Via Trump, Defending His Sanity, Says He’s a ‘Very Stable Genius’.
Update, Noon: The Times has now changed its online headline from ‘sanity’ to ‘mental fitness’ – Trump’s unfit for office in any event, as a matter of cognition, knowledge, or character.
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twelve. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 11m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1759, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis are married in New Kent County, Virginia. On this day in 1921, ‘Janesville women abhor salacious entertainment’: “On this date the Janesville Federation of Women decided to “censor” movies and vaudeville in the city. Members of this organization praised and promoted what they considered “better offerings.” They were zealously critical towards those of a “salacious” nature. No follow-up ever determined whether the women were successful in their quest or if the increased publicity for “salacious” shows backfired.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Rachel Maddow contends we’ve seen that “In a year, Republicans went from caring about the Russia investigation to caring about undermining it. And the FBI in that time has become oddly compliant“:
In a year, Republicans went from caring about the Russia investigation to caring about undermining it. And the FBI in that time has become oddly compliant. pic.twitter.com/zJeiUaHHhz
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 6, 2018
Jennifer Rubin contends Senate Republicans become Trump accomplices in manipulating the system:
“The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Friday that the Justice Department investigate for possible criminal charges the author of the now-famous “dossier” alleging the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin during the 2016 election.
The move by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) marks a major escalation in conservatives’ challenges to the FBI’s credibility as the agency investigates whether any Trump associates committed crimes. Another Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), joined in the letter to the Justice Department.
Their letter makes what is called a criminal referral to the Justice Department, suggesting it investigate the dossier author, former British spy Christopher Steele, for possibly lying to the FBI. It is a crime to lie to FBI agents about a material fact relevant to an ongoing investigation.”
This is an outrageous political stunt, one with no legal ramifications and obviously designed to take the heat off the White House as damning reports bolstering an obstruction-of-justice claim and questioning the president’s mental fitness have sent the White House spinning.
(Grassley & Graham have two possible strategies: create a diversion, and also forestall release of the transcript of the ten-hour testimony from FusionGPS executives about the dossier as that those executives have requested. By enoucouraging an investigation into dossier author Steele, Grassley & Graham will be able to say that must withhold FusionGPS’s transcribed testimony about the dossier ‘pending the outcome of an investigation.’ That testimony, if released, would by the account of those who gave it leave Fox, Breitbart, and Trump’s defenders with no credible reply. See The Republicans’ Fake Investigations, linked here on 1.3.18)
Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman L. Eisen ask Did Trump Obstruct Justice?:
….Of all the elements that must be proved to establish the offense of obstruction, the one that is most critical is corrupt intent: Did Mr. Trump wrongfully intend to obstruct the criminal and congressional investigations? The facts contained in these reports strongly suggest he did.
We now know, for example, that the president took aggressive steps to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation because he needed Mr. Sessions to protect and safeguard him, as he believed Eric Holder Jr. and Robert Kennedy did for their presidents. This shows that from the outset the president was concerned that he needed protection from the impact of any investigation. In fact, when the president’s efforts were unsuccessful, he purportedly responded by saying, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” perhaps suggesting that Mr. Trump wanted the attorney general of the United States to act as his personal criminal defense lawyer — a startling view into his state of mind.
Equally significant are new revelations that the president had drafted a letter to the F.B.I. director at the time, James Comey, describing the Russian investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated.” Those disclosures support that the president’s statements to the press and the public in connection with firing Mr. Comey were misleading. The president, of course, publicly claimed that Mr. Comey was fired because of his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. This matters because attempts to cover up the truth are classic indicators of a culpable state of mind under the obstruction statutes.
In this same vein, the Wolff book claims that the president’s lawyers believed that his efforts aboard Air Force One last summer to shape his son Donald Jr.’s statement about a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.” Mr. Wolff also asserts that one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen quit over the incident because of a concern that it was obstruction of justice. That was a wise move. If the president knowingly caused his son to make a false statement to interfere with the investigations or cover up the facts, that alone could constitute obstruction of justice….
(See also from the same authors, as linked here on 10.19.17, Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump.)
Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller report More departures on horizon for struggling White House staff:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Already setting turnover records, President Donald Trump’s White House is bracing for even more staff departures and an increasing struggle to fill vacancies, shadowed by the unrelenting Russia probe, political squabbling and Trump’s own low poll numbers.
Entering a grueling year that is sure to bring fresh challenges at home and abroad, Trump faces a brain drain across a wide swath of government functions, threatening to hamstring efforts to enact legislation or conduct even basic operations. Some departures are expected to come from senior ranks — the staff churn that makes headlines — but more are likely among the lesser-known officials who help to keep the White House and Cabinet agencies running.
In Trump’s first year, his administration’s upper-level officials have had a turnover rate of 34 percent, much higher than any other in the past 40 years, according to an analysis by Kathryn Dunn-Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The study found that 22 of the 64 senior officials she tracked have resigned, been fired or reassigned.
Anecdotal evidence among more junior officials — the White House wouldn’t release data — suggests similar departure rates, and White House aides acknowledge difficulty filling roles in the administration….
(Rats, a listing ship, and rising waters…)
The Quiet Exuberance of Winter:
“You have to be at peace with the fact that something might happen, and you might not make it through,” says Alexandra de Steiguer, the caretaker for the Oceanic Hotel, in Brian Bolster’s short documentary, Winter’s Watch. De Steiguer has spent the past 19 winters tending to the 43-acre grounds of the hotel, on Star Island, which sits 10 miles off the coast of New England. In the long, wintry off-season, she is the island’s sole inhabitant.
Winter’s Watch explores de Steiguer’s relationship to extreme isolation. Its meditative imagery contemplates the beauty of absence, while de Steiguer reflects on the unique challenges and rewards of solitude. “There are no other distractions,” she says. “You have to decide how to fill your days….and yet it is peaceful, and I can use my imagination.”
The hulking—and possibly haunted—hotel bears a striking resemblance to The Shining, but de Steiguer maintains that “if there are ghosts out here, they are being extremely kind to me.” Rather, she has embraced what she calls “the great waiting of winter.”
“Being alone here and seeing the struggle of winter makes me feel connected to the web of life,” she says. “Winter has a quiet exuberance. You have to look into the bones.”
For the first time in Saint Louis Zoo history, a cheetah has given birth to eight cheetah cubs. The cubs, three males and five females, were born at the Saint Louis Zoo River’s Edge Cheetah Breeding Center on November 26, 2017. Mother and cubs are doing well and will remain in their private, indoor maternity den behind the scenes at River’s Edge for the next several months.
In over 430 litters documented by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), this is the first time a female cheetah has produced and reared on her own a litter of eight cubs at a zoo. The average litter size is three to four cubs.
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be party cloudy with a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:36 PM, for 9h 10m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1855, King Camp Gillette is born: “On this date King Camp Gillette was born in Fond du Lac. He worked for many years as a traveling salesman. After much experimentation, he developed a disposable steel blade and razor. He established the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1901. Sales for his product skyrocketed. Gillette remained president of his company until 1931 and was a director until his death the following year.”
Recommended for reading in full —
James Fallows writes It’s Been an Open Secret All Along (“The scandal of Michael Wolff’s new book isn’t its salacious details—it’s that everyone in Washington has known its key themes, and refused to act”):
The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. We’ll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it’s a remarkable tale.
But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.
Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities. He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart. He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens. He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home.
And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office….
Joe Scarborough writes I asked Trump a blunt question: Do you read?:
Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.
“Can you read?”
Awkward silence.
“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.
I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to …. He was postliterate — total television.” But “Fire and Fury” reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron”….
(There are problems either of character or cognition that might make reading difficult.)
Brian Stelter writes This is bigger than Trump vs. Bannon; it’s about Trump’s capability:
Some commentators raised doubts about Trump’s competency even before Election Day. But there’s been a palpable change as of late. Media conversations about Trump’s competency are certainly more common than, say, six months ago.
Jake Tapper said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Thursday that “this new book and the new tweet about his big and powerful button” are “renewing talk about the 25th Amendment and lawmakers’ fears about President Trump’s mental health.” He asked: “Is this all below board?”
Related: Wolff’s Trump book going on sale four days early amid furor
White House aides and pro-Trump hosts on Fox News say that it is completely inappropriate to be questioning his stability.
But Republican Senator Bob Corker has broached the subject several times in recent months. Last October he called the White House “an adult day care center.”
On Thursday it was reported that a Yale psychiatrist briefed a dozen members of Congress — mainly Democrats — last month on Trump’s mental fitness.
The meeting was kept private at the time. These questions about fitness are more frequently whispered than shouted.
On MSNBC on Thursday, anchor Katy Tur, who covered the Trump campaign, recalled that a former Trump staffer asked her a couple of months ago, “Do you think he’s lost a step since the campaign?”
“This,” she said, “is a pervasive view among those who know him. That should not be surprising”….
Steve Vladeck explains The Fatal (Procedural) Flaw In the New Manafort Suit:
For the second time in as many months, “Younger abstention” is in the news. Last month, it was as a legal concept sufficiently foreign to one of President Trump’s district court nominees so as to turn him into a viral internet meme (and, ultimately, lead him to withdraw from consideration). Now, it’s because of the… odd… lawsuit filed on Wednesday by Paul Manafort, seeking to invalidate the authority of Special Counsel Mueller to prosecute him. I already tweeted about why, on the merits, there’s very little to Manafort’s substantive claim until and unless the Supreme Court actually wants to revisit Morrison v. Olson—and perhaps not even then….
the doctrine of “equitable restraint” precludes collateral attacks on ongoing criminal proceedings absent some showing that there is no adequate remedy available to the plaintiff within the ongoing criminal proceeding (e.g., a motion to dismiss the indictment or disqualify the prosecutor). And there is no dispute that equitable restraint applies with equal force to suits to enjoin ongoing federalcriminal proceedings—where there will often be far less of a concern about the availability of an adequate remedy within the criminal process.
In that regard, what is striking about the complaint in Manafort v. U.S. Dep’t of Justiceis what it has to say about the absence of a meaningful remedy for Manafort’s claims within his ongoing criminal proceeding: Absolutely nothing. Instead, Manafort is asking a different judge of the same district court to provide relief that is unquestionably available to him, if appropriate, from the trial judge, without any allegation of the type of bad faith or misconduct by that court (to say nothing of irreparable harm stemming from the same) that would justify an exception….
(Manafort has nothing here except a public-relations angle.)
Iguanas are falling out of trees in Florida:
One of the strongest winter storms on the East Coast in modern history has pummeled cities with snow and sleet, forcing schools and businesses to close while grounding thousands of flights.
And in South Florida, it is “raining iguanas.”Green iguanas, like all reptiles, are coldblooded animals, so they become immobile when the temperature falls to a certain level, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, they become sluggish. Under 40 degrees, their blood stops moving as much, Sommers said.
They like to sit in trees, and “it’s become cold enough that they fall out.”
This is not a new phenomenon — there were similar reports in 2008 and 2010 — though it is not typical.
There’s something funny, and something sad, about the City of Jefferson’s decision to host for five more years a Harry Potter festival with the same mediocre promotional leadership the festival’s had while in Edgerton and (more recently) in Jefferson.
See Attack of the Dirty Dogs (“If vast numbers are disappointed, it matters not at all that [Jefferson City Manager] Freitag thinks the event exceeded his middling hopes. The only benefit in knowing what he thinks is to learn that he doesn’t understand the instrumental role of government and that he’s too undiscerning to know the difference between a good and bad time.” It’s worth noting also that I am not writing from personal disappointment; I found the many accounts of patrons who wasted hundreds traveling to Jefferson and buying tickets for this shabby event truly moving. They deserved better.)
What does this mean for Whitewater? It’s an assurance of years without even the possibility of this dirty-dog-run festival befouling our city. One always hopes for more than merely avoiding the bad, but avoiding the bad is a good start.
For the town blogger, specifically, this means an opportunity for me to concentrate on more important matters (e.g., use of force against peaceful residents, whether immigrants or non-immigrants, matters concerning ongoing assaults on and off campus, defending principles of open government, and digging in as hard as one can against every last aspect of Trumpism).
It’s wrong to continue a shabby festival, but if that shabby festival stays away from Whitewater’s city limits, one can be satisfied. There are better matters to occupy our attention in Whitewater.
Thanks, City of Jefferson — my best to you all, from the very deepest place in my heart.
For Ramona Flanigan, Edgerton City Administrator? I’ve never met Ms. Flanigan, but from everything I’ve read she’s smart, professional, and capable. Her city hosted the event for two years before wisely passing on more (after which the promoters decamped to Jefferson).
Note to Edgerton: You need to consider a promotion for Flanigan. She’s served you well. I’m not up on all the titles available in your city, but if baroness or duchess is untaken, I’d say that’s a start. Good sense deserves a good reward.
Note to Flanigan: If you’re ever in Whitewater, feel free to drop me a line. Lunch is on me. My pleasure, I’m sure.
For the press? Coverage of the festival is proof of how weak the local press really is. The Daily Union ran a fine investigation into the festival’s bad showing in Edgerton, and gave Jefferson a forewarning of the debacle that was to come. The DU even reported on this year’s mess, until someone apparently got cold feet and coverage shifted into overdrive in support of city officials and promoters who were behind it all.
All of these local papers are afraid of municipal officials (and far more afraid of hyper-cautions advertisers). If an advertiser gets the sniffles, the publisher comes down with double pneumonia.
There are probably many reasons that neither America nor any other country has selected the scaredy cat as a national symbol. That’s just no way to be.
Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of ten. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 09m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Fire Department will hold a business tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1923, Milton College takes a stand against dancing: “Milton College president A.E. Whitford banned dancing by students in off-campus, semi-public places such as confectionery stores.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Wolff reports “You Can’t Make This S— Up”: My Year Inside Trump’s Insane White House:
….There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump’s family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.
Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia “collusion,” Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)
There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something….
(Everywhere, in public and from private accounts, Trump shows evidence of cognitive decline, approaching in seriousness his long-existing moral and ethical deficiencies.)
Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker report Trump lawyer seeks to block insider book on White House:
A lawyer representing President Trump sought Thursday to stop the publication of a new behind-the-scenes book about the White House that has already led Trump to angrily decry his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
The legal notice — addressed to author Michael Wolff and the president of the book’s publisher — said Trump’s lawyers were pursuing possible charges including libel in connection with the forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
The letter by Beverly Hills-based attorney Charles J. Harder demanded the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book” or excerpts and summaries of its contents. The lawyers also seek a full copy of the book as part of their investigation….
(Cease and desist on behalf of the most public figure on the planet…good luck with that.)
Josh Marshall sees The End of the Beginning:
One of the things we will be focusing on on the Russia front in 2018 is not simply breaking a lot of news but on narrating the bigger picture. It can be a difficult story to make sense of because it has so many tentacles. There are so many disparate and far-flung parts to keep track of and make sense of. One of the top themes of Glenn Simpson’s and Peter Fritsch’s must-read oped published yesterday in The New York Times is that the focus on conspiracy during the 2016 campaign cycle has almost totally eclipsed examination of Donald Trump’s longstanding involvement with the Russian criminal underworld and money laundering which laid the basis of what happened in 2016. (That has always seemed to be Trump’s greatest fear.) We’ll come back to that.
So where are we now in this story? A series of revelations in the final weeks of 2017 placed us at what we should think not as the beginning or the end but the end of the beginning. We are still only at the front end of this investigation. We still know only the outlines of what happened and how. But we are past any serious question about whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. There was. It’s no longer a matter of probability, even high probability. We know it from either undisputed facts or sworn statements from Trump associates now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
As I wrote a week ago, the entire ‘controversy’ over the Steele Dossier is meaningless in any substantive sense. Even if it were literally propaganda from the DNC comms office it wouldn’t change the facts about what the FBI and then Mueller investigations have already uncovered. It is classic misdirection and mendacity in its most direct form. Steele wasn’t some oppo researcher. He was one of his country’s top Russia spies, very well-placed to conduct such an investigation. He was and is trusted and held in high repute by the FBI, in part because of his work in the FIFA scandal. But the storm of abuse and misinformation from Trump supporters have nonetheless cast his work under some public taint. The aforementioned OpEd by the men who run Fusion GPS, I think, finally sets the matter straight. The dossier wasn’t the origin of the investigation. But it added to US counter-intelligence concerns (perhaps more like alarm bells) because as Simpson puts it, “our sources said the dossier … corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp. The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign”….
(The case against Trump grows stronger each day. Much more to be done, but it will be done.)
Ben Schreckinger reports Vladimir Putin’s Worst Enemies Are Hosting a Summit in His Honor (“Organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” are assembling the Russian president’s fiercest critics to discuss everything from Putin’s finances to his unraveling. Here, an exclusive sneak peek at what’s in store”):
….Imagine Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics and dogged enemies all getting together in one room to, among other things, discuss his downfall. Well, that’s more or less what organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” have in mind.
(Good for them – free people should know their enemies.)
These ‘Looping Towers’ Have A Running Track On The Roof:
Small towns have reputations for being plain-speaking places, but the less so, in fact, than reputation suggests. One will hear much about who’s running, who’s in, who’s out, but not as much – if anything – about what candidates believe.
Longtime readers know that I comment on politics, but know also that I’m opposed to mixing a publisher’s and a candidate’s roles in a small town. Indeed, one may say that completely opposed fits my view accurately. They’re separate roles to my mind, each valuable, each belonging within a larger civic life of which they are parts. (In any event, this bleeding-heart libertarian blogger does not, and would not, represent government; officials are more than capable of speaking for themselves.)
But that’s a critical role for a candidate, isn’t, it? Good candidates with worthy candidacies say what they believe, what they’d like to see, what they hope to accomplish. They stand for something, and say so.
(This is another reason that key meetings should be recorded for public viewing. The December 11th Whitewater Unified Schools meeting that heard prospective appointees answer questions – in full – would have been valuable to this community. It has been our past practice to record these meetings, and it should be our continuing practice. I posted a bit on this general topic in December, and will have more to write after finishing a longer series. From December, see Twilight, Midnight, and Daylight. No one should settle for less; it’s a challenge to a better practice to expect that anyone would.)
If one had any advice for a candidate, it would be this: tell people what you believe, and what you hope to do. Say so plainly and clearly, so that all the community might know your views.
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fourteen. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:34 PM, for 9h 08m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred nineteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1777, Gen. Washington and the cOntinental Army are victorious at the Battle of Princeton.
Recommended for reading in full —
Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch describe The Republicans’ Fake Investigations:
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators….
Sarah Kendzior contends With Trump, The GOP Is Playing A Game Of Diminishing Returns:
In December 2016, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham emerged as one of the strongest Republican critics of Donald Trump, and particularly, of his ties with Russia. Graham called for a bipartisan investigation, warning that while the Kremlin had targeted the Democrats this time, it could be the Republicans next. He noted that Russians had hacked his email, and proclaimed: “Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s an American issue. We must stand together.”
One year later, Lindsey Graham is taking a different stand–alongside Donald Trump at his golf course, which Graham deemed “spectacular” in his latest bout of gushing sycophancy toward the POTUS he once rejected. On November 30, Graham slammed the press for characterizing Trump as “some kind of kook not fit to be president,” directly contradicting his own words from 2016, when he said: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office”….
Given that some of Graham’s worst fears about Trump’s Kremlin ties and mental state have been legitimized, what accounts for the senator’s changed attitude toward the president? There are a variety of possible rationales available for conjecture, many of which apply to the GOP at large. Opportunism may play a role, as Graham complies with Trump in order to pursue right-wing extremist economic policies and war. Blackmail may also be an issue, given that Graham has admitted his email was hacked, as was the RNC’s, by Russia. Trump has derided and threatened members of Congress and private citizens, and it’s not a stretch to imagine him unleashing his fire– publicly or privately–on Graham….
(Who, if anyone, owns Lindsey Graham?)
Anna Nemtsova reports A Russian Blackwater? Putin’s Secret Soldiers in Ukraine and Syria (“While Ukraine’s military has many honored volunteers fighting to defend their border, Russia’s expeditionary forces often are contractors fighting for pay, and dying in silence”):
RUSSIAN VETERANS of modern wars serving abroad do not see much public support, nor do they receive much help from independent civil groups, simply because their participation in the conflicts abroad often is a state secret.
At his annual press conference earlier this month President Vladimir Putin admitted for the first time since the first days of the war that there are members of the Russian military in Ukraine, but denied that they were the same as regular troops. “We never said there were not people there who carried out certain tasks including in the military sphere,” Putin said.
Ruslan Leviyev and his Conflict Intelligence Team are a unique non-commercial group based in Moscow and investigating real stories of Russian soldiers fighting in foreign countries. “If in Ukraine soldiers are treated as national heroes, Russian recruits often die anonymously,” Leviyev told The Daily Beast. “The society feels indifferent to the numbers of casualties in the Russian military, to how many soldiers are wounded.”
(Putin pays for Russian adventurism in others’ blood and others’ money.)
From an August poll and story, Gary Langer reports 1 in 10 say it’s acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views:
….9 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll call it acceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, equivalent to about 22 million Americans. A similar number, 10 percent, say they support the so-called alt-right movement, while 50 percent oppose it.
(One in one hundred would be too many.)
With Turtle Treadmills, a Novel Test For Stamina:
Marykate Jasper argues Why Kylo Ren Is the Perfect Villain for the Age of the Alt-Right (some movie spoilers in her observations):
Kylo is incredibly powerful, but he is also incredibly childish. When the Rebels escape him in The Force Awakens, he throws a ludicrous temper tantrum with his lightsaber. In The Last Jedi, Luke goads him by appearing via projection, and the Resistance goads him with the Millennium Falcon, because they all know his personal, childish desire to destroy those things will distract him from the First Order’s strategic goals. Even Snoke calls him “a child in a mask,” mocking the pretensions of his pseudo-Vader mask and voice modulator. He is a boy’s unintentional parody of the imaginary, long-lost manhood he wants to emulate. Like the “alpha males” of the MRA movement, he makes himself ridiculous by emulating something that never existed as he imagines it did.
But perhaps the most damning and crucial part of Kylo’s characterization is that the good guys really, really want to believe in Kylo, even though they shouldn’t. Just as we see scores and score of sympathetic portraits of Trump voters, and unconscionably gentle write-ups of alt-right bigots from outlets like Mother Jones and The New York Times, we also see Rey desperately trying to believe that if she just reaches out, if she can just understand the pain and anger that motivate Kylo, then she can convince him to make the right decision….
A few quick comments:
1. Star Wars. The harder right one goes – and it goes farther right than the MRA (men’s rights activists) – the more one sees of contempt for the character diversity in Star Wars. In this way, there’s something apt about Jasper identifying Ren, a leader of a fascist dictatorship, with the alt-right. (How much farther right does the alt-right go? The Daily Stormer and other similar sites believe in so-called white sharia.)
2. Dangerous Fanaticism. These are dangerous and repulsive fanatics, who hear Trump dog-whistling to them. They’re formerly small figures who find comfort in the words and actions of the most powerful man in all the world.
Their ideology is one of vile lies.
3. The New York Times and Mother Jones. Jasper’s right to call out publications that glamorize racists, but I’d suggest that for Mother Jones, the example she cites was an unfortunate misstep by that magazine. For the Times, there’s a more troublesome history of failing to see the alt-right clearly.
4. Desperately trying to believe… Jasper’s spot-on, however, when she criticizes Star Wars heroine “Rey [for] desperately trying to believe that if she just reaches out, if she can just understand the pain and anger that motivate Kylo, then she can convince him to make the right decision.”
Yes, there’s a desperation to that false optimism. Although it is true that sometimes a very good man can turn around a bad one, that’s rare, sadly too rare.
More often, it’s more like an antelope trying to understand a hyena: even if the antelope could understand the hyena, all that would be learned is that the hyena would like to chew off the antelope’s leg.
It is a dream – often a progressive one – to hope that through understanding the malevolent will become better, perhaps much better. It’s a noble dream, but if grounded properly this hope depends not merely on understanding those who are dangerous, but as much on those who are dangerous understanding and wishing to be otherwise.
In Star Wars, Rey’s time is better spent, at a minimum, driving Kylo Ren away. Our time is better spent defending against, driving away, and then everywhere overcoming the malevolent.
So will Trump fundamentally alter American conservatism, or is he a mere phase in a longer, unchanging tradition? Three American conservatives, and Britain’s George Orwell, have something to interesting say on the matter.
1. Charles C.W. Cooke:
Whatever its shortcomings—and they are many—the American Right is too complicated and too interesting a force to be ruined or consumed by a single preposterous president. Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.
Via Jennifer Rubin Is Everything She Hates about Trump Worshippers
2. David Frum:
The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?
You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite the flux of their adherents. In this view, millions of American conservatives may build their political identities on enthusiastic support for Donald Trump, but American conservatism will continue humming in the background as if none of those human commitments mattered at all.
This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.
Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.
Via Conservatism Can’t Survive Donald Trump Intact.
3. Rod Dreher:
This is why I just shake my head at conservatives who think Trump is an aberration, a Cromwellian interregnum before the Restoration of the monarchy, so to speak. It is certainly true, at least right now, that Trump is cultivating no heirs apparent. But the idea that right-of-center voters will have learned their lesson by voting for Trump, and will come home to the traditional GOP — that’s bonkers.
Think of how Trump (and to a much lesser extent, Roy Moore) is changing what it means to be an Evangelical. American Evangelicalism, like American conservatism, is a broad and durable movement that was here a long time before Donald Trump showed up, and will be here after he leaves. But the way so many white Evangelicals have embraced Trump really is changing Evangelicalism — this, even though Trump is not even an Evangelical! It is impossible to see how white Evangelicalism can return to the status quo ante after Trump leaves office….
My basic point is that whatever calls itself “conservatism” will not have survived Trump, if by “survive” one means emerges from him relatively unchanged. It’s not so much the substantive changes Trump will have made (there may not be many) as it is the role he played in knocking off the GOP’s and the conservative movement’s traditional elites. The definition of “conservatism” is going to be fluid for a long time after Trump, in part because of Trump, and in part because of the intensification of the broader cultural and technological forces that brought Trump to the presidency.
4. George Orwell.
I’ll risk application of Godwin’s Law to include a powerful insight from George Orwell. Orwell wrote to critique H.G. Wells (a socialist, not a conservative) on Wells’s view of the war. Wells held – in 1941 – “that the Blitzkrieg is spent,” etc. That was wildly false, of course: the war stretched on years longer, at vast cost. To contend that the Third Reich was spent in 1941 is to give no meaning to the word spent.
Orwell understood that Wells’s complacent optimism was false, profoundly so:
He [Wells] was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come.
If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons….
Via Wells, Hitler and the World State.
I’ve long admired this essay of Orwell’s, for its moral and practical clarity. It’s a reminder of how clever men (Wells then, Cooke now) sometimes are – in the most important matters – also obtuse men.
Frum and Dreher are right that conservatism will not be able to outlast Trump unaffected. Cooke’s complacency is at best a false hope, and also a self-serving one (justifying diffidence in the face of Trump’s transgressions). Conservatives like Rubin, Wilson, and McMullin see this and so fight on, but most conservatives are now transformed in to something unworthy (they’re either Trumpists or timid).
I’m quite sure – even in the small town from which I write – that there are self-styled conservatives who believe (as with Cooke) that they’ve no need to oppose Trump wholeheartedly, as our present circumstances are a mere phase before a restoration of the prominent position they’ve long enjoyed.
Trump will meet his political ruin, but it will come through the efforts of those in opposition and resistance who actively opposed him. The complacent and entitled men who sat on the sidelines of this fight won’t escape the truth of their inaction: head down and eyes averted is a disgraceful memorial.
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twelve. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 07m 39s of daytime. The moon is nearly full, with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1918, Wisconsin troops depart for Europe: “On this date the Wisconsin 127th and 128th Infantries departed for France from their training facility at Camp Arthur in Waco, Texas. Initially, these divisions were assigned to construct depots and facilities for troops that would follow. On May 18, they were assigned to the frontline at Belmont in the Alsace where they faced three German divisions. In the following months, 368 troops were killed, wounded or missing. Ironically, their enemy, native Alsatians, spoke German and the Wisconsin troops were better able to communicate with them than their French allies.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jared Yates Sexton considers The Toxic Loyalty of Trump’s Hardcore Zealots (“They’ve excused his winking at neo-Nazis and his support of an accused child molester. Is there anything—anything—that would make Trump’s die-hards leave his personality cult?”):
….They had stayed with him through an unthinkable gauntlet: frequent criticism of war heroes, racist rhetoric, video of him admitting to disgusting conduct, and a deluge of women charging him with sexual assault. So by the time he assumed the role of president in early 2017, his base was fairly immune to any criticism or story dealing with something as mundane as bureaucratic appointments or legislation.
While he stocked his administration cabinet with lobbyists and billionaires, people worth billions of dollars, including multiple staffers who’d worked at high profile banks like Goldman Sachs, his supporters continued to parrot his intention to drain the swamp even while he filled it with every pen stroke. He told them he was the president of the working people even while he promoted bills that would take away their health insurance his and the GOP’s legislative agenda set its sights on the Affordable Care Act that provided them healthcare and his cabinet stripped nearly every regulation that protected the food they ate, the water they drank, and the schools where their children learned.
As the rest of the country turned on Trump and his approval ratings plummeted, his diehard base stayed firm. Roughly 30% of the voting public continued to support him, seemingly proving his assertion that they were so loyal he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody.” They’d weathered one scandal after another, watched Trump undermine journalists, threaten NBC’s broadcast license, trade barbs with the unpredictable head of a rogue nuclear state, and yet, they still seemed unwavering loyal….
(True enough, and so to succeed against Trump, one’s main focus should be on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)
Rick Wilson writes How Donald Trump ate the nation: The President has inserted his toxic brand of politics into every last corner of American life:
….Some people like to say our nation is more divided than ever. Obviously that’s a laughable notion for a country that lost over a half-million of her sons in a bloody Civil War.
Still, there are sweeping, powerful forces pushing our society into Balkanized camps. The catalyst of today’s division isn’t royalists vs. patriots, freedom vs. slavery, or big government vs. small, or hippies vs. squares. Today’s cultural and political divisions are driven now by more potent forces: celebrity, and rage.
Trump hasn’t just infused every single aspect of our politics, but, like some Japanese movie-monster kaiju he’s furiously, inexorably consuming our culture, from entertainment to business to education and every other institution in between….
(This infusion is a consequence of Trump’s authoritarian character – he seeks to influence both political and cultural life, including even mundane matters. He’s without normal restraint.)
Maura Ewing reports A Judicial Pact to Cut Court Costs for the Poor (“The consensus that we would do this, that we would all do it, gives us cover that we wouldn’t be labeled as liberal or too soft on defendants”):
In North Carolina, it costs inmates $10 a day to stay in jail before they’re even found guilty of a crime. Yet most people jailed pretrial are there because they can’t afford bail. It’s a predicament Mecklenburg County Public Defender Kevin Tully points out time and again to judges: that those who can’t buy their own freedom are charged for their own confinement.
In North Carolina, as in other states, judges have the discretion to reduce or waive some fines and fees. But there, as elsewhere, they don’t often use it—thanks in part to legislation that makes doing so difficult. Now, district-court judges in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, are banding together to change how the courts impose fines and fees.
Starting last month, they committed to consulting a “bench card” during every case—a piece of paper they use to remind themselves to thoroughly assess a defendant’s ability to pay before setting a fine or fee, as well as which ones are waivable or can be reduced on a sliding scale. It’s a simple act, but one that could have significant consequences for low-income defendants and their families….
The judicial pact in Mecklenburg County was born of a working group; judges, public defenders, district attorneys, and court clerks had been strategizing since the spring of 2015 on how to reduce the county’s jail population. An analysis revealed that 18 percent were there because they failed to pay court costs, fines, or fees; and they stayed for roughly four to seven days, said district-court judge Becky Tin, who’s part of the working group. “A lot of these [legal financial obligations] that defendants were being arrested for not paying were set … without ever conducting an ability-to-pay hearing,” she said….
Amber Phillips lists 12 things we can definitively say the Russia investigation has uncovered so far:
To review everything we’ve learned about Russia this year, let’s rewind to May. That was a big month President Trump, who fired his FBI director because he thought “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
His own administration didn’t see it that way. A few weeks later, the No. 2 at the Justice Department, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed a special counsel to ramp up the FBI’s existing investigation into “this Russia thing.”
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s mission: Look into how Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, whether it colluded with Trump’s campaign, and investigate anything else he sees fit to investigate….
So what have all these ongoing Russia investigations found so far?
A lot, but at the same time, no one big thing we can point to that indicates a sure direction of the investigation. “What we can take away is we are in the midst of a major investigation with foreign policy ramifications,” said Jeffrey Jacobovitz, a white-collar lawyer who has defended Clinton administration officials.
Here are all the things we know about the Russia investigation to date, ranked in order of their perceived magnitude [list follows]….
These 10 Robots Make Life A Lot Easier:
An explorer comes to a forest, one he’s not seen before. He’s been in forests before, but not one as dense and dark as this one. He could stop, and make predictions about what it might be like, but however long he takes, the forest yet stands before him. Our national outlook is like this, overcoming even the smallest, most distant places.
The delusional will deny there’s a dark forest, the fearful will sit still, and the faint-hearted will go around.
Americans are neither delusional nor fearful nor faint-hearted.
Predicting, however, is not exploring.
If an explorer, then an exploration: one either goes in or abandons the effort to more intrepid men and women.
Better to rely on past experiences, present understanding, and ongoing observations, walking cautiously but confidently into the forest.
On the other side: something better, either discovered or, if necessary, created.
Good morning.
A new year begins for Whitewater under partly cloudy skies and a high of six degrees. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4L:32 PM, for 9h 06m 46s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1836, an act of the Michigan legislature forms the Wisconsin Territory.
Recommended for reading in full —
In September, Lawrence Tabak wrote Why Foxconn’s Wisconsin Promise Of 13,000 Quality Jobs Is An Empty One:
Proponents of the deal, which include President Donald Trump, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, are blinded by the political windfall that would come with Foxconn’s promise of 13,000 jobs at the $10 billion Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) factory and assembly complex planned for southeast Wisconsin (Ryan’s home district). These politicians are so eager to score a political win that much of Wisconsin’s promise of $3 billion in tax incentives to Foxconn would be paid in cash.
But careful study of Foxconn’s past dealings shows that the number and quality of jobs promised for Wisconsin are highly suspect. Back in 2007, when Foxconn announced plans for the facility in Plainfield, they said the plant would employ 1,400 people. The fact that the facility has matured to a workforce of 900 gives some indication of their prowess, or perhaps lack of honesty, when it comes to job prediction. (The same percentage shortfall would take the promised 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin down to 8,357.)
Foxconn’s original proposal to Wisconsin is also telling. Before the jobs number swelled to 13,000, Foxconn initially proposed 2,000 jobs — incidentally, the same number of workers currently employed at Foxconn’s LCD factory complex in Sakai, Japan, the largest and most advanced LCD factory in the world. The LCD plant itself was up and running with 1,000 workers. Boosters of the Wisconsin deal have visions of the working lines at the old Chrysler and GM factories in Kenosha and Janesville, where motivated high school graduates could make a living wage. But the few images and inside descriptions we have of the Sakai plant, by far the best model for what the Wisconsin factory will look like, show engineers and technicians behind computer terminals overseeing the work of giant robotic machines.
In addition to the numbers, the quality of jobs promised Wisconsin is also in question. In their written testimony in support of the Foxconn legislation, the heads of the Wisconsin Department of Administration and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation used the term “family-supporting 13,000 jobs” eight times. Much has been made of Foxconn’s estimate that the average salary will be $54,000, but there is no written guarantee regarding it. Furthermore, pay the top Taiwanese management team tens of millions each and the average is so skewed as to be meaningless. There is a welcome provision in the legislation that Wisconsin’s generous contribution of 17 percent of payroll be limited to jobs paying $30,000 to $100,000, which will certainly incentivize Foxconn to meet that mark. But Foxconn is relentless in cost management and if an unsubsidized job can be filled at a wage producing a lower cost to the company than a subsidized $30,000 job, history shows they’ll do so. And the modest constraints of the legislation give Foxconn enormous flexibility to spread those subsidies beyond native Wisconsinites. For instance, the company is known for traveling efficiency teams that roam the globe imposing the company’s latest assembly improvements. These teams have to have a home base somewhere—why not Wisconsin, where their wages would be subsidized by the state?
(It’s worth noting that the 13,000 jobs estimate is from Walker, not Foxconn. Foxconn hasn’t promised anything like 13,000.)
Julia Ioffe reports What Russian Journalists Uncovered About Russian Election Meddling:
Here’s a rundown of what we learned from the Russian press this year:
In an updated edition of their book, The Red Web, Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan—veteran reporters on the Russian secret services—revealed how and when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on the American election. It happened, according to Soldatov and Borogan, at a meeting in April between Putin and a small inner circle of his national security advisors, most of them former KGB officers. Putin’s decision was also reportedly an emotional, knee-jerk one, in retaliation to the release of the Panama Papers, which implicated him. Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.
An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.
That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race. They learned their subject matter by reading Americans’ social media posts and by watching House of Cards, effectively weaponizing American culture and openness.
Last week, TVRain ran a written interview with Konstantin Kozlovsky, who is currently in a Russian prison for hacking into various Russian banks. He confessed to hacking the DNC and to creating the viruses Lurk and Wanna Cry, the latter of which is responsible for a ransomware attack that paralyzed computer networks across the world. Kozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)
Earlier this month, the Bell, a scrappy upstart website based outside of Russia, published a detailed exposé by the legendary Russian investigative journalist Svetlana Reiter about the four Russian men—two of them high-ranking FSB cyber warriors—arrested in Moscow last December in connection with the 2016 election hack. Reiter delved into the mystery of why the men were charged with, of all things, passing information to the CIA about the Russian cyber-attack. According to Reiter, they had been set up by a rival faction in Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The rivalry, which Soldatov and Borogan had also reported on, centered on securing both the prestige and budgetary funds that came with penetrating U.S. government cyber-defenses. This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack….
(These Russian journalists take huge risks to report these stories, as Ioffe notes: “many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether. This is apparently the case with the journalists who published the RBC report on the troll factory: After receiving threats, they left journalism. ” They are brave men and women who have risked much for the truth. Trump wishes to reduce our own press to the same perilous condition.)
Taylor Hosking catalogues The Rise of the Alt-Right (“Selections from The Atlantic’s coverage of 2017, when the right-wing movement gained momentum”):
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, white nationalists gathered in Washington, D.C. for an annual conference, where The Atlantic captured the audience offering cheers and enthusiastic Nazi salutes. At the helm was Richard Spencer, the leader of the “alt-right,” a term he popularized. “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” they exclaimed. Spencer would go on to set up a “hub” for the alt-right movement in the Washington area. But fractures within the the movement were emerging at the Deploraball, an event held in January, where figures of the alt-right celebrated Trump’s victory.
Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News who once described the site as “the platform for the alt-right,” served as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House. Over the course of the year, the resurgence of white nationalism would play out on the national stage….
In The Atlantic’s September cover story, “The First White President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that race propelled Trump to the White House. Chloé Valdary countered that there’s no single explanation for Trump’s election. Vann R. Newkirk II called for the need to define white supremacy, claiming that giving it too narrow of a definition allows it to flourish. And Adam Serwer argued that efforts to highlight non-racial explanations for Trump’s glaringly racial appeal is a long-standing political tradition in “The Nationalist’s Delusion.”
Anne Applebaum writes of The euphemisms I refuse to use in 2018:
In columns or commentary, one sometimes needs to simplify in order to save space. But here’s my New Year’s resolution: In the coming 12 months, I will try to avoid the expressions “far-right” and “populist” whenever possible. They are catch-all adjectives, useful in describing a general phenomenon. But they are also euphemisms, and they disguise what’s at stake.
The terms “right” and “left,” not to mention “far-right” and “far-left,” have long been due for a rethink. They date from the French Revolution of 1789, when the nobility sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries sat on the left. Since most Western “right-wing” parties aren’t seeking to conserve aristocracy anymore, and many of the “left-wing” parties stopped being revolutionary a long time ago, the metaphor has grown stale.
As for “far-right,” it doesn’t really belong on that scale, because the modern European “far-right” isn’t conservative in any sense at all. Nor does it have much in common with parties of the so-called center-right, many of which favor free markets and global trade and are happy to participate in international institutions and treaties. The “far-right,” by contrast, is anti-trade and anti-market, favoring instead a greater role for the national state or, in Hungary for example, for oligarchs close to the ruling party. More important, many favor a greater role for those ruling parties, treating with suspicion journalists, courts, civil servants, universities and even police forces that question their compliance with existing law….
(Applebaum finds no easy solution, and there isn’t one: we lack clear terms as no description seems wholly adequate.)
Here are Highlights of the January 2018 Sky:
On January 4th, I posted Whitewater’s Outlook for 2017. Here’s a review of that post. Original from 1.4.17, with comments from 12.31.17 in blue italics, paragraph by paragraph —
A year like 2016 – nationally – should leave a prudent person cautious about making predictions. I’ll not overlook the lesson from last year’s national scene, and I’ll apply it to 2017’s local outlook. Rather than predictions, I’ll offer a few observations on the likely direction of local affairs.
This was the right approach; extreme circumstances make predictions especially difficult, and worse, they become wishful distractions from actual work.
Local politics. Trump’s election completes what amounts to a nationalization of politics, in a state like Wisconsin that’s already seen (these last six years) the triumph of statewide concerns over purely local ones. There are still local issues – and they’ll need to be addressed. The adage that all politics is local, however, has never be so wrong as it is now. National issues will stop being conflicts between Republicans and Democrats (and millions of people, of which I am only one, are neither); the fundamental national divide will come to be between radical populism and democratic republican government. See, Evan McMullin’s Ten Points for Principled Opposition to Authoritarianism and In a Principled Opposition, the Basis for a Grand Coalition.
Honest to goodness, the Whitewater area is clock-a-block with aging town figures and publishers (Gazette, Daily Union, Banner) who think they can ride out Trumpism by ignoring it, escaping blame for its many excesses (and quietly savoring some of those excesses, to be honest). No, and no again: there’s no waiting out Trump, getting around Trump, carrying on as usual. Better, of course, that Trump had never come on the scene, but an ostrich with its head in the sand looks like ostrich with its head in the sand.
Whitewater’s economy is stagnant; stagnation is relative decline.
Fiscal policy. Expect local government to try to consolidate a few staff positions, while simultaneously asking for as many big ticket items as possible, and pursuing revenue-generation schemes that either cost too much, achieve too little, and perhaps degrade the environment and quality of life while doing so.
It’s been less troublesome in this regard than one might have feared; part of that is simply because there’s not much left at the bottom of officials’ wishing well.
University life. The last chancellor was supposed to be the bridge between town and university life, a longstanding town notable who would run the university the way city insiders wanted. If there’s anything to learn from this, it’s that Whitewater’s town notables are unsuited to run a modern American university. The future for UW-Whitewater lies in a more geographically diverse student population, but that population will bring higher expectations on and off campus.
Whitewater has a choice: meet those expectations, at the price of discarding traditional local standards, or frustrate those expectations, and watch the leading economic force in the city decline. Expect attempts to split the difference between competing views, in a way that satisfies few, and gains Whitewater nothing.
Whitewater’s campus administration has had an easy year – the challenges from consolidation with UW-Rock are yet to come, the problem of recruitment elsewhere will only get worse, and this chancellor and her predecessor have never faced a serious critique of the campus culture.
School district. Aside from assuring safety, construction will never replace instruction, and grandiose marketing will never replace unique and admirable individual accomplishments presented in a lively way. It’s an easy pose to say that no one else understands education except a marketing-mad few; it would be more believable if they made their work more than cut-and-paste presentations. All around, this community is filled with smart, well-read residents.
It’s an ill-fitting crutch to say that anyone who offers a critique is anti-education or opposed to children’s futures.
A combination of condescension to rural residents, and yet fear of their complaints, leaves the district’s full-time leadership mired in reactionary public relations that neither instructs nor uplifts nor attracts. Rationalizing that some aren’t ‘our population’ consigns all the community to the condition of the under-served.
The most important work happens inside the building. True yesterday, true today, true tomorrow.
Green shoots. Here’s what’s hopeful. In this city, the best ideas – private restaurants, a brewery, community events, charitable efforts, and a nearly-all-year city market, etc. – are successful not because city government guides them, but because talented, private individuals need no political guidance. See, An Oasis Strategy.
Whitewater will not be a prosperous city until her some of her residents stop deferring to local government as a solution (or, more commonly, stop using government as a brake on anything that they don’t like). Government as an overbearing father is politics-as-bad-parenting.
There are national political challenges that cannot – and must not – wait. The resolution of those challenges will assure a better life for all, across this continent. Yet for those matters unique to this small city, it is in the local apolitical work of so many talented people that Whitewater’s particular hope for 2017 rests.
Here we are, at the end of a long year. Our national politics is troubled, our state politics is troubled, and our local politics has not been worse (and injurious of constructive private life) only through restraint of the worst of national and state impulses within this city. One could hope, of course, that 2018 will see a similar forbearance, but in a conflict no prudent person would place his or her hope merely in others’ forbearance. Someone in Africa might hope not to be devoured by a hyena, but resting that hope on the hyena never becoming hungry would be, at a minimum, unrealistic.
