Today's Must-Read: Remember Joe McCarthy?

Digby gives a good overview of the Nunes memo shenanigans and coming attractions. This part summarizes the attitudes of the hard-core Nunes adherents quite nicely:

It's true that a few others have joined that chorus, signaling that at least a handful of Republicans don't want to be associated with the notion that this memo "vindicates" the president. (Notably, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not among them.)

Chairman Nunes is undeterred. Axios reported on Sunday:

The House Intelligence chair and his team have told members and associates they've found other examples of politically motivated "wrongdoing" across various agencies, including the FBI, the broader Justice Department, and the State Department . . . Republicans close to Nunes say there could be as many as five additional memos or reports of "wrongdoing."

One wonders if Nunes has any knowledge of that time in 1950 when a senator named Joseph McCarthy pulled out a "list" he claimed had the names of 200 people in the State Department whom he accused of politically motivated wrongdoing. It didn't end well.

I'm sure there will be more memos forthcoming -- Trump's gotten so much mileage out of this one that it makes no sense to stop. And of course, there will be more rebuttals, which Fox News and the base will ignore and the New York Times will find some excuse to discount.

At any rate, read the whole thing -- it's deja vu all over again.

Trump vs. US

Reading through the news this morning, I had a thought: what could make Putin happier than crippling the U.S. intelligence establishment?

Let's start with Trump dismissing intelligence reports that he apparently, from all evidence, has not seen. He'd rather put his confidence in Julian Assange (which position he's now furiously backing away from). My reading is that he wants to sweep Russian involvement in throwing the election as far under the carpet as possible, despite the fact that US intelligence has caught high Russian officials high-fiving each other over Trump's win.

So now he's developed this relationship with the American intelligence community that can only be described as "adversarial." This sort of sums it up, if a bit snarkily:

Priess says the intelligence community will continue to try to adapt to the new president, and suggests “at one extreme that could mean producing the President’s Daily Brief in the form of tweet-length analysis. If the president prefers to have judgments expressed in easy-to-digest short form, that’s doable, and there is precedent for that.”

But then, someone has to get him to read them, and we know that doesn't necessarily happen (especially if the president is preoccupied with making a deal for a new resort development in say, the Crimea). Remember 9/11? There was ample warning of that.

And it seems that mere public criticism isn't enough:

"President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said," The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday night. "The move is prompted by his belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized, these people said."

The Journal added, "One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world."

And under the heading "Lame Excuses":

The president-elect, who has been nervously tweeting more frequently in the past days, Thursday morning posted tweets claiming he has only been posting statements from Julian Assange to help "the people" decide what's the truth – a ridiculous and irresponsible excuse akin to a climate change denier or evolution denier insisting there are two sides to the already scientifically settled arguments.

I never thought I'd be one to defend the CIA, but much as I distrust them, we need them.

This is not going unnoticed or unremarked, even in the Senate (even though Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing his best to keep the lid on it):

Senator McCaskill, who thankfully won her seat in 2012, is up for reelection in a very red state, so her voice is something we cannot take for granted. Unless, however, Democrats get off their butts and mobilize like the Tea Party did in 2010, 2018 could mean a 4th Reich for America. McCaskill wants answers, as do most people who prefer the facts.

SEN. MCCASKILL: Who actually is the benefactor of someone who is about to become commander-in-chief trashing the intelligence community?

I assume that the biggest benefactors of the American people having less confidence in the intelligence community fact that the actors you have named today: Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and ISIS. . . .

The notion that the soon elected leader of this country would put Julian Assange on a pedestal compared to the men and women of the intelligence community and the military that is so deeply embedded in the intelligence community, I think it should bring about a hue and cry no matter whether you're Republican or a Democrat. There should be howls! And mark my word if the roles were reversed their would be HOWLS from the Republican side.

Others are not being so gentle:

Malcolm Nance✔
@MalcolmNance

We must finally admit Trump is openly giving aid & comfort to a foreign intelligence agency & a cybercriminal. He is 1 step away fm treason.
1:27 PM - 4 Jan 2017

2,816 2,816 Retweets
4,631

I may update this as I run across more info.

Quote du Jour

You get to guess who it's from:

What this century needs is a good plague to revive the old values.

Role Models

Boy Scout leaders. In Utah:

A group of Boy Scout leaders is potentially facing felony charges for destroying a rock formation nearly 200 million years old.

The trio of men was adventuring in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park when they decided to film themselves knocking over one of the formations, known as "goblins."

One man can be seen leveraging himself against a nearby rock and pushing a formation over.

"We have now modified Goblin Valley," the cameraman crows. "A new Goblin Valley exists with, uh, this boulder down here on the bottom. Muscles here pushed it off."

The three laugh, cheer and high five each other.

"Savin' lives is what we're about"? I think any rational personal would call it "vandalism."

Assholes. I hope the authorities stick them with massive fines.

About All That Data Mining

And the government/industrial complex in general, a clip from the 19997 film Good Will Hunting:

The president has dismissed it all as "hype":

"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program's about," Obama said. "As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at peoples' names and they're not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism."

Ah, yes -- the "may" identify folk who "might" engage in terrorism. How reassuring.

About that metadata that doesn't really tell the government any of your secrets, via Digby, this article from The Atlantic, with some real eye-openers:

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Read the whole article -- it gets worse.

It occurs to me that it's maybe slightly more difficult than a total no-brainer to set up systems that are going to correlate certain batches of metadata to show the patterns that Landau is talking about -- Google and Amazon do it all the time. (See this bit from TPM about a company that actually does this. Although they're denying any government connection, even though their first client was the CIA.) Do you really want something like this being run by people who operate in secret, under the auspices of judges who meet in secret and whose decisions are secret, all for something as vague as "national security"? And tell me, who's going to insure our security from programs like this?

And do we dare ask who has access to this information?

Things like this are probably a major reason that I'm into total escapism these days.

Chutzpah, Squared

I've had a hell of a week -- flu, dental work, and for a grand finale, I threw my back out -- but this story deserves some notice.

Some Very Serious Recommendations from the Parasite Class. From CNBC:

Executives of the Business Roundtable are urging Congress to raise the Social Security and Medicare age eligibility to 70, from the current 67, and to adopt means testing for wealthier retirees, in order to keep the entitlement programs solvent longer-term.

"When you look long-term at the U.S. fiscal health, you have to look at these questions," said Business Roundtable President John Engler during a meeting with reporters in Washington Tuesday.

The idea is not likely to be popular. The Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction committee saw opposition when it suggested lifting the retirement age to 69. The Roundtable executives argue that raising the level gradually for those less than 55 years of age now will provide substantial long-term savings to the entitlement programs, while still giving Americans time to adjust to the new requirements.

"It's the power of compound savings here," said Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, and vice chair of the group's health and retirement committee. "If you start to save now, it really adds up."

Stephenson's pay last year was roughly $22 million. I can't see him hurting for retirement income.

And this bit really pissed me off:

The CEOs said they are looking at pragmatic options which provide a long-term solution to the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending.

That is pure, unadulterated horse-pucky. First off, Social Security and Medicare are not "entitlements" -- they are earned benefits. They're insurance programs, and I can see where these bozos are trying to model them on private insurance companies, which are possibly the biggest legal racket in the country. (The only thing I can think of that's more blatant is military spending.) It's like the health insurance industry -- you get sick, they cancel your policy.

There are a couple of realistic "fixes" on this. For Social Security, it's probably too simple for the 1% Club to fathom: lift the cap on the payroll tax. Ta-Dah! Solvency for at least the rest of the century, and probably beyond.

And here's my Congresswoman, Jan Schakowsky, with a fix for runaway health-care costs:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The really depressing thing about this is that the parasites from the Business Roundtable will be lobbying Congress, and the members of Congress will listen to them, rather than tossing them out on their asses.

I guess you get what you pay for.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Child Labor Laws!

David Atkins over at Hullabaloo has come up with a phrase I really like a lot: "asshole objectivism." That pretty much describes all the Randians I've seen in print. That was in this post, about Donald Trump taking Newtie's idea to put poor kids to work as janitors. From First Read:

Trump explained: "He did mention if I could do something for some of the kids in very, very poor schools throughout the city. I thought it was a great idea. We call it an apprenticeship, and I think we all know about "The Apprentice." We're going to be picking 10, young, wonderful children, and we're going to make them 'apprenti.' We're going to have a little fun with it, and I think it's going to be something that is really going to prove results. But it was Newt's idea, and I think it's a great idea."

That's the answer: exploit the little bastards.

Censorship Is Alive and Well in the U.S.A.

I haven't commented on this story -- I'm not sure why, but I just didn't.

The public library system for Burlington County, New Jersey, has ordered that all copies of Amy Sonnie’s Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, which the library director labeled as “child pornography,” be removed from library shelves.

Library director Gail Sweet ordered the book’s removal without having followed a formal book challenge process. Instead, she acted on an informal complaint from a member of the local chapter of Fox News commentator Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project. Emails (PDF: 11 pages/296 KB) obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey show that the complaint was made by Project member Beverly Marinelli, who is also credited with persuading Rancocas Valley Regional High School to ban the same book in May.


However, there's a very good follow-up at BTB that's worth a read:  the way to confront those who want to sweep you under the rug is to call them on it --  loudly and publicly.  Because what happens is you get this:

Meanwhile, Sweet contends that while they “always willing to reconsider things,” she called the library’s attempt to withdraw the books without public notice “a nonevent that has become one.”

Yeah, well, they'd love for it to remain a non-event, but we're not going to let them.