Republican Daddies and Democratic Mummies

I’ve never understood any of this. Usually even on the crazy stuff I can figure out why people believe it, but this? Trump’s a crook, and has always been one. He could have been prosecuted on a number of fraud and labor laws at any time over the past twenty years, and has continued with prosecutable corruption since his election. Neither other politicians nor the media have made an issue of that.

Then there are the allegations about Russian interference in the election. We’ve established a system so opaque and so apparently corrupted that the usual ways of checking on honest elections, like exit polls, don’t give the right answer. Any addressing of this issue has focused on stopping troll farms on social media rather than serious reforms like paper ballots publicly counted, voting rights enforcement, transparency laws with regard to political/issue funding.

So I can understand why totally corrupt leaders would put on this show, but I don’t understand at this point how it can have any effect whatsoever on anybody outside their cocktail party lists.

Che Pasa has the general dynamic correct: these people are all too fucking old, they all came of political age in a different time, and they fear Republican backlash if they exercise any power in governance without asking permission first. It’s not because Pelosi is rich, although it doesn’t help. It’s that she doesn’t want to take a risk and endanger her majority because of her own political upbringing and experience taught her that taking such risks only spur backlash. And with no hope in the Senate “what’s the point?”

Of course, it’s not Morning in America anymore, the 1990’s are over, and there is growing support for increased liberalism. There’s not much evidence I can see that there would be any kind of backlash to exercising this power, but no one cares about evidence anymore. The media declared it a failure, so it is.

As far as Mueller, I don’t think his being a Republican really affected his decisions either, but I do think Trump successfully intimidated him. Many campaign finance experts for example believe Don Jr. clearly should have been charged/indicted, and I think if it was anyone else he probably would have. Maybe not, all our campaign finance laws are being junked under “free speech” rights under this Supreme Court anyway.

With the recess upon us, flooding Congressional townhalls when the critters go back home would probably be worthwhile. Pelosi is complicit, she’s also a coward and derelict of her duty. However, she can also count votes. If the votes move, she’ll move.

I agree. It wasn’t just Democrats but the Establishment in general who wanted Mueller to save their asses and get rid of Trump. In fact, the Establishment has serially anointed virtually every Republican who issued some random, unserious peep against Trump. Invariably, after taking a quick star turn in the media, they folded immediately back into the brothel of cowardly whores that is the Republican party. They even did this with a career hack like William Barr. He lobbied to be Trump’s hitman at the DOJ, but that was supposed to be OK because he was deemed an “institutionalist” –until of course he wasn’t. Then they moved on to Pelosi, the grand strategist, the 52-dimensional chess player. But Pelosi’s strategy her whole career has been to do nothing. In Pelosi-speak, this is called “leadership.” She just waits until the pendulum that swings toward Bush or Trump swings back in her direction. When people get sick enough of Republicans, then they will come back for a cycle or two to the Democrats. Standing for anything, fighting for anything (other than as Ian says, her rich friends) are just so much wasted energy. The thing is if Trump has been derelict in the discharge of his duty, Nancy is being equally derelict in hers by failing to hold him to account as prescribed by the Constitution.

End of first part of comment.

I once read that Thomas Jefferson was a terrible public speaker; He had an irritating voice and people couldn’t stand listening to him. But boy howdy, that man could write. His fingerprints are on so many of this country’s founding documents. hat is what his reputation is based on.

Mueller and his staff wrote two reports. The hearings today got him to agree that once Trump leaves the presidency his actions are indictable. Many of his staff lied under oath for him, he colluded with the Russians. What more is needed? As Mueller kept repeating, “Read the reports.” The man isn’t a movie star, how do people expect him to act?

Have the citizens and “journalists” of this country become so inbred that they need action movie type drama to understand that? Edward R Murrow must be rolling in his grave.

As for Mueller, I think that what has gotten shorted in the media’s sanctification of Mueller and his investigation was the institutional view. What I mean is the Iron Law of Commissions (and/or probes, investigations, etc.) Commissions and special investigations are sold to us rubes as impartial attempts to get at the truth. What they actually are are mechanisms to kick the can down the road until such time as we rubes have forgotten, our tempers have cooled, or the waters have been sufficiently muddied. On top of this, commissions can be limited by their budget and timeframe. But the really fundamental way the product of a commission is controlled is by who gets named to them (or put another way who does the naming) and what the scope of the commission is. I learned much of this from studying the 9/11 Commission. It was at least the third such commission. The White House had operatives in its structure. They sought to limit its time, budget, and access to White House officials. Very specifically the Commission was prohibited from assigning blame. And most of its recommendations were left to twist in the wind for a considerable time. So what does this have to do with Mueller?

Mueller was chosen by Rod Rosenstein, the then Deputy Attorney General, after AG Sessions had recused himself. What is important to remember about Rosenstein is that he wrote a memo laying the ground work for the firing of Jim Comey, the FBI director, on the basis of his handling of the Clinton emails when Rosenstein knew at the time that the real reason was the Russia investigation. (https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/23/what-rod-rosenstein-knew-when-he-helped-trump-fire-comey/)

In doing this, Rosenstein obstructed justice, as set out in 18 US Code 1505:

“Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication influences, obstructs, or impedes or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law under which any pending proceeding is being had before any department or agency of the United States, or the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had by either House, or any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress—

Shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.”

Rosenstein did not want to name a special counsel at all, but was eventually pressured into it. So in some really fine CYA, he chose someone who was credible but would defer to him and the DOJ (a godsend to AG Barr when he decided to hijack the report) and stay within the limited scope of the inquiry as he Rosenstein laid it out. Mueller a conservative Republican with a long history in law enforcement and even longer deference to the chain of command was the perfect candidate. On top of this, Rosenstein oversaw Mueller and could tabs on his activities.

If the Establishment media had not been so enthralled with Rosenstein and Mueller, and the narrative they wove around them, the tells were there. First, the primary objective of the investigation should have been interviewing Trump under oath or before a grand jury. They knew what the political considerations were, the appeals process in the courts, and election timing. Everything should have been scheduled with this in mind. So Mueller’s it got late in the process and we ran out of time does not ring true. Second, the media created this narrative that Mueller was working his way up from small fish to bigger and bigger fish. But this too was untrue. Mueller had fairly early on both Mike Flynn and Rick Gates (Manafort’s chief lieutenant) under the gun and cooperating. So he started out near the top. But then seemed to go nowhere particular with them. Third, if you want to be taken seriously, you go hard and you go heavy with your indictments to send a message to all concerned that they better deal early and fruitfully, or else. But Mueller’s indictments went exactly the other way. People like Papadopoulos were undercharged and received barely a slap on the wrist. Later, when Manafort (essentially a career criminal reneged on his deal, something Mueller et al should have seen coming for miles) this opposite message had been sent and was received by Manafort’s judges who sentenced him more lightly (the inequality of our justice system) as a white collar offender and not an inveterate criminal. Fourth, after we saw the report, several other pulled punches became evident. Mueller did not follow Trump’s finances. With Trump, a life long crook himself, if you want to understand him and his actions, you follow the money. This was a no-brainer. Mueller could have but did not name Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator or state that only Trump’s position as President and DOJ policy precluded his indictment. He could have talked about collusion, its association with conspiracy, and while not itself a named criminal offense, certainly a term that does occur in the law. He could have and should have indicted Don Jr. on lying to Congress at the least, and possibly Kushner as well for his pattern of lying on government forms about his Russian and other connections, and certainly Rosenstein. Fifth, then there was the whole, here’s the report, I’m done hand off to Barr who immediately sat on it, lied about it, and hacked and edited it to pieces. This elicited a brief ten minute response from Mueller, looking very tired, and another I’m done. Then the final Congressional subpoena, delay, testimony, and final now I’m really done. Speculation on my part, but Mueller’s health may have determined the timing of the report’s release but not its overall content and trajectory. The report does show that Trump obstructed justice on multiple occasions and that the Russians were certainly trying their best to meddle in the election, with highly debatable results. But as a conservative Republican, Mueller was not going to do Nancy Pelosi’s work for her. And Pelosi is not going to do her work if she can possibly avoid it. So there we are.

Final thought:
Said it once and I’ll say it again. The revolution won’t be televised because it will never happen until enough people don’t have a television.

TV is revolution kryptonite. Don’t think for a second the media owners aren’t banking on that fact. Just keep you slack jawed and compliant b/c you don’t want to miss the latest installment of Survivor.

Worthless junkies.

Trump is good for Israel, that is the answer.

I commented about the Mueller investigation a couple of years prior. I had it right. Spot on, in fact. This isn’t rocket science. It’s perception management.

Don’t Get Your Hopes Up

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Lawyers are scumbags. I have yet to meet one or know of one who is worthy of my respect. They are the worst of civilization. They’re even worse than pedophiles, and that’s pretty f*cking bad. Why are they worse than pedophiles? Because lawyers have the ability to do much more damage than pedophiles. Pedophiles can only damage one victim at a time as horrible & heinous as that is, but lawyers, especially government lawyers, can ruin millions, nay tens of millions and perhaps even hundreds of millions, of lives with their diabolical “legal” machinations.

I have no faith whatsoever that justice will come from Rod Rosenstein’s (imagine that — a Jewish Lawyer — I didn’t know there was such a thing!!) appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. The following Politico article validates my assertion. It didn’t inform my assertion, it validated it.

Lawyers suck. Shakespeare had it right — what he said is as relevant today as it was centuries ago. They are evil Incarnate. If you believe Mueller can be independent & objective in this endeavor, you are a fool and I have some swampland to sell you in the Arizona Desert. No lawyer is independent & objective, especially Robert Mueller despite the lamestream media’s admiration for him & his “stellar, impeccable credentials.” Prove me wrong. I want to be wrong, but I know I’m not.

Mueller’s Law Firm’s Clients Could Cause ‘Wrinkle’ In Appointment

Robert Mueller could face one significant issue with his appointment as special counsel to lead the Justice Department’s investigation into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: The law firm he’s worked at since 2014 has represented several prominent players in Trump’s bid for the White House.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner are all clients of Wilmer Hale, the firm Mueller is leaving to assume the position of special prosecutor overseeing the high-profile Russia election probe.

One prominent expert on government ethics rules said Wednesday that lawyers entering federal service would normally be required to recuse themselves from decisions regarding individuals who were represented by the new official’s former firm.

“It’s a possible wrinkle in all off this,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor and former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. “Usually, there would be a one-year cooling off period.”

More at the link behind the title.

Robert Mueller, appointed FBI director by George W. Bush, was the genius behind turning the FBI into a highly contrived, and illegal in my opinion, counterterrorism unit that creates terrorist plots out of thin air and recruits unwitting, basically retarded, Americans to engage in terrorist acts. Do you trust this geriactric, aristocratic ass to find justice in regard to anything Trump has done and will do? If you do, you’re an IDIOT!!! He has been appointed for containment purposes only, not to find or bring justice. He will drag this out for many years to the point most people will forget about it and not care any longer. This born-with-a-silver -spoon-in-his-mouth old codger works for the plutocracy because he’s one of the plutocracy. He always was and always will be until the day he dies. The containment crew is being called in to mitigate the spectacle & contain the damage. Mueller’s one of the wealthy elite. He has nothing but disdain for the little people. Wake up, people!! The foxes are guarding the hen houses, and I have some news for you, Trump is not a hen. You are.

Here’s an article from Rolling Stone about the FBI’s new mission set in motion by George W. Bush and the then FBI director, Robert Mueller. What a bunch of sick, twisted, sadistic bully boys. These people are about as anti-democratic as one can be. They rival Putin’s Russia in their mendacity. And we’re to believe they will be independent & objective about Trump’s chronic criminality? Give me a break. Get the f*ck out of here. How stupid do you think people are? Nevermind, you’re right, they’re pretty f*cking stupid.

How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing ‘Terrorists’ – and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

The feds have seized an Orwellian power – the power to decide which ideas are dangerous, regardless of the genuine threat they pose.

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that’s because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. (“They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items,” one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. “I’m not sure,” he responds, “I just downloaded it last night.”) It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that’s not what they’re doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

To see how, travel with me to rural Florida, and another arrest that occurred at almost exactly the same time. On April 28, members of American Front, a white-supremacist group labeled “a known terrorist organization” in the affidavit justifying the arrest, took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake “Occupy” signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida. No script, no choreography for maximal impact on sensation-hungry news broadcasts, no melodramatic press conference with a U.S. attorney and FBI Special Agent in Charge; this arrest only went down after an informant working with state law enforcement fled in fear for his or her life after being threatened by the group’s leader Marcus Faella with a 9mm pistol. And though the media reported the involvement of a “joint terrorism task force of FBI and local law enforcement” the arresting affidavit does not even mention federal law enforcement; the charges filed were state, not federal. A circuit court judge scrawled a bail amount of $51,250; that was accidentally knocked down to $500. The Cleveland anarchists were held without bond.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat. That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

Who else are we supposed to be afraid of? Certainly animal-rights and environmental radicals. In 2006, when FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the indictments of Animal Liberal Front activists who burned down a horse-rendering plant in 1997, harming no humans, he called such property destruction one of the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.” We’re supposed to be afraid of Muslims, of course – though not even necessarily Muslim militants. In a sting stunningly anatomized on a Pulitzer-worthy This American Life episode from 2005 the target, British citizen Hemant Lakhami, known as “Habib,” was an Indian-born Willy Loman, so dumb he referred to night-vision goggles, which he’d never heard of, as “sunglasses” and so broken down and desperate for attention he told the federal informant he had full-sized submarines to sell. He was egged by the informant into selling him Stinger missiles (Lakhami had approached him hoping to sell him mangoes). Upon Lakhami’s terrorism conviction then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie stepped up to the press conference microphones to announce, “Today is a triumph for the Justice Department in the war against terror. I don’t know that anyone can say that the state of New Jersey, and this country, is not a safer place without Hemant Lakhani trotting around the globe attempting to broker arms deals.”

But don’t worry your pretty little heads over the epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55 cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and carry them out. It’s just too bad for their victims they did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to tell.

I use the word “story” advisedly. Entrapment is the most literary of abuses of power: Investigators and prosecutors become as unto little Stephen Kings, feeding into, and feeding, the fear centers of our lizard brains in order to manipulate their audience. Unsurprisingly, the tactic crops up whenever the powers that be are themselves most frightened for their power, such as during the 1960s, when instigation of criminal acts by agents provacateurs infiltrating the anti-war movement became extremely prevalent. When one of the accused Chicago 7 left the courtroom just as a witness for the prosecution left the stand, the other six became horrified when it became clear that the guy who had just got up (actually to go to the bathroom) was a plant about to testify against them.

The antiwar movement soon learned whom to be afraid of: people who don’t quite fit in, who always seemed ready to volunteer for anything (if you’re on the FBI payroll, you don’t need a job), people pressing violence when everyone else in the room preferred peace. In the 1972 “Camden 28” trial of Catholic left conspirators who tried to steal and destroy registration records from a local draft board, the star witness got his breaking-and-entering training from the FBI and swore in court that the accused never would have raided the building absent his leadership. Although the people the FBI preferred to recruit were the sort who had trouble keeping jobs anyway. They were frequently mentally unstable: the agent provocateur whose recordings got twenty-three members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War indicted for supposedly conspiring to attack the 1972 Republican National Convention with “lead weights, ‘fried’ marbles, ball bearings, cherry bombs … wrist rockets, slingshots, and cross bows” had received a psychological discharge from the Army. And they were usually criminals. In the Harrisburg 7 trial of in 1972 (in which the feds fantastically claimed that a pacifist priest, some nuns, and their confreres intended to blow up the steam tunnels beneath Washington, D.C.) the prosecution’s star witness had offered himself to the FBI as an undercover New Lefty from the jail cell where he was serving time for so many crimes the U.S. Attorney had classified him as a “menace to society.”

The entrapment game still works the same. In the case documented on This American Life, informant “Habib” was such a notorious liar, thief, and con man that the feds deactivated him – until after September 11, when suddenly “different FBI bureaus were fighting” for his services. The key informant in the Animal Liberation Front arrests was a truck thief and heroin addict. The dude in the Cleveland anarchist case, identified by thesmokinggun.com as a Donald Trump fan named Shaqil Azir, had convictions for cocaine possession, robbery, and passing bad checks – and was also under a current check-fraud indictment the FBI covered up in its affidavit. They also neglected to mention his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court.

Such choices are a feature, not a bug: Criminals with cases pending are able to act more convincingly as, well, criminals, and will do anything the government asks to reduce their sentences; sociopaths are better able to manipulate the emotions of macho young men. The play’s the thing. Although sometimes the play becomes too convincing: In the Watergate hearings in 1973, some of the witnesses testified that hearing about VVAW’s violent plans to disrupt the Republican convention were what convinced them it was OK to break laws on behalf of their president.

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, “We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government.” You don’t see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. “Such tactics” are just not a very big deal any more.

You know what else has changed? You and I – to our shame. Entraptment is illegal – but the question of whether law enforcement set up a legal sting or illegal entrapment is for a jury to decide. Entrapment was why juries acquitted the defendants in the Camden, VVAW, and Harrisburg cases. “How stupid did those people in Washington think we were?” a Harrisburg juror told a reporter. The feds don’t have to worry about folks like that any more. Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them with offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

The civil liberties of the Florida white supremacist Marcus Faella, at least, have been honored. He was out on bail the day he was arrested. There’s no police informant to monitor his activities any more, but not to fear. His experiments in attempting to produce the deadly toxin ricin, according to the Florida affidavit, have not so far been successful. And Connor Stevens, heard on the menacing video shown on Cleveland news saying that his favorite part of Occupy protests ” is meeting people walking down the street, average people, talking to them, hearing about how they’re affected by the economy, by the justice system, things like that”? He is safely behind bars. So, for the rest of his life, is Hemant Lakhami, the hapless Stinger missile salesman. The man who put him there, Chris Christie, is now the celebrated governor of New Jersey, and was all but begged by his fellow to run for president. Republicans think he tells a good story.

“Those are the simple truths”

Not interested in these particular simple truths. There are far deeper agendas at play. E.g., George Webb has pointed out that 4 US intelligence assets have been misrepresented as Russian Spies:

July 24th, 2019. Did Mueller’s Team Commit Prosecutorial Malpractice. Or Malfeasance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWizejQdd4c

Webb also says not to trust Barr (who did, after all, start out his career in the CIA).

The coup-like intelligence operation against Trump had roots in British intelligence, something our Republican and Democratic friends seem ignorant of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRQaVwohEiU&t=2268s More to the point, they act like they want to remain ignorant.

That’s one sure way for us sheeple to remain ignorant, isn’t it?

Robert Mueller’s Deep State affiliation is far more relevant than his Republican affiliation.

Not surprising for the guy who was FBI director when this went down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hycank4AxBo

Ole Bob didn’t exactly get to the bottom of that one, either!

450.org

Hey now. Easy on the lawyers. There are those of us out there who are continually trying to use what little power my license gives me to make the world a better place one client, one 501c3, and one argument at a time.

The problem isn’t the lawyer per se, but the adversarial English common law system. Do a dive into the European. Ivil law system and see if lawyers still get the same bad rap.

Like any profession, the sociopaths seem to rise most quickly to the top because capitalism rewards sociopathic wealth accumulation behaviors. Same with politics. The two party system is designed off the legal system that bore it — adversarial.

@ ponderer

The DKos readership, like much of older, suburban professional-class electoral base of the Democratic Party, is living inside its own delusional bubble. Mueller and Russia,Russia,Russia is just one of many gaslit rooms in a mansion of many such rooms.

re: Mueller as a lawyer

The charge that Mueller is a bit of an entrapment artist has some force. And, not just because he charges the cover-up rather than the crime. He also focused his prosecutorial resources on technicalities rather than his investigatory resources on establishing facts. It made for a crappy report, with either sweeping theses with no support in factual detail or propositions framed as empty negatives. Ultimately, Mueller carried water for the Intelligence Community in empty buckets and his inability to find some moral force for his prosecutorial zeal, such as it was, doomed his effort to irrelevance.

It is not the Mommy Party v the Daddy Party — both of those metaphors imply moral force of some character. But, I think at this point, neither Party has any moral force left. Each was looking to the other Party to come up with some. And they have nada.

Hey Ian,

What was that you said recently about Markos pulling up the ladder?
Couldn’t find the tweet.

For himself and a bunch of would-be political consultants who helped him start the site and hung around until they were hired by candidates or office-holders. 

Once they were in, the goal was achieved.

Then they got bored. Being political playahs wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Moulitsas through things like Netsroots appropriates the progressive label and applies it to a bunch of center-right policies and politicians. Also have you noticed in the MSM there is no Left? There is only a Far Left and this gets applied to anything that is not center-right.

People put way too much stock in politicians. Anybody who puts their faith in Pelosi or Sanders or AOC or Trump or any of these people is foolish. That is why I don’t understand people who ruin friendships and family relationships over politics. Your inner circle of family and friends might be there for you if you end up in a bad spot but not any of these politicians.

As far as less affluent people supporting Pelosi and the Democrats, some do it out of naked partisanship (“Team Blue vs. Team Red”) or because of identity politics or social issues or because they figure that voting for the lesser of two evils is worth it which is not something that I would sneeze at. “Support” doesn’t always mean that you are a fervent supporter. You can give qualified support to bad politicians because you think the alternative is worse. That is why I understand why some people still vote for the Democrats even if they find them disappointing. The same could be said for people who dislike the Republicans but vote for them because of their stance on abortion or some other issue that makes them lean to the GOP instead of the Democrats even if they don’t really like either party.

Blizzard has advocated here that the dead students and teachers and grieving parents and first responders at Sandy Hook Elementary School are crisis actors, and that those dead students and teachers are not dead. Sucks but, the Blizzard of Ooze is pretty easy to ignore.

The second round of the farcical democratic party debates should be enlightening if not entertaining. Brought to you by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.

I’m not arguing against M4A, but what exactly does M4A look like with unstoppable tsunamis of refugee migration coupled with the deleterious health effects of climate change (chronic kidney disease) and the runaway price of technological innovation in extending lives?

Last time I checked, hunter-gatherers didn’t have dialysis and insulin. When their time came, they laid down under a tree and died instead of bankrupting the village.

Bill Hicks

Due to highly restrictive ballot rules here is literally no way to run for a national public office unless you run as a dem or repub.

Sanders has far more chance running as a democratic socialist in the dem party than he would running as a democratic socialist in a democratic socialist party.

——-

About the age thing–young voters under 45 prefer the oldest candidate, Sanders, by far. It’s not age but policy, or we’d all be in on Teacher’s Pet Pete candidacy. The vast majority of pols dem or repub are repugnant no matter the age. Age is useful for someone as an identity politics tool, but it’s not useful for the rest of us.

The “legal but not legitimate” rubric becomes a “one’s own petard” one becomes hoist on if Sanders were to win by an electoral majority but a popular vote non-majority.

If that were to happen, and a President Sanders were to find himself thereby delegitimized, the hustlers of that “legal but not legitimate” canard will have only themselves to blame.

Absent forcing slave labor to produce the dialysis machines and administer the dialysis, you can only minimize the costs so much.

You don’t get to the doctor much, do you? Price gouging is common today in the medical, pharma and insurance industries. In my own personal experience, it’s far worse than even just 20 years ago.

No matter who you are if you win the electoral college but not the popular vote, your Presidency isn’t legitimate. Erecting strawmen gets us nowhere.

bruce07, perhaps you have trouble with the legal concepts. As was said about Nixon, it wasn’t the crime, but the coverup that ended with his impeachment and resignation.With the case for obstruction clearly laid out in the Mueller report, what will get him done in, if he is, is his coverup. Similarly, with the Trump Tower meeting, it isn’t the content, it is that it happened at all. How is the weather in Saint Petersburg BTW?

Somebody here once suggested a M4A system which was ‘mixed economy’, where patients could choose between government, private or some combination.

Sadly, the actual competition between different public and private systems, all competing to check and balance each other, would resemble capitalism. That would be risky. Everybody knows that normally functioning capitalist societies always lead to totalitarian communism.

Hugh, with Nixon there actually was a crime, the investigation and prosecution of which Nixon actually obstructed.

As Mueller has insisted repeatedly, no attempt to reach a judgment on, let alone build a case for, obstruction was made. Without an underlying crime, obstructing the investigation and prosecution of which would be the objective of an alleged obstruction, it would be very hard to establish criminal intent.

The weather this Sunday in Russia’s federal city on the Baltic is still quite warm, but a shower is expected to introduce cooler days ahead.

Do I read 450.org correctly, as saying that climate change causes kidney disease?

If so, can anybody de-mystify this shocking claim? It seems quite insane, to me.

Google it, metamars. Apparently it is a line of active speculation by serious people.

Thank you, Blizz, for hitting us over the head with your toxic bigotry just in case any of us were unsure.

I invite everyone to re-read the statute I cited above. It says nothing about needing an underlying crime to be successfully pulled off before coming into force. It is not especially hard to make a case for intent when you have a stable genius surrounded by attorneys ten times as chronicled in the Mueller report engaging in obstruction.

Mueller made no judgment about a crime because it was DOJ policy not to indict a sitting President and Rosenstein chose Mueller precisely because he knew Mueller would stay within the guidelines he and the DOJ prescribed. But as Mueller said in his short May 29, 2019 presser:
“And as set forth in the report after that investigation, if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” And they, of course, hadn’t.

I agree with NR. It is bizarre that we rail here daily about the damage and destruction rule of the many by the few does to us and to our country, but somehow if those few come from places like Wyoming, it’s all OK. The problem is it’s all a con. The ordinary people of Wyoming are not that much different from the ordinary people of California and New York. But what is true is that it is much cheaper for the rich to buy the politics and politicians of low population states like Wyoming than it is high population states.

@ Hugh

Of all the regular commenters, you are the most attentive to documented facts, the most likely to make the effort to find and report relevant facts. (As in this case, the statute on obstruction.)

It is therefore almost more disturbing to me to see you embrace tendentitious partisan narratives in place of good judgment and careful, circumspect reasoning.

So, you have discovered that statute law is overbroad and leaves discretion in the hands of prosecutors. And, Justice Department policy is that prosecutors are to suspend that discretion in the case of a sitting President.

That a purely technical case for literal obstruction can be made, overlooking the fact that the investigation proceeded to its conclusion with no effective inhibition and concluded that there was, in fact, no conspiracy or (loosely) collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russian state to cover up — seems to me to make the whole controversy of two years duration nothing but a distraction, and now morally and politically irrelevant, except insofar as it has derailed politics in the U.S. for still another extended period — nothing featured in the discourse of mainstream Media has made any real sense since roughly 2008. “Outrage” of the kind you exhibit cannot be credited as genuine or sincere given the facts of the case.

It is simply not possible to have a democratic politics while arguing with such falsified passion over non-issues. Which is, i suppose, by design, at least for the tptb who hire Morning Joe and the talking idiots at CNN. What you get out of it, to align yourself with such synthesized nonsense, i cannot guess.

I decided to look at the search-retrievable Images for Ian Welsh to see where the portrait-image of Mustapha Kemal would fall. And I don’t see it anywhere. It is all the way gone. Isn’t that interesting?

Now what would really be strange is if my mention of that fact in this comment were to cause that image of Mustapha Kemal to re-appear. What if it is a Schroedinger image? What if it is here, or not-here, or here . . . for purely probabilistic reasons?

2^10 prosecutor out of control

Bruce:
“It is simply not possible to have a democratic politics while arguing with such falsified passion over non-issues.”

Well then we should scrap the entire constitution because, as I’ve said here many times, the U.S. is based entirely on an adversarial political and legal system. Theory being if we argue about stuff vehemently enough the truth is sure to fall through the cracks sooner or later.

Thus Churchill’s maxim about the U.S. getting it right after trying every other option first.

That’s all well and good in the past. However, our bicker and argue system has now brought us to ecological inflection point in which we have no time to lose.

Good lord. When will everyone realize that the problem is not Trump and stop all extrapolitical dreaming. The problem is us. We, the people, who are supposed to be smart enough not to elect people like him. Or, at least be sensible enough not to put the worst candidate in history up against him. But no. Nobody wants to do the work that it takes to be an engaged and educated voter. They’d rather do the fucking Al Bundy and sit around in front of the TV with their hand down their pants.

That is us. Full stop.

Eric: We, the people, who are supposed to be smart enough not to elect people like him. Or, at least be sensible enough not to put the worst candidate in history up against him.

Yes, but we aren’t, are we?

It does not matter how smart any of us might be individually, nor how committed to civic engagement in principle.

Politics is a team sport, a collective activity, a social process.

Politics has to be organized, and it matters by whom it is organized, for what purposes and by what means.

And, politics is about choices. But, not necessarily neat discrete choices. In a representative system, the voter chooses, well, representatives, who then argue among themselves over abstract rules.

I, personally, did not vote for either Trump or Clinton. And, i know enough math to recognize that my individual vote is beyond insignificant, and enough philosophy to recognize that the choice of President is an existential mystery, impossible to predict for its consequences.

I have said that politics is a society thinking, and i think you would be right to observe that American society is, even by its own dubious historical standards, remarkably stupid.

I think it has been made stupid, both deliberately and inadvertantly. I do not think its stupidity is individual laziness. Not to get unnecessarily Marxist, but class has something to do with it. (Saying “racism” is about class.) Deliberately poisoning politics to further corporate business interests and promote the ideas of very rich individuals is a big part of what is going wrong.

The extreme centralization of decision-making, in business and finance especially, is paralyzing the political processes. The focus of political attention on Presidential politics is a symptom of this paralyzing centralization, which is also driving a corrupting irresponsibility at all the lower levels of administration and business where most of us live and work.

Most of my acquaintances are Democrats, who are too stupid to see that Obama was a very bad President, that Hillary was a monster, and that Trump was elected in desperation. And if they were not already stupid enough, they are told Trump is a racist leading racists and that is all you need to know, shut up and, by the way, Russia,Russia,Russia. But, “smart” enough to “see” that none of this is their fault and it is foolish to think anything can or should be done about, say, ending perpetual war or enacting medicare for all.

The important thing is outvoting the racist rubes who refuse to believe in climate change, even if it is to elect Democrats who will complacently do nothing while signalling their Party’s Virtue.

Obstruction is a nothing-burger. There was a book that postulated that the average person commits 3 felonies a day. The “law” is so big and so broad that actually adhering to it is probably impossible, the ruling class like it that way. Like Epstein, the Elite don’t think those laws apply to them anyway. Only the President is supposed to be above it. It’s more than a little Ironic that a degenerate class of scum can criticize Trump for being above the law (he’s POTUS, so while he is in office, he is) at the same time they ignore their own vast crimes.

@Electorial College hate
I have been arguing for years that the NFL should use the total yardage to determine the winner. Forget field goals, they are anti democratic. For get touch downs, those are just for the hi-light real. The Russians want you to go for touchdowns. Forget that, run the ball. The winning team runs for the most yards, the rest are paid Trump bots.

NR:
“Yea,no,that’s not how it works, sorry.”

That’s exactly how it works, it’s in the Constitution. You’d think after a hundred years or so, more people would have noticed that the branch that enforces the law is necessarily “above” it. There is only one remedy, impeachment. Just like Judges and Law Enforcement giving each other “wide” latitude in what is and is not allowed. That parts’s not in the Constitution, but is has been everyday practice for a few hundred years.
It might not be desirable, but it is what it is. Don’t start confusing how you want things to be with how they really are.

bruce wilder:
“I think it has been made stupid, both deliberately and inadvertantly. I do not think its stupidity is individual laziness. Not to get unnecessarily Marxist, but class has something to do with it. (Saying “racism” is about class.) Deliberately poisoning politics to further corporate business interests and promote the ideas of very rich individuals is a big part of what is going wrong.”

Couldn’t agree more. And the TV is the direct line to the stupid making. TPTB know this chapter and verse, which is why rich people historically buy up the media. Tell me it doesn’t actively encourage lassitude.

ponderer:

“That’s exactly how it works, it’s in the Constitution.”

Okay, quote me the section of the Constitution that says “The President is above the law.”

@450.org

A-h-h-h, he apparently had the support of PART of the Deep State. He had a bunch of generals support him as a candidate. I’ve also heard they solicited him, though I don’t have confidence in this being true, and know of no evidence that it is true. Given Trump’s age, though, I certainly find this plausible. At his age, we could have expected that he would have lost the fire in his belly, and be content to play golf and lay on the beach.

Saying a bunch of generals supported him doesn’t mean they were acting in a Deep State capacity. However, certain damning things about candidate Trump were kept out of the media, so I assume the military dudes had something to do with that. That would demonstrate an illegal, or at least hidden and anti-democratic, capacity.

The Deep State is not monolithic, as any non-numbskull should be able to infer from the lethal conflicts in Syria between Pentagon proxy forces and CIA proxy forces. Recall, also, that (some power center in) the Pentagon bombed Deir Ezzor, Syria, within about a day of Kerry striking a deal with the Russians, thus blowing up agreement. The Russians concluded – rightly – that the US is not “agreement capable”. So clearly there were Deep State actors within the Pentagon who subverted Presidential authority, also, before Trump arrived on the scene.

So, for your comment to be true, all Deep State factions would have been in the tank for Trump.

And that is a laughable proposition. “Pee pee dossiers” used as reasons for FISA warrants, government spies (“informants”) placed in the Trump campaign, etc., etc. Perhaps when you’re done laughing at the Trump supporters, you can educate yourself on the elite shenanigans perpetrated against Candidate Trump, and President Trump.