Gutting OCE, Part Two

In spite of what you're hearing from the "mainstream media" (and how ever did it get that tag?), it wasn't Trump's tweet that stopped the House from neutering the ethics committee:

Democrats and other watchdog groups were also critical of the Monday night vote. A coalition of more than a dozen organizations and activists expressed their frustration in a Tuesday morning letter to House Democratic and Republican leadership. Members also faced a barrage of angry phone calls from constituents.

“I can tell you the calls we’ve gotten in my district office and here in Washington surprised me, meaning the numbers of calls. People are just sick and tired,” Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) said of the simmering outrage over the proposed change. “People are just losing confidence in the lack of ethics and honesty in Washington.”

(Emphasis added.)

And our congresscritters are way surprised at that.

It's interesting that WaPo devoted the first third of the story to Trump's tweet before getting around to the operative factor: calls from angry constituents are not something that Congress tends to ignore.

This is pretty entertaining:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) pushed for the weakening of the OCE on Monday. His office said it would have provided “protections against any disclosures to the public or other government entities.”

A government official familiar with the internal operations of the OCE disputed Goodlatte’s assertion that the amendment would “strengthen” the office.

“Representative Goodlatte’s statement that this is an effort to strengthen ethics is a baldfaced lie,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “This will do nothing but weaken the office and weaken ethics in Congress.”

The official said the office was “blindsided” by the amendment, but noted that members of Congress have been trying to eviscerate the office since the day it was created in 2008 following the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. The official said members of Congress were particularly incensed by the office’s investigation into an expense-paid trip that 10 lawmakers took to Azerbaijan in 2013.

(Even Abramoff is trashing the House GOP for this.)

Mostly via Balloon Juice.

Donald Trump, In His Own Words

This -- well, just read it:

I'm speechless.

Via Balloon Juice.

Coming Attractions, Part II: North Carolina Was Just a Warm-up (Update; Update II)

Who needs ethics, anyway?

House Republicans have gutted an independent ethics watchdog, putting it under their own control, in a secret ballot hours before the new Congress convened for the first time.

The unheralded vote severely weakens the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which was set up after a lobbying scandal in 2008 to investigate corruption allegations against members of Congress. The move, led by the head of the House judiciary committee, defied the Republican congressional leadership and was reportedly supported by several legislators currently under OCE scrutiny.

The amendment was voted through by the House Republican conference over the New Year’s holiday with no prior notice or debate and inserted in a broad rules package the House will vote for on Tuesday. It turns the formerly independent OCE into the Office of Congressional Complaint Review, a subordinate body to the House Ethics Committee, which is currently run by the Republican majority and has a long history of overlooking charges of malfeasance by lawmakers.

The new body will not be able to receive anonymous tips from members of Congress or make its findings public.

The ineffectiveness of the House Ethics Committee was the major reason for the creation of the OCE to begin with. Take this as a pre-emptive move: the Republicans control Congress and are not going to waste any time cashing in.

I mean, look at who their shining example is going to be -- President Pay-for-Play.

Update: And it takes Kellyanne Conway, Trump's Obfuscator-in-Chief, to turn it into something really, truly surreal:

Conway, who ran Trump’s campaign and now serves as a senior advisor, complained Tuesday morning on “Today” that the Office of Congressional Ethics had been “overzealous” in investigating “consumer complaints” since its creation in 2008.

“If a constituent has a complaint, they can still lodge that complaint,” Conway said. “They just can’t do it anonymously.”

One can only conclude that Trump's staff is just as ignorant about the government as he is.

Update II: Well, that didn't last long. Via Joe.My.God.:

So much for Kellyanne Conway’s “mandate.” CNN reports:

House Republican leaders have pulled a proposal that would gut its independent ethics panel, amid widespread criticism of the plan, multiple lawmakers tell CNN. The decision comes less than two hours after President-elect Donald Trump criticized the timing of the vote, which was scheduled for the first day of the new congressional session.

Coming Attractions

Another reason to be wary of hate speech laws:

A man in Kazakhstan has been sentenced to three years in prison for insulting Vladimir Putin, reports suggest.

Sanat Dosov, a businessman and activist, was found guilty of breaching a Kazahk law that bans the incitement of “national hatred” and will now have to serve his sentence in a penal colony.

Dosov is alleged to have posted negative comments about Mr Putin on social media, including one in which he shared an image showing the face of the Russian president alongside those of former communist leaders Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. He also called Mr Putin a “fascist” and “terrorist” and said he was “ruining” Russia.

Under Kazakh law, it is illegal to incite “social, national, generic, racial, class, or religious hatred” or insult “the national honour and dignity of religious feelings of citizens”. The law – Article 174 – has been criticised for being dangerously vague and in recent months has been used by state officials to imprison critics.

Considering the thin-skinned would-be dictator who's about to become president of the US, we can be glad the whole "hate speech" thing never really caught on here.

Via Joe.My.God.

Welcome, 2017

And what could be more fitting than more reviews at Green Man Review.

As for the rest of it, I think I'll just wait and see.

2016: Parting Thoughts

Thanks to Balloon Juice.

A Story

I know -- I've been absent -- half the news, which just gets more and more depressing (Carrie Fisher and George Michael, within a day?), and half a miserable cold which is, slowly, getting better.

But, I promised you mini-stories at Green Man Review, and there's one up today, so check it out.

What's New at Green Man Review

A pretty wide selection today, so click on over and take your pick.

Carol of the Bells

My favorite Christmas carol, in my favorite version:

Santa Tracker Update

Here's more on the story of how the Santa Tracker got started:

This all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

Shoup's children, Terri Van Keuren, 65, Rick Shoup, 59, and Pam Farrell, 70, recently visited StoryCorps to talk about how the tradition began.

The Santa Tracker tradition started with this Sears ad, which instructed children to call Santa on what turned out to be a secret military hotline. Kids today can call 1-877 HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) to talk to NORAD staff about Santa's exact location.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. "Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number," she says.

"This was the '50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States," Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. "And then there was a small voice that just asked, 'Is this Santa Claus?' "

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus."

There's more. Click through a read the whole thing.

Via Digby.

And Beginning This Evening

Hannukah:

"Nes Gadol Haya Sham" (A Great Miracle Happened There) was recorded completely in Israel. The song compares the lights of the hanukkiah/menorah to the Light in our hearts. When people see the symbol of a lit hanukkiah/menorah in the window they should remember that "a great miracle happened there" in Israel at the time of the Maccabees when the nation survived violent persecution and the Temple was restored to Israel and rededicated. Likewise, when people see us we should be like a living hanukkiah/menorah of Light so that when they see our lives they can recognize that "a great miracle happened there" in our hearts!

From the video description at YouTube.

Via Balloon Juice

On the Lighter Side

Now that the Hairpiece has decided to ramp up his nuclear war rhetoric, it's time for a break -- and, given the season, what better than NORAD's Santa Tracker?

There are few Christmas traditions in the U.S. that are prized and anticipated quite as much as the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) efforts to track Santa Claus.

For the remaining 363 days of the year, the joint U.S. and Canadian agency monitors the North American territory for aerospace or maritime threats. However, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the agency is tasked with keeping tabs on the whereabouts of the jolly man in the red suit, and relaying the information to millions of children (and even some adults) from around the world who call and email, requesting an estimate on when to expect a gift delivery. The practice has been in place for 61 years.

It initially began completely by accident in 1955, when Sears department store misprinted a phone number in an advertisement it placed in a Colorado Springs newspaper, urging kids to dial Santa directly. Instead the phone calls went to Colorado Springs' Continental Air Defense Command Center (CONRAD). Not wanting to crush the spirits of children, then-colonel Harry Shoup told his colleagues to play along and provide callers with Santa’s exact location. NORAD replaced CONRAD in 1958, and the tradition has continued.

And if you want to follow Santa's progress yourself:

Antidote

I really don't know why I surf the news any more. There are no surprises -- the North Carolina legislature did not repeal HB2 as promised (these are people with no morals, no ethics, no integrity, and no standards -- also known as "Republicans"); Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter have revealed themselves to be white supremacists -- again; Donald Trump has named another oligarch to his administration; Roy Moore is being considered to replace Jeff Sessions in the US Senate (I guess the governor wants to get the closest match possible -- a raving homophobe to replace a raving racist).

Happily, every once in a while you run into a story like this:

A gay couple have been receiving hundreds of letters to their apartment addressed to Santa Claus.

Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker started receiving the letters back in 2010 after they moved into their apartment on 22nd Street, Manhattan.

The pair had been warned of the letter before they moved in, with previous tenants of the apartment saying they received a handful of letters for Santa.

“They never answered them because it was only three or four letters a year,” Glaub, 36, told PEOPLE.

“And the first two years I lived there, it was that exact thing. I’d get three letters and I didn’t really think anything of it. I was like, ‘Oh, sorry — wrong number.’”

After a couple of letters trickled in the first year, the gay couple, who have now been married four years, started receive more and more.

It’s at that point they decided to start replying to the messages.

How many of us would do that? Even if it's only three or four a year. As it turned out, they received 450 letters by Christmas Day, 2010.

But wait:

The couple struggled to cope with the huge influx of letters, so set up a Facebook group and used their friendship group to reply to every letter.

They set up a Facebook group, Miracle on 22nd Street, where strangers from all over the world have taken to writing replies.

“It’s just so strange! It’s caused this global effort!” Glaub, a marketing executive, says.

“We’ve had people from Hawaii to Alaska, Germany to London, Nicaragua, Abu Dhabi, Tokyo — all helping. I guess that’s the power of social media.

“Why would a woman from Abu Dhabi care about some family from Corona, Queens? It’s amazing.”

Social media does have an upside.

And now you know the source of my optimism about humanity: I'm convinced we're hard-wired to take care of each other. Republicans are an aberration.

E-Mails!!1!: There Was No There There

Guess what the result of the FBI "reopening" the e-mails investigation a few days before the election:

The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin — though they did not have any inkling what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The documents, made public Tuesday after a Los Angeles lawyer sued for their release, reinforce the impression that when the bureau revealed less than two weeks before the election that agents were again investigating Clinton, they had no new evidence of actual wrongdoing. The FBI’s revelation upended the presidential campaign, and to this day, Clinton and her supporters say it is at least partly to blame for her surprising loss to Donald Trump.

There's more at HuffPo:

The warrant connected to the FBI search that Hillary Clinton says cost her the election shouldn’t have been granted, legal experts who reviewed the document released on Tuesday told The Huffington Post.

FBI Director James Comey shook up the presidential race 11 days before the election by telling Congress the agency had discovered new evidence in its previously closed investigation into the email habits of Clinton, who was significantly ahead in the polls at the time.

When Comey made the announcement, the bureau did not have a warrant to search a laptop that agents believed might contain evidence of criminal activity. The FBI set out to rectify that two days later, on Oct. 30, when agents applied for a warrant to search the laptop, which was already in the FBI’s possession. The FBI had seized the computer as part of an investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

The unsealed warrant “reveals Comey’s intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at time,” Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said on Twitter Tuesday.

Read this whole article -- it gets worse. Much worse.

Via Dibgy, who notes:

I know that it's considered whining to be concerned about this but seriously, we should be concerned about this. The FBI is the most powerful domestic intelligence and police agency in the country. In the world, actually. It's really a big deal if they interfere in democratic elections. In fact, it's the mark of authoritarian states.

The problem with the warrant really is beside the point. They didn't seek the warrant until after Comey had dropped his bombshell. If they hadn't gotten the warrant it's unlikely it would have made any different. Comey had already tainted the election in the final stretch and it wouldn't have helped. Still, it's outrageous all on its own that this warrant application was "garbage" and that James Comey almost certainly had to have approved it.

If Comey simply "made a mistake" then he should be removed from office because that level of bad judgement means he is incapable of doing the job. If he did this in order to head off Giuliani's pro-Trump FBI agents leaking to the media, then he's lost control of his agency and he also needs to be removed. (And again, it would show monumental bad judgement since a notice coming from the FBI director would be far more damaging than any anonymous leaks to the press from rogue FBI agents. ) And then there's the fact that Comey may have taken the action he did for straight up political purposes. He was deputy counsel for the Republican Senate Whitewater Committee which leaked like a sieve and was outrageously partisan. He should be fired for that.

Whatever James Comey's motives, his actions and that of his agents who seemed to be working on behalf of Donald Trump should be investigated, just as the alleged Russian hacking must be investigated. (Indeed, his unwillingness to put his weight behind a bipartisan statement about the Russian hacking merits an investigation of its own.) This was a world-changing event.

I said at the time it was Comey playing politics. We got a good sense of where he was coming from in July, when he called a press conference to announce that the FBI had found nothing actionable in its investigation -- while taking the opportunity smear Clinton as much as he could. The maddening thing about this is that, in spite of flouting normal procedure, a direct advisory from the Attorney General, and quite possibly violating the Hatch Act, Comey will face no consequences.

And let me add that I think Digby's concerns about the role of the FBI in this whole debacle are fully justified, and only exacerbated by the news that Trump plans to maintain his own private security even after he's sworn in.

Welcome to post-democracy America.

Yay! (Knock on Wood)

It looks as though the layout of the blog has corrected itself -- side bars on the side and footer at the foot.

Cross your fingers.

Culture Break: Béla Bartók: Winter Solstice Song

From "For Children", Vol. 1, No. 38. Performed by Bulgheroni Elia, eight years old.

A lively little tune for those of us in the winter doldrums.

The days are getting longer.

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.

What's New at Green Man Review

Yep, it's that time again. Good stuff, including a lot in the holiday spirit, so click on through.

It occurred to me that I should mention our stories, little fictions published on Wednesdays which are quite entertaining. I've contributed a few, so you should check them out. (Not that I'm tooting my own horn or anything.) Here's a sample.

Today's Must-Read: Useful Idiots

Paul Krugman (and why has this man never been appointed to a high-level government position? We need someone like him.) lays it out:

On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a “useful idiot” serving Russian interests. That may not be exactly right. After all, useful idiots are supposed to be unaware of how they’re being used, but Mr. Trump probably knows very well how much he owes to Vladimir Putin. Remember, he once openly appealed to the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Still, the general picture of a president-elect who owes his position in part to intervention by a foreign power, and shows every sign of being prepared to use U.S. policy to reward that power, is accurate.

But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story. As recent reporting by The Times makes clear, bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media.

Let me explain what I mean by saying that bad guys hacked the election. I’m not talking about some kind of wild conspiracy theory. I’m talking about the obvious effect of two factors on voting: the steady drumbeat of Russia-contrived leaks about Democrats, and only Democrats, and the dramatic, totally unjustified last-minute intervention by the F.B.I., which appears to have become a highly partisan institution, with distinct alt-right sympathies.

He goes on from there, and no one gets away unscathed. Read it.

Footnote: The President's final press conference makes a nice coda.

And This Is A Surprise?

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Unless Trump picks a diverse Secretary of Agriculture, the line of succession to the presidency would be 12 white guys — via @maddow

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