their kids screw up every which way, they’re more likely to go to college and get good jobs than poor kids who do everything right.

Lower-income people in the United States are deprived of a basic sense of hope that they and their loved ones can get ahead. High-income people have every reason to believe the world will be a kind place.

Commenters roundly criticized the study. They say the study grouped income of $35K – $99K. Which doesn’t make sense. $35K is close to the poverty line. $99K isn’t.

Doctor Grumpus adds:

This new study found nothing new: Poverty sucks, and being in a state of happiness in poverty is very difficult. Once one is out of poverty, the likelihood for happiness increases, but after that, more money doesn’t increase the likelihood for happiness. There is nothing in the presentation of this research that suggests otherwise. (Notice that the report just presents the extremes, and not the trajectory of the change...I am confident in saying that, based on the totality of the research, the relationship between happiness and income is not linear).

Emily Alford at Jezebel wrote that some teenage boys really like the nasty guy.

So with all the performative masculinity bullshit they’re wading through, it’s not exactly a shocker that boys have fallen for one of the worst performances of masculinity of all time—that of charlatan-in-chief Donald Trump.

Some boys are using the nasty guy as an example of how to bully the girls. One boy put it this way:

Just historically, when you think Republican, you think males, and when you think liberals, you think more female.

Hmm. I wonder why… It certainly can’t be because the GOP has, for at least the last decade, been modeling the worst of white male supremacy, which chases everyone else out of the party.

End the cover-up

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate tomorrow. She is urging the Senate to end to cover-up. To emphasize her point she tweeted a comparison of the nasty guy impeachment and that of Bill Clinton:

Key witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 12
Clinton: 0
Subpoenaed witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 9
Clinton: 0
Major document subpoenas blocked by the president
Trump: 5 (100%)
Clinton:0 (0%)
Wholesale defiance of document requests
Trump: Yes (all 71 administrative requests ignored)
Clinton: No
Documents produced by the president
Trump: 0
Clinton: More than 90,000 pages
Number of witnesses who testified in Senate trial
Trump: ?
Clinton: 3 (who had already testified in the Starr investigation)



Twitter user uwu posted a long thread of the art that has come out of the Hong Kong protests and the artists who make it. The profile says “Take your broken heart and turn it into art.” The link is to an image of protest cakes, which is in the middle of the thread. Scroll up and down for the rest of it. Naturally, a great deal of the art features gas masks. There are also lots of umbrellas which were the symbols of protests a couple years ago, before the current round started a half year ago.



Andy Doe taught his first child how to use photoshop. And now he has a thread about famous works of art with search and rescue boats added. One of the painting is the Barque of Dante in which several people are in the water outside the boat. It looks like the rescue is coming just in time.



Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has said he will donate $690,000 to help Australia recover from the fires. The odd number makes more sense as $1,000,000 Australian dollars.

He was roundly scorned for such a stingy gift.

Stingy? Yeah. Business Insider says his personal wealth grows by $181 million every day. The profit (not revenue) of his company in 2018 was $74 billion. So $690 thousand is a rounding error.

Jason Karsh tweeted that Bezos could use two days of earnings and give away $1M to some lucky family every day for a year.

Hunter of Daily Kos noted that $690,000 doesn’t even buy a house in Silicon Valley. Then he added:

People can't help but draw conclusions. A good one to draw might be "The charity of the top 0.1 percent and of corporations both are vastly overstated and not even fractionally as useful as simply taxing them at the same effective rate as the rest of us pay, so maybe we should get on with that already."

Elizabeth Warren tweeted:

If the only way to run for president of the United States is either to be a billionaire or to suck up to billionaires, then we're going to have a country that works better for billionaires—and worse for everyone else.

Back when Bush II was trying to convince America to go to war in Iraq a favorite tactic of his supporters was to bully liberals by accusing them of loving Islamic terrorists. Now that the nasty guy is trying to convince America to go to war in Iran his supporters are back to using that tactic. This time it isn’t working. Amanda Marcotte at Salon reports that Rep. Doug Collins tried it and had to (pretend to) apologize.

Weaponized our corruption against us

We had rain all day yesterday. Today the Detroit paper said we got 1.9 inches at the airport, setting the record for the greatest single day rainfall in January. Adding in rain on Friday and much of the area got 2-4 inches. The park/floodplain behind my house is flooded (no danger to the house). When I got up yesterday the temp was 51F, quite warm for Detroit in January. At noon the temp had dropped to 37F. Overnight a lot of that standing water froze, so my senior friends didn’t venture out this morning.

If the temperature had started out 20 degrees colder yesterday we would have gotten an epic blizzard.



I read the transcript of another Gaslit Nation podcast, this one titled Human Sacrifice. Yeah, that sounds ominous. The hosts of the podcast are Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. It was released on January 8, which was between the assassination of the Iranian general and Iran’s retaliation of tossing missiles at military bases holding US soldiers.

Chalupa starts off by criticizing President Obama and the Iran Deal. The problem was that Obama and his team failed to prioritize the bigger threat, which was Vladimir Putin.

So, the nasty guy, with Putin’s help, stole the White House. And then ripped up the Iran Deal. That’s the result of not prioritizing threats.

Yes, Iran is a threat. And Soleimani was the architect of that threat. He worked to make Iran a regional power, from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He did so through directing proxies to get rid of those in his way. At this he was legendary, the most influential operative in the region in modern times. Chalupa lists several examples of his terrorism. Even so, Iran’s influence doesn’t work well outside the Middle East.

In contrast, Putin’s influence is highly successful outside of the region around Russia. Chalupa said:

When compared to Iran, Russia tends to be better at asymmetrical warfare with greater impact on Western States within their own borders, while the Kremlin weaponized our own corruption against us, propping up far-right groups and leaders, infiltrating useful idiots and complicit actors like the NRA. The Obama Administration, with the noble goal of trying to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power, spread itself too thin with the Iran Deal, and in the process gave Syria up to Russia and Iran and gave Iraq up to Iran. The world needs to eradicate nuclear weapons but the reality is when you're juggling several crises, prioritize the one that faces an immediate danger to your country. In this case, asymmetrical warfare by the Kremlin was the immediate danger because it was so effective, as we've seen in the rise of Brexit and Trump.

Russia by the way is a nuclear power and did it need its nukes to successfully undermine us?

Obama had successfully contained ISIS, an extraordinarily difficult task. But Obama had missed that Russia was the bigger threat, one that killed more civilians in Syria than ISIS. And now that ISIS containment is being undone by Putin’s puppet.

Chalupa again:

Kremlin aggression had to be confronted at the core, which of course was very difficult, but it was right there out in the open. The aggressive disinformation campaigns, propping up far-right leaders in Europe, in the US, spreading its influence to Western capitals through oligarch proxies close to Putin, buying off politicians and other political influence. Through Western corruption, the UK and US let Putin in through the front door....

We have the rise of authoritarian populism and the Climate Crisis hitting us at once, because master strategists in asymmetrical warfare, Putin and Soleimani, have outsmarted the most powerful military on Earth.

I’m not convinced that “outsmarted” is the right word. Maybe it is, though I think “out corrupted” fits better.

The nasty guy has been impeached. He wasn’t impeached for what he did to the 2016 election, but for what he was planning to do in the 2020 election.

Cambridge Analytica was a company that in 2016 did voter manipulation on “an industrial scale.” The company collapsed and closed when *The Observer* showed they had misused 87 million Facebook profiles. But the people who ran the company were not punished, so the prospect of manipulation by them or their admirers in our next election is even worse. And CA was only a small part in a much bigger operation.

Chalupa played a clip from CBS of two unidentified people interviewing Barbara Slavin, director of the Atlantic Council’s Future of Iran Initiative. In this clip Slavin discusses the winners and losers as the assassination of the Iranian general plays out.

Winners from this are ISIS, Al Qaeda, Sunni fundamentalists that hate Iran as well as the United States. Russia, China, which will become more powerful in the Middle East.

All this winning will make it untenable for American forces and diplomats to stay in Iraq and maybe even Syria.

Biggest losers are people of the Middle East, people of Iran, people of Iraq, people of Lebanon. They were beginning to push back against some of these policies and now the subject will be changed to the United States and what the United States has done.

Yes, a president in personal political trouble will use a war as a distraction. But no war is only a distraction. A war has terrible consequences.

When this podcast was recorded Iran had not yet tossed missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US military. Kendzior thought one way Iran might (and still might) retaliate is some sort of cyber attack. And if it does … In 2018 the nasty guy changed the Nuclear Posture Review so that nukes are an acceptable strike to a significant cyber attack. The nasty guy has been obsessed with nuclear weapons for 30 years. The only way to keep him from using them is remove him from office.

Chalupa said the nasty guy is the Reality Show President. He loves carnage. He’ll want a big season finale for his reality show. And Chalupa thinks that’s inevitably a nuclear weapon. And the adults in the room who might keep him from doing it? They’re either accomplices or they’re gone, either pushed out or jumped ship. There is a huge vacuum of power in this administration with so many position vacancies.

Kendzior adds:

The key to understanding Trump, is that, in his mind, this is a show. In his mind, people are disposable. In his mind, a geopolitical conflict is just an act of presentation, of performance. He does not understand the value of human life. He does not understand, I think, what other human beings are.

The discussion turns to John Bolton. I think he used to be National Security Advisor, but was fired, though he didn’t actually go away. The question is why is Bolton ready to testify now, when he refused to testify in front of the House? One reason is that testifying now means doing so before the GOP controlled Senate rather than the Dem controlled House. Another, says Chalupa, is Bolton testifying to clear the nasty guy’s name is in exchange for getting the war he always wanted.

Kendzior says with Bolton’s offer Pelosi should say, if you’re willing to testify come do it in front of the House under open inquiry. Alas, in spite of actual Articles of Impeachment it has been way too late to start holding the Trump Crime Family accountable. Bring the truth to light.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has brought religion to his job. He believes in the Rapture and using that as a guide to shape policy. The Rapture is a fundamentalist belief that when certain conditions align, including Israel being a thriving country, Jesus will return. Those judged to be suitable (fundamentalist) Christians will be taken up to Heaven as the rest of the world descends into a final war of good and evil. This prophecy doesn’t appear as such in the Bible. Maybe a century and a half ago the idea was cobbled together and supported through passages scattered through the Bible.

So in Pompeo’s thinking his job, as one of those suitable Christians, is to help events along to make the Rapture happen. To do that he wants to protect Israel from Iran. And a way to do that is force regime change in Iran.

Which means, Kendzior says, the nasty guy has surrounded himself with…

this sort of nexus of Evangelicals, and Zionists, and general Rapture fiends, and fatalists like Trump, people who just are cool with the apocalypse like no particular religious affiliation needed.

And Chalupa replies:

I mean, in this case we're talking about religion being used as it always has historically been, and on this level as a means to hold onto or gain more power. Its power at the center of this. This isn't about spirituality by any means, it's about power. And Soleimani and all those who are going to be the destroyed in the fallout of Soleimani's assassination, they are human sacrifices for Trump, and Trump has basically abused his power in part by creating human sacrifices. Look at all the lives he's destroyed, including the lives of innocent children and separating families on the border. Those are human sacrifices by Trump for his own power to please his base.

It is time to join the grassroots efforts to elect bold progressives, close down the Kremlin’s loopholes that weaponize our corruption against us, hold polluting social media giants like Facebook accountable, and getting truth out there. Join your community. Grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left.

No tangible results

The guy who started Daily Kos signs his posts as Kos. I’ve seen the full name though I don’t have it in front of me. Kos wrote about the strange candidacy of Pete Buttigieg for president. He’s unqualified and untested (haven’t we seen that before?). He’s never had to win more than 11,000 votes. And his support from the black community, a constituency any Democrat needs to win, is zero – because Mayor Pete has a race problem.



Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave US Attorney John Huber a free hand to find something – anything – on Hillary Clinton. The nasty guy rallies still resound with chants of “Lock her up!” So there should be a reason to actually do that.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports Huber has turned in his report after two years of investigating. Short answer: “No tangible results.” He found nothing. The Clintons did not profit from the Uranium One deal. The Clinton Foundation really is a charity doing wonderful work around the world (in stark contrast to, say, the Trump Foundation). And as for her emails, the FBI investigation into that (which found no breach of security) was shown to have been conducted properly.

Alas, this report won’t stop the chanting.



Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate next week. This comes after Moscow Mitch claimed he had enough votes to start the Senate trial before he got the Articles.

This prompted news pundits to say Moscow Mitch won the round and Pelosi lost. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos tweeted that she disagrees. Her reasons:

* The impeachment trial (and we know how it will end – see cartoon here) is only one battle in the long political war of 2020. Moscow Mitch has more risk in losing his majority than Pelosi does. Her withholding of the Articles over the last few weeks has put vulnerable Republicans in a worse place. She has increased their pain while giving up little.

* Moscow Mitch had said delaying the Articles was “fine by me.” Now he’s railing at Pelosi from the Senate floor. The nasty guy is also getting more antsy by the day.

* John Bolton refused a House subpoena but said he would respond to a Senate subpoena. Pelosi now has a big reason to take him to court – which might reveal damaging info just before the fall campaign.



Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on the 29th paragraph of a story in the Wall Street Journal about the nasty guy’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Soleimani. The article said, with no elaboration or indication of its importance:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.

Clawson responds:

So Donald Trump assassinated a high-ranking foreign official, risking massive war, in part because it would help him in an impeachment trial that’s happening because he tried to use U.S. military aid to extort a foreign country into helping him win re-election.

Actually, that scans.

And then the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal reported it buried deep in a long article, as if it was no big. Actually, that also scans.

I’ve heard that this assassination is much more worthy of being an article of impeachment than the articles already passed.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos talks about threats to our election system coming up to America’s big day in 2020. After listing yet another threat and the chaos around it she wrote:

And chaos, says Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, "is the point." She says that "You don't actually have to breach an election system in order to create the public impression that you have. […] You can imagine many different scenarios." Making populations distrust their elections systems is probably the most effective means of undermining a democracy, which in the case of Russia and the U.S. has been the underlying objective. That puts officials trying to combat the incursions in a difficult position; they’re damned if they warn the citizenry of the hacking and increase people's perceptions that the system is rigged and damned if they don't warn the populace to be aware of attempts to manipulate them.

By now you need a dose of cute.

The first time I visited Australia back in 1994 the tour I was with stayed at a resort lodge north of Melbourne. That evening a friend of the lodge owner brought over a joey, a baby kangaroo. She did it by bringing in a basket filled with small blankets that did a decent job of mimicking a kangaroo pouch.

Joshua Potash tweeted a brief video from Siobhan McKenna of nine cloth pouches each with a joey rescued from the fires.

We watch movement, we hear music

This afternoon I saw the documentary film Cunningham about the revolutionary dance choreographer Merce Cunningham. He got his start as a dancer in the 1940s. He gathered his own company and rose to prominence in the 1950s. The film tracks his art to about 1975. He worked up to his death in 2009 at age 90.

A good chunk of the film is recreations of his famous works from the 50s and 60s by the members of the still existing Merce Cunningham Dance Company. These sequences showed off the work well, much better than archival film, though there are sequences of that too.

Cunningham didn’t like the label “avant-garde” though his dances were quite different from anything that had done before. Here’s one way to explain one of his innovations: the dancers’ motions are synchronized and we hear music, but the movement and the music have nothing to do with each other. At one point Cunningham said the dancers didn’t hear the music until the performance.

For many of the dances in the 1950s the music came from John Cage, one of classical music’s eccentrics. Cunningham and Cage were a gay couple at a time when it wasn’t easy to be that. The film says only that Cunningham and Cage wrote letters saying how much one missed the other.

This music didn’t have much of or any melody and didn’t have much of or any beat. It didn’t matter that the dancers didn’t dance to it. The dancers could also dance to the noise of passing traffic. Even without the music the dancers could move together, sometimes doing the same thing at the same time. Also without the music as a guide one could see the different emotions projected by each dance.

Cunningham talked about how he worked with the dancers. He didn’t create a sequence of movements that some generic dancer was to execute. He watched for what the dancer could bring to the dance. He was interested in the person as much as he was the movements.

I enjoyed the film. I also quite enjoyed the dancing, as strange as such dancing may seem. I guess I’ve gotten well acquainted with modern music so understand modern art and modern dance fairly well.

Blog puzzles

About three years ago someone or some group in Italy began accessing my blog. The way this appeared in the stats was rather strange. Approximately every other day or so there would be a spike of 75-80 page views. Looking closer I saw these spikes all came in one hour. If it was random people in Italy or even a group of friends it seemed strange they would all access my blog at the same time. Perhaps some automated system?

The volume was also strange. The cumulative stats say that there have been 28,800 views from Italy over three years. That’s quite a lot, considering over twelve years I’m almost at 4,200 posts. So that number of views could have read the entire contents of this blog almost 7 times.

In November those spikes slowed down and in December they stopped. There haven’t been any readers from Italy since December 16. My page views have dropped from about 2400 a month to 1300 in December and projections for January suggest maybe 1000. All that is a puzzle.

Another puzzle is in the list of page views by country there is frequently the entry “Unknown Region.” That appeared in the list for today. How is it possible that a computer’s home country can’t be identified? Is my blog being read by some government agency in some country that doesn’t want to be identified?

Liberal legislative exchange

For many decades America has been bedeviled by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Membership is open to corporations and GOP state legislators. ALEC would try out some highly conservative and corporate friendly law in one state with a legislature controlled by the GOP, then make the text of that law available to GOP legislators in other states. Such ready-made bills usually came with assistance in getting them passed.

ALEC has been a thorn in the side of Democrats for about a half century. But attempts to get a Dem equivalent up and running have fizzled rather quickly. Hard to keep the money flowing when it doesn’t come from corporations.

It looks like such a progressive group has finally developed staying power. The State Innovation Exchange, SIX, has now been around for five years. One of its efforts is to codify abortion protections into state law in case the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. For example, SIX helped overturn an abortion ban in Massachusetts (173 years old, but inoperative with Roe v. Wade in place) and then went on to make sure abortion would remain protected in the state. SIX helped with policy materials, a press strategy, a video to share on social media, and contacts with legislators who crafted similar bills in other states who could share successes and failures.

Never known a time without war

The nasty guy seems to believe that Iran tossing missiles at a couple US military bases in Iraq and avoiding fatalities was their whole response to his assassination of their top military leader. I’ve heard that Iran has lots of other ways to retaliate.

So was war averted? At the moment, who can tell?

Philip Bump of the Washington Post created a pie chart for each year since 1905 (when Hester Ford, the oldest currently living American, was born). The chart shows what percent of the lifetime of someone born that year the US has been at war. Right off – for anyone born 2001 or after it is 100%. Those born about the time the Afghanistan War began are now old enough to fight in it. Nearly a quarter of Americans have never known a time without war.

We’ve been at war for 35% of Hester Ford’s life. We’ve been at war for 45% of my life.

For this chart Bump didn’t include minor skirmishes, like the invasion of Panama or Grenada. He limited the definition to declared wars: WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, and Afghanistan.

Bump notes that the Afghanistan war does not feel as immediate as WWII (the sheer scale of it) and Vietnam (when the draft sent men to death and TV brought war to our living rooms).

Which is why it’s worth noting that the conflict continues nonetheless. War isn’t — or shouldn’t be — just an ongoing presence in the background, something that’s simply there over the course of our lives. For most of those 78 million Americans, though, that’s exactly what it has been.

Bill in Portland, Maine, who writes a weekday Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos, reminds us and tries to remind the media that during the last unnecessary war who got it right? The liberals did. So as we face another unnecessary war listen to them.

The liberals knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. The liberals knew we were being flat-out lied to. The liberals knew we'd win the war and lose the peace. The liberals knew every propaganda tactic the conservatives threw at us, up to and including planting a male hooker in the White House press corps to toss out softball questions, and passing off staged news conferences as actual news stories. The liberals followed the mountains of money being bulldozed to the coffers of incompetent private “reconstruction” companies run by Republican cronies. And we knew the real death toll.

We nailed the Iraq War fraud. The beforehand, the duringhand, the afterhand.
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The credible voices still come from Dirty Liberal Hippie Land. We have the best bullshit detectors, and the best memories. Full stop.

Kerry Eleveld, also of Daily Kos sees one bid difference between the war the nasty guy seems to be trying to start and the one Bush II started. Voters already know the nasty guy is a serial liar. He doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt – at least not from citizens (news outlets are another matter).

The Daily Kos quote from last Friday:

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
~~Arundhati Roy

As part of a longer discussion of the nasty guy Propane Jane tweeted:

We’ve reached the moment where we don’t just need to be in the streets clamoring for Trump’s removal b/c he’s unfit, corrupt and incompetent, but because dissociating ourselves from him is necessary for our collective safety and survival. The world needs to see us apart from him.

There were lots of protests last Saturday (images here). More today, and I hope they went well. I wasn’t a part of them this time, though I’ve been a part of protests several times over the last three years.

One of my favorite comic strips was Calvin and Hobbes which ended 24 years ago (my sisters know well that another favorite was Peanuts). I was delighted to learn there is a Calvin and Hobbes Twitter account, which is now posting some of the old strips. I learned this when someone linked to a strip that is excellent commentary of this past week. So I’ll let Calvin and Hobbes have the last word on today’s discussion of war. Click here and here (though you may have to click on the image to see the full text).

A Methodist divorce

A Plan of Separation had been negotiated between progressives and conservatives to split the United Methodist Church. The plan will be voted on during General Conference in May. You can find more details in my brother blog.

You haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying.

I read through the transcript of another podcast from Gaslit Nation, this one titled A New Era of Cyberwar. Hosts Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior brought on Andy Greenberg of WIRED. His latest book is Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt or the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers.

Perhaps I should start with an explanation of the series title Gaslit Nation. There were movies made in Britain in 1940 and America in 1944 with the title Gaslight. In both of them a female character is repeatedly told that what she sees and hears is not true. The term gaslighting means a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is manipulated into doubting their own reality, to undermine their confidence and credibility.

Kendzior and Chalupa are saying that the nasty guy, the GOP, and the entire transnational crime syndicate in which they operate is gaslighting the entire nation. An example is the brazen attempts to declare that Ukraine hacked the 2016 election and not Russia.

Here’s Greenberg’s summary of the book:

This is a story about a cyberwar that unfolded in Ukraine that the world has watched unfold without reacting, without coming to the defense of this country in the shadow of Russia. As a few, Cassandra has warned that this cyberwar was going to spill out to the rest of the world, and it did. That is the arc of the book. By the time that we felt the effects of this cyberwar in the West, it was too late. I think that you guys have told the story of Ukraine as something of like a canary in a coal mine for the West, and this story kind of mirrors that as well.

Ukraine is a land caught between East and West. It is the borderlands, the pawn that both sides fight over. Through history it has been intertwined with Russia. Chalupa has said many times, “It’s a miracle that Ukraine as a country even exists.” Ukranians want what they see in London or LA – to be able to rules themselves and not be anyone’s pawn.

At the moment Russia wants to pull Ukraine back into its sphere of influence. So Russia does to Ukraine what it intends to do to the rest of the world. And one of the first things they did was meddle in the Ukrainian election in 2014, two years before they would do the same thing in America. To understand Putin and what he intends for the world look at what he’s doing in Ukraine.

In December of both 2015 and 2016 Russia hacked the Ukraine power grid and turned off the power to hundreds of thousands of people. Greenberg made the connection and wrote about it in WIRED. The day that issue hit the newsstands the NotPetya cyberattack hit Ukraine and spread to the rest of the world. Greenberg didn’t think his prediction would come true quite that fast. From the book’s introduction about what happened in Ukraine:

ATM and credit card payment systems inexplicably dropped offline, mass transit and the country's capital of Kyiv was crippled. Government agencies, airports, hospitals, and the postal service, even scientists monitoring radioactivity levels at the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, all watched helplessly as practically every computer in their network was infected and wiped by a mysterious piece of malicious code. This is what cyberwar looks like. An invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization.

In America one big effect was all 17 of the shipping terminals owned by Maersk were paralyzed. Ships arrived at these ports and could not be unloaded.

Because most of the damage was in Ukraine, the world barely noticed.

Partly why we didn’t notice was the big companies that were hit didn’t want to talk about it.

And our government, starting with Obama, ignored it, thinking it was just Ukraine’s problem. They’re not even in NATO.

One group of hackers is called Sandworm because some of the stuff associated with their malware references the science fiction novel Dune. So hackers who crossed all sorts of red lines deserved rebuke and punishment, which didn’t happen. The nasty guy has this big blindspot whenever there is talk of what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

The idea for these cyberattacks came from Stuxnet. This was the first malware designed to destroy something in the physical world. At a time when Iran was using centrifuges to enrich uranium this malware, created by the US and Israel, was introduced to the facility housing the centrifuges. The malware instructed them to do crazy things, which destroyed them.

Did we prevent Iran from making a nuclear bomb or stop Israel from attacking Iran? Perhaps. But we also gave Russia the idea for hackers to mess with power plants. There’s one difference – Russian hackers, Kremlin people in general, are willing to cause massive collateral damage and let civilians be harmed or killed. Stuxnet was targeted. NitPetya was not.

Some of us still think that we go “over there” to fight wars. Our oceans protect us. But cyberwarfare is without borders. Malware can easily hop an ocean. Greenberg:

Sandworm, to me, seems to be this kind of collection of motives, these disruptive acts of massive sabotage. They do send a message to the West. They say, "We have this ability, if you mess with us, we can turn off your power, we can unleash destructive worms in America." That does box in what I think the US is willing to do in Syria, in Ukraine, for instance, when we know that that capability is in Russian hands. But there's also almost terroristic effect of these attacks. They are their own sort of influence operation. They make Ukrainians scared. They make Ukrainians lose confidence in their own governments. They try to make Ukraine look like a failed State. That is, I think part of their intention.

There may be other motives for their actions. One motive might be massive machismo – I created this tool and I’m going to use it. I don’t care about the consequences of my actions. Another motive might be petty – since Russia was banned from the 2018 Olympics for doping they may have been the ones behind the hack of the Olympic computer systems. If Russia can’t enjoy the Olympics, no one will.

Greenberg again:

Hackers in countries like Iran and North Korea and Russia, they have a kind of insurgent mentality. I think they want to blow things up in part because that is how you destabilize the global order and put yourself in a better position. Whereas, the US, and even China, they use their cyber capabilities very strategically just to advance their own interests, and in a way, that is often pretty restrained and limited. Even in China's case, it's really just espionage for the most part.

And, of course, the Chinese are using these tools against their own citizens. As for the US, they have teams trying disrupt the attacks of others. But their efforts are very targeted against only the perpetrators. American teams could be causing blackouts, but are careful not to.

How to counter this? “Banks, not tanks.” Diplomacy and sanctions, not warfare. At the very least, calling it out. Greenberg said:

Why don't we see more White House statements about these unacceptable cyber attacks saying this is a red line? The arena of cyber warfare is one where the red lines are still being drawn. If you don't call out unacceptable attacks, then you essentially are telling the adversary, "Well, you haven't crossed the red line yet. Keep trying." And that's what they've done.

There should be a Geneva Convention for the internet around cyberwar. Such things as touching a hospital or a power grid are considered a war crime.

Completely beholden

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the latest revelations in a mystery in the nasty guy’s past. Deutsche Bank gave him some huge loans. Why would they take that chance?

The question of why Deutsche Bank would extend a series of huge loans to Trump has been dangling since before he ever announced his candidacy for president on a golden escalator ride. When Trump first went to Deutsche Bank, he was worse than broke. He had just finished bankrupting multiple casinos in New Jersey, and then had convinced investors to back a takeover of those casinos at a fraction of the original value. Then Trump deliberately allowed the investment group to go bankrupt so he could grab the whole deal himself at a fraction of what his investors had paid. Then he went bankrupt. Again. And along the way he was socked with a massive fine for money laundering at his now bankrupt (again) casino.

Trump was so fiscally radioactive that no American bank would let him in the door. But Deutsche Bank turned around and gifted Trump with loans that gave him a fresh start and an apparently miracle turnaround of his New York real estate empire. Those loans have always been the subject of head-scratching over just what Deutsche Bank could have been thinking. But if Forensic News is right, what Deutsche Bank was thinking was that it wasn’t risking a damn thing, because the Russian government was actually vouching for Trump through VTB Bank. If Trump didn’t come through, Vladimir Putin was offering to make it good.
…
If [these allegations] are true, this would show that Donald Trump was 100% dependent on the Russian government for his “big comeback.” It would mean that he was completely beholden to Putin for his real estate, for his golf courses, for his candidacy—for everything.

History’s greatest daylight robbery

Public Citizen tweeted:

Wealth of 400 richest Americans:

2009: $1.27T
10: $1.37T
11: $1.5T
12: $1.7T
13: $2T
14: $2.3T
15: $2.3T
16: $2.4T
17: $2.7T
18: $2.9T
19: $3T

Federal Minimum Wage:

2009: $7.25
10: $7.25
11: $7.25
12: $7.25
13: $7.25
14: $7.25
15: $7.25
16: $7.25
17: $7.25
18: $7.25
19: $7.25

Yeah, the wealth of the 400 richest families more than doubled in ten years. This isn’t about the rich amassing more money. This is about making sure the poor stay poor.

Kimberly Adams of NPR’s Marketplace and Jesse Drucker of the New York Times reported that the 2017 GOP tax cut law was so hastily written that it is full of holes. These aren’t necessarily loopholes that we frequently hear about. These are cases where the law didn’t specify everything and the IRS has to come up with rules and regulations to make it all work.

Not surprisingly, corporate lobbyists watched that rulemaking process closely and lobbied to shape them to corporations’ advantage. When the feedback on new rules is 99% from corporations it is hard not to bend to their desires, especially with the nasty guy is the boss. But it means collecting hundreds of billions of dollars less than the law projected.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the effect of those 2017 GOP tax cuts and those IRS rules. He calls it “history’s greatest daylight robbery.”

The result is a budget deficit that has jumped over 50% since Trump took office—a deficit that will top $1 trillion in 2020.
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It won’t be until after the election that Republican leaders will determine that, sadly, something must be done about America’s new sea of red ink. By destroying Social Security, Medicare, and every program intended to help the poor.