Trump fans.

Here are some Trump supporters threatening to burn down a woman’s bookstore. Because, deplorable. pic.twitter.com/687HE3MVDo

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 9, 2018

To the surprise of no one who was paying attention, it turns out that the leaders of the Women’s March have a Farrakhan problem.

Mass movements are sewn together from a wide variety of sources, so they often sweep in unwanted companions as they move toward their goals. No one, however, expected to discover that three Women’s March co-chairs—Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory—had ties to Farrakhan.

No one at all? When Sarsour’s hijab was on all those March posters?

It all came to a head last week, after Farrakhan delivered his address to the annual Nation of Islam gathering for Saviours’ Day, the sect’s three-day holiday honoring its founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad. Farrakhan denounced “Satanic Jews,” said that “when you want something in this world, the Jew holds the door,” and at the climax of his speech, proclaimed, “White folks are going down, and Satan is going down, and Farrakhan by God’s grace has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew—and I’m here to say, your time is up.”

Naturally, this renewed interest in just what the Women’s March was thinking. Mallory further stoked controversy when a woman questioning her about Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism drew a response from a preacher asking her to condemn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and praying for Jesus to cast out the “wicked spirit laying on her heart.” Linda Sarsour surfaced to say the man was “too blessed,” and Mallory tweeted, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!”

Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism has been an issue for decades. Tensions over Islam and Palestine and anti-Semitism have been a thing for decades. None of this is new or particularly surprising.

Part 5 of BuzzFeed’s big Russia series –

Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.

Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong “comprehensive investigation,” a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an “accident,” and prosecutors closed the case.

Gee, what a striking coincidence that that happened just before he was supposed to meet with the Feds. Also…a series of drunken falls alone in a hotel room that left blunt-force injuries on the head, neck, and body? That would take some doing. Yes, people can fall down when drunk, but to fall repeatedly onto something hard enough to do all that would take work. Falling against a sink or table or chest of drawers could cause an injury like that, but over and over again? Always against the hard wood or porcelain as opposed to the bed or the carpet?

But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were.

“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can’t get into.”

If that’s true it involves a federal prosecutor, and no doubt a bunch of other federal employees.

He continued: “What I can tell you is that there isn’t a single person inside the bureau who believes this guy got drunk, fell down, and died. Everyone thinks he was whacked and that Putin or the Kremlin were behind it.”

In another previously unreported revelation, the two FBI agents said it was the Department of Justice that paid for the hotel room where Lesin died. DOJ officials had invited the Russian to Washington to interview him about the inner workings of RT, the Kremlin-funded network that Lesin founded, they said.

But Lesin never made it to the interview. He died the night before it was scheduled to take place.

Last month, a two-year investigation by BuzzFeed News revealed explosive evidence pointing to Russia in 14 suspicious deaths on British soil that the UK government had largely ignored. Four high-ranking US intelligence officials confirmed that those deaths had been linked to Russian security services or mafia gangs, two groups that sometimes work in tandem, by “intelligence gathered in the field and analysed” by US spies and handed to Britain’s security services. But the UK police publicly declared that none of the 14 incidents involved foul play. As a result, the public has been kept in the dark about what national security officials have long suspected: Russian assassins may have murdered in the UK with impunity.

And now maybe they’ve started doing it here.

Neither do I.

Father of Parkland victim slams NRA videos:

"If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country. Why are we letting this lobby have anything to do with DC? I don't understand it!" https://t.co/9eh7udBMsx pic.twitter.com/FZeTqvTRmK

— ABC News (@ABC) March 7, 2018

The Huffington Post tells us the word “globalist” is the hot new thing in the White House right now…and not in a good way.

The term “globalist” has been used at the White House at least three times this week in reference to an outgoing Jewish Trump administration official, raising some eyebrows because the word is increasingly used in xenophobic and anti-Semitic contexts.

The word came up on Wednesday when a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether a similar candidate will take the place of Gary Cohn, the outgoing director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council.

“He was a noted free trader, a globalist. Will the president seek another globalist, another free trader?” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked.

Ah Devin Nunes – the lying weasel who will commit any outrage to try to save his darling Don.

…last week, the California Republican was credibly accused of leaking texts from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member to Fox News as part of an unusually misguided partisan stunt.

Patriotism at its finest.

Slate added last week that Nunes’ greatest hits include “being forced to admit that he hasn’t personally read the court documents that he based an FBI–Hillary conspiracy memo on, being forced to admit that the FBI actually did disclose the information about Trump ‘dossier’ author Christopher Steele that Nunes had accused it of not disclosing, and being forced to admit that he had coordinated his statements about the phony Obama ‘wiretapping’ story with the White House and then lied about it.”

Lying weasel, lying in the service of an even worse lying weasel. Let us now praise famous men.

Nunes spies the real danger:

One of the nation’s exercises in democracy can be found on late-night TV. Hosts crack sharply critical jokes about the country’s politicians without fear of retribution from said politicians.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sees that exercise very differently. He told Fox News Channel that a skit Stephen Colbert did mocking Nunes’s memo alleging FBI bias in the Russia investigation is a danger to the country.

Isn’t that funny now – here’s me thinking the danger to the country is Representative Devin Nunes lying and leaking a senator’s texts to Fox News, when really it’s a late night talk show host mocking said Devin Nunes.

Nunes’s “danger” comment makes more sense when viewed through an authoritarian lens — that free speech can somehow undermine government that has been functioning for nearly 250 years.

Nunes’s allies in the White House have increasingly decided to see the world through the lens of authoritarianism. Instead of rebutting their critics, White House officials have resorted, a number of times, to saying it’s irresponsible to criticize the president and his staff. One of the most egregious examples came in October when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it would be “highly inappropriate” for journalists to fact-check Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, because he’s a general.

If all else fails I guess they could just poison us.

The Trump administration cares.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made a contentious visit to the site of last month’s Florida school shooting Wednesday, in which she was criticized by survivors and abruptly walked out of her own press conference.

Ok, the Trump administration cares about people who are deferential to them.

DeVos spent the morning at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where former student Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17 students and teachers on Valentine’s Day. Her visit immediately sparked criticism and backlash from shooting survivors and advocates on social media.

“Do something unexpected: answer our questions,” Aly Sheehy tweeted at DeVos. “You came to our school just for publicity and avoided our questions for the 90 minutes you were actually here. How about you do your job?”

I think she sees her job as privatizing as many public schools as possible and letting the others rot.

She also told reporters she toured the school with student journalists, and vowed to return to sit down with them and further delve into the issues. The editor of the school’s newspaper “The Eagle Eye,” however, said DeVos “refused to even meet/speak with students.”

So she tells an occasional lie – at least she didn’t open fire on them!

Plus she’s a good sport and listens to criticism.

When further pressed on the issue of arming school staff, with questions surrounding training standards and student opposition to such a program, DeVos walked away from her podium and ended the press conference.

Kids today are so disrespectful.

It was a nerve agent.

A nerve agent was used to try to murder a former Russian spy and his daughter, police have said.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious in Salisbury on Sunday afternoon and remain critically ill.

A police officer who was the first to attend the scene is now in a serious condition in hospital, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, said.

Is that terrifying enough yet? Will Trump ever have second thoughts about his best friend Volodya?

There are 14 other deaths under scrutiny.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian agent, was rushed to hospital after collapsing in London. As the world watched, a rare and highly radioactive isotope destroyed Litvinenko’s organs one by one, and he died three weeks later.

A British public inquiry found that the former Russian agent had ingested Polonium 210, and that his assassination was likely ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That is, Donald Trump’s dear darling beloved friend. Trump says Putin is trustworthy while Mueller is not. Trump believes whatever Putin tells him, while he treats Mueller’s investigation as a fraudulent attack on him by political enemies.

Russia has denied any involvement, but the case has put renewed scrutiny on a string of deaths in the UK in the past two decades. The chair of the home affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper MP, wrote to Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Tuesday calling for a review of 14 other cases.

Those cases were variously found to have been heart attacks, suicides, accidents, and deaths by natural causes, but some allege that they amount to a pattern of state-sponsored murder on British streets.

The CIA carried out some murders of that kind in the past. Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffat were blown up by a car bomb in Washington D.C. Our hands are not clean. Nevertheless…

There was Alexander Perepilichnyy.

Perepilichnyy was born in Ukraine and made his fortune as a financier in Russia, allegedly helping government-connected Russians launder money. In 2010 he fled to Britain and began to co-operate with British authorities. He collapsed during a run near his home, the day he returned from a short trip to Paris.

Initial toxicology tests on Perepilichnyy’s body revealed nothing suspicious and it was ruled to be a natural death. But two years later, a fresh round of tests arranged by a life insurance company found traces of a rare and deadly plant toxin in Perepilichnyy’s stomach.

Gelsemium, a flowering plant native to China and Southeast Asia, is known as “heartbreak grass”, because its leaves, if swallowed, cause cardiac arrest.

US intelligence sources told the BBC at the time that they believed Perepilichnyy was murdered. An extensive investigation by Buzzfeed News claimed that the businessman was one of at least 14 people US officials suspected were killed in the UK by Russia.

(BuzzFeed again. Just yesterday I was reminded that BuzzFeed broke the story of the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed is far from just a gossip rag.)

In Salisbury, counter-terror police have taken over the investigation. The park bench where Mr Skripal collapsed has been cordoned off and a restaurant where he ate lunch has been temporarily closed.

If it turns out to have been a Russian attack, part of the purpose will have been to warn those in Russia against betrayal, and those in exile that they are never safe, said Mr Browder. “It sends a message to the rank and file that terrible things can befall you and your family,” he said.

That’s the country Trump is in thrall to, either through blackmail or through bone-deep stupidity. That’s the country that is remaking the US in its own image.

The BBC:

The leader and deputy leader of far-right group Britain First have been found guilty of religiously-aggravated harassment.

Paul Golding, 36, and Jayda Fransen, 31, were arrested over the distribution of leaflets and posting of online videos during a Muslim gang-rape trial.

…

The court heard they had targeted homes and people in Kent whom they believed [to be] connected to a rape trial at Canterbury Crown Court where three Muslim men and a teenager were convicted of rape and jailed.

Is this a matter of free speech, or of targeted harassment?

I think it’s the second.

During their trial in January, Folkestone Magistrates’ Court heard the pair confronted people they believed were defendants in the gang-rape trial.

However, in each case, they instead targeted innocent members of the public.

They filmed the abuse and then released it on social media and through the Britain First website.

They also posted offensive leaflets through the letterboxes of houses in the area where the rape-trial defendants lived.

Up close and personal; that’s harassment.

Antonio Damasio has a new book, and started a Twitter account apparently to promote it. Interesting thoughts.

Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors and negotiators of human cultures. #TheStrangeOrderofThings

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 18, 2018

Love, compassion and gratitude are emotions and are forces for the good. Only negative emotions such as anger, hate or contempt are destructive. Blaming emotions for our social ills misses that critical distinction.

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 26, 2018

Claiming reason as the solution to social ills misses the point that often facts and arguments only improve conditions when they persuade and prompt action. Persuasion requires emotions and feelings as the critical negotiators.

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 26, 2018

That in a nutshell is what I tried to argue in a Free Inquiry column responding to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter aphorism:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.

I said no, evidence is necessary but not sufficient, you have to start farther back – with human needs and feelings. I learned that partly from reading Damasio, so I’m glad to see he has a new book.

The immune system, the hypothalamus and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause: the deep biological mechanisms behind what we now call pain and pleasure.

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) February 9, 2018

The natural force of homeostasis, present in the simplest organisms, carried over into organisms with nervous systems, was expressed as feelings, and motivated creative reason. It has remained pervasive in cultures. #TheStrangeOrderofThings

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) March 6, 2018

Wanting to feel good rather than bad, in short, and then extending that to other people – that is, realizing they have the same need and want, and grasping that fairness means extending the good things to everyone. Fairness is part of homeostasis too, it’s the solution to the discomfort of seeing or enacting injustice – unless of course you’re like a Trump and genuinely see your own needs as the only needs that matter.

The force of homeostasis can be diminished and subverted in the cultural space. It needs to be strengthened by intentional civilizational efforts guided by agreed-upon humanist values. #TheStrangeOrderofThings

— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) March 6, 2018

That’s the latest one.

Kellyanne Conway broke the law. Twice.

A federal ethics agency has ruled that one of President Trump’s closest White House aides twice broke the law separating government from politics.

Kellyanne Conway, who was Trump’s campaign manager in 2016, advocated for Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s recent Senate election during live television interviews broadcast from the White House lawn.

The Office of Special Counsel found Conway violated the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their office for partisan politics.

The OSC is nothing to do with Mueller’s investigation. (They should use different names then. Have a heart.)

In two interviews on the Alabama race, one with Fox News and one with CNN, Conway spoke in front of the White House using her official title, counselor to the president, while repeatedly attacking the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones.

“Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled. He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime. Weak on borders. He’s strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners,” said Conway in a Nov. 20 appearance on Fox & Friends.

Unabashed campaigning, while brandishing the White House.

“While the Hatch Act allows federal employees to express their views about candidates and political issues as private citizens, it restricts employees from using their official government positions for partisan political purposes, including by trying to influence partisan elections,” the agency’s report says. “Ms. Conway’s statements during the Fox & Friends and New Day interviews impermissibly mixed official government business with political views about candidates in the Alabama special election for U.S. Senate.”

The agency says Conway never responded to its inquiries and says that it has submitted its report to the president for “appropriate disciplinary action.” Because Conway is a high-ranking presidential appointee, it’s up to Trump to decide what action is appropriate.

And because Trump is a narcissist who thinks he outranks the law, Trump won’t even bother to think about action. A deputy press secretary issued a statement saying nuh-uh she did not either shut up.

Conway also came under scrutiny for endorsing the fashion line of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump during a February 2017 interview. Walter Shaub, the then-head of the Office of Government Ethics, criticized the president’s decision at that time not to discipline Conway.

Shaub, who has since left the government and now works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said Tuesday that Trump needs to act on the OSC report about Conway. “The White House cannot continue to have one standard for the federal workforce generally and a lower standard for appointees who are close to this President.”

But it’s going to. Nothing will stop it.

Corrupt enough yet?

A key aide to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been granted permission to make extra money moonlighting for private clients whose identities are being kept secret.

A letter approving outside employment contracts for John Konkus — signed by an EPA ethics lawyer in August — was released Monday by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The ethics official noted that Konkus’ outside contracts presented a “financial conflict of interest” and barred him from participating in matters at EPA that would have a “direct and predictable” financial benefit for his clients.

Norm Eisen said on Twitter that he didn’t even let people do outside work for non-profits when he was Obama’s ethics honcho.

The Washington Post reported in September that Konkus had been scrutinizing grant applications for mentions of climate change, which he reportedly referred to as “the double C-word.”

That’s in line with statements by Pruitt, who as the administration’s top environmental official has embraced a pro-fossil-fuel agenda while questioning climate science showing that global warming is primarily caused by man-made carbon emissions.

House Democrats decried what they called the politicization of the EPA’s grants-making process in a letter sent to Pruitt on Monday.

“A political appointee cutting millions of dollars in funding to EPA grant recipients on what appears to be a politically motivated basis, while at the same time being authorized to serve as a paid media consultant to unnamed outside clients, raises serious concerns of potential conflicts of interest,” said the letter. Signatories included Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

I guess Republicans have an edge in ignoring conflicts of interest, since they think profit is sacred and thus holy and thus incapable of involving corruption.

Environmentalists said Monday that the agency’s lack of transparency about the private payments to EPA staff on the public’s payroll raises concerns about whom they are really working for.

“The American people already know that Scott Pruitt is working for corporate polluters and not for them, but the revelation that his staff is moonlighting for private clients while working at the EPA full-time brings suspicions of pay-to-play to a whole new level,” said Melinda Pierce, the legislative director of the Sierra Club. “And if Konkus is not working for polluters directly, the public is forced to ask whether he is running a partisan political operation from within the agency instead.”

#swamp