Today's Must-Read: The G7 Debacle

There's a lot of commentary on how Trump's behavior at the G7 summit shows his ignorance of the mechanisms of international trade. Take this, via Digby:

From the Economist:

On trade, at one point it seemed as though Mr Trump was in search of some sort of grand bargain, as he called for the end of all subsidies, tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade. But this was more an indication of how poorly Mr Trump understands the global trading system than a serious summons to the negotiating table. Even so, combing through the joint communiqué, signs of genuine co-operation were to be found, including a commitment to agree on new rules regarding “market-distorting subsidies” and state-owned enterprises.

Of course, Trump repudiated the communiqué, but then, he'd never intended to support it anyway -- it smacks too much of cooperation with other countries. o (I'm not the only one who thinks so -- Rachel Maddow has the same take.) He's not stupid. He's not as smart as he claims, by any stretch. I wouldn't call him intelligent -- that implies the ability to learn from new evidence, and in that regard he displays the same characteristics as his more ardent worshippers: he, and they, reject anything that doesn't support what they "know" to be true. (It's no coincidence that he has such strong support among evangelicals.)

It is perhaps more surprising that Mr Trump still faces people who think he can be persuaded by facts. The Cirque du Soleil performers who entertained the G7 leaders on Friday evening were not the only ones tying themselves in knots. At the meeting, Mr Trump’s counterparts brought binders of figures to the session devoted to trade in an attempt to persuade him that his belief that the rest of the world was unfair to America was mistaken. Tellingly, the desk in front of Mr Trump was bare. He later told reporters the others had been smiling at him as if they could not believe they had got away with using America as a “piggy bank” for so long. “The gig is up,” he said.

Read the whole thing -- it's a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what was going on.

Digby has another piece that ties into this directly, in which she underscores what I just said about Trump's lack of good faith going in:

If you wanted a president who would tell his friends to go pound sand, then Donald Trump fulfilled your every wish. He went to Quebec for the G7 summit meeting with the intention of putting American allies in their place. They were to understand who was in charge and who makes the rules: The Trump States of America. On the White House lawn prior to taking off in Marine One for the Canadian summit he made it clear:

We’re going to deal with the unfair trade practices. If you look at what Canada, Mexico, the European Union, all of them have been doing to us for many, many decades, we have to change it. And they understand it’s going to happen . . . European Union treats us very unfairly. Canada, very unfairly. Mexico, very unfairly.

(If you don't understand why this is nonsense, read this from Paul Krugman, who won his Nobel Prize for his work on international trade.)

Then this got published, and Trump lost it:

I've already mentioned the attacks on Trudeau by Kudlow and Navarro. Digby offers more on Kudlow's performance:

Kudlow, who should know better but seemed somewhat "under the weather," didn't recognize the total absurdity of such pearl-clutching in light of the thuggish threats his boss has been issuing for months. But somewhere in the middle of his bleary tantrum he opened a new front, indicating to Jake Tapper that the G7 countries had been expected to kowtow to Trump and allow him to dominate their industry and trade, as a way to impress North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with Trump's manly superiority. He portrayed their unwillingness to sacrifice their own voters to make Trump look like a Real Man as a betrayal of world peace.

Kim may have led a cloistered life, but he's not that dumb. He has already shown that he largely has Trump's number, and what he didn't know before, Chinese President Xi Jinping has surely shared with him in their meetings leading up to this summit. All Trump has done is degrade the alliances between the U.S. and its closest allies for reasons that only he knows.

The reason is that the whole G7 performance was meant to show Kim Jong-Un that Trump is the alpha male, so he'd better watch his step and give Trump what he wants.

We've already seen that Kim can play Trump like a fiddle. I'm half expecting the Singapore summit to end up with a declaration of war.

Read both pieces -- the details are fascinating.

Connect the Dots

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm not prone to conspiracy theories. In this case, however, we actually are dealing with well-organized extremists who have intimidated the press into validating their bullshit, taken over statehouses by rigging elections and are trying to do the same thing to Congress, and who have, over the past thirty-five years, taken over the Republican party.

One of their favorite wedge issues is the Second Amendment, which they claim gives citizens (meaning they themselves) an unrestricted right to own assault weapons (for daily use?). Anyone who's spent two seconds thinking about it will tell you there are no unrestricted rights -- not if you want a society to function at all.

Well, now they've decided that God is on their side:

Supposedly pro-life far right wing Christian leaders are using the Bible and Jesus to claim Americans not only have a right to guns – and even assault weapons – but some insist every adult has an obligation to carry an AR-15. . . .

Here are some of the religious right's most extreme, like Gordon Klingenschmitt, claiming the Bible says “all the citizens ought to be armed so they can defend themselves against left wing crazies.” And David Barton, claiming the Founding Fathers called the right to keeping bear arms, "the biblical right of self defense."

Then there's the Family Research Council's Jerry Boykin saying when Jesus returns he'll be carrying an AR-15. That's similar to Christian pastor Chuck Baldwin, who said it's a "Biblical requirement" that every American adult (and even some younger than 18) own an AR-15 or similar assault-style weapon.

You may remember that Barton is the one who claimed that the Constitution was taken word for word from the Bible. (Given to George Washington on Mount Vernon, no doubt.)

It's easy to laugh at them, because they are, in my cousin's words, "buckso wayzo". Unfortunately, there are enough people who pay attention to them that we wound up with a con artist as president.

Now, get this:

Liberty University is planning to open a state-of-the-art shooting range on campus next fall as part of the conservative Evangelical Christian School’s commitment to promoting gun ownership and firearm sports.

University president Jerry Falwell Jr. said that Liberty’s new complex will feature pistol, rifle and shotgun facilities as well as an archery range built into the mountainside of the 7,000-acre campus near Lynchburg, Va. Falwell said the project will result in one of the most expansive firearms ranges on any U.S. college campus. The blueprints call for at least $1 million in construction and landscape improvements that will provide new opportunities for student clubs and athletic teams.

Liberty already allows guns on campus, and offers training for students to qualify for concealed carry permits.

Oh, and I mentioned something about followers:

Falwell said that he was nervous when he first spoke about the school’s firearms policy at a gathering for parents whose children were considering Liberty for their higher education.

“I was a little timid about telling parents about it because I thought some would be worried,” Falwell said. “But I never got such enthusiastic applause.”

Oh, and guess who offered their full support:

Falwell said that after meeting with National Rifle Association executive vice president and chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre, the university decided to move forward with its plans for the shooting range complex. Brad Butler, Liberty’s planning coordinator, said the NRA provided crucial expertise on best practices for safety as the school examined designs for the project.

These are the people who keep talking about a "civil war" to "take back" their country. Can you say "Onward, "Christian" Soldiers"?

Today in Disgusting People: Rhetoric (Update)

There've been too many disgusting people in the news lately to single any one of them out. Here's a brief list:

Let's start with Erick Erickson:

"There is only a one way street and the crowd that demands tolerance only wants tolerance for themselves. All others must be silenced," Erickson writes. "The political left is becoming the American ISIS."

He also throws in the required Nazi comparison.

And then there's "Coach" Dave Daubenmire, addressing more moderate (i.e., real) Christians:

"Don’t you understand what’s going on? Don’t you know it’s a war? Don’t you know they want your children? Don’t you know they’re occupying your pulpits? Don’t you understand that those same people singing ‘Jesus loves you this I know’ want to kill us?”

Then there's Pastor-Governor Mike Huckabee (who doesn't know the difference between the two):

Appearing on Fox & Friends this morning, the ex-Republican presidential candidate tied in James Hodgkinson’s shooting spree that left Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) in critical condition to a leftist movement.

“This is a bigger issue,” Huckabee said. “This is an attempt to overthrow the elected government. And I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that what we’re seeing is not necessarily an organized attempt but a widespread attempt by people who hate the results of the election. Who want to overturn it not by another election, but by violent means. By any means possible!”

The one-time Fox News host, whose daughter works for the Trump administration, went on to say that this is a much greater threat to America’s democracy than anything Russia has attempted to do.

That's just skimming the top -- or the bottom -- over the past couple of days. Two observations: these are characters who used to be on the fringes of the right; they're now being mainstreamed by the alt-right and the Trump cheerleaders at Fox (well, OK, the "independent" press in general).

Second, they're prime examples of pure projection. The overwhelming majority of incidents of political violence in the past few years have come from the right. But then, "conservatives" have all bought in to "alternative facts."

What's worrisome is the degree to which the rhetoric has ramped up: they're doing nothing more than normalizing politically motivated violence, and the rest of us will pay the price.

Update:And of course, Republicans are building on this foundation:

3. This ad is playing in the district, which Handel has condemned but not asked to be taken down https://t.co/hmTICNP1PP pic.twitter.com/a880Z9zJSy

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 19, 2017

Today's Must-Read: Beyond Trump: A Twofer

No, not what happens when The Hairpiece finally implodes, but digging deeper into how he got where he is. First, from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, the Russian reaction to the hacking hearings:

The Los Angeles Times indicates it is not only Trump knocked back on his heels. Russian hackers have been surprised by the blowback. “The story has magnified more than the Russians expected,” said William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the Rand Corp:

Traditionally, former Soviet governments were reluctant to get involved in the internal politics of America because of the risk of possible retaliation. “But Putin has been willing to do that and to take extra risks,” said Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and onetime presidential special assistant for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia.

[...]

“The fact that they were willing to do it openly suggests Putin is trying to fire a shot across the bow, in a political sense, to show that Russia has the capacity to make it look like the integrity to the U.S. elections is not as strong as Americans think it is and to undermine confidence … that the democratic process is honest,” Courtney said.

The L.A. Times report notes that Kremlin loyalists claimed Monday's congressional hearings are meant to undermine Moscow's ties with Trump:

The aim of this week’s hearings in Washington “is not to allow Trump to improve ties with Russia,” said Sergei Markov, a Moscow-based political analyst and a former lawmaker with the ruling United Russia party. “Very serious circles in the U.S. think that they can’t let Russia become a great power, that Russia should be pressed, pressed, pressed.”

Sullivan thoughtfully provides this lead-in to Digby's analysis of the Republican strategy (if we can call it that):

Just now, encouragement from Moscow cannot be helpful to a Trump administration and Republican leaders in Congress hoping to make this investigation go away quickly if not quietly.

Notes Digby:

Republicans on the committee followed Trump’s lead as best they could. Despite having backed the Patriot Act and NSA mass surveillance to the hilt in the past, nearly all of them are now born-again civil libertarians, overwhelmed with concerns for the privacy rights of average citizens as long as they are named Michael Flynn.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., did everything but beg Comey to say he was investigating newspapers and would promise to prosecute journalists. Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., went on and on about the Clinton Foundation. It was almost as if these GOP congressmen wanted to talk about anything but the Russian hacking of the election campaign.

As Politico’s Michael Crowley told Brian Williams on MSNBC last night:

There’s just an unwillingness [among Republicans] to hear the fundamental facts of what happened in this election. It’s a desire to tell a different story, to have a narrative that this is about leaks. And sure, that’s a valid point to raise and it’s a serious question. But relative to the idea that a foreign government interfered in our election, tried to distort our democracy, it just doesn’t compare. And I just saw so little concern about that on the part of he Republicans on that committee today. I just found it very strange.

(Emphasis added.)

Of course they want to talk about anything else -- Benghazi!!1, E-Mails!!1!, the Clinton Foundation, anything but Russian interference in our election. Digby hits a key fact that's been lost in the twitter storm:

Maybe Republicans have other motives for trying to downplay this growing scandal aside from partisan loyalty to a president most of them barely know. As I noted here on Salon a few weeks back, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta were not the only hacks. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was hacked as well and the information was professionally curated and disseminated by none other than the same Guccifer 2.0. The release of that information targeted close campaigns where the information could be most effectively used against the Democrats.

The New York Times published a long exposé about this last December showing exactly how the hacks were done, but amid the Trump furor it’s never been followed up. One can imagine why Republican Intelligence Committee members would prefer it never is. After all, the Russians apparently didn’t just interfere on behalf of Donald Trump. They interfered on behalf of House Republicans. Somebody might begin to wonder what they expected in return.

I'm not sure that whether the Russians expect something in return is quite the right question: My own take is that Putin is most interested in destabilizing the West as much as possible to pave the way for further territorial grabs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Exploiting divisions in the EU and NATO goes hand in hand with tampering with elections -- not only ours, but in France, Germany, even the UK. (I wonder if anyone thought to check and see if Russia had any involvement in the publicity in the run-up to the Brexit vote.)

As far as the Trump/USA arm of this strategy, aside from the hacking and leaks of Democratic e-mails, etc. (with the willing, even eager collusion of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and if you believe differently, you've been hiding in a cave), there are Trump's business dealings. I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to release his tax returns, not because of whether or not he paid income taxes, but because of where the money came from. It's widely rumored that he's up to his tiny little nuts in debt to Russian banks and oligarchs, and I think it would be foolish to discount those rumors completely. Oh, and let's not forget Trump's appointment of the CEO of Exxon/Mobil, Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State, someone who's worked on deals with the Russians before -- and who also happens to be skipping his first meeting of NATO foreign ministers but will be traveling to Russia soon. The reasons for that are painfully obvious:

Tillerson, whose relationship with the Kremlin dates back to the early 1990s, has struck several major deals with the Russian state-run corporation Rosneft and received the prestigious Order of Friendship award from Putin in 2013.

In 2014, Exxon was on the brink of signing a lucrative deal with Rosneft to drill for oil in the Russian Arctic when the US leveled sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea and invading eastern Ukraine. The Obama administration sanctioned Russia again late last month for its meddling in the presidential election.

Tillerson's close relationship with Russia and Putin, however, has led to speculation that as secretary of state, he could push for sanctions on Russia to be lifted — allowing Exxon's Arctic agreement with Rosneft, reported to be worth $500 billion, to proceed.

I'm willing to bet the substance is just as awful as the optics.

OK, there's more here than just a twofer, but these things just seem to flow together, you know?

Playing Both Ends

against the middle. And it starts to be more and more likely that the player is Putin.

A lot of people are taking it as a given that Trump is a Russian puppet; I don't know that I'd go that far, as to figure he's being actively manipulated from Moscow, but he's sensitive to where the money comes from, and a lot of it is coming from Russia. From Reuters, via Joe.My.God.:

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump downplayed his business ties with Russia. And since taking office as president, he has been even more emphatic. “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings. A Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.

The buyers include politically connected businessmen, such as a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm that works on military and intelligence facilities, the founder of a St. Petersburg investment bank and the co-founder of a conglomerate with interests in banking, property and electronics.

As far as Trump having no deals in Russia, no loans in Russia -- let's see the tax returns, Hairpiece.

I'm not the only one to have noted that one of Putin's goals is to destabilize the West, hence Trump's jabs at NATO and the EU. (An aside: I think it might prove very interesting to investigate possible ties between Russian interests and Nigel Farage -- and maybe Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, among others.)

But now it seems that Putin may be playing both ends:

YEKATERINBURG, Russia — This provincial Russian city, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, is about as unlikely a place as any to find the leader of one of the more unlikely political causes to arise in opposition to President Trump. But Louis J. Marinelli, the 30-year-old English teacher who is the president of the Yes California movement, which seeks independence for the state, has decided to call it home.

Word of “Calexit,” a quixotic idea that has floated around California for years, spread on social media after the election of Mr. Trump in November. Even though it has virtually no chance of succeeding — it would require an amendment to the Constitution — it has gained some traction in the state. Several technology industry leaders have voiced their support, and a ballot measure is in the works for the 2018 election.

Now with renewed attention on the movement, Mr. Marinelli is under scrutiny for living in a country that many in the United States see as an adversarial power.

Russians who meet Mr. Marinelli sometimes mistake him for a political refugee from the United States, assuming he would be repressed for his antigovernment positions at home.

And back in California, he is on the defensive for accepting travel expenses and office space from a Kremlin-linked nationalist group. That acceptance has raised the prospect that Russia, after meddling in the election to try to tip the vote to Mr. Trump, as United States intelligence agencies have said, is now gleefully stoking divisions in America by backing a radical liberal movement.

I think it would be a mistake to credit Putin - or Trump, for that matter -- with any particular ideology, aside from personal gain. (Yes, I think that can be an ideology -- just look at Wall Street and the banking industry. We call them "right wing", but that's really beside the point.) They're spouting nationalism in public, and Trump is on record as trashing globalism in the political sphere, and then sending Trump, Jr. off to cut deals around the world.

We live in interesting times.

Who Cares What It Costs

The general consensus is the the Republican "replacement" for the ACA stinks. Tom Sullivan discusses the whole mess at Hullabaloo:

House Republicans last night unveiled their first pass at a replacement for Obamacare. It comes in two parts. You can read the American Health Care Act here and here. There is a summary of changes here. The Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the costs of the proposal. Moments after its release, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) dubbed it Obamacare 2.0.

Basically, it's pretty much what we figured: it knocks a few million people off of Medicaid, a few million more lose their exchange policies because they get priced out of the market, it gives the wealthy a bunch of goodies, and makes a lot of money for the insurance companies -- or it would if so many people weren't unable to afford policies at all.

The most interesting aspect of this, to me, is the rush to get it to the floor for a vote.

Klein is incredulous:

After literally years of complaining Obamacare was jammed down the American people’s throats with insufficient information or consideration, the GOP intends to hold committee votes on their bill two days after releasing it, and without a Congressional Budget Office report estimating either coverage or fiscal effects. It’s breathtaking.

I don't know why everyone is surprised at the rush -- it's garbage, the Republican leadership knows it's garbage, they don't care about costs or the deficit unless they're debating a Democratic budget, it screws poor and middle-income people as well as older people, and it is a step toward erasing the last eight years (which is the major plus, as far as they're concerned).

They're seriously trying to rush it through before the opposition gets organized; they figure they can sneak it through while the press is focused on Trump's paranoid fantasies about being bugged. And they know Trump will sign it, because he'll sign anything anyone puts in front of him, and once that happens, mission accomplished.

Today's Must-Read: The Russian Factor

Josh Marshall has what I think is a pretty good summary of why the Russian hacking of Democrats' e-mails had the result it did, although I think he understates it a little:

The administration did a huge amount over the course of the fall to alert the public, alert the world was happening. They finally went so far as to issue a public consensus judgment of the entire US intelligence community about Russian tampering in the election.

This was loud. Everybody heard about it. It was widely reported. It certainly didn't get the same volume or intensity of attention as Hillary Clinton's emails. But the President can't control press coverage. The key issue was that political partisanship by and large kept Republicans from caring. The dynamics of the presidential contest were more important than foreign meddling or sabotage.

It's not, in my opinion, that the Republicans didn't care. It's that they welcomed it. The conservative focus has been narrowed down to "will it help us gain/maintain power"? That's the only question of any importance to them. If you doubt that, take a look at what's happening in North Carolina, now that a Democrat has won the governor's office. Oh, and let's not forget God's chosen and all their bullshit about "traditional values." It's all about power.

On the whole, though, Marshall's got it pinned down, although there is one more notion on which I think he's once again understated the issue:

The vast majority, I would say basically all of what the Russians found, was pedestrian and inconsequential. I would say that it had a small to marginal effect on the outcome. But it was an extremely close election that can be enough to make the difference. Can you imagine the emails within the RNC as Trump went from being the scourge and mortal enemy to man of destiny? But having close to all of one side's private communication dribbled out into the public realm and fluffed up by a credulous press was obviously damaging.

(Emphasis added.)

It's not that the leaks were "fluffed up" -- they were eagerly sought after and trumpeted from the rooftops by a press that was on an anti-Clinton feeding frenzy. My own take is that the American press did at least as much as the Russians to tilt the election in Trump's favor. Putin just provided the ammunition.

Today's Must-Read, Part Two: Congratulations

Via Digby again, this is pretty much how I feel right now:

It goes on:

This is by the cartoonist David Horsey:

I’m sure thousands of bottles of Budweiser will be raised tonight in those white, working-class neighborhoods of the upper Midwest that put Donald Trump over the top in the electoral college. You folks should enjoy your moment and don’t trouble yourselves with the thought that plenty of celebratory champagne is being poured in corporate board rooms, country clubs and in the spacious mansions of hedge fund managers.

Thanks to your votes, Mr. and Mrs. White Working Class, all those rich people will soon get a massive tax cut and relief from the environmental regulations that have kept them from polluting your air and water and from the financial oversight that has restrained them from milking every last penny from their employees and the victims of their big-money schemes.

Yes, congratulations. At the same moment you elected a billionaire who claimed he would drain the special interest “swamp” in Washington, you kept in power insiders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the biggest snakes in the swamp, plus all the other Republicans in Congress who have fought to keep the mighty flow of corporate dollars streaming in.

You think you have struck a blow against the “elites” on the coasts who look down on “real Americans” in the heartland. You say you have been forgotten or misunderstood by the powers that be. That may be true. But I must say that those of you who act as if you are the only ones in the country who work hard, care for your families and love your country are pretty damn elitist, as well.

I look around at my friends and neighbors here on the West Coast and I see lots of patriotic people who put in long hours of labor to put food on the table and put their kids through school.

There is Keith, a guy with whom I recently got acquainted when we discovered our common affinity for good drinks, good ribs and good jazz. Keith is a muscular black man who would likely be subject to unfair and unfriendly scrutiny from the local sheriff if he showed up in a small Midwestern town, but forget the stereotype. Keith had a career in the Marines before taking a job managing security for Hollywood celebrities. In his free time, he works to help the homeless in downtown Los Angeles.

There is the Korean family that runs the laundry down the street from my apartment who never seem to take a vacation or even a day off. There are the Latino men I see laboring every day in the Southern California heat cutting lawns and repairing houses. There are the men of every race I pass by on my way to work who are hauling steel, handling jackhammers, driving trucks and raising girders as they build new subway lines and raise up towering skyscrapers.

And there are my colleagues in the newsroom, both the seasoned veterans of the news business and the charged-up millennials. There’s nothing elite about them, unless being able to spell and use proper grammar are now elite attributes. The men and women around me are working harder than ever for wages that are not rising in an industry threatened by rapid change. Sound familiar?

Most of us here do not live in Beverly Hills. We live in more modest places such as Pasadena, East Los Angeles, Inglewood and Long Beach. Of course, the working class here is a lot more brown than where you might live. They sweat just as hard, though, and put in long hours just like you — maybe longer, and maybe for less money. But you have not done them a favor by electing a guy who threatens to start a trade war based on an illusion. The illusion is that if America cuts itself off from the global market, all those manufacturing jobs your fathers once had will come flooding back. It won’t happen. The robots have taken over the assembly lines. But what a disruption in trade would do is shut down the West Coast ports and, according to expert estimates, kill more than 600,000 working-class jobs in California.

I know you didn’t think about that sort of effect when you cast your protest vote to Make America Great Again, but what exactly were you thinking? Whenever one of you was interviewed by a TV reporter all I heard was you parroting the vague generalities being spouted by your candidate: America doesn’t win anymore; we need a wall to keep out immigrants; political correctness sucks.

Trump’s careless ignorance could make him the world’s most dangerous man[.]

I didn’t hear any of you say you were happy with the longer droughts, bigger storms and more vicious wildfires that are devastating farms, ranches and rural communities. But your new president has promised to rip up the international treaty that might mitigate some of the extreme weather caused by climate change.

I didn’t hear any of you say you were tired of the peace and order created by the NATO alliance and would rather have a cozier relationship with the Russians. But you just elected a man who has denigrated NATO and has warm and fuzzy feelings about Vladimir Putin.

I did hear plenty of you say you hated big government, but is that because you are someone who got fined by the EPA because your industrial plant was poisoning a river? Or because you are a rancher who doesn’t want to pay grazing fees when you exploit publicly owned land? Or because you are a farmer who doesn’t want to admit that government price supports are what keep your business viable?

Does your hatred of government mean you voted for more pollution? With your vote, were you demanding that big banks be set free to run the economy into the ground? Were you eager for less consumer protection? Did you insist that more of the tax burden be put on average Americans and less of it on the super-rich? I hope those are the things you wanted because that is what you will get from a Republican Congress and a Republican president.

Do I sound angry? That is because I am. I’m mad because your misguided hissy fit is messing with the country I love. I am as much a patriot as you are. I choke up when I visit the Lincoln Memorial or the graves of the Kennedys. I love the flag and do not cringe from the Pledge of Allegiance. When I ride a horse across open country, I feel a link with all my ancestors — the first of whom arrived on the Maryland shore in the 1640s. Those family members who came before me slowly made their way West, generation after generation, until they finally found a home within sight of the Pacific. I am about as “real” an American as you can get.

But I am fed up with those of you who think there is only one way to be American. Some of the truest Americans I have met are among those whose ancestors came here in slave ships. Some of the Americans who give me the most hope are the children of parents who slipped across the border in search of a better life; young dreamers working hard for an education and a chance to contribute to our society. Some of the Americans I admire the most are like my friend Jack who left the narrow-mindedness of his home state and came West to Los Angeles, where he met and married the man he loved. America is great because it has room for all these people and more.

If, ultimately, the real reason you voted for Trump was because he promised to start shutting doors that have been opened for people who do not fit a narrow definition of American, you should understand you are in for a fight. It’s now my turn to say it: I want my country back.

I wish I could think that those who voted for a neo-fascist adolescent for president were in for a rude awakening and might see the light, but at this stage, he'll just blame someone else for shafting them and they'll buy it, lock, stock and barrel.

The Truth Slips Outt

Once again, the Hairpiece tells it like it is. Speaking in Colorado -- of course, it was about how the election is going to be stolen from him by election workers destroying ballots they "don't like" -- he came up with this:

Later in his speech, Trump reiterated: "I don't love the concept of ballots."

Now, we already know he doesn't like elections:

Donald Trump suggested today that the election should be canceled and called for him.

Speaking in Ohio, the Republican presidential nominee questioned why the election was even being held, saying that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's policies are "so bad."

"In just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right?" he said. "Why are we even having it for? What are we having it for? Her policies are so bad. Boy, do we have a big difference."

Trump is not an outlier among Republicans: they've been trying to de-legitimize our whole system for years, with attacks on the courts, putting fundamental rights up to popular vote, chipping away at women's rights, voting rights, and now marriage rights, to the extent that Trump's statements are the logical next step.

And the scary thing is, a significant number of his supporters are on board with that.

“We are the new GOP!”

And just who might that be? Why, the white supremacists, who have finally come marching out from under their rocks:

White nationalists are working to identify their “top people” — or at least any racist with a college degree — to staff a potential Donald Trump administration.

William Johnson, chairman of the white nationalist American Freedom Party, and other organized racists who back the Republican presidential nominee see a chance to set White House policy if Trump is elected next month, reported The Guardian.

From the Guardian story:

“About three months ago,” Johnson begins, “I was talking to Richard Spencer about how we need to plan for a Trump victory.” Spencer is another prominent white nationalist – he heads the generic-sounding National Policy Institute. “I said: ‘I want Jared Taylor [of American Renaissance] as UN Ambassador, and Kevin MacDonald [an evolutionary psychologist] as secretary of health and Ann Coulter as homeland security!’ And Spencer said: ‘Oh Johnson, that’s a pipe dream!’ But today, he’d no longer say that, because if Trump wins, all the establishment Republicans, they’re gone… They hate him! So who’s left? If we can lobby, we can put our people in there.”

Ann Coulter as homeland security? I would have thought secretary of state.

Take all those comments about angry old white working class men as Trump's base with a big helping of salt. This is where his support is coming from, and given that the younger members are the most extreme -- well, there goes the stereotype. And given his comments on jailing Clinton should he win the White House, you can guess what kind of country Trump and his supporters envision.*

No, I am not going to say the "H" word.

* And don't forget the evangelical bigwigs who are sticking with Trump. Given the histories of the likes of Perkins and Bauer, it's a good fit.

The Pussy Tape

This is what I get for not being online last evening. The stories are all over the place, along with the reactions. (For a good run-down, see Joe.My.God. this morning, and be sure to note who is not jumping ship.)

However, having watched the way the media have been managing the election -- and if you've been following that topic, you know they're doing more than Trump's good buddy Putin could ever hope to do -- this stuck out at me. Via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice:

… On Monday, according to an NBC source, one of the entertainment newsmagazine’s producers remembered Trump’s 2005 taping session with former “Access” co-host Billy Bush…

By mid-week, executive producer Rob Silverstein and his producing team had taken a look at its contents…

By Friday morning, Silverstein had decided to broadcast it, and a script had been written. The story was not slated to air on Friday night’s edition of the show, however.

That means the earliest it would have aired is Monday night — after Sunday’s presidential debate.

Another NBC source confirmed that “Access” was working on a story, and that NBC News knew about it, but said that as of Friday morning the story “wasn’t quite finalized.” …

NBC had the story and sat on it. David Farenthold of the Washington Post broke it, because he's actually committing journalism.

'Nuff said?

Idiot du Jour

via Digby, this moron:

Trump Voter: We are young, urban, and have a happy future planned. We seem molded to be perfect young Hillary supporters. But we're not. Both of us voted Libertarian in 2012, and ideologically we remain so. But in 2016? We're both going for Trump.

For me personally, it's resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture. That’s where it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. There is no saying “Hey, I disagree with you,” it's just instant shunning. Say things online, and they'll try to find out who you are and potentially even get you fired for it. Being anti-PC is not about saying “I want you to agree with me on these issues.” It's about saying, “Hey, I want to have a discussion and not get shouted down because I don't agree with what is considered to be politically correct.”

Let's start with the most obvious, not to dismiss what may be this person's own experience (there are idiots on the left, as well): Having tried to have rational discussions with right-wingers, the shouting down and name-calling seems to originate with those who can't support their positions any other way. What I'm getting from this is more regurgitated right-wing propaganda about the "fascist left" -- on the same order as the religious extremists who are screaming about being "persecuted" when they're not allowed to pick and choose which laws to observe. The fact that he voted Libertarian should tell you a lot.

And I can't help but wonder how many times this person has just tuned out when someone disagrees with him. I've run into a couple of commenters at blogs who don't seem to be able to respond to what I actually wrote -- they just repeat the same flat statements, without substantiation, as though that were some sort of argument.

It goes on, and gets more and more bizarre. Digby summed it up nicely:

It's all about him having to defend the fact that he's a raving asshole. Yep. I can see why he loves Trump so much. Having to show good manners in public is just too much.

Today's Must-Read

This headline brought on one of those "Aha!" moments about the 2016 presidential campaign:

Sanders may be bad on details but he has what Clinton lacks — the spirit of protest

That's what the whole election is about, on both sides:

Not that the fuzziness mattered to Sanders supporters. His devoted following, mostly white and young, will remain steadfast to the end. Their loyalty to him is reminiscent of the Donald Trump supporters who don’t seem to care whether anything that comes out of his mouth is based on fact.

This is because both of their campaigns are rooted in the narrative of protest. Sanders has erected a big social justice tent that can fit in just about everyone on the left who responds to a call for revolution. But the Daily News session revealed that the revolution may be as impractical and unachievable as Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again.

In spite of what you've been hearing from the corporate media, it's not just Trump's supporters that are unhappy with the status quo -- there's a large proportion of the left that's equally unhappy (and, in my own personal opinion, with much more justification). To Sanders' credit, he's attacking some of the real problems, rather than throwing up straw men to generate anger. I don't think he has a real handle on policies to address those problems -- not in a real nuts and bolts sense -- but at least he's focusing on something real, rather than deporting everyone who's not white and old.

Are You Sure We're Not In Kansas Anymore?

Or any other state where Republican-controlled legislatures have been trying to guard against "voter fraud." Via tristero at Hullaballoo, this report:

As an elected lawmaker and member of Myanmar’s governing party, U Shwe Maung attended dinners with the president and made speeches from the floor of Parliament. But this weekend, the country’s election commission ruled that despite more than four years in office, he was not a citizen and thus was ineligible to run for re-election in landmark voting in November.

“I was approved and considered a full citizen in 2010,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “Now, after five years, how could I not be eligible?”

Mr. Shwe Maung’s plight is but one example of what appears to be the mass disenfranchisement of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority who number around one million in Myanmar.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who cast votes in elections five years ago have been struck from the electoral rolls, election commission officials have confirmed, although without providing a precise number.

Substitute "Latino" or "African-American" or "poor" for "Rohingya," and you could be talking about Kansas, or Florida, or Ohio, or. . . .

If you think the progression to genocide is extreme, consider this, from one of the Hairpiece's fans:

Awesome followers he has:

“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,’ ” said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company. “That’d be one nice thing.”

Kind of like killing Cecil the Lion only a lot closer and cheaper.

How about this? From more of The Donald's fans:

Police say two brothers from South Boston beat a homeless man because he was Hispanic—and The Boston Globe reports one of the men said he was partially inspired by Donald Trump.

The 58-year-old homeless man was asleep next to Dorchester’s John F. Kennedy/UMass stop when he woke up to the brothers urinating on him, police said. They then punched him and beat him with a metal pole, police added.

The two brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, were on their way home from the Red Sox game on Wednesday night when they decided to attack the homeless man, according to police.

One of the brothers claimed to be partially inspired Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, allegedly telling police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” the Globe reports.

After he was informed about the incident, Trump told the Globe, “it would be a shame . . . I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

Trump has since modified his reaction -- seems the blowback was enough to catch his attention.

And if you're thinking these are just a couple of isolated incidents, go back and read the NYT article linked in the Cecil the Lion quote from Digby. Why does this seem to center on Trump? I think Paul Krugman has hit it:

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Of course, the attitude is not limited to Trump -- it's a Republican thing.

"Let Them Eat Cake"

I saw this story while surfing, yesterday I think, and my only thought was, "Mike Pence is a dick." In case you missed it, he was trying to rationalize kicking 65,000 residents of Indiana off of food stamps.

The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration announced last month that beginning in 2015, it would no longer request a waiver to the federal work requirement for certain people who use the SNAP program. Up to 65,000 single Hoosiers could lose food stamp benefits unless they are working 20 hours a week or attending job training.

Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Pence argued that 50,000 people had joined the Indiana workforce since 2008 so it was time to return to a “core principle” of welfare reform.

“How do you feel about people who say you are targeting poor people?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked the governor.

“I’m someone that believes there’s nothing more ennobling to a person than a job,” Pence insisted. “And to make sure that able-bodied adults without dependants at home know that here in the state of Indiana, we want to partner with them in their success.”

“You know, it’s the old story,” he continued. “Give someone a fish, and they’ll eat for a day. Teach them to fish, they’ll eat for a lifetime. I think this is an idea whose time has come here in the state of Indiana.”

It's estimated that there are two million people out of work in the Midwest, but only a million jobs. Good luck with that fishing pole, Gov. Pence.

And it appears I'm not the only one who thinks he's a dick -- the Young Turks took a swing at him, too:

Brothers in Arms

There are dots to connect here. First, this post from Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog, on the rich and the way they see the world, based on this piece by Chris Hedges. Hedges writes:

“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.

See also this piece by digby.

My own experience is somewhat different, but not very. At one point I worked at an art museum as the executive secretary to the director, which meant working closely with the board. I raised eyebrows and caused comment all over the institution early on in my tenure because I dared to argue with the president of the board, who in retrospect, fits fairly neatly within the paradigm described by Hedges -- and this was one of Chicago's "lakefront liberals." For most of my tenure there, however, I worked with his successor, a woman of great charm and intelligence to took me into the fold, so to speak -- she learned to value my judgment and intelligence (and my political acumen), and when I followed her to another job, I had great input into policy and had the day-do-day operations left entirely in my hands. But there was always an underlying attitude that came out when she started talking about people's social standing -- including mine: I just wasn't in her class.

It didn't help matters that I simply refused to recognize the "superiority" of the people I was dealing with. It wasn't rebellion -- it just never occurred to me that they were superior, except that they had more money. They didn't share that opinion.

Now, some connecting, with this piece by Rob Tisinai at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Thomas Peters, NOM’s communications director, shows us the limits of empathy.

Peters suffered a diving accident that left him with a fractured fifth vertebrae, a severe spinal cord injury, and doubtful prospects for recovery. Fortunately, it seems, he’s doing better than most with this kind of injury, though he still may never walk and has limited use of his upper body. Recently, on NOM’s website, he posted “Reflections on my Time Away.”

. . .

The accident has taught me more about the incredible gift of marriage. My father, during his speech at my wedding reception, said the sacrament of marriage gives us the grace to do the impossible. I have met people during these months who think it is incredible, even impossible, that my wife and I survived a trauma like this having been married only three months. I tell them it helps to marry the right woman and get married the right way, the way the Church taught the two of us what marriage is and why it should be honored. People have told us that they are inspired and receive hope from the witness of our marriage – it inspires us too, I respond! We feel it is possible to face anything, even a future of me paralyzed, so long as we cling to each other, to God, and to our marriage vows.

I think the connection is somewhere in the comment I left at Tisinai's post, to the effect that ideology trumps humanity: Peters is not capable of independent thought and has to rely on what the Church has told him to think, especially, in this case, about marriage and gay people. (In my comment I noted that, in my opinion, it's a morally and intellectually stunted outlook.)

It comes down to the Other -- for the rich, everyone else is the Other, to be kept in their place; for Peters and his cohorts, those who don't follow their ideology, and especially LGBTs, are the Other, to be fought at every turn -- and to be kept in their place, preferably out of sight and, consequently, out of mind.

There's an element of pathology in both, and I suspect it's the same, or a very similar, pathology: lack of ability to connect with others, lack of empathy, and consequently, a lack of social consciousness. In some cases, I hesitate to go so far as to call it sociopathy, but it's at least the seeds of it: it's an outlook that is totally self-referential and self-absorbed. (By way of illustration, I'm reminded of the story about one of NOM's interns who went to a rally of some sort or other and was "saddened" by the preponderance of marriage equality demonstrators and the relative paucity of the "pro-marriage" contingent. Her reaction was that allowing same-sex marriage "diminished" her relationship with God, and "demeaned" her own -- future, and therefore hypothetical -- marriage vows. So it was all about her, and not about the people -- not really people, mind you, but abstractions -- whose rights, and whose essential humanity, she was working to deny.)

And also common to both the anti-marriage activists, as exemplified by Peters, and the rich is the element of control: they must be the ones controlling others.

The sobering part is that the rich are succeeding. The NOMbots, happily, not so much.

Connecting Dots

A couple of stories this morning that somehow linked together in my mind. First, this one, about the Naval Yard shooting in Washington:

The top surgeon at a Washington, D.C. trauma center minutes ago told reporters that “there is something evil in our society” when “when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries.” Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief medical officer at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, at times close to tears, decried the “senseless trauma” she says she sees daily.

“There’s something evil in our society that we as Americans have to work to try and eradicate,” Orlowski said. “There’s something wrong here when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries,” she added. “There is something wrong.”

It's heartbreaking:

And somehow, that connected with this story, about Miss America:

The crowning of Miss New York, Nina Davuluri, as Miss America should have been, to paraphrase her platform, a celebration of diversity through cultural competency. But in the hours after her victory, Twitter became a frank demonstration of American incompetence in matters relating to both ethnicity and geography.

“Well they just picked a Muslim for Miss America. That must’ve made Obama happy. Maybe he had a vote,” said one user.

“I am literally soo mad right now a ARAB won. #MissAmerica” wrote another.

It should go without saying that Davuluri, a Syracuse native of Indian descent, is neither Muslim nor an Arab. But according to Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes, the American-born Davuluri doesn’t “represent American values,” unlike the blonde-haired, blue-eyed contestant from Kansas, Theresa Vail.

Trust Fox News -- and I'm more than a little convinced that Fox News is a big part of the problem. The nice part of this story is that Twitter was deluged with tweets in support of Ms. Davuluri, as it should have been.

And how does these connect? I suspect it has to do with something I mentioned in a couple of comments at the AmericaBlog story. First:

The Miss America pageant is one of those iconic "American" things that might have made some sort of sense once upon a time but have become such institutions that the whys don't matter any more. They just are. I'm not sure that it has anything to do with a "sense of national honor" (except for the mouth-breathers who have a warped idea of what this nation is about anyway). It does have a lot to do with a sense of national identity, I think, which is why the reaction from the racist fringe has been so vocal -- you can't be "American" if you're not just like them, which leaves the rest of us -- who do have a more realistic sense of what America means -- scratching our heads and wondering where these idiots came from. (And heaving a sigh of relief that we're not just like them.)

Which leads to:

The teabaggers are the latest manifestation of an element that's always been with us: the "conservative" element (read "reactionary") who can't deal with change. They spend most of their time hiding under rocks and waiting for an opportunity to make their voices heard -- usually at the behest of someone who is vastly smarter and who can use them to further his own agenda -- Reagan with the "Christian" right, the Kochs and Karl Rove with the teabaggers are only two of the latest examples.

It seems that element will always be with us. The frightening thing now is that they've managed to accumulate the power they have. Another case of the tail wagging the dog. I hope the Republican partly implodes before they manage to destroy the rest of us.

There's an element of American society that is small-minded, mean-spirited, vicious, violent, and easily unhinged. (Although I doubt that it's just us -- make that "human" society.) So give them radio, social media, and worse, guns, and this is what you get.* There's a kind of synergy working: crazies have access to wider audiences than ever before, and it's starting to have a strong effect on our national mentality.

It's their core values: exclusion, arrogance, ignorance, hatred for the "Other."

Cue the religious right. And the Second Amendment freaks. The Internet is littered with stories that tie into this.

* And they elect people just like them to Congress.

NSA Oversight -- Right (Update, Update II)

Digby has a good post on this this morning, that sort of sums up everything that's wrong with trusting the government to govern itself, at least as far as safeguarding Americans' privacy rights. To start off, Digby has this choice little bit from the Guardian:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.

I'm sure you've all heard this story, from the late days of the Bush administration:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Do you think anything has changed under Obama? Then:

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?"

"No, sir," General Hayden replied.

And now:

The day after the Guardian revealed details of the NSA's Prism program, President Obama said: "Now, with respect to the internet and emails, this doesn't apply to US citizens and it doesn't apply to people living in the United States."

Speaking at a House hearing on 18 June this year, deputy attorney general James Cole told legislators "[T]here's a great deal of minimization procedures that are involved here, particularly concerning any of the acquisition of information that deals or comes from US persons.

"As I said, only targeting people outside the United States who are not US persons. But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only can we keep it."

Do you believe that?

Digby has what I think is the best summation:

There is every reason to be skeptical about the NSA's oversight of its own programs. After all, Edward Snowden was able to do a whole lot of things they claim nobody can do. Is it reasonable to think that there aren't other operatives digging in where they shouldn't be? Or certain people who think they have good patriotic reasons to do it and can't see why a stupid legal technicality should stand in the way? These are human beings not machines. They can talk themselves into anything.

My own prediction, based on my admittedly jaundiced view of the government and its respect for the Constitution, as filtered through "national security!!11!!!": This will change when major corporations find out how much of their "privileged" communication is sitting in a government data storage facility.

Update: Another post from Digby, with the president's response to the stories coming out about the abuse of the NSA surveillance apparatus.

He seemed to have been saying today that Snowden's revelations ruined his plan to have an orderly investigation of the NSA programs even though there is no evidence that he was doing any such thing. Certainly, there is no evidence that there was any "plan" to inform the American people since the senators who were running around with their hair on fire were lied to right to their face in open testimony by the intelligence community.

Somebody's in full damage control mode.

And another story on the President's news conference, from TPM, with a slightly different take:

President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered “appropriate reforms,” he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.

No, Mr. President, the distrust has been created because you and the national security apparatus have far overstepped the bounds of what's allowable and lied to us about it. That's what's created "distrust."

And this just points out how clueless Obama and everyone else in Washington is:

“Understandably, people would be concerned,” the president said. “I would be, too, if I weren’t inside the government.”

WTF?

Update II And from Glenn Greenwald, favorite bete noir of some elements in our polity. (Fine, he has an agenda. Good luck finding someone who doesn't. And I happen to agree with most of Greenwald's.)

A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden - Lavabit - announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users' content.

What's instructive is this:

What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this:

I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on - the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests."

Via Balloon Juice. John Cole has a slightly different take on my prediction about big business, above:

Money talks, which is why we had a big press conference today. You and I can’t afford a lobbyist, but you start screwing with the high tech industry’s bottom line, and you bet your ass some changes will be coming.

Talk among yourselves.

Today's Required Reading

Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog has done my work for me this morning, taking off from stories by John Schiffman and Kristina Cooke at Reuters and Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. Just a few key points from those articles:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

… The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

So all these agencies -- two dozen, you got that? -- are funneling information into DEA. Why DEA? Well, the program was started in 1994 as a resource to fight Latin American drug cartels. But the DEA doesn't just sit on the information. No, it shares it.

Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.

The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.

About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show.

And as Gaius Publius points out, the information doesn't necessarily stop with those local cops. Being a Chicagoan, I know better, and I'm going to take it one step farther: you can bet that information is finding its way to outside parties -- non-law enforcement -- who have an interest. In return for (insert your favorite quid pro quo here).

And then when they nail someone based on an "anonymous tip," they lie about the source.

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.” … “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”

Gee, perjury on the part of prosecutors. Who would have guessed?

Smith draws an interesting parallel:

In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.

Just another facet of the corporate state: Banks and the Feds operating on the same principles. And who else, do you suppose?

But it's all for "national security." There, don't you feel safer?

Read GP's post, then dig into the linked articles.

And then check your blood pressure.

It's Official

They did find the bones of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester.

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III.

Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch's family.

Lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, told a press conference to applause: "Beyond reasonable doubt it's Richard."

There's a video of the press conference at the link, plus a lot of supplementary information. Check it out.