"I'm Glad You're Dead!"

Last week, Robert Mueller died.  A former FBI director who took office the day before 9/11, Mueller came out of retirement to investigate Donald Trump's dealings with the Russians to try to steal the 2016 presidential election, and many Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and independents hoped for Mueller's report to bring about Trump's downfall.  Instead, his report got whitewashed by Bill Barr, Trump's then-Attorney General, and Democrats balked at pursuing the matter further.  The tragic irony is that Mueller died knowing that Trump had come back and has since ensconced himself so securely in power that no one, for the time being, can touch him.

And when Mueller died, Trump, complaining that Mueller's investigation had hurt him and other people, said he was glad he was dead.

And yes, I was immediately reminded of the scene in the 1989 Batman movie in which the Joker electrocutes a rival gangster with a joy buzzer and says to his burned-out skeletal corpse that he's glad he's' dead.

When the President of the United States starts talking like a gangster who's become an evil clown, we're in trouble.

We're mainly in trouble because Trump's glee in knowing that a political enemy has died is inspiring similar expressions of glee over other people dying.  Someone I was (note tense) connected to on Facebook actually expressed jubilation over Chuck Norris's death because he said that Norris's arch-conservative politics and his movies and television work promoted a racist agenda because the villains in his films and TV shows tended to be Palestinians, Colombians . . . you get the picture.  But on his TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger," Cordell Walker (Norris) had a black partner who was also his best friend, so go figure.  And other gleeful comments about Norris dying have appeared on Threads.

Look, I was not a Chuck Norris fan and I obviously did not share his political views, but I would never express any sort of glee over his passing, even though this guy on Facebook did, which is why I unfriended him.  What's next - heavy metal fans celebrating the death of Dash Crofts of Seals and Crofts because they think popular music has now become much less boring?   Superhero-movie buffs celebrating Valerie Perrine's death because they couldn't stand her in the Superman movies?  No such comments on social media yet, at least to my knowledge (and by the way, there are a couple of Seals and Crofts songs I do like, and I loved Valerie Perrine and thought she was good even when the movie she was in wasn't, so let me get all that straight).  But the uncharitable comments made about Norris (can we expect Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco to do a "This F*cking Guy" video about Norris on their Hysteria YouTube channel soon?) are clearly a by-product of the ethos Trump has set by celebrating the deaths of Robert Mueller, Rob Reiner, and possibly any other man named Robert by his mother.  (Robert DeNiro, take note.)

But of course, while I would never say anything gleeful about the death of someone I merely found odious, I would not hesitate to celebrate upon hearing of the death of someone so irredeemably evil that there would be no more appropriate reaction to that person's death . . . like when I cackled when I heard that Rush Limbaugh kicked the bucket.  And when Madonna dies, the news will be music to my ears - which is ironic, since her recording career has never produced anything that sounds like music to my ears.  (When she fell of a horse in England back in the 2000s, my first reaction was, "I hope the horse is all right!") And of course, most of us will likely celebrate the death of one Donald J. Trump, with Monty Python alumnus John Cleese having said that when Trump dies, "the glorious outburst of happiness of celebration will be heard on the outer moons of Jupiter."

Quite an understatement.  I would throw in the outer moons of Saturn as well.

Stone Free

Roger Stone got his prison sentence commuted just before the crooked political consultant was scheduled to begin it.  Democrats have complained, of course, and so far Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Pat Toomey of Pennsylcania are the only Republicans to denounce the move.  Well, except for Robert Mueller, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that it doesn't change the fact that Stone is still a convicted felon for making false statements in the Russia investigation, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

It's no accident that Trump did this the day after the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that he could not block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. from acquiring Trump's tax returns and also ruled, again 7-2, to send a congressional request for his financial documents back to the lower courts, possibly allowing that to go forward later. After the Supreme Court - including Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh - told Trump that their interpretation of the law was that he must comply with the law, Trump commuted Stone's sentence to demonstrate that he is the law.

Even Nixon - whom Stone worked for - wouldn't have done this.  Trump's brazenness and his insistence that Stone was the victim of a witch hunt only serve to demonstrate how important it is that he be voted our of office in November.

Robert Mueller - What Did I Tell You?

There is a metric unit of length measurement called the micrometer, and it is so small it takes a thousand of them to comprise a millimeter.  And if I had the ability to measure anything in micrometers, I still wouldn't be able to measure any appreciable movement of the needle toward impeaching Trump after former special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony before Congress last week.

Mueller testified before two separate House committees last week and Democratic efforts to turn the dry words of his report on Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election into electrifying prose for the cameras.  Instead he mostly gave monosyllabic answers to what were mostly "yes or no" questions.  When he did elaborate on an answer, or when the answer he gave was not to a "yes or no" question, he sounded like a non-English speaker ignorant of Tudor history reciting Shakespeare sonnets off a page.  Mueller had said that he was not going to go beyond the parameters of his report.  He was not going to provide any new or eye-opening information.  What, may I ask, did the Democrats expect?     

And so the Democrats remain divided on what to do about Trump even as the Republicans are united and confident going forward.  Also, barring a major disaster other than himself, Donald Trump will be the 2020 Republican presidential nominee.  The Democrats, saddled with a choice of two dozen candidates for their party's presidential nomination, have a way to go before even a quarter of them get eliminated - and the ones who will be eliminated first are the perpetual one-percenters in the polls that never had a chance anyway.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were able to salvage something out of the Mueller debacle by getting more attention focused on Russian resole to interfere in the 2020 election.  The Senate Intelligence Committee has just issued a report warning of the danger of Russian interference in all fifty states.  Except that Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell won't allow a vote on any election security bills passed by the House, and other Republicans dismiss the idea of a threat to or electoral system.  You know what that means.  It means we're licked.

As those two wise men Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson once wrote, we can't go on pretending day-by-day that someone, somewhere, will soon make a change. We can now stop pretending that Robert Mueller was that person.

One More Mueller Time Again

Robert Mueller's testimony to Congress takes place tomorrow, and it's as eagerly awaited as the release of his original report on Trump.  And it may very well turn out to be just as disappointing as the release of the report.

Democrats hope that Mueller, who will not disseminate any more information that he already has in this report, will at least reiterate the findings in his own voice and give some drama to findings that most people have shrugged off or haven't even read.  This, they hope, will give some impetus to popular support for impeaching Trump, though the Republican Senate will acquit him. Republicans hope that their questions for Mueller in his testimony will shoot some holes into his report's conclusions in an effort to protect Trump, even though he is still generally unpopular outside of his base.  In the end , both sides will claim victory and America will lose.

I'm crossing my fingers that the tectonic plates of American politics will shift ever so slightly as a result of Mueller's appearance before Congress and will result in Trump's early ouster from office - and by that, I mean an electoral defeat for Trump in 2020.  But I'm not optimistic.  This show is more likely to be the Washington equivalent of an eagerly awaited big-budget movie that disappoints and flops once it opens.       

One More Mueller Time

Now that Robert Mueller has spoken abut his report on Trump and resigned as special counsel, let's quickly review a few facts.

Mueller looked for evidence that Trump was involved in criminal wrongdoing but the big story here is Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections - and a lot of Trump's alleged criminal acts have nothing to do with Russia.  The Mueller investigation was meant to highlight the lengths at which the Kremlin sought to help Trump and demoralize the Democrats (although Debbie Wasserman Schultz got a head start on the latter).  And Mueller found several examples of Russian malfeasance that must be taken seriously, whatever happens to Trump.

Also, whatever happens to Trump is contingent on the facts Mueller did find out about the Donald that led to what he couldn't find out about him.  In other words, he can't say the President is guilty or innocent of anything; but the trail leading to the truth is embedded in the facts he does have.  That's why Mueller said the report speaks for itself.

Impeaching a President is no painless task for anyone, and the Democrats have to be certain they have enough support from the public and enough evidence against Trump before they can indict Trump.  When will they have enough support and evidence?  How and when do they open impeachment proceedings without stirring the hornet's nest that is the Trump base and risking a backlash against Democratic candidates in the 2020 elections?  Those are things the Democrats, frankly, have to figure out for themselves.

Mueller Time Again

When Attorney General William Barr - whom everybody keeps calling "Bob Barr," confusing him with Bob Mueller and ironically naming a former Republican congressman from Georgia who supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton - released the Mueller report (with redactions) on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, we found out some interesting facts.  First Trump campaign officials made overtures to Russian nationals, some of whom were believed to be Americans because they contacted them through the Internet. (The Russians pretending to be Americans were sending out anti-Hillary propaganda and operating out of building in  St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg, Russia, not St., Petersburg, Florida.)  Robert Mueller's report offers a caveat that, while there were many contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians while the Kremlin was hacking computers, including that infamous June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russians operatives over possible "dirt" on the opposition, there was no agreement of collusion between the two parties.  There was no collusion . . . but only because there's no evidence that Paul Manafort and a Putin operative met at a hotel in Prague or Bratislava or wherever and hashed out a plan to sabotage Hillary Clinton.

"While the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign," Mueller wrote, "the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks' release of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation."

Trump also tried to have Mueller fired or at least reined in, and he even asked then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to withdraw his recusal.  Sessions may be a bigot, but he's not dishonorable; he refused to listen to Trump.  ("Death before dishonor," as they say down in Sessions' native South.)  Many more White House officials stopped Trump from committing any act that could be perceived as a crime; in instances when they failed to do so, Trump himself didn't commit a criminal act only because he didn't know what the hell he was doing.  Because justice was not obstructed - mainly because Trump himself never actually tried to stop Mueller, preferring that someone stop Mueller for him - Mueller decided there wasn't enough evidence to accuse Trump of obstructing justice, but because of all the obvious examples of how Trump wished to impeded the investigation, that was why he could not exonerate Trump either.

Barr has since declared that Trump has been cleared, twisting the facts to suit Trump's argument while leaving out all of the evidence and the charges pointing in a different direction.  Trump, in fact, figured that the jig was up when Trump, upon hearing the Mueller would investigate Russian interference in the election, said, "Oh, my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my Presidency.  I'm f--ked."

This is all bad news . . . for the Democrats.

What???  The intent of the Mueller report is to avoid the issue of accusing Trump of any wrongdoing; rather, it is meant to provide Congress a guide for how to proceed.  He wrote that there should be a process where the evidence is weighed, the charges are made through Congress rather than through an indictment (you apparently can't indict a sitting President), and the accused defends himself.  But with enough cherry-picked conclusions to allow Trump, his supporters, and the whole goddamned Republican Party (one honorable exception: Mitt Romney) to claim exoneration at a time when most Americans don't have the stomach for a Watergate-type investigation, the Democrats have two choices, and either way they could give Trump an advantage in the 2020 elections.  If they investigate Trump in the House and possibly vote on impeachment, it will anger the Republican base and turn off swing voters more interested in health care and living-wage jobs than shenanigans in the White House.  If they don't investigate, they let Trump get away with everything he's done up to now . . . and will do later.

I've been told that the Democrats can focus on the issues for 2020 and still investigate Trump - "walk and chew gum at the same time" - but this is a party that famously blows it when faced with dealing with Republican scandals.  The Iran-contra affair should have been a boon for Democrats in the 1988 presidential election, but it was their third straight loss despite Vice President Bush, who won the Presidency over Michael Dukakis, having had more to do with that scandal than he was willing to admit.  How far back do you want to go?  The Teapot Dome oil scandal that occurred under President Harding and was uncovered after Harding's death in office in 1923 put Republicans in an embarrassing position going into 1924, but they kept the Presidency after the Democrats took 103 ballots at their convention to nominate one John W. Davis, an esteemed diplomat, to oppose President Coolidge, who won a full term.  (To be fair, Coolidge had nothing to do with the Teapot Dome.)  And those scandals were nothing compared to the Trump White House, a scandal in and of itself; the Teapot Dome scandal involved illegal profiteering on government oilfields and Iran-contra was an earnest attempt by President Reagan at détente with the Ayatollah Khomeini gone awry when renegades in his own National Security Council hijacked it to benefit right-wing mercenaries in Central America.

What we have going on now is even more serious than Watergate.  If the Democrats can't figure out how to capitalize on this level of corruption while still promoting a positive agenda for 2020, then they're finished as a party.

Less mentioned but just as important is the finding that the Russians tried (successfully, alas) to sow division, influence voters, and promote chaos and discord in the 2016 presidential election, interfering in what Mueller called a "sweeping and systematic fashion."  Even if Trump had lost, as was expected, Russia would have still divided people enough to make a Hillary Clinton Presidency a nightmare for Hillary herself.  Maybe the Russians weren't involved with WikiLeaks as much or as closely as suspected, and maybe the Democratic National Committee should have gotten a better firewall for their servers,  but even the most die-hard Julian Assange fan or the most ardent Jill Stein voter (again, I voted for Dr. Stein out of a personal dislike for Hillary that goes back long before Russian interference in our elections was an issue) has to admit that Vladimir Putin was up to something.  After all the evidence of Russian malfeasance not involving collusion or obstruction of justice, there's no other conclusion anyone can come to.  

As I believe I said once before on this blog, the twenty-teens have been a disastrous decade for the nation.  It began with Citizens United and is ending with citizens divided, with all sorts of social, political and cultural failures in between.  And no one has been able to get away with so much and profit over the polarization of Americans than Donald J. Trump.  How his Presidency unfolds and what ultimately happens with it could tear this country up eve n more.  Or it could be a catharsis preceding a rebirth and renewal of America.  On this Holy Saturday, I'm not optimistic of the latter possible outcome coming to pass. 

Trump Trouble?

Don't look now, but Donald Trump could be in serious trouble.

The Mueller report, which may or may not get out soon, apparently has more damning information and conclusions that Attorney General William Barr has let on about.  Trump is still saying that he has nothing to hide, and he's so confident in his non-exoneration in the Mueller report that he says he wouldn't mind if its contents were in fact released to the public.  He is safe  - so he assumes - in the knowledge that Barr will find a way to release just enough of the Mueller report to appear transparent but not enough to get him in more hot water.

On the other hand, Trump has made it clear that his tax returns are off limits, and he refuses to release them.  The Democrats are trying to subpoena them as part of an overall investigation of his business dealings, though they are not necessarily expecting to find anything that would lead to impeachment.  And yet Trump is curiously - unless you think he does have something to hide - resisting calls for a look at his tax returns.  (So is Bernie Sanders, but that's another post.)  He's hoping to divert attention from them by threatening to close the Mexican border . . . and firing Kirstjen Nielsen as Homeland Security Secretary due to her refusal to go back to a migrant-family separation policy.  To illustrate just how clueless Trump is about domestic security, he will, with the appointment of Kevin McAleenan to succeed Nielsen in an acting capacity, have had three Homeland Security Secretaries - more Homeland Security Secretaries in one term than either Bush the Younger or Obama had in two terms.      

Trump is so unpopular that he could lose the 2020 presidential election running unopposed.  Fortunately for him, the Democrats have to nominate an opponent.  I've already commented on nine declared candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, expressing a preference for none of them, and there may be twice as many declared candidates left for me to comment on before I'm through.  Ugh.  And even after I've vetted Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Pete Buttgieg, Tim Ryan, Wayne Massam (who?) and a dozen-odd more candidates I don't know from Adam or Eve, Unn D. Sided will still remain my preference.                        

Mueller Time Is Barred

After Attorney General William Barr looked over the report on the Russia investigation handed in by Robert Mueller  (below), he issued a summary of the Mueller report this past Sunday - giving talking heads on cable news something to talk about all day along on the slowest news day of the week (pre-empting in the process a couple of CNN documentaries I'd been hoping to watch!) - that said there was neither evidence of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign nor evidence of obstruction of justice.

Trump quickly claimed victory, suddenly embracing Mueller as a truth-teller and blasting the Democrats for insinuating that a crime had been committed and that they will pay dearly for their attempted character assassination.

So is this the end?  Are the Democrats doomed to wearing egg yolk on their faces all the way to next November? Is Trump vindicated?  Not so fast.  Mueller was supposed look at the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election and catch the guys who were involved.  He did that.  And while he found no evidence to suggest that Trump went so far as to collude with Putin to get himself elected President, he did find a whole lot of other wrongdoing that highlighted the extent of Russian interference in our elections.  There's another problem - while Mueller's report said that he couldn't find enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice, he couldn't find enough evidence to exonerate Trump either.  It was Barr who said that Trump was exonerated, which makes sense, considering that he was appointed by . . .  Trump.

And Rod Rosenstein more or less agreed with Barr's conclusion.

And while this investigation had nothing to do with Trump's finances and tax returns, there is some information in the Mueller report that could be helpful in those investigations being handled by the Southern District of New York and the New York State Attorney General's office, as well as House oversight committees.  So this isn't over for Trump.  But this should put to rest the idea that this investigation would be the silver bullet that would take Trump down.  Of course, the Mueller report should be issued in its entirety, and, in matters like this, we should never take the word of an Attorney General appointed by the President on such a matter as the final word.  But while it may raise more questions than it answers, looking at the full Mueller report isn't necessarily going to answer any more questions.  Democrats were ready to accept Mueller's findings - which, by the way, yielded a lot of indictments - whatever they may be, and now they have to do so.   

Besides, what if Trump is telling the truth and he did not collude with the Russians?  Could it be possible that the Russians did try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election even as Trump had nothing to do with it, and that any charge that he didn't win fair and square is being leveled by Democrats who are ready to blame everyone for Hillary Clinton's loss except Hillary Clinton herself for her lousy campaign and the Democratic National Committee for failing to get a reliable firewall for their e-mail servers when those same Russians decided to break into them?  No, of course not, that would destroy their narrative.

It seems nothing short of high irony that the biggest critics of what Trump called "this Russia thing" are not Trump supporters but are in fact liberals and anti-Clinton Democrats.  They saw the Russia investigation as another diversion from the real issues regarding the quality of life in America and a distraction from the fact that the Democrats have done little to help the people and have failed to pass universal health care or bank regulation.  The Russia story, as far as they're concerned, was just another ruse by establishment leaders to get people's minds off the real issues - Russophobia from the Cold War days repackaged to dupe the masses.  Well, guess what - the Mueller report is the best thing to happen for Democrats as well as for Trump.  It may be an even better thing for Democrats.  The Mueller report is the end of the beginning, a precursor to the other investigations I alluded to that will take place with a lot less noise for now.  This frees the Democrats, especially their 2020 presidential candidates, to talk about the issues affecting average Americans and not about Trump, even as Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings lead their respective House committees' investigations of Trump outside the limelight of public scrutiny.  These subsequent investigations could find something to reverse Trump's fortunes, but for now, Democrats have the opportunity to change the subject to serious issues like health care and climate change.  Nancy Pelosi's decision to avoid pursuing impeachment looks more like a stroke of genius and less like a stroke.

Note to Democrats: It was never Mueller's duty to save the day.  It's up to you to save the day by energizing your base and nominating for President someone people can actually vote for, as opposed to having a place to cast a ballot against Trump, while providing congressional oversight over his conduct in office.  Mueller's work is done.  You are only getting started.

Stonefaced Shutdown

On the same day that Trump confidante and Nixon apologist Roger Stone was arrested and charged by Robert Mueller's investigation with lying about the nature of his involvement in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Trump himself was forced to end the government shutdown after five weeks and agree to the same deal he rejected at the last minute back in December to keep the government open.  This happened as FBI Director Christopher Wray was expressing outright anger over the shutdown and the impact it was having on his agency even as FBI agents were . . . arresting Roger Stone in Florida.

Stone apparently was more active than he has been willing to admit in exposing e-mails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) regarding Hillary Clinton's campaign after WikiLeaks found that the DNC had a cut-rate firewall and hacked some very damaging attitudes from Hillary and her campaign toward Catholic voters, Wall Street, her wimp-out on single-payer health care,  and just about everything else.  Stone was apparently vigorous in pursuing of Russian-hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid.  He was allegedly very active in talking with Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks - which may or may not be a Russian front - in getting the material released in a timely  matter so it could be leveraged against the Clinton campaign.  Then he tried to tamper with a witness, a talk-radio host, to keep him from telling the truth to Mueller about the nature of the conversations that had over WikiLeaks.

Does your head hurt yet?

While there is no accusation toward Trump of colluding with the Russians, it's clear that Stone was deeply involved in manipulating sensitive information to ensure a Trump victory (although the Democrats helped by nominating Hillary).  It won't be long before Trump is implicated. 

Oh yeah, the 2020 presidential election.  Bernie Sanders is running, and Beto O'Rourke won't decide for several months.  Never mind, Beto.  I'm taking a serious look at Colorado senator and rumored presidential candidate Michael Bennet . . .    

The Prez Trumps The Law

Can we impeach Trump yet?  Because I'm getting sick and tired of him even more than I already was.

Now it turns out that the FBI has been investigating Trump for working as Vladimir Putin's client head of state, pretty much running the United States the way the Russians want him to.  And there's even a report that he considered withdrawing the U.S. from . . . NATO!

Meanwhile, while Robert Mueller is zeroing in on whether Trump colluded with the Russians (isn't that obvious by now?), former Attorney General William Barr is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee to get his old job back, and he's likely to get it, even though there is plenty of reason to be concerned about him.  He thinks that the President should have greater power and always have the upper hand over the other branches of government.  He's making enough promises that Mueller will be able to complete his investigation and being just evasive enough to re-assure Trump.

We're entering our third year of Trump.  I have a feeling it will all turn out like this . . .

Out of Sessions

I've never seen so many liberals shed tears not of the crocodile variety over the forced resignation of a racist, reactionary Attorney General.  Jeff Sessions was not an icon of equal justice under law, but he showed integrity in recusing himself from the Russia investigation, allowing for the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor in the investigation.  Now this new clown Matthew Whitaker, a Trump loyalist and a Mueller critic,  is the acting Attorney General and is poised to find a way to undermine Mueller in a way that Trump never could before Sessions was forced out.

Popular wisdom is that if the Democrats had gained control of the Senate - which was never going to happen - Trump wouldn't have forced Sessions out the day after the election.  That's correct.  If the Democrats had taken back the Senate, Trump would have forced Sessions out a week after the election.  The possible expansion of the Senate Republican majority, depending on how elections in Arizona and Florida turn out, only emboldened Trump, as his belligerent attitude in his last press conference ("Did you see Trump's last press conference?"  "I hope so!") demonstrated.

But Democrats have just regained control of the House (I'll talk about that later), and they are getting ready to pick up where Mueller may be forced to leave off.  I'm not for impeaching Trump for as long as there's no evidence to warrant impeachment, but I am all for the investigation.  Just because there may not be any evidence of Trump colluding with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election doesn't mean Mueller and the Democrats don't have to look.  

Oh, Great, More Trump News

While the Trump legal defense wades through the swamp  that was supposed to have been drained, Trump's star lawyer Rudolph Giuliani - who was one a nice guy but is now a mean old man - said that he was afraid of Trump talking to Russia-investigation special counsel Robert Mueller because the truth could be set against an alternative version of the truth, and then added for good measure, "Truth isn't truth!"

To be fair, what Giuliani meant was that Trump could tell the truth and someone else could tell a contradictory lie that could be believed over the truth.  And I almost - almost - feel sorry for Rudy, as his client is the classic boy who cried "Wolf!" - a pathological liar who will not be believed even when he tells the truth.  I almost feel sorry for Giuliani . . . but I don't, because Trump never tells the truth.

As for the rescinding of former CIA director John Brennan's security clearance . . . I suspect that Brennan only fanned the flames of this brouhaha by insisting that it's "hogwash" that there was no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians.  There's no evidence of collusion yet.  (I'll expand on that in a moment.)  Trump is doing this, of course, to scare security experts who still have that clearance from speaking out against him, but when he started badmouthing a security expert no one had ever heard of or from, it became obvious that, if you're a former intelligence officer or national security adviser, you can still lose your clearance even if you shut up. 

It's telling, though,  that more security experts find Brennan to be a TV-camera-loving blusterer of a cable-news commentator, yet they all defended him.  As for the fact that Brennan has no security clearance anymore, that means he can't look at sensitive information and advise the White House based on that information . . . like Trump was ever going to consult him anyway.  

No, to the point that there's no evidence of collusion with the Russians yet . . . Brennan's comments were apparently based on circumstantial evidence.  As  the movie North By Northwest has demonstrated, circumstantial evidence can frame an innocent party, and the evidence has to be solid and incontrovertible  to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  I am not saying that Trump is innocent of the charge of Russian collusion and that there is no proof of colluding with the Russians.  I merely note that the evidence proving so isn't available yet.  Which is precisely why the Democrats should not run in the midterm elections on impeachment or even mention it.  If they do, then they give Trump ally Steve Bannon what he wants so he can push Republican turnout in the midterms to offset the expected Democratic surge and keep the GOP in control of the House.  So please, Democrats, keep talking about health care, wages, and infrastructure.  But not impeachment.  I've long since lost interest in the topic.

And I have never been interested in the Paul Manafort trial.  Oh, is that still going on?  Yawn . . .    

The Plot Begins To Unravel

Robert Mueller is issuing a subpoena for the Trump Organization's documents regarding their dealings in Russia.  Now if there is any funny business going on with that country's oligarchs, Trump will be exposed as the con man everyone suspects him to be, propped up by Vladimir Putin and bending over backwards to keep the Kremlin protected from international sanctions and isolation.  Perhaps knowing that the jig may be up, Trump has allowed his aides to condemn Russia's connection to the poisoning of a Russian double agent and his daughter living in England and to approve sanctions against the Russians - but he's not yet ready to take credit for anything that would offend Putin.

"Mueller is not fooling around," Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted in response.  "A subpoena carries the force of law . . ..  If Donald Trump fires him, it's because Trump is hiding something bad from the American people."  House Republicans are certainly hiding something, since they terminated the investigation of the House Intelligence Committee into Russian meddling in the election and declared there was no collusion without hearing any testimony from witnesses Democrats wanted to bring in, which would have undermined that argument.  And by the way, the Senate investigation continues. 

While all of this is going on, Donald Trump, Jr.'s wife Vanessa has filed for divorce.  Talk about a danger signal!  This is the political version of a signal in the atmosphere that clues weather forecasters into a coming storm.  Vanessa Trump's split from her husband means that a sh--storm may be coming.     

And what about porn star Stormy Daniels, speaking of storms?  Please, that's a nothing-burger compared to the scandalous news about Trump and Russia that's about to blow up all over the Internet.

Ajit Pai may be considering an end to Net neutrality sooner rather than later.      

Meanwhile, Andrew McCabe was fired as FBI deputy director two days before his retirement because he misled investigators about letting FBI members share with the press damaging information about the investigation of . . . Hillary Clinton?  I give up, nothing makes sense anymore.

Troll Trouble

Robert Mueller has caught so many parties in his Russia probe that I can't keep up with them. So I'll focus on the one that may be most important - this past month he indicted thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies on charges of conspiracy for trying to persuade voters in 2016 to support Hillary Clinton's various opponents and vote against Hillary herself.  The companies include the Internet Research Agency, based St. Petersburg (no, not St. Petersburg, Florida), which produced the political propaganda aimed at American social media and the two companies that helped finance it.

The tactic was simple - troll the voters.  The object was to discourage people from supporting Hillary and make sure she lost.  The Russians posted memes and fake Facebook pages promoting not just Donald Trump but Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Dr. Jill Stein in the general election.  There is not proof that Trump knew about this or was involved in it, and Trump naturally insists that it exonerates him.  It doesn't, of course, but it lets him off the hook for the time being, and it also buys Mueller some time.  And in that time so far,  he's managed to indict former Trump camping manager Paul Manafort on money laundering and bank fraud charges after former Trump aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.  Gates had lied about the details of a 2013 conversation about Ukraine involving Manafort, a member of Congress, and a lobbyist.  Manafort and Gates have consulted Ukrainian politicians.

As for the 2016 disinformation campaign . . . well, it definitely proves even to those who dismiss the bot stories and the Russian "fake news" strategy as drivel that the Russians indeed tried to influence the outcome of the election.  But let me be clear.  I do believe that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential election and were using an online disinformation campaign.  I just don't think it determined the outcome.  To suggest otherwise would be to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for blowing the easiest election for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 (2000?  No, Al Gore won and the Presidency was stolen from him!) and would be to suggest that voters who went for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and went third-party in the general election (myself included in the latter instance) don't have minds of their own and are subject to Russian brainwashing.  The people who blame the Russians for influencing the outcome, by the way, are the same people who dismissed Ronald Reagan's Soviet-bashing as xenophobic paranoia.  I'd vote for someone other than Hillary in opposition to Trump all over again.

I just don't know if I would still vote for Dr. Stein.  As a presidential candidate, Dr. Stein was not the best messenger the Green Party could have gotten behind to promote and advance its agenda.  Also, she failed to get the Greens to five percent nationwide, rendering them ineligible for federal matching funds in 2020.  Dr. Stein is right when she says that the Democratic establishment is trying to silence liberal voices both within and outside of its own party, and she noted that the Greens were promoted with a couple of Russian-generated memes out of a trillion that were posted on social media.  But her willingness to meet with anyone and everyone on the subject of global affairs - including the infamous Moscow dinner that placed her at the same table with Vladimir Putin and not-yet-then Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn - continues to embarrass some of us who voted for her.  To be fair, she did stress before that her trip to Russia was "about promoting diplomacy, peace, and international cooperation on pressing global issues," and that she was one of several Americans at that Moscow dinner promoting a saner and more just foreign policy.  And there was no intent on her part to conceal her dealings in Russia.  But it's not Dr. Stein's transparency that's in question; it's her judgment.  She wanted to be taken seriously as a third-party U.S. presidential candidate, yet she was seen hobnobbing not only with America's worst foreign adversary but also with its most ethically dubious retired Army man, Michael Flynn.

As a Martin O'Malley supporter, I wonder if I should have written O'Malley in back in November 2016.  The only problem is that you don't vote directly for a presidential candidate in the United States - you vote for Electoral College candidates pledged to vote for your presidential candidate.  New Jersey has fourteen electoral votes, and you vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their identities.  There are no Electoral College candidates for an undeclared write-in presidential candidate, of course, so how could I vote for fourteen O'Malley electors who didn't exist?  My vote for Dr. Stein actually offended some of my friends, which wasn't worth it.  One such friend, a dear, sweet woman I've know for a few years now, chastened me for my vote and told me I helped Trump.  

I give up.  I'd rather have voted for O'Malley and been ridiculed than voted for a third-party candidate on the ballot and be scorned.  Why not write in O'Malley? After all, no Russian meme encouraged anyone to vote for him in any way, shape or form.

And I've got a mind of my own.

(Oh yeah, the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo was finally released.  Yay.  Whoppee. :-p)

You're Not Fired

Robert Mueller is still the special counsel investigating Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential campaign and possible collusion between Trump and the Russians.  But he almost lost his job.  The New York Times reported that Trump wanted to fire him back in June - a charge Trump denies - but White House counsel Don McGahn refused to carry out the order, threatening to quit.  With this news out, Mueller has become untouchable.  Do you think Trump is going to fire him now?  He can deny that he ever did try to fire him all he wants, but if he does try to dismiss him, it's going to look very, very bad.  

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) thinks that Trump will still try to get Mueller out. I don't think so.  Trump isn't going to do anything that will encourage anyone to turn against him and force him out of office.  He's going to do everything he can to survive to the bitter end.  And if Mueller finds enough damning evidence to have Trump removed from office, the bitter end will come sooner rather than later.

I don't know which was the funniest occurrence of the past couple of days - Sean Hannity acknowledging the veracity of the Times' report by cutting to the chase (specifically , a car chase that had nothing to do with Trump or Mueller),  Republican senator Ron Johnson of WIsconsin suggesting a "secret society" in the FBI trying to get rid of Trump, or the FBI being accused of conspiracy when several months' worth of anti-Trump texts by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page went missing . . . only to be recovered shortly thereafter.          

Tangled Web

Hillary Clinton celebrated her seventieth birthday last week and got a present from Senate Republicans - an investigation.  She learned, as did the rest of us, that the Senate was planning to investigate her for approving a sale of a uranium mine to a Russian company while Secretary of State and receiving a donation for the Clinton Foundation from the company that sold the mine to the Russians . . . and for colluding with the Democratic National Committee into paying for the compilation of a dossier of records showing a relationship between Donald Trump and Russia that was assembled and written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, between June and December of 2016.  This was more of a gift for Trump than for Hillary; he pounced on both reports hoping that they would be bigger news than the indictment coming from Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump, which everyone knew would be against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  So who cares about Paul Manafort, who left the Trump campaign early?  Especially with Hillary conspiring with Russia! 

As expected, it was Manafort who, along with a guy named Rick Gates, got indicted for, of all things, money laundering.  But also caught with his pants down was ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, who was found to have been in contact with foreign nationals tied to the Russians offering dirt on Hillary and seeking a connection with the Trump campaign.  Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying about it in early October 2017.

The Papadopoulos case is more serious for the Trump White House.  Manafort's charges pre-date his association with Trump.  But Papadopoulos's role in the campaign may reveal something about the Russia connections Trump has that he doesn't want anyone to know about.

Oh, and about the charges against Hillary . . . Uranium One, the Canadian company that sold the mine to a Russian company - the uranium for which must be used for energy purposes and can't be exported out of the United States - was approved by a board independent of the State Department, and that dossier had been started for one of Trump's Republican presidential primary opponents.

Trump should just admit that he's trying to deflect attention from charges against his cronies.  But investigations against Hillary are likely going to proceed anyway.  I don't know why.  She's irrelevant.  The way Trump and the GOP are still going after her, you'd think the entire Democratic Party didn't matter!

Ha ha, perish the thought!

A tangled web indeed . . .

Mueller's The Word

You know what's funny?

I'll tell you.

There's been so much media attention on Charlottesville and North Korea in the past several days that special counsel Robert Mueller (above) has been able to investigate Trump's Russia connections without a great deal of media attention.  Not since the spring of 1987, when the media's coverage of the Iran-contra affair was overshadowed by coverage of the PTL ministry scandal and the Gary Hart sex scandal, has something so paramount been an afterthought of a story.

Although it looks like things may be picking up again.  I just saw a story about how Mueller wants to talk to former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus.

Shhh!  Let's move on to something else.  Let Mr. Mueller do his work without any media attention, so Trump won't notice!

Irritation Men

Donald Trump's new immigration proposal - backed by a bill from two Republican senators from, you guessed it, the South - is carefully constructed to appear like it helps our economy but is designed in fact to delay or prevent the day that non-Hispanic whites become less than 50 percent of the population in These States.  It would only allow nuclear family units and not extended family members to come here, and they would have to be highly educated and be able to speak the American language.  Well, I'm certain that they would be highly educated, if they can speak Cherokee.   

Ha ha!  I mean English, of course.  This bill would obviously be partial to English-speaking immigrants, meaning it would be partial to countries like Great Britain, Ireland and Australia, where English is widely spoken, but the education requirement would keep out folks from Third World English-speaking countries such as Jamaica and Nigeria - from which people come to study in the U.S. because higher-education opportunities back home, shall we say, leave a good deal to be desired.  And families couldn't be reunited, although bringing families together has been the cornerstone of American immigration policy since 1965.

If these restrictions had existed in the early 1920s, just before the racist 1924 Immigration Act restricting immigration to those northern Europe was passed, my Italian maternal grandfather wouldn't have been able to come here.   

Trump and his nationalist adviser Stephen Miller defended the proposal, and Miller was very irritable and irritating with reporters who found the bill exclusionary, defending it as a bill that would be economically advantageous, not racially disparaging.  He insisted that the bill would benefit the economy for all Americans, and he even said he was insulted by the suggestioin that it would keep out people from non-English-speaking countries because such a suggestion assumes that people from such places can't speak English.

By the way, "Miller" is a nice Anglo-Saxon name.  It's also a nice German name (most immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century were German and spoke the language even after they became assimilated).   It's also a nice Jewish name . . . and Stephen Miller just happens to be Jewish.  Eastern European Jewish, to be exact; his own great-grandfather came from Belarus, where English is not widely spoken.

By the way, Donald Trump's own paternal grandfather - who changed the family name from Drumpf - could not have gotten into this country from Germany under such restrictions.  And non-English-speakers from non-English-speaking countries are more common than Miller thinks; did he ever notice that Germany's own chancellor doesn't speak the language of Shakespeare?

The irritating Tom Cotton, the  Republican U.S. Senator from Arkansas who is co-sponsoring this immigration bill with Senator David Perdue, a Republican from Georgia, ironically divulged the true intention of the bill in defending it on economic grounds.  Cotton said that allowing only highly skilled immigrants would protect unskilled American workers from foreign-born competition from low-wage jobs.  Well, if you really wanted to help the economy, why not provide more skill training  opportunities and increase wages for lower-paying jobs through minimum-wage laws?  Because improving the lot of workers is the last thing Republicans (and many centrist Democrats) want to do.

So much for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  That line came from Emma Lazarus, of course - she was of German-Portuguese Jewish ancestry. 

The bill has no chance of passage, as most Senate Democrats and many Senate Republicans oppose it.  But that's not the only reason it will fail.  Trump may not be in a position to promote it for much longer; special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been irritating the White House, has expanded his investigation into Trump's business dealings, and he has called a grand jury as part of his investigations.

By the way, "Mueller" is a nice German name . . . ;-)

This Just Got Interesting

The title is ironic.

The Justice Department has just appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling into the U.S. presidential election and helping Trump.  This is a positive step, but it's a baby step at best.  A independent prosecutor needs to take the reins of this investigation, and the White House seems unfazed by this latest development.  Trump maintains his innocence.

"As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know - there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity," Trump said in a statement reacting to the Mueller appointment. "I look forward to this matter concluding quickly. In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country."

Gag me with a spoon.  Well, we'll see about that.

Meanwhile, things on Wall Street got really interesting yesterday - the Dow Jones average dropped over 300 points over more news about Trump's possible meddling into the FBI's Russia investigation.  And did I mention that he's beginning his first foreign trip as President?