Harassment and abuse dished out

Dec 5th, 2018 11:51 am | By

A thread by Rosa Freedman:

Piss on her office door and inside on the floor. Threatened with rape, followed outside after dark, by men.

This is not any kind of liberation or progressive politics. This is disgusting male bullying of women.

It was 3:30 a.m…

It’s hateful malicious bullying, and you can’t build any kind of progressive politics on that. Harassing women is not in any way a form of talking truth to power, not least because women are not the sex that has monopolized power.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments


A host of little laws and some great big ones

Dec 5th, 2018 10:54 am | By

Rebecca Solnit notes that Trump’s crimes are so many and various that we lose track of them.

The current head of the federal government, the person who is supposed to somehow embody the rule of law, is in violation of a host of little laws and some major constitutional ones. USA Today reported in June 2016 that Trump and his businesses “have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination.” The paper charted 1,450 cases in which he or his businesses were defendants along with his bankruptcies and mentioned the Trump University fraud lawsuit, which he eventually settled for $25m, finalized quietly this April. Our president steals from poor people: that’s what that lawsuit is about.

Yep; I’ve been making that point regularly all along. He stiffs contractors, he hires foreign workers so that he can pay them less, he charges his many golf weekends to us.

He has lived his life in a world without consequences – his father’s money smoothed the way for a life in which he made messes and others cleaned them up. He appears to be one of those people who was so rarely told that what he was saying was wrong, boorish, or inane that he has no sense of how he’s perceived or what people are thinking or, often, how things work. Feedback is what steers most of us straight, and power and privilege mean that you can avoid it if you want. When you’re a star they let you do stupid things, and he has done so many.

Maybe, but he’s also a massive narcissist. He hasn’t been able to avoid all feedback, but his narcissism distorts it into an illegitimate attack by very bad people on a very special person.

Summer Zervos sued Trump for defamation for remarks he made about her in 2016, when he suggested her allegations that he groped her were lies; lawyers suggest that his greatest risk in the lawsuit is that he will perjure himself. Another lawsuit for incitement to riot and negligence is moving forward in the sixth circuit court, by three young protesters who were attacked at a Trump rally in March of 2016 after Trump yelled: “Get ‘em out of here.” His former chauffeur is suing for unpaid wages.

All underlings, all people with far less power and money than he has. He’s a narcissist and a bully.

All this trouble exists in addition to whatever the Mueller investigation will bring as allegations and charges and perhaps grounds for impeachment. On 29 November, the Mueller investigation seized tax records from the law offices of Trump’s Chicago lawyer, Ed Burke. Maybe the most important new possible charge, a law professor noted to me, emerges from the report in BuzzFeed that Trump planned to offer Putin a $50m condo if he succeeded in building a Trump Tower in Moscow, while he was running for the presidency. If true, it is a spectacular violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This 1977 law makes it “unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business”. Trump seems to have admitted he was doing exactly that and apparently thinks that justifying it aloud was good enough.

He apparently thinks that about everything. All he has to do is say on Twitter that he “lightly looked at” the Trump Tower Moscow project and everyone including Mueller will say “Oh, ok then.”

There’s a big pile o’ stuff. Flynn is helping Mueller with at least three investigations. The waters are rising.

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In which we are told we miss the WASPs

Dec 5th, 2018 9:47 am | By

Good god. Ross Douthat wrote a thing, and it’s so jaw-dropping I should just let it speak for itself. I won’t, but I should.

He starts by pretending that the “nostalgia” for George Bush the elder requires subtle explanation when in fact it’s just settled conventional routine: we have to pretend the newly deceased president was a gem, hidden or obvious. They did it with Nixon ffs so obviously they were going to do it with Shrub 1. But the fiction gives Douthat a pretext for quoting this bilge:

Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”

Which people, kemosabe? That’s a tiny minority of rich white males there, and I strongly doubt the rest of us wish they still had a lock on all the levers of power.

But never mind, because Douthat was just clearing his throat for the real meat of his Big Idea:

I think you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

In other words, we long for the return of the talentless godbothering white male.

He goes on to make the not-new point that meritocracy is not egalitarianism, but he doesn’t make it well or very coherently.

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Trump’s unfitness doesn’t hang on what Mueller uncovers

Dec 4th, 2018 4:05 pm | By

Asha Rangappa on what’s really at stake:

Cohen’s guilty plea on Thursday demonstrates that Trump’s behavior is fundamentally incompatible with the vision of government expressed by the Constitution itself. To wit, Trump not only believes it’s OK to profit from the presidency, but he’s also willing to put the U.S. under a foreign adversary’s thumb to do it.

…

Candidate Trump’s secret attempt to enrich himself through a business deal with a hostile foreign adversary is the embodiment of the twin evils the Constitution seeks to prevent. That the deal didn’t materialize is immaterial from a constitutional point of view: They may still have influenced Trump’s weirdly favorable view of Russia, or the inexplicable change in the Republican Party platform on Ukraine. And by keeping it secret, President Vladimir Putin’s ability to expose Trump, at any time, gave the Russian government leverage over the highest public office in the country even after the deal fizzled out. Even if Trump began these negotiations while he was a private citizen, its impact on our relations with Russia has continued into the presidency—making it a matter of public concern that required transparency from the outset.

Instead what it got from the outset was a long string of attempts to obstruct justice (remember, he was pushing Comey to protect Flynn just days in) and lies and concealments. Transparency was there none.

And we don’t even know all of it.

The public still hasn’t seen Trump’s tax returns, and what other liabilities he might have in Russia or elsewhere. The president is also facing three lawsuits—from members of Congress, the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, and the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—over potential violations of the emoluments clause. And without knowing what financial interests Trump has in Saudi Arabia, the public is in the dark regarding the United States’ failure to take action—at Trump’s direction—over the murder in October of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul.

He could have multiple corrupt interests all over the planet.

[W]hat makes Trump’s actions egregious is not just what he did, but the position he was running for—and now holds—while doing it. For example, Trump’s business entanglements in Saudi Arabia matter because as president, he holds almost sole authority over the Unites States’ foreign policy decisions with that country.

And look at what he’s doing with that authority.

By continuing to lie, Trump has prevented Congress from being able to effectively utilize the Constitution’s Plan B: impeachment. With the Cohen plea, however, it’s time to acknowledge that Trump’s unfitness doesn’t hang on what Mueller uncovers. It’s demonstrated by his disregard for the basic premise of the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold.

Bam.

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Fundamental misunderstanding

Dec 4th, 2018 3:36 pm | By

Oh good god, Trump thinks climate change is a matter of local clean air and water.

He’s telling us he wants clean air and water! As if that’s the (whole) issue! He has no idea what climate change is! He has no clue that it’s a global issue!

There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world…

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Let’s just ignore the size differences

Dec 4th, 2018 11:30 am | By

Oh gawd I’m listening to today’s Woman’s Hour, the segment about trans women in women’s sport, and it’s excruciating. It starts around 11 minutes in, with a recorded discussion between the host Jane Garvey and an academic, Beth Jones. Jones starts with burble about estrogen and testosterone and uses the word “cis” so Garvey asks her to explain it. It means people who are satisfied with or don’t question their gender, Jones says. So that would be hardly anyone then. Garvey points out that 99% of women are not trans and Jones is all “Oooooooh I wouldn’t say that, we don’t know, wibble wibble.” Garvey says at any rate the vast majority of women don’t call themselves cis; Jones says yes that’s right, most women are cis. Jones is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Around 14:30 Garvey says should we just do away with sport divided by sex? Jones says in a perfect world that would be great but it’s probably not “feasible” now…but she doesn’t say why and Garvey doesn’t ask. Why isn’t it “feasible” now, though? What’s the obstacle?

Jones says we have mixed sport already, people on weekends in parks and things play together, it works a treat. Garvey says but in professional sport surely women would be pushed out, and Jones pretends to think there is no reason to think so at all, she just can’t imagine what Garvey means. She is thick as two planks.

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An open display of obstruction and witness tampering

Dec 4th, 2018 10:27 am | By

Barry Berke and Norman Eisen spell out how Trump’s tweets yesterday are evidence of his obstructing justice.

Monday, Trump edged closer to an open display of obstruction and witness tampering: He urged potential witnesses against him to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement — and implied threats against those who do.

Trump began by publicly attacking Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, who pleaded guilty last week to lying to Congress about a Trump real estate project in Moscow and who has been cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump suggested in a series of tweets not only that Cohen is lying but also that he should receive no benefit for cooperating, as Cohen’s lawyers have requested: “‘Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.’ You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? … He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”

I keep wondering if Trump actually understands that these tweets are or look like or flirt with obstruction of justice, and that that’s a crime, and that slapping them out there the way he does could potentially (though by no means certainly) get him in legal trouble. Is it that he understands that but thinks Republicans will save him? Or that he does but thinks his adoring fans will save him? Or that he does but he thinks They Wouldn’t Dare? Or does he just not grasp it at all? I don’t know, and it’s a puzzle.

Obstruction and witness-tampering law prohibits retaliation by the subject of a criminal probe against those testifying against him. Trump is, of course, an identified subject of the relevant investigations. But as president, he is also ultimately responsible for the federal prosecution power — and he is openly attacking Cohen, who soon faces sentencing, with federal prosecutors who ultimately report to Trump given an important say.

And it doesn’t get much more sleazy than that. He’s a subject and he has the power to meddle. Brilliant.

Then Trump heaped praise on Roger Stone for refusing to squeal like Cohen.

So where he threatened a stick against Cohen, Trump offered a carrot to Stone, signaling where their allegiances should lie. This proof of potential witness tampering and obstruction of justice is made even stronger by the fact that the messaging is from the person who holds the most powerful get-out-of-jail-free card: a presidential pardon.

…

Under normal circumstances, someone engaging in this type of behavior could be criminally charged. But in this case, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has previously indicated that a sitting president should not be indicted. We disagree, and the issue is unresolved: Neither the Supreme Court nor any lower court has yet addressed it. Still, Mueller is unlikely to defy the department’s guidance.

Maybe that’s the answer to the puzzle – maybe Trump thinks the Office of Legal Counsel has given him blanket permission to commit crimes in full view.

That makes it all the more important that Congress examine whether the pattern of evidence constitutes an abuse of power or criminal obstruction of justice. That has proved a forlorn hope with Congress in the hands of Trump’s party. But with the House about to change hands, there is reason to hope that will occur once Mueller issues his long-awaited report on obstruction.

The president’s frenzied tweets suggest he recognizes that threat. Perhaps that’s why a later tweet in Monday’s tirade was directed at the special counsel: “Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think) and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies. The truth is very bad for their mission!” Quite the opposite is the case: Congress, and all of America, await Mueller’s report on Trump’s deeply troubling behavior.

Personally, I would like to see Trump dragged away in handcuffs kicking and screaming.

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“Why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

Dec 4th, 2018 10:00 am | By

The emoluments case is going ahead.

A U.S. district court judge has now ruled that discovery can proceed in a lawsuit that the attorneys general of Maryland and the District have filed against Trump. The president had tried to stall the lawsuit, but failed.

This discovery process will now entail an effort to peer into the finances of the Trump International Hotel in D.C., which has become a magnet for spending by foreign governments and dignitaries. The lawsuit alleges that by profiting in this way, Trump — who declined to divest himself of his business holdings as president — is violating the emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from taking such benefits from foreign (or state) governments unless Congress okays it.

…

To grasp the real significance of this, we need to look at why the court has allowed this lawsuit to move forward. In July, the court denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the suit. Trump had tried to define “emoluments” very narrowly. But the judge instead accepted the plaintiffs’ argument that they constitute “profit,” “gain” or “advantage,” i.e., the sort of profits that go to Trump’s businesses.

Importantly, in so doing, that ruling affirmed the idea that the goal of the constitutional ban on emoluments is to remove any doubt that a federal official is letting his private profiteering influence his decision-making on behalf of the public. The framers “made it simple,” the ruling said. “Ban the offerings altogether.”

The thing about Trump, of course, is that he couldn’t possibly care less about that. The money is almost the whole point for him. I say almost because there’s also the narcissistic reward, but the money is key. Being president is a golden opportunity to make big bucks, and any ideas about putting the country ahead of his personal profit might as well be the tooth fairy as far as Donnie Two-scoops is concerned.

[T]his case goes directly to the core of Trump’s blending of private and public interests, which this presidency has taken to an extraordinary degree. For instance, we have no clear idea of just how much money his family made off the corporate tax cuts he signed. Meanwhile, in recent days, questions have mounted on other fronts. We cannot dismiss the possibility that Trump’s refusal to hold the Saudi crown prince responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is related to his financial entanglements with the Saudis, something that Democrats will separately be investigating.

I’d call it the likelihood rather than the possibility.

Meanwhile, in this context, it’s worth looking back at Trump’s response to Cohen’s admissions. Trump blithely conceded that he pursued the Moscow project, and said there was nothing wrong with it:

“I was running my business while I was campaigning,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

That. That idiot corrupt question has been haunting me since last week. Why should you lose lots of opportunities, you greedy sack of shit? Because you’re supposed to be working for the country now, not for your bank account. Because a president needs to be free from direct financial motivations, that’s why.

(It would be nice if they could also be required to be free of indirect financial motivations too. I think both Clintons were way too keen to make rich and powerful friends while they were in the White House, but that’s a kind of corruption that would probably be impossible to legislate out.)

For Trump, it’s simply not part of the equation that American voters might have been entitled to know that he was pursuing a lucrative real estate deal that required Kremlin approval, even as he campaigned on a promise to pursue better relations with Russia — and even as he publicly absolved Russia of the direct assault it was wagingon our democracy on his behalf. Of course, Trump was aware that revealing this would be bad for him, so he lied to keep it concealed.

But steady, insistent inquiry by news organizations and law enforcement — and, now, via the advancing of the emoluments lawsuit — is cracking the fortress. And the cracks are only likely to widen.

Here’s hoping.

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Women should try harder

Dec 4th, 2018 9:29 am | By

Women and sport is a theme today.

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Because domestic violence is a man’s problem

Dec 4th, 2018 8:50 am | By

Anna Moore at the Guardian:

Patrick Stewart was five years old when his father returned from the second world war to wage his own war on his wife. On weekend nights, Stewart would lie in bed, alert, awaiting his father’s return from the pub, ready for his rage, braced to throw himself between his parents to protect his mother.

Two years ago, Luke and Ryan Hart’s father shot dead their mother, Claire, and their 19-year-old sister, Charlotte, before turning his gun on himself. This happened days after Charlotte and Claire had left the family home in Lincolnshire in a bid for freedom. Until then, Lance Hart had exercised total control over his family.

The three of them were on a panel organized by a domestic violence group called Refuge.

“Because domestic violence is a man’s problem,” Stewart tells me before the event. “We are the ones who are committing the offences, performing the cruel acts, controlling and denying. It’s the men.”

And yet – as always – the people listening are almost entirely women. Among the journalists, activists and supporters in the packed audience, I count five men.

And of the men who do attend, some are there to ask “what about the men??”

The US educator and speaker Jackson Katz has made this message* his life’s work. The author of The Macho Paradox, Katz teaches the “bystander approach”, in which communities are encouraged to take ownership of the problem of relationship abuse and men are encouraged to challenge sexist comments and unacceptable behaviour. His programme has been delivered in the military and at colleges, sports teams and businesses across the US.

*that men should not look away

Katz keeps wondering why more men don’t get involved.

One obstacle, Katz believes, is men’s fear of judgment from other men. “They worry that they’ll be seen as soft or insincere or ‘not a real man’.” Another is a lack of role models. “There haven’t been a whole lot of men in a public space who’ve spoken out,” he says.

If that first reason is true it’s pretty pathetic, and also telling. It’s pretty pathetic for men to fail to be in solidarity with women because other men might think they’re too gurrrrrly. It’s also telling that being thought too gurrrrrly is so aversive and so powerful.

This next bit is painful.

For the Harts, public speaking has been equally transformative. “For the first year after it happened, it was Groundhog Day,” says Ryan, an engineer who took a year off work after the murders. “Wake up, walk the dog, eat some food, go to bed. We were waiting for time to heal – and it doesn’t.

“Then Surrey police asked us to speak to them about coercive control. We were quite nervous, but found that speaking gave us a purpose. For our entire lives, Mum and Charlotte had been our purpose – freeing them from our father, moving them away and giving them a good life was all we wanted. When we lost them, each day became meaningless. Now we’re creating something in their name, living a life that would make them proud.”

Pause to pull ourselves together.

Before long, the brothers moved beyond recounting their personal experiences to addressing its causes. “To tackle domestic abuse, you need to look at masculinity,” says Luke. “Our father’s need for control came from his beliefs on what it means to be a man. I think most men – like me, before this happened – don’t realise how dangerous it is.”

This is where feminism can be so useful, provided it’s allowed to be feminism and not hijacked to be a cheering squad for Hannah Mounceys. Feminism can explain why setting up a polarity of powerful aggressive dominant people on the one hand and feeble submissive subordinate people on the other will of course foster violence in the doms toward the subs. It’s not just kink, it’s the whole damn social order.

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If a woman won’t even twerk when asked…

Dec 3rd, 2018 5:28 pm | By

Sigh.

Woman wins major sports prize. Man tells her to shake her booty.

What should have been a historic moment in football was ruined when Ada Hegerberg was asked to twerk on stage at the sport’s night of nights in Paris today.

Norwegian Hegerberg, who plays for Olympique Lyonnais in France, won the inaugural Ballon d’Or award for the best female player in the world, beating out 14 other nominees including Australia’s Sam Kerr.

Normally reserved for the men throughout its 62-year history, the 2018 Ballon d’Or finally recognised football’s best women and Hegerberg was rewarded for her outstanding international and club form before the man next to her put a dampener on her big moment.

DJ Martin Solveig, who was a guest host at the awards ceremony, asked the 23-year-old striker to twerk after she received her prize. Hegerberg promptly shut him down, saying “no” and turning her back on him.

While he issued a great braying laugh. I guess we should be grateful he didn’t grab her skirt and yank it over her head?

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A variety of undesirable legal and societal implications

Dec 3rd, 2018 5:07 pm | By

Nope.

Dutch motivational speaker Emile Ratelband may feel like a 49-year-old but according to Dutch law he is still 69.

A Dutch court on Monday rejected Ratelband’s request to shave 20 years off his age in a case that drew worldwide attention.

Well he can’t literally shave any years off his age; he was asking to change his records – to lie officially about how old he is.

“Mr. Ratelband is at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly,” Arnhem court said in a press statement . “But amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register of births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This would have a variety of undesirable legal and societal implications.”

Plus…it would be false. This idea that we get to erase the truth in favor of our fantasies about ourselves is a bad stupid mistake.

The court said it acknowledged “a trend in society for people to feel fit and healthy for longer, but did not regard that as a valid argument for amending a person’s date of birth.”

Ratelband also insisted his case did have parallels with requests for name and gender changes.

“I say it’s comparable because it has to do with my feeling, with respect about who I think … I am, my identity,” he said.

Yes, and that’s one of the aspects of the “I am what I identify as” craze I hate the most. I hate the idiot narcissism of it, and the dualism (the body is nothing, the imagination is everything), and the denial of reality.

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A clear refusal to follow the law

Dec 3rd, 2018 4:52 pm | By

It turns out doctors can’t just fling meds around like so much potato chips. There are regulations.

The GP prosecuted for failing to register her online advice services for transgender patients with a health regulator in Wales says she has moved her service to England.

But Helen Webberley admits she has still not registered with inspectors there either.

She was fined £12,000 by a district judge who called the offence “serious”.

…

Webberley was also told to pay £11,307 costs and her company, Online GP Services, has been fined £2,000 at the court hearing in Merthyr Tydfil.

The Abergavenny GP started a private service for transgender patients online in 2015, and said she has treated thousands of patients in that time because waits for NHS services are so long.

But is what she does actually “treatment”? Does it cure a disease?

But a complaint was made to the General Medical Council (GMC) after she prescribed cross-gender hormones to a 12-year-old child.

Is that treatment, or is it something else?

District Judge Neil Thomas said: “In this case there seems to be a clear refusal to follow the law and that is a significant aggravating factor.

“Webberley was a doctor of considerable experience. The court has to regard this offence as serious.”

After the hearing she said she had never set out to break the law, adding: “My work, which so many of my patients have called life-saving, has now resulted in a criminal record and this is absolutely devastating for me.”

Last year the GMC put restrictions on Webberley while they investigated her work.

It could be true both that patients call her work life-saving and that it has risks. Patients don’t always know what they need, which is why doctoring is a technical profession with several years of training. Patients could think her work is good for them and be wrong.

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Champ

Dec 3rd, 2018 3:47 pm | By

Oh look, the Asian Women’s Handball Federation Championship yesterday.

Guess who was in Group A.

Image may contain: 1 person, playing a sport, standing and shorts

It’s our old pal Hannah Mouncey!

I thought rugby was Hannah’s sport, but no, handball is Hannah’s real favorite.

I have always been a handball player first. It’s the one constant I’ve had in my life from the age of 18 up until now, almost 30, and all the changes that have happened in between. As much as I’ve tried to get that across, it has somehow always got lost in the media’s obsession with football and the mainstream sporting codes.

I played football last year in Canberra with my mates, just to enjoy it. This year, with Darebin in the VFL, it became a bit more serious but while I’m still aiming for the AFLW draft in October, there’s an event not long after which in many ways holds more personal significance.

After three years, I’ll finally be representing Australia again.

I’ve been selected in the Australian women’s handball team for the Asian Championships in Japan at the start of December.

Let’s have a big round of applause for brave Hannah.

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Not the end but the beginning

Dec 3rd, 2018 12:24 pm | By

Charles Blow says it’s only going to get worse.

I expect Trump to admit nothing, even if faced with proof positive of his own misconduct. There is nothing in the record to convince me otherwise. He will call the truth a lie and vice versa.

I also don’t think that Trump would ever voluntarily leave office as Nixon did, even if he felt impeachment was imminent. I’m not even sure that he would willingly leave if he were impeached and the Senate moved to convict, a scenario that is hard to imagine at this point.

I don’t think any of this gets better, even as the evidence becomes clearer. I don’t believe that Trump’s supporters would reverse course in the same way that Nixon’s did. I don’t believe that the facts Mueller presents will be considered unassailable. I don’t believe Trump will go down without bringing the country down with him.

In short, I don’t believe we are reaching the end of a nightmare, but rather we are entering one. This will not get easier, but harder.

Cheerful.

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They all knew

Dec 3rd, 2018 12:08 pm | By

Greg Sargent at the Post reminds us what we now know:

I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s own campaign, and possibly Trump himself, knew at the time that Russia was waging an attack designed to sabotage our democracy on Trump’s behalf, which they eagerly sought to help Russia carry out.

We didn’t know that, but they did.

Over the weekend, the legal team working for Michael Cohen, President Trump’s estranged fixer and personal lawyer, filed a new document requesting leniency, now that Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress to conceal efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that continued at least into June 2016, around when Trump clinched the nomination. The new filing says Cohen was in “close and regular contact” with White House advisers and Trump’s legal team while he prepared to lie to Congress — raising the possibility that they were actively consulted on this plan.

Why would Cohen want to conceal that timeline, which Trump, too, lied about? Because as Democrats pointed out on the Sunday shows, revealing it would show that Trump was likely compromised, because the Russians knew that Trump had concealed that he had pursued lucrative financial dealings with Russia even as he publicly called for an end to sanctions on them, giving them potential leverage over him.

One, he was lying to us in his successful effort to win the election, and two, because he was lying he was compromised with respect to Russia.

Russia. It couldn’t be India or Peru or Thailand, it had to be Russia – Russia with all those nukes, Russia with Putin’s iron grip on power, Russia whose bosses do not like us – it had to be Russia he was all corrupt and cozy and compromised with. A dirty corrupt deal with a friendly country would be bad enough, but this ain’t that.

The new revelations also make Trump’s statement absolving Russia of any blame for the DNC hack look much worse. Trump had self-interested political reasons for absolving Russia of this blame, obviously, but now we learn he appears to have had self-interested financial reasons for doing so — again, which he concealed from American voters.

Finally, in light of the new revelations, Trump’s exhortation to Russia to hack Clinton’s emails becomes an even more emphatic exclamation point on this stretch of events. His openly proclaimed desire to politically benefit from a hostile foreign power’s efforts to undermine our democracy was bad enough. In retrospect, it looks even worse, now that we learn that up until that point, he’d been trying to reach a lucrative deal with that foreign power — while keeping that effort hidden from the voters.

Yet Republicans are still defending and protecting him.

Image result for alice through the looking glass tenniel

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Quite balmy actually

Dec 3rd, 2018 11:43 am | By

From Pliny:

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Bully pulpit in every way

Dec 3rd, 2018 11:05 am | By

The Post collects more lawyers who point out that Trump is witness tampering in plain sight.

In another tweet Monday, Trump praised another longtime associate, Roger Stone, who also has drawn Mueller’s scrutiny, for having said he would never testify against Trump.

“This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about ‘President Trump,’ ” Trump wrote. “Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’ ”

The tweet about Stone drew immediate criticism from several lawyers, who said it amounted to witness tampering.

Among those who chided Trump was George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and a frequent Trump critic. On Twitter, he referenced Trump’s tweet and wrote: “File under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512,” citing sections of the federal code that deal with obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) weighed in later.

“This is serious,” Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter. “The President of the United States should not be using his platform to influence potential witnesses in a federal investigation involving his campaign.”

It’s disgusting that he’s doing it at all, and it’s disgusting that he’s doing it on Twitter where anyone and everyone can see it. It’s so mobsterish, so law-contemptuous, so brazen, so openly criminal. It’s as if Don Corleone went on The Tonight Show to say “Make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

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Witness tampering du jour

Dec 3rd, 2018 10:22 am | By

Trump is losing it again.

Twitter is of course overflowing with jokes about this new person, Scott Free.

Norm Eisen crisply points out that that right there is witness tampering.

Said by the biggest liar ever to sit in that chair.

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Paying for Milo

Dec 3rd, 2018 10:12 am | By

Milo Yiannopoulos is having money problems.

The far right activist Milo Yiannopoulos was more than $2m in debt during 2018, according to a collection of documents assembled by his former Australian tour promoters and seen by Guardian Australia. Creditors listed in the documents include employees of his company, a wedding venue and his former sponsors, the billionaire Mercer family.

The documents indicate that as of April 2018, Yiannopoulos owed $1.6m to his own company, $400,000 to the Mercers, $153,215 to his former lawyers, $76,574 to former collaborator and Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari, and $20,000 to the luxury jewellery brand Cartier.

As of 2 October, Yiannopoulos owed sums of several thousand dollars to far right writers including Ian Miles Cheong, anti-Islamic ideologue Pamela Geller and science fiction writer Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, the documents indicate, amongst others.

It seems so unfair, doesn’t it. Here’s Jordan Peterson getting 80k a month on Patreon while poor Milo can’t even get out of debt.

The cache details the deterioration in the relationship between Yiannopoulos and his former promoters, Gold Coast-based Australian Events Management, run by brothers Ben and Dan Spiller.

What does that sound like? Oh yes, Travis Pangburn, who was doing all these Events with Dudely Atheists Talking and who suddenly stopped paying everyone and closed up shop, leaving Sam Harris and others squawking plaintively for their money. Maybe being a jackass doesn’t pay all that well after all.

Yiannopoulos and the promoters made successive failed attempts to organise speaking tours to Australia in 2018.

The British-born former Breitbart writer was to be accompanied by various guests, including the rightwing US commentator Ann Coulter, the English Defence League founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, the Australian senator Fraser Anning, who once called for a “final solution to immigration in Australia”; and the Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, who was himself refused a visa to enter Australia late last week.

Selling racism and sexism for BIG BIG CASH PRIZES.

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