The REAL Scandal: Republicans Are Kompromized by the Kremlin

If the Republicans' efforts to dig up scandals on Joe Biden and his son Hunter - in an effort to weaken Biden's standing and cause embarrassment to cover for donald trump's real weaknesses and scandals (and upcoming criminal trials) - looked weak and ridiculous on their own, that's because the GOP's efforts to stir up scandal were weak and ridiculous.

And now, those Republican efforts have turned into a goddamned John Le Carre spy novel with the revelation that one of their key "witnesses" to Hunter Biden's business shenanigans was not only lying about his testimony but that he was passing along "evidence" fabricated by Russian Intelligence.

It's unsettling enough that the Special Counsel overseeing the investigation in Hunter Biden's potential criminal behavior had to pull a 180 on relying on this "witness" Alexander Smirnov and issue felony charges against him instead. And then, worrying that the Nevada magistrate who handled the bail release on Smirnov was giving Smirnov a chance to flee the country, they recharged Smirnov in a California court with more specific evidence - and that he was a flight risk - to ensure the guy stayed in custody.

How important was this "witness" to Republicans digging for Biden dirt? According to that AP News report from Lindsay Whitehurst, this important:

Smirnov’s claims have been central to the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family and helped spark what is now a House impeachment inquiry into Biden.

They became a flashpoint in Congress in July as Republicans demanded the FBI release the unredacted form, a so-called FD-1023, documenting the unverified allegations. Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky had subpoenaed the form as Republicans deepened their probe ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Republicans acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if the allegations were true but said they were significant in their investigation of Hunter Biden.

The allegations of Russian contact with the source of those allegations should be a death knell for the impeachment inquiry, said Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “It appears like the whole thing is not only obviously false and fraudulent but a product of Russian disinformation and propaganda,” he said.

Of course, the Republican leaders on this - Comer, Jim Jordan, the other clowns in that car - are running away from having Smirnov as their keystone to their entire impeachment effort, except for the fact they've been running away from every other tainted source they tried to rely on over the past year of sham hearings and "rumored" revelations.

What this twist exposes is not only their failure to find legitimate scandal against their true target Joe Biden (they honestly don't care if Hunter goes to jail or not), but exposes how corrupted and compromised the modern Republican Party leadership is towards a foreign power like Putin's Russia. The nominally conservative pundit at Washington Post Jennifer Rubin spells out the problem (this was via a gift link, don't know if it will paywall):

Are Republicans easy marks or willing participants in Russian anti-Biden operations? That’s a troubling question raised by the Feb. 14 grand jury indictment of a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, on charges of concocting a tale about President Biden’s supposed involvement in his family members’ business dealings.

Allegations by Smirnov — who appears to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to the federal indictment — have formed the backbone of the House Republicans’ laughable attempt to build an impeachment case against the president. They championed him as their star witness. Now the Republicans’ fact-deficient storyline has been shredded...

Now Republicans are pretending that Smirnov wasn’t so important after all. They’re vowing to plow ahead on this cock-and-bull mission that never got off the ground. Not only did multiple witnesses testify that Biden had no involvement with his son’s business dealings, but previous allegations that Biden acted on his son’s behalf had also already been thoroughly repudiated...

The current House debacle overlaps with a Russian disinformation project described by the national security specialists Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa on the website Just Security in 2020. That scheme enticed Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) to buy into the now-discredited scenario that as vice president Biden sought on behalf of his son to stop an investigation of Burisma. (It also added in another phony Ukraine election interference claim.)

And let’s not forget that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III found “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf.

The current revelations concerning Smirnov should not merely spell the end of the comically inept impeachment proceedings; they should provoke questions about Republicans’ recklessness in peddling claims they apparently knew were unreliable.

At the very least, it is clear that House Republicans had reason to be skeptical of Smirnov’s allegations instead of embracing them. FBI briefers “warned lawmakers that the document, known as a 1023, containing Smirnov’s allegations against the Bidens also included raw, uncorroborated intelligence that should not be made public,” CNN reported on Wednesday. Even if the Republicans did not know Smirnov might have ties to Russian intelligence, they certainly knew the basis for making wild allegations about Biden was extremely shaky...

Republicans’ affinity over multiple elections for Russian-backed plots should warrant wall-to-wall coverage. (Let us not forget Russian efforts detailed in the Mueller report to enlist the Trump campaign and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) Responsible news outlets should press House Republicans to justify their refusal to vote for aid for Ukraine and habit of spreading Russian conspiracy theories.

In short, Trump (enabled by House Republicans) wants Ukraine aid blocked and invites Vladimir Putin to invade NATO countries with military budgets Trump deems insufficient. He already has served as an indispensable helpmate in Putin’s assault on democracy and the international order. No wonder Russia appears yet again ready to pull out all the stops to boost Trump.

Rubin refers back to a particular matter that obsessed me during the trump years: The Mueller Report. It annoys me to no end that when then-Attorney General Barr - appointed by trump to shut down the Mueller investigation before it closed in on trump himself - ended that grand jury probe, he promoted - and the mainstream media bought into - the lie that the Report "exonerated trump" and that was the end of that. What everyone seemed to ignore were the factual elements Mueller's team found - the first half of his legal objectives - rampant and provable evidence that Russian Intelligence and their oligarch allies actively engaged in election interference in 2016. What Mueller couldn't prove was trump's direct involvement with those efforts (instead Mueller found at least five instances of Obstruction, which he couldn't criminally charge due to Presidential Immunity but tried to get House Democrats to attempt impeachment, which they failed to pursue).

I remain shocked and angered to this day that Congress both Democrats and Republicans failed to heed Mueller's - and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence agencies - warnings that Russia - above all the other foreign powers looking to interfere like China and Iran - will continue to attack America's electoral systems to force the results - like stealing the presidency AGAIN for trump - that benefits Russia instead of the U.S. and our long-standing European / Middle Eastern / Asian allies. There's been almost no legislation - no priority put to making our elections more secure nor passing legal sanctions and punishments on Russia for their crimes. We're talking about acts of war getting committed on us - our rights as Americans - and nothing, no response.

Worse: We have had solid evidence for almost a decade that Russia was, is, and will do anything they can to disrupt and divide the United States. And it's getting clearer that the Republican Party as a group are happy to help them.

I mentioned before how the Republican mindset - drawing from their deep conservative ideology - their One Truth is that they view only themselves as True Americans. To do so, everyone else - aka Democrats and those who do not fit in the Republican Culture War like women, Blacks, Latinos, gays and trans, and more - dare not and cannot be considered "American" even though geographically, demographically, philosophically, we are as American as they.

Their problem is that those conservative Republicans are not in the actual majority of Americans... and they know it. They've been sliding out of contention with the majority of voters since 2008, they'd been warned after the 2012 election cycle, and yet instead of moderating themselves to retain broad appeal the conservatives doubled down on Culture War extremism and RINO purging to keep party unity, tied into aggressive state-level and federal-level gerrymandering and voter suppression to skew elections to their favor.

Thing is, that Game of Demographics can only work for so long, as the Republican extremism on issues like abortion (and related issues like birth control and IVF) and tax cuts for the rich peel away the edges of their GOP voting base to where they can't "win" even with all the gerrymandering and suppression.

So the Republicans are desperate to get any help from anywhere they can. Even if that help is coming from a foreign power like Russia where their leader Putin and his cronies are openly threatening our allies and our own nation's safety/stability. Even when that help falls under open acts of sedition that rely on corrupted persons like Smirnov. 

Similar to how trump's 2016 campaign met with and tried to coordinate with Russian nationals over getting dirt on Hillary Clinton - in possible violation of 52 US Code sect. 30121 - the current House Republican leadership and their allies from trump's Justice Department (looking at you Bill Barr) have come dangerously close to breaking that law getting tampered/manufactured Russian intel just to pursue false claims against Biden. Not to mention more obviously legal problems like suborning perjury and presenting false evidence.

The GOP leaders did all this because they truly believe 1) they're above the law, 2) they're the Real Americans fighting against un-American Democratic "criminals," 3) the Russians are not the bad guys. That last part is important because the modern Republicans driven by their Culture War bullshit truly see Putin - with his open homophobia, his disdain for "librul" Western norms, and "traditionalist" worldview (not to mention his sadism towards his lessers) - as a serious ally in that Culture War.

I wasn't there to see it, but I read the history books about the Red Scare, the McCarthyism of the 1950s where conservative Republicans openly hunted liberals and left-leaning Americans as Communist threats buddying up to Stalinist Soviet Russia. "Pinko down to their underwear" was the accusations, and anybody who ever expressed solidarity with Soviet Russia were hounded until they were broken or dead. Today, we now see those inheritors of the conservative Republicans happily and publicly embracing a Russian regime that may no longer be Communist but is just as corrupt and tyrannical as anything Stalin ever led.

The irony of such betrayal is lost on these modern Republicans, too greedy and too desperate to stay in power to see how they've sold their own ideals and their own nation out to a Russian dictator.

This scandal ought to convince every American voter who truly wants what is best for our nation - for our families, for our communities, for our future - to stop voting for a Republican Party corrupted and compromised beyond redemption. 

Elections matter, people. There's a reason why Putin wants to corrupt ours this 2024 just like he tried in 2020 and succeeded in back in 2016. Get the vote out, America. For the LOVE OF COUNTRY  everybody, do NOT vote (R)epublican (R)ussia.

Unavoidable Conclusions To an Ongoing Train Wreck

Welcome to the Darkest Timeline (via Ken White at The Atlantic).

Federal prosecutors filed three briefs late on Friday portending grave danger for three men: the former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and President Donald Trump...

In brief No. 1, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office argues that Paul Manafort breached his cooperation agreement with the government by lying to the FBI and the Special Counsel’s Office in the course of 12 meetings. The brief oozes a level of confidence notable even among professionally hubristic prosecutors: Mueller says he’s ready to present witnesses and documents, and that he gave Manafort’s lawyers an opportunity to refute the evidence but they could not. Mueller is sure he has the receipts.

According to the brief, Manafort lied about his communications with the reputed Russian intelligence agent Konstantin Kilimnik, whom Mueller has scrutinized as a possible conduit between the Trump campaign and the Russian government... Mueller also asserts that Manafort lied about some of the payments he received and about an investigation in another district—possibly, based on the context, the Southern District of New York investigation of Michael Cohen and the president. Finally, and of great concern to the White House, Mueller claims that Manafort lied about his contacts with the Trump administration before his guilty plea, and that text messages, documents, and witnesses prove that he was in contact with administration officials...

In brief No. 2, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asks a federal judge to sentence the former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to a “substantial term of imprisonment”—meaning between three and four years...

The New York prosecutors blast Cohen’s “rose-colored view of the seriousness of his crimes,” accusing him of a “pattern of deception that permeated his professional life.” Prosecutors portray Cohen as stubbornly obstructing his own accountant to cheat at taxes, even refusing to pay for accounting work that raised inconvenient issues he wanted suppressed...  Cohen, they say, schemed to pay for two women’s stories (Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, we now know) in violation of campaign-finance laws in order to influence the 2016 election, and did so “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1”—that is, the President of the United States...

And that brings us to brief No. 3: Special Counsel Mueller’s separate sentencing brief in Cohen’s lying-to-Congress case. He does not recommend a sentence but informs the court about the nature of Cohen’s assistance to his office. Mueller discloses that Cohen has “taken significant steps to mitigate his criminal conduct” by pleading guilty to lying to Congress and meeting with the special counsel seven times to discuss his own conduct and other “core topics under investigation.” That includes information about multiple cases of contact between other Trump-campaign officials and the Russian government, and about Cohen’s contact with the White House in 2017 and 2018, suggesting an ongoing inquiry into obstruction of justice...

Just to note, the Obstruction of Justice relates to trump firing James Comey for refusing to stop the investigation on Michael Flynn, a retired general and major trump campaign player who was in deep with Russians already and was tagged as a serious security risk.

Everywhere in this mess of trump scandal, there are Russians. Russian business partners. Russian contacts. Russian handlers and GRU agents. At some point we're going to find red trump hats reading Druzhishche (buddy).

How serious a breach of national integrity is this?

I normally don't quote from Wired magazine, and you wouldn't normally think it would have any political insight to give. But Wired is tied into network security issues - which is where all the Russian hacking/subversion of our national security comes into play - so they would have a reason to comment. Or at least Garrett Graff would:

WE ARE DEEP into the worst case scenarios. But as new sentencing memos for Trump associates Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen make all too clear, the only remaining question is how bad does the actual worst case scenario get...?

A year ago, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic outlined seven possible scenarios about Trump and Russia, arranged from most innocent to most guilty. Fifth on that list was “Russian Intelligence Actively Penetrated the Trump Campaign—And Trump Knew or Should Have Known,” escalating from there to #6 “Kompromat,” and topping out at the once unimaginable #7, “The President of the United States is a Russian Agent.”

After the latest disclosures, we’re steadily into Scenario #5, and can easily imagine #6...

In fact, what’s remarkable about the once-unthinkable conclusions emerging from the special counsel’s investigation thus far is how, well, normal Russia’s intelligence operation appears to have been as it targeted Trump’s campaign and the 2016 presidential election. What intelligence professionals would call the assessment and recruitment phases seems to have unfolded with almost textbook precision, with few stumbling blocks and plenty of encouragement from the Trump side.

Mueller’s court filings, when coupled with other investigative reporting, paint a picture of how the Russian government, through various trusted-but-deniable intermediaries, conducted a series of “approaches” over the course of the spring of 2016 to determine, as Wittes says, whether “this is a guy you can do business with.”

The answer, from everyone in Trumpland—from Michael Cohen in January 2016, from George Papadopoulos in spring 2016, from Donald Trump, Jr. in June 2016, from Michael Flynn in December 2016—appears to have been an unequivocal “yes.”

Mueller and various reporting have shown that the lieutenants in Trump’s orbit rebuffed precisely zero of the known Russian overtures. In fact, quite the opposite. Each approach was met with enthusiasm, and a request for more.

Given every opportunity, most Trump associates—from Paul Manafort to Donald Trump, Jr. to George Papadopoulos—not only allegedly took every offered meeting, and returned every email or phone call, but appeared to take overt action to encourage further contact. Not once did any of them inform the FBI of the contacts...

What we are uncovering - something I'd long noted and what Graff is highlighting now - is not only a Presidential campaign willing to break election laws but also willing to betray our nation to a foreign power, driven entirely by a lust for everything that foreign power offered them.

I admit to personal bias. I wholeheartedly believe with only the partial evidence shown of Worst Case Scenario #7: trump AS A RUSSIAN AGENT. Straight up treason.

But here's the upsetting thing. Scenario #7 isn't the breaking point. Scenario #5 - where Russians actively infiltrated a Presidential campaign and trump knew/should have known - is just as bad as #7. This is the level where any honest citizen would have stopped and said "No". This is the point where a legal campaign would have drawn a line. ANY foreign intervention into our internal decision-making - our elections - would be tantamount to betraying every American living or dead who stood for our own nation's sovereign status.

trump and his Inner Circle crossed that line. They never said "No," they said "Yes" and repeatedly. They did it with eyes open and arms wide. Violating national security protocols we have in place to prevent foreign meddling, to stop foreign espionage and spying. They propped the door and let every crook in, because they are crooks themselves.

We're openly seeing evidence of Scenario #5 for trump's campaign, and every bit of it points to acts of treason.

And Cohen's revelations point to Russia being involved since the damned PRIMARIES, when trump was kneecapping Republican candidates from Jeb to Rubio to Kasich to Cruz to every other wanna-be who were left whimpering on the sidelines wondering how the hell they were beat. How does it feel, Republicans? HOW DOES IT FEEL TO KNOW YOUR OWN PRIMARY WAS COMPROMISED BY PUTIN?

To quote my boss Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice:

But here’s what matters: If Trump isn’t brought to justice, the United States of America will cease to exist as a sovereign nation. It’s frightening to face that fact, but face it we must because a criminal gang has seized the executive branch. We and our fellow citizens will either root them out, or we’ll pretend accept that this is just how things are now.

Welcome to the Darkest Timeline. Welcome to the Second Civil War, between us and Putin's Puppets.

Get to work saving the United States. STOP trump NOW. STOP THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FROM STEALING THE REST OF US. 'Cause right now, it's not really trump or the Republicans profiting from this crime. It's Putin. And the United States is going to suffer if he wins outright.

Waiting For the Week It All Goes Down

It's been established that federal investigators clamp down on issuing indictments or make public statements about cases that would affect things in the months before an election - which is THE reason James Comey will NEVER be forgiven for that nothingburger of a "But Her Emails" report the week before Nov. 9 2016 - so now that the midterms are over (and Thanksgiving done and did) there's a ton of expectations about Mueller's ongoing special counsel cases surrounding Russia's interference in the 2016 elections.

The buzz is out there that Mueller has been sitting on "dozens" of sealed indictments, with various trump Inner Circle players - Roger Stone, donnie junior himself - reportedly telling their friends they're facing charges. trump himself has been going through noticeable mood swings in public, and had re-upped his attacks on Mueller post-election.

With yesterday's announcement that Mueller is pulling Paul Manafort's plea agreement over the fact that Manafort has continued lying to investigators, we're facing a likely moment for those sealed indictments to go out, linking Manafort's culpability to the people about to get arrested.

An interesting side note is "why did Manafort endanger his plea deal in the first place?" I caught this little tidbit on Twitter:

Quick link to Emptywheel here:

Paulie can’t help himself. According to Mueller’s team, he has kept lying and lying since entering the cooperation agreement.

After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement. The government will file a detailed sentencing submission to the Probation Department and the Court in advance of sentencing that sets forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement herein.
As the defendant has breached the plea agreement, there is no reason to delay his sentencing herein.

As I noted back in September, the standard the government has to prove to claim Manafort has breached his agreement is just “good faith,” as compared to preponderance of the evidence with Rick Gates...

Just about the only explanation for Manafort’s actions are that — as I suggested — Trump was happy to have Manafort serve as a mole in Mueller’s investigation.
But Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies...

If Manafort was an attempt to subvert the investigation within, it didn't work. If it did anything, it revealed that Mueller's team has more damaging - and VERIFIABLE - information on hand condemning a lot of players in trump's world. Worse, Mueller's investigators gave trump enough room to condemn himself by likely answering their questionnaire all wrong.

All this means one thing: a lot of people are facing a lot of jail time (unless trump breaks every foundation of the Constitution first). What does this actually mean?

The most likely targets of the indictment will be every person who showed up at the June  9 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and trump's campaign. This is huge: the most direct link of trump's people to a foreign power in discussions to get aid from that foreign power to steal the election.

So who we know was AT the meeting:

Americans
donald trump junior, inner circle family confidant
Jared Kushner, trump's son-in-law and major campaign advisor
Paul Manafort, at the time trump's campaign manager

Russians
Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin connections
Irakly Kaveladze, a Georgian-American, under investigation for money laundering
Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist accused of ties to Russian intelligence
Anatoli Samochornov, Vesenlitskaya's translator

Brit
Rob Goldstone, business go-between and media PR for Russian entertainers/ connected figures.

(If anyone noticed anybody hiding behind the coffee cart in the corner, I hope they get named too)

It's unlikely the Russians will see a courtroom in the U.S. but any charges will restrict their ability to travel outside of Russia. So the real damage is going to hit the Americans and the Brit Goldstone (unless he flees jurisdiction, but I doubt the UK government will give him any protection).

While the direct participants are in serious danger, there's a question mark about the people who knew the meeting happened but didn't personally attend. They could be on the hook - under charge of conspiracy, or related charges to any criminal activity that happened because of that meeting - and it may explain the "dozens of indictments" that insiders say are out there.

It would be interesting to see how broad a net Mueller will cast when the indictments go out.

He'd better do it quick, before we get distracted by our Saturnalia decorating and party plans.

July 27 2016 A Date Which Will Live In Infamy...

trump publicly called on Russia to "find Hillary's missing emails," which in Far Right Wingnut Conspiracy-Speak meant "Hey, hack her server to find embarrassing shit."

A Daily Beast article from that day:

During a Wednesday press conference in Florida, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails from her tenure as secretary of state. “Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That will be next. Yes, sir.”

Betty Cracker commentary from Balloon Juice:

As Adam noted yesterday, the DNC hack isn’t just standard intel gathering that virtually all governments do. The decision to use WikiLeaks as an outlet to publicly release the information to interfere with an election “meets the definition of an act of cyberwar,” according to Dave Aitel, whose Ars Technica editorial was quoted in Adam’s post...

So to recap, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump openly “adhered” to a hostile foreign government and encouraged it to commit an act of war on the United States...

A more detailed review from Aaron Blake from the Washington Post:

There are many, many potential problems with this scenario — and not just for Clinton's campaign, but also for U.S. national security. Indeed, the logical extension of his comments is that a foreign power would be deciding how to handle possibly sensitive information about a potential U.S. president...

But Wednesday's comments ratchet things up even more. Even as he contended that he's not the preferred candidate of Russia — as Democrats have alleged and Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested — he's now hoping Russia has potentially damaging information about a possible U.S. president.

That's stunning. And while Trump did not say he wants Russia to use those emails for blackmail or espionage purposes, his previous comments make clear it's a possibility he's very well aware of...

My take back in the day:

It doesn't matter that Clinton's email server has already undergone a complete federal investigation, where the worst the FBI found was that it was improper that Clinton was doing this (following how previous Sec of States did their private servers!).

Trump is taking the Far Right Narrative that Evil Clinton is still hiding something, anything, and they want to get at it by hook or by crook. Preferably by crook.

This is insane. This would be like having Richard Nixon asking Red China to wiretap Muskie (didn't have to, he hired his own). This would be like having Teddy Roosevelt asking Canada to intercept telegrams sent by Alton B. Parker back in 1904. This would be like John Adams asking the kingdom of Norway to raid Thomas Jefferson's home for his personal papers...

And for all those takes, what really did happen because of what trump said to the world that day? Refer to David A. Graham at the Atlantic just this July 13 2018...

The broad outlines of Friday’s indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, charging 12 Russians with conspiracy, identity theft, and money laundering in connection with hacking during the 2016 presidential election, are not surprising. The hacking of the Democratic National Committee has been public knowledge since July 2016, and even then, the authorities publicly stated that the perpetrators were Russian government officials. Other details, such as the apparent involvement of WikiLeaks and Trump adviser Roger Stone, were also known. Some of the details, however, are striking...

On July 27, 2016, at a Trump press conference in Florida, the candidate referred to 33,000 emails that an aide to Hillary Clinton had deleted from the former secretary of state’s personal email server. The DNC had recently announced the Russian intrusion, and Trump speculated that if Russia broke into the DNC, it would have accessed Clinton’s emails, too...

(trump) was encouraging a foreign adversary to illegally hack into messages by a former secretary of state that might contain sensitive information, then release them publicly.

Trump had good reason to believe that Russia was listening. The previous month, his son, Donald Jr.; son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians who they believed were offering damaging information about Clinton. (The meeting wasn’t revealed to the public until 2017, and both the Russians and the Trump campaign officials say no dirt was exchanged.) Prior to the meeting, Trump Jr. had received an email stating that the meeting was “ part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Mueller’s indictment offers new evidence that Russia was listening—and acting on Trump’s request. The indictment charges 12 officers of the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence agency, with hacking intended to interfere with the election...

This is asking a foreign power to spy on an American citizen, to spy on an American who worked as a Senator and Secretary of State, to spy on an American running for the Presidency.

How can that NOT fit the definition of treason spelled out in the US Code? "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States..."

On this day in 2016, donald trump went on live television and committed an act of treason asking Russia to interfere with the elections, putting into play another part of what is turning out to be the Crime of the Century: Theft of the electoral process of the United States.

Everyone saw the crime taking place, and for now the thieves are getting away with it.

Do not forget this day.

The Long Frustrating Sunday Of Coping With the Shitgibbon

One of the things I hate about this Era of Eternal trumpism (trumpus Horribilis) is how the ongoing scandal that is his damnable corruption makes it IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with a political rant blog like this.

I was going to start out this day writing about the news report that trump's campaign people - through trump ally Erik "Blackwater" Prince - made connections in 2016 with nations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate where those foreign powers offered to help trump win the election. Which is, by the by, illegal under 52 US Code.

This is serious stuff. As well as linking trump to even more corruption - the implications of Quid Pro Quos in that under trump's administration both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are getting exactly what they want - there is the likelihood Prince perjured himself before Congress when he was questioned about these type of meetings going on during the campaign. And while Russia's connection to all this - especially the interfering in the election itself - is still a part of the investigation, this revelation shows how eager trump and his people - especially his own son donny junior - were to make any lawbreaking deal they wanted.

But then this tweet from the Shitgibbon himself got out there (via Mock Paper Scissors):

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

As Tengrain himself notes: And game, set, and match: that sounds like Obstruction of Justice right there.

What trump is trying to do is call into question any investigation into the 2016 campaign, convinced that such digging is politically motivated as a revenge plot by Obama (and Hillary). Nevermind the evidence that such investigations began early in 2016 separate from any involvement from Obama's White House. Nevermind the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI (and other intel agencies) are not motivated by partisan politics and are doing their jobs (which in this case is uncovering financial and political corruption). Read all these tweets collected on Anne Laurie's Balloon Juice article to understand better.

As what might happen tomorrow if trump does send his bullying command to Justice, there's a likelihood they will simply defer the request to their Inspector General (IG) office and let the IG investigate trump's claims (which are mostly based on wingnut conspiracy crap spewed via InfoWars and Fox Not-News). It won't defuse the argument - the wingnuts will never accept any finding that doesn't fit their fantasy Narrative - but it will keep this situation from escalating into a larger Constitutional Crisis.

Unless trump uses the "lack of urgency" by the DoJ to start firing people like Deputy AG Rosenstein to get the results he wants, in which case he IS trying to obstruct the investigation and IT WILL BE open warfare.

Even getting into Rudy Giuliani's claim that Mueller is promising to end his investigation by September is so small potatoes that I'm just going to link it here without comment. Except that WHY should we believe Rudy about Mueller's own plans?

So here's to seeing how Monday rolls out.

I don't want the world to end this week. Jewel Staite is coming to Orlando MegaCon this Memorial Day weekend...

fan art by Adam Withers. If he shows up at a comic-con, HIS SH-T'S GOOD GO BUY SOME.

Mind Games With the PSYOP Crews

At Midnight all the Spambots
And the Facebook crew
Come out and analyze everyone
That knows more than they do
-- Bob Dylan, updated Desolation Row

Today - building off of a weekend's worth of news reports regarding a data-mining corporation Cambridge Analytica taking too much private info out of Facebook to use as campaign data for Russia and trump to abuse - there's been more revelations that CA was using more than just data to manipulate the political landscape. Via Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice who starts off linking to the British Channel 4 reporting:

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.

In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.

Um, let's start off with HOLY SHIT and work from there.

Silverman gives much-needed clarification:

What Nix and Turnbull are caught describing as their standard operating practice is separate from whatever program Christopher Wylie built for Cambridge Analytica. Rather, they’re describing a hybrid of privatized human intelligence and what are sometimes referred to as black psychological operations (black PSYOP), which is a misuse of the term. Initially black PSYOP was used as short hand for the highly compartmented covert form of PSYOP necessary to support special operations. This is not surprising as Cambridge Analytica is subsidiary business development unit of SCL Group, which claims to provide these services to the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD. Several boutique companies were created to do this type of work in support of coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and people eventually left these companies and started their own boutique shops. All they’re really doing is creating propaganda and then trying to insert it into the news and social media space without it seeming to come from non-natives...

For my understanding, just on this report alone, I'm thinking Cambridge Analytica are a bunch of hyped-up pimps looking to fuck up other peoples' governments for their own gain and profit. Not to cast any aspersions or anything...

The bribery issue itself is a huge concern. As Channel 4 noted, that tends to be illegal. But the thing catching my eye is the part where they bring in Ukrainian sex workers to tempt/blackmail pols. This begs the question "How did they have access to THAT particular resource?"

'Cause the first thing I think of when I hear something crooked related to Ukraine, my first thought is "Manafort." Considering how that guy was playing on the political global stage, I wonder how tied to CA he could be.

All that thinking aside, this brings up a serious problem about our Social Media world, and how tied into our networks we've become. I've been a user on Facebook for ages, since 2006 or so. I've used it to make and keep track of friends from high school, college, work, and shared interests. To find out - no to have my fears confirmed - that all my social activity and postings can be used against me by foreign agencies looking to disrupt my nation's political arena is horrifying.

I am tempted to cut off Facebook right now. I can't because of work-related reasons - we use Facebook to let other users know about my library's programs and events - but I am seriously looking into other Social Media apps to replace our Facebook page.

Just not Snapchat. Those sons-of-bitches disrespected Rihanna. What the hell were they thinking?

To everyone else I know on Facebook. We need to find a safer way to stay in touch.

And we need to shut those Cambridge Analytica crooks down.

The New Year Better Open With a Shit-Ton of Arrests For the trump Campaign

This shit, I can't even right now (via the New York Times):

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton...

...Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

Trying to keep up with the timeline on this should be a full-time PAYING gig at the honest media outlets. As long as the benefits include free drinks at the nearest bar because SWEET JESUS CHRIST THIS IS INSANE.

...The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies...

Don't forget that by July 27 - when the leaks were becoming noticeable and the media was noting that it seemed to come from Russia - trump openly called on Russia to hack Hillary some more.

trump is now running around claiming "It's not collusion, but if it IS collusion is not a crime." Well, dealing with a foreign nation to subvert the U.S. Election system IS a crime. Getting that foreign nation to hack American citizens for your benefit is a crime. And knowing how trump works - that it's all about the money (and money HE can acquire) - I'm willing to bet there's a lot of fraudulent stuff there to boot (there's a reason why Mueller brought in investigators experienced in money laundering cases).

Every last bit of this on trump's side of things reeks of TREASON: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason..." We may not be directly at war with Russia, and the Cold War itself a historic relic, but we are opposed to that nation on many foreign issues - especially Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Middle East - to where we have active sanctions against Russia (something that trump promised to end, there's your Quid Pro Quo).

If this were England involving itself in our election, if this were France, if this were Canada or Jamaica or Egypt or Saudi Arabia or any other "close ally" of ours, this would still be a problem because a FOREIGN POWER would be involving itself in the sovereign affairs of our own government. We had an international scandal when a British Ambassador commented on the election of 1888, which may have thrown the election against Grover Cleveland (who won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College, SOUND FAMILIAR?). Our own government admittedly meddled in the elections of other nations during the Cold War, under the pretext of stopping global Communism, so say hello to the irony of Russia interfering in ours.

So this bothers me. It horrifies me, truly, that the Republican Party seems willing to sign off on this to clench onto political power they might not have honestly earned. That trump and his campaign staffers seem - based on the known evidence - to willingly, gleefully seek Russia's aid in all of this reaches a level of criminality that fits - to my American sensibilities - the definition of treason.

Arrest them all. Damn them. Let this new year be a clean slate for the nation.

Just Another Junkie For Fame

Get rich get high get drunk on your desire/
Stand back relax now watch me start a fire/
I don't think they take me serious/
Normal life makes me delirious - "Junkies for Fame" Shinedown

So what exactly does the recent declassified report on the possible involvement of Russian hackers and other agents on the United States 2016 General Election mean?

Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday.

The report depicts Russian interference as unprecedented in scale, saying that Moscow’s role represented “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” beyond previous election-related espionage.

And we're talking going well back before the Cold War of the 1950s, when the spy stuff was edge-of-war serious.

The campaign initially sought to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, “denigrate” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and damage her expected presidency. But in time, Russia “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and repeatedly sought to artificially boost his election chances.

It means Trump, the incoming President-Elect, is in debt to a foreign power in more ways than one.

The 14-page document made public also serves as an explicit rebuttal to Trump’s repeated assertions that U.S. spy agencies cannot determine who was responsible for a hacking operation that extracted thousands of emails from Democratic Party computer networks and dumped them into public view via the WikiLeaks website.

Trump's been spending far too much time on Twitter - so so eager for the views, don't you know - trying to downplay the story, trying to claim it's just the Democrats being sore losers, but it's not the Dems, it's our own federal government saying this shit is real:

In the report, the CIA, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded with “high confidence” that Russian intelligence services penetrated numerous computer systems tied to U.S. political parties and then “relayed” the email troves to WikiLeaks.

So one thing that has to happen is, you gotta make up your mind: can you trust the CIA and the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence of being correct on this? There's always been the skepticism with those agencies, questionable intel, the possibility of partisanship (esp. with the FBI), all that. Thing is, for the most part these agencies try to do their jobs the best they can. There may be a conservative bent to those intel offices (and rogue agents - "cowboys" - running their own agendas), but those agencies have to exist in a world where they have to answer to either political party at any given time. That means they don't try to play favorites or pick a side (usually). What they try to focus on - and what you can at least trust them on - is being as accurate and informed on national security issues that are a direct threat to our nation's borders and its citizenry.

If each of these agencies - and the FBI and CIA have a history of being at odds over jurisdiction - are saying there's a "high confidence" that Russia was meddling in our elections, and if they're publishing this much information in a declassified report within MONTHS of it happening, then there is something serious and legit about these allegations.

This brings up troubling issues. Trump profited from Russia's involvement. Considering the number of people on Trump's payroll with connections to Russia, and considering Trump's own public stances on Putin, is there a possibility Trump was involved in tampering with the elections? Because if there is...

That is, of course, speculation. But the question, and the trouble behind it, needs asking.

But Trump doesn't want to answer that question. He's acting as though these reports are meaningless. Even though as President one of the things he's got to learn is that he DARE NOT ignore these reports. The intelligence agencies exist for a reason, and are actually trying to do their jobs.

And the more these reports get out, the more Trump defends his BFF Putin, and the more Trump tries to underplay the seriousness, and the more Trump makes it clear he's hostile to our own intelligence agencies. He's pretty much down to his only defense being "Trust me on this."

But we can't trust you on your word, Trump. You lie far too often to ever be trusted.

And we've seen your act for the last 40 years, Trump. You've never been about public service, or the civic good. You've always been about YOURSELF and your goddamn Brand Name Trump (tm), hogging the spotlight and desperate for love and respect you've NEVER earned.

I doubt Trump openly worked with Russia to upend our elections. But I'm certain he knows he benefited from it, and he views Putin and Russia as more his friends and allies than his own nation. It's all about getting his ego stroked, never mind how he gets it done. He's getting hooked on Love From Russia, and the risk becomes how much he'll give away to keep it coming.

You're betraying your nation for an attention addict's fix, Trump, with Putin as your dealer and narcissism as the high.

You damn junkie, selling out the USA for an arm's worth of Ego.

Gods help us.

How the Electoral College Failed

For starters, the wrong candidate won.

Our system of the Electoral College - where the Popular Vote doesn't win it, it's where you win enough states with enough Electors - for what I can tell is the only one where the runner-up can secure a victory. Nearly every other elective government out there - from the parliamentary forms to other federal-based setups - seems to go with "whoever gets the most votes wins." Even the parliaments - where multiparty systems mean a plurality-winner can form a coalition government with other minor runner-ups - has it as a given that the largest vote-getting party gets the Prime Minister spot and sets all the rules.

All because our electoral system doesn't go by Popular vote for the Presidency. It goes by a complex system where each state determines their Electors, who then decide who they want for President. Granted, the Electors still go by who won their state, but that could create a situation - like we just had this year 2016 - where states with minimal populations all team up for one candidate who barely wins their states (Trump) while the states with larger populations all went for the other candidate who garners more voters (Hillary) but not enough Electors.

But no. For the office of the Presidency, the guy who gets second place among the actual voters can still end up in the White House. This is like having a seven-game World Series where the Cubs win 4 games but the baseball commissioner gives the trophy to the Indians because they had a better ERA during the series. It defies logic.

The biggest problem is that the Elector count is skewed, distorted in favor of small-population states - where few people live - and against the large-population states where, you know, everybody really lives.

Wyoming is the smallest population state at 585,000 or so. California is the largest at 39,250,000 or so. Simple math has California roughly 67 times the population of Wyoming.

Because the Electoral College is required by the Constitution to equal the number of representatives and senators in Congress, Wyoming gets 3 Electors because of the sole minimum representative plus two senators. Due to a cap of representatives (435 members, set in 1929), the disbursement of representatives makes it 55 Electors for California (53 reps, two senators). Let's divide 55 by 3... it shows California getting 18 times the number of Electors. Even though Wyoming has fewer Electors, those Electors carry more value. If California gets the number of Electors that their population actually warrants - 67 times - we should be giving California nearly 202 Electors.

But we don't.

If the Elector count is still tied to Congressional representation, we'll never see this fixed. There's a reason why the number of representatives in the House is capped: any expansion of more seats would increase the costs of the bureaucracy. The number of representatives - not just for California but all the other states that would see an increase in seats - would likely triple the existing number into the thousands. Organization chaos would kick in: there's not enough committees to seat them all, and the lack of office space for all those new staffs would make things worse.

Granted, there are solid arguments for increasing the number of representatives - our nation's population has tripled since 1929, we do need more effective representation if there were more Congresspeople to serve their districts, and more seats would make it harder for large/midsized states to gerrymander - but the arguments are for moderate increases, not outright doubling/tripling of seats.

If we did something to make the Electoral College equal in value between the states, we'd need to separate the College from the Congress. Make it so that the number of Electors is based on the Voters-to-Elector ratio in the smallest state (Wyoming) and then divide Voters-to-Elector across all the other states.

The argument FOR the Electoral College is "oh, the smaller states need representation." But that flies against the needs - and the rights - of the voters who live in larger population states. Why should voters in California or New York or even Texas suffer all because of where they live? Why does Wyoming or Vermont or Rhode Island get more of a say of who wins the Presidency?

In one of those tone-deaf things, a number of Far Right pundits are crowing that "oh if you don't count California, then Trump won the popular vote." Here's the thing: YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO IGNORE CALIFORNIA. CALIFORNIA COUNTS JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHER STATES. Maybe even more than that, because CALIFORNIA IS WHERE MOST OF THE PEOPLE LIVE.

The President of the United States is the office that represents the entire nation, that should mean every voter in the nation should have a say on who the President should be. Does that include the voters in Wyoming and Vermont and Montana? Sure. But it should also include the voters in Texas and New York and Illinois and Florida and all the other large-population states. And California.

If you're worried about the small states, they still get equal representation in the U.S. Senate - where the rules of Holds and Cloture make it easy for small states to block anything they don't like - and those states still have their own Governors to fight for them at the federal level. Not to mention the fact that the Constitution still has safeguards like the 10th Amendment and the 14th Amendment - silly little thing called DUE PROCESS that makes it so that things have to be equal to all before the law - to keep states reasonably protected and represented.

This is for the President of the United States. This is for everybody. And everybody should get an equal say regardless of which state they're in.

The other big problem with the Electoral College is how it handles the state results as Winner Take All.

California's Electoral count of 55 all went in for Hillary who got 8 million votes, while Trump got zilch even though 4 million voters showed up for him there. Do you think those 4 million enjoy the idea that they live in a "Solid Blue" state when the truth is it's all jumbled? Texas Electoral count of 38 all went to Trump who won 4 million voters over Hillary's 3 million. Do those 3 million Hillary voters enjoy being stuck in a "Solid Red" state that's close to 45 percent Blue?

If we did increase the Electors to reflect actual voter numbers, say California goes up to 202 EV and Texas goes up to 139 EV and so on, we're setting up the viability to have the Electors sorted out by percentage of voters. That way, no one candidate wins all, they win the portion of the voters that sided with them.

The Electors that reflect the Senate seats go to the candidate who gets the majority (or plurality if there's multiple candidates) of the votes in that state. So that's two off the plate. Let's go with California set with 202 Electors. Set aside 2 for Hillary winning the state: out of the 200 left, Hillary got 61.5 percent to Trump's 31.5 percent and Gary Johnson's 3.4 percent as the third-place Libertarian. 200 times .615 = 123 EV and .315 = 63 and .034 = 6.8 okay round up to 7 for Gary Johnson. 123+63+8 = 194, okay so there's 6 Electors to partition out to the other runner-ups, but that's the beauty of this: Now the minor third parties have Electors for them. Granted, they're close to zero compared to the numbers the Big Two get, but it's better than the actual zeroes they were getting... and if they perform better in other states, those Electors add up.

In the percentages matchup, Hillary gets 125 (plus the 2 Senate EV, remember) out of Cali, Trump gets 63 EV he didn't have before, Johnson gets 8 EV, the others get one or two, and then you start spreading that out among the other states. Republicans now have a reason to fight for voters in what were once Solid Blue states: Democrats now have a reason to fight voters in Solid Red states. And the Electoral College will more accurately reflect the Popular Vote.

I've gotten arguments in the social media - Twitter, natch - that we "don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic." That is, we're not a direct vote system like the classic democracies of the Greeks: we're supposed to be modeled after the Roman Republic system. Thing is, even republics are more responsive than the current Electoral system. I don't recall from my studies - in both World History and Latin classes - a single Roman election for Consul where the runner-ups got the victory parade. Psst: what made the Romans a Republic was the system of Checks and Balances within the government itself.

The Electoral College was designed to be a Check, goes the argument: The Founders didn't trust the direct vote of the people and so set up the College to get the states to determine which candidates won. The Founders actually wanted the results to be a mess: They wanted the College to determine the "best qualified" candidate - to filter out the crazy or the ill-suited - regardless of the Popular vote. And if the Electors couldn't decide, the Founders wanted the House to determine who served as President, as another Check to make the President more "accountable" to Congress.

It's a sick joke that in the few times that the Electoral College has been in question - 1800, 1824, 1876, 1884, 2000, 2016 - it's never worked the way the Founders intended. The results of 1800, 1876 and 2000 in particular created constitutional crises. In 1824 the clear popular choice - Jackson - got screwed over by a House of Representatives that preferred Adams, and it created a toxic political environment of the following Jacksonian era - the Spoils system in particular - that tainted politics until the civil service reforms of the Progressive era of the late 19th Century.

And the Electoral College never voted their consciences: The Electors (mostly) voted the way their states went Winner-Take-All. The few Faithless Electors who voted their mind only did so as a protest vote where the result (just one guy for Reagan in 1976, for example) had no impact.

Only one of the Presidents who won the Electoral in spite of the Popular won re-election (Dubya the noted exception), and few of them left behind any notable legacy. So there's that to consider.

At some point, the Presidential elections are going to have to respect the right of the People to vote as a nation for the office that represents the nation. We can keep the Electoral College as a stop-gap or a braking mechanism to ensure the "Mob Rule" that the Founders feared would not rise up to claim a powerful seat in the federal government. But it's got to reflect what the people want a lot better than the mess we've got now.

A Dark Truth About American Partisanship

When Election night happened, one of the arguments about how bad everything was going turned on the fact that the voter turnout seemed LOWER than the 2012 Election. Arguments were made about how UNPOPULAR the candidates were and how it doomed voter turnout to give Trump an Electoral College victory by eke-ing out better turnout in the mid-sized battleground states.

Thing was, it was too soon to make that claim. This election cycle had a ton of voters do so by Absentee ballot and mail-ins, which required hand counting and took longer than expected even after you threw in the time for recounts. As a result, the "low" turnout actually kept ticking upward with more ballots confirmed...

So by now, the weekend before the actual Electoral College does their thing, we do have a realistic accounting of the results for 2016.

Clinton: 65,844,594 votes
Trump: 62,979,616 votes
Other: 8,137,687 votes

Here's the thing about the 2012 turnout:

Obama: 65,915,795 votes
Romney: 60,933,504 votes
Other: 2,236,110 votes

Notice anything? The 2016 turnout kinda matched the 2012 voter turnout. Granted, Trump got about 2 million more voters than Romney did, but Romney also got a slightly higher percentage (47) of actual votes than Trump (45). The real difference was the third-party voter turnout, but that was more to the Libertarians with Johnson getting 4.4 million of those votes with a 3 percent share.

We can nitpick at the numbers and the results, but here's what I'm getting from these comparisons:

Our elections are no longer about the issues, the elections are no longer even about the candidates: the elections are about partisan turnout.

Let's face it. Both major parties had up for nomination two of the most unliked candidates in modern times. NOBODY running for the highest office had these kinds of Unfavorable numbers (polling in the mid to upper 60 percent "hate him/her"). And yet... Hillary did just about as well as the popular and charismatic Obama (who suffered the same amount of mudslinging if not more from the GOP) and the blatantly vulgar Trump did slightly better than Romney (whose biggest sin is his personality being more plastic than a Lego toy store). Trump is still polling under 50 percent on the popularity charts, which is rare for a "winner" heading into the inauguration: Even Bush the Lesser had a Favorable bump from Americans in general wishing him "good luck" at the start of his tenure.

The issues can go sit in a corner and sulk, but the polling showed solid majorities of people wanted immigration reform (that didn't involve mass arrests) and wanted Obamacare and wanted their Medicare and Social Security untouched... and they still voted for the Republicans in large enough numbers to guarantee that party held both Congress and the White House, and to assuredly DESTROY each and every one of those items on the checklist.

No, what's happening here is clear evidence of the political divisions that have polarized our nation. The voters - the citizens who are paying attention to who's doing what in government - are now so set in their voting preferences that nothing - not the issues, not hated candidates - can change their views.

Even with the all-too-obvious clues that Trump was IS a tiny-fingered vulgarian of the highest caliber - his caught-on-tape rant of "Grab Em By the Pussy" should have driven his sorry sexist ass into exile on the furthest island in the South Pacific - a solid number of "Christian" holier-than-thou "clean thoughts chum" Republicans still voted for sexual assaulter to represent them. I've noted before there were clear factions among the GOP base - the ones who cheered Trump on vs. the ones who held their noses and closed their eyes and clapped slowly in the background - and yet when the time came those "clean" and clear-headed Republicans still voted for the vulgarian because they honestly cannot cross the aisle to vote for someone else or even leave their choice blank in protest.

Even with Hillary suffering hit after hit from the media over inflated (and FAKE) "scandals" like her emails, even with her coping against a Far Left Progressive group still pining for Bernie Sanders, even with enough voters thinking to themselves "do we WANT another four years of Clinton culture warfare"... she STILL got as many votes as Obama had in 2012. Granted, she didn't get the voter percentage, but the numbers still prove the solid base of Democratic voters sided with her despite the trepidation and worry. Being hated wasn't the reason why she lost (she lost due to voter suppression in key states, and to minor shifts in voter turnout in others).

The Democrats could have run the Second Coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the voter turnout would have stayed roughly the same. The Republicans could have run the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan and the voter turnout would have stayed roughly the same.

Either party could have run a dead dog as their candidate and the voter turnout would have stayed roughly the same.

Because we're locked in now. There are so few voters who have the willpower to shift their opinions and their choices in any way to affect the outcomes. Nearly everybody has made up their mind and are rooting for THEIR team no matter the circumstances.

There may be generational differences - older voters Republican, younger voters Democrats - but that didn't mean much now and it won't until the demographic shift (I *was* hoping it'd have been now, but it's looking like 2020 or 2024) really finally kicks on. There may be voters who actually care about the issues, but they had no impact on this election cycle as they were drowned out by the partisans who place party above the people. And there's no sign of that changing for the next cycle.

Unless there's a massive economic or natural disaster. Unless the voters - especially the White majority voters - are directly impacted by the destruction of the incoming Legion of Doom. And even then I wouldn't doubt that the voters would stick by their party to the bitter end. And by then we're likely seeing a body count of innocent lives ruined by the failure of our voters to actually step back and realize "HOLY SHIT WE JUST LET A CON ARTIST INTO THE WHITE HOUSE."

We as a nation are no longer capable of choosing our candidates with any rational or sensible guidelines. Because of that, we're not going to get any genuine reforms and policy shifts we need to keep ourselves educated, or employed, or healthy, or improved.

It's no longer the elections than decide our nation's fate. It's the disasters we let happen because we've let the parties make the choices for us.

Stuck On Stages Two And Four

"To err is human, to forgive, divine" - Alexander Pope

"Alexander Pope never had to live in a world with Donald Trump" - Paul Wartenberg

Everything Trump represents sickens and horrifies me.

This is the most unqualified, sadistic, uneducated, ill-informed, ill-humored human being to ever reach the office of the Presidency of the United States. That is saying something in a field made up of Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding.

At least terrible Presidents like Millard Fillmore, U.S. Grant and Jimmy Carter had their virtues and achieved some things that did not harm the nation. At least dangerous Presidents like Jackson or LBJ or Nixon were crafty or showed some respect towards the Constitution and the office they served.

Trump will do no such thing.

Trump will defy every law, ignore every protocol, insult every citizen that does not serve his wants.

He's already ignoring the conflicts of interests his business dealings have with the integrity of the Office of the President. His claims of putting things into a "blind trust" are turning out to be like all the other lies he's spun his entire life. The possibility Trump will violate the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution itself is bordering on 100 percent happening.

The recent meeting Trump held with the leaders of the Tech Industry - with his own children who are managing his financial "empire" - had the look and feel of him getting an idea which companies and CEOs he could shakedown for bad business deals. Anyone remember the gangster conference in the Godfather? Yeah, like that, with Trump as Barzini.

Harding was never this bad. At least Grant never profited from the graft of his own administration. Nixon for all his sins never crossed so many lines that Trump threatens to cut to shreds.

We're facing not just one Constitutional crisis, but a series of them, one laid atop another like a stack of bent playing cards that will blow itself down the second someone sneezes at it.

We are at the beginning of an age of failure and despair, where the kleptocrats huddle to form a kakistocracy, led by a con artist whose disasters underscore every lie he's ever told, and Trump has told so many.

If I'm in a dour and depressed mood, this is just one of the many reasons why.

To hell with the Five Stages of Grief. I'm stuck on Anger and Depression, to hell with Bargaining and to HELL AND DAMNATION with Acceptance.

What the hell, America. What. The. Hell.

A Sad And Sardonic Saturnalia Season

I blame 62 million Americans who didn't take their fidelity to the Roman Gods as serious as they should have.

You people do realize we're going from a Marcus Aurelius in Obama to a Commodus in Trump.

Thanks a bunch, 62 million Americans.

The pagan god Saturn will doom us all with Saturn-themed punishments, to be signified by giant rings circling your belly until the final fate.

I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY.

Three Other Voices From This Thin Raft

I'm still trying to figure out how to continue expressing my rage at a nation where 62 million fellow Americans voted for an openly sexist, racist con artist to represent us to the world, but until then I have to find comfort from the others in the blogosphere who still have their voices and a keen understanding of the hell we're about to enter.

First off, there's Driftglass, who's been railing against an intentionally blind and self-serving media elite for decades now, and who had just written a long and beautiful argument about the media's folly allowing such a crook to dominate them (and us):

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing...

Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower...

If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.

If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!...

Ask a Trumpshirt if they remember any of this at all and they'll give you a dirty look, followed by a dozen "Yeah, but what about..."s, each of which will also be bullshit.  Then they will scamper away, because they have literally been conditioned by years of hate radio and Fox News and the Breitbart Collective not to remember anything from The Big Scary Past that is ideologically inconvenient.

In other words, if a dirty Libtard says it, it ain't true, and anyone who says anything I disagree with is obviously a dirty Libtard.  QED...

Then there's Rude Pundit, who like me was stunned by the result, spent time in the wilderness collecting his thoughts, and coming back today to discuss his insights (some of which, especially about the fucked-up electoral process, I agree with):

But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54 percent of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far. Sure, that's way too many dumb fucks for any nation, but fuck you if you think Donald Trump has a "mandate" or a "historic victory" or some such shit. It's a goddamned embarrassment to say to the world, "Yeah, over here each person's vote is totally not equal..."

Trump won Petroleum County (yes, there is a goddamn Petroleum County) in Montana with a total of 278 votes out of 322 cast. Clinton won Manhattan's county in New York with 515,481 votes out of nearly 600,000 cast. In your precious list of counties won, those are each counted once.

I got nothing against the shit kickers and roughnecks of Petroleum County and I hope they don't have anything against us up here in the Northeast. But double fuck anyone for saying that 1 Montanan who voted for Trump is worth the same as over 1850 people who voted for Clinton in Manhattan. Your history-making is bullshit. Trump is the Loser-in-Chief, and he will always have asterisk after his name that'll drive him insane(r)...

Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point...

And then there's John Cole at Balloon Juice, who has a pretty blunt way with words:

If I read one fucking more thinkpiece, blog post, semi-literate tweet, or Facebook forward blaming whatever the fuck “identity politics” is for Democrats losing the election I am going to lose completely and totally lose my shit and climb a fucking bell tower. I don’t even know what people mean when they say identity politics anymore. So let me ask you:

Is it identity politics when you cater to white supremacists, the Klan, and neo-nazis to win an election?

Is it identity politics when you say white lives matter or blue lives matter?

Is it identity politics when you cheer building a wall to keep out rapey Mexicans?

Is it identity politics when you intentionally close voting districts in minority areas to suppress the vote?

Is it identity politics when you pass bills saying you can legally discriminate against the LGBT community?

Is it identity politics when you threaten a cop for wearing a hijab or try to rip the hijab off people in public?

Is it identity politics when you call for a ban on Muslims and claim that a government list of Muslims is a good idea?

Is it identity politics when your healthcare bills do nothing for women’s health but hand out Viagra like skittles?

Is it identity politics when children of color are disciplined more frequently and severely than white schoolchildren?

Is it identity politics when your #1 priority is passing bills telling what women can and can’t do regarding their reproductive health decisions?

Is it identity politics when the justice system systematically incarcerates minorities or when cities set up nuisance policing policies in minority communities?

Is it identity politics to insist that everyone say Merry Christmas?

Is it identity politics when you cheer stop and frisk in minority communities?

Is it identity politics when you claim “coastal elites” aren’t real Americans and that the heartland is where the “real people” live?

Is it identity politics to pay women less than men (and women of color even less)?

Is it identity politics to totally lose your fucking shit over a black Santa Claus or a black Jedi or boycott Rogue One because WHO FUCKING KNOWS THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING NUTS?...

I left the GOP because of their identity politics. I couldn’t sleep at night being aligned with warmongerers, homophobes, christianists, climate deniers, flat earthers, racists, xenophobes, and every garden variety bigot under the sun. The Republicans are the real party of identity politics- it’s all about stroking the few, the white, the privileged, and that’s all they have. They don’t actually have policy proposals or ideas, unless “Fuck ’em let them starve,” “Fuck ’em they don’t need health care,” “Fuck it, let’s bomb them,” “Fuck it, let’s put them in jail,” “Fuck it, the bible says so,” or “Fuck it, let’s burn it all down” count as policies and ideas...

I know where Cole's coming from: I'm also a former Republican driven away by the Culture War madness and their obsession with a tax-and-slash agenda that's been proven twice to be bad ideas (as though the third time or the thirtieth would be the charm).

Each one of those three voices are expressing the reality of the horror Trump and his fellow Republicans are going to inflict on the rest of us. All because of a rigged game and a broken electoral system. And none of this is going to get fixed until the entire thing collapses, ironically because these Republican policies are self-destructive and doomed to fail.

We can see this train wreck acomin' and nobody's going to be able to do anything about it until it's too late. And by then the body count of the innocent will be terrible to behold...

Fox Not-News War On Saturnalia Accelerates

These goddamn buzzards won't be satisfied until they wipe out every Latin Studies program in the United States.

Just see here about Trump acolyte Corey Lewandowski eagerly claiming that "Merry Christmas" is allowable again. It's maddening.

Even when there's solid evidence that millions of Americans have been saying "Merry Christmas" between 2009 to 2016 with no problem at all!

Meanwhile, I can't even get Hallmark Cards to issue a Saturnalia card for the season. THE FOOLS.

This is what I'm up against.

/cries

Castro Is Dead. Cuba Can Live On If the Right People Do The Right Thing

One of the things I teach about writing in Microsoft Word class is how publishers work with Font Size. Normal reading text is 11 or 12 point font. Book publishers have chapter titles usually between the 24 to 32 point font sizes. Newspapers and magazines usually go between 24 to 36 point sizes for their minor stories under the fold or inside the pages. Anything over 42 point font size is for major news stories.

Anything Earth-shattering - the start of a war, landing on the moon, Hillary getting a replacement server for her email account - and we're talking 72 point at the least. Sometimes the headline banner will take the entire front page.

So when one of history's more pivotal players on the global stage of the last 60 years passes away - a person who was the target of hatred on a scale comparable to Hitler, Stalin, and that guy cutting you off at the McDonald's drive thru - it's gonna be headline news at the largest possible font you'll ever see. I guarantee you the front page of this morning's Miami Herald had to be printed on extra-sized paper to handle this:

Fidel Castro is dead.

You can't begin to imagine, even if you've lived in South Florida for nine or more years, just how hated Fidel was down in Miami-Dade. It was a passion, more fiery than a thousand suns and more dark than a thousand nights. I met anti-Castro Cubans from time to time back when I was a registered Republican at some of the party gatherings - most memorably at a rally for John McCain's Presidential campaign in 2000 - and those guys were rabid about Commies and Fidel.

To quote the Herald:

Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.

Few national leaders have inspired such intense loyalty — or such a wrenching feeling of betrayal. Few fired the hearts of the world’s restless youth as Castro did when he was young, and few seemed so irrelevant as Castro when he was old — the last Communist, railing on the empty, decrepit street corner that Cuba became under his rule.

He held a unique place among the world’s leaders of the past century. Others had greater impact or won more respect. But none combined his dynamic personality, his decades in power, his profound effect on his own country and his provocative role in international affairs...

Castro rose to control Cuba by wrenching power from a corrupt regime, promising major reforms and an end to that corruption. But he also delved whole-hearted into Communism and alienated Cuba from their closest neighbors, above all a United States that did not enjoy the idea of a Commie nation just ninety miles away from Key West.

Whatever benefits Castro brought to Cuba, he also brought major civil liberties violations - his record of homophobia in particular was deplorable - and essentially quashed dissent or differing views. He held onto his Communist ideals even after the fall of the Soviet Union by 1991, unable to find enough allies to share that ideology to keep his nation fiscally afloat. By the time he retired in 2011, all he had left was pretty much Venezuela, and that nation is in worse shape (that nation is one bad day away from food riots that could topple everything).

The only thing that kept Castro and his party in power was his open defiance of a United States government that could never abide his Communist ways. To a Latin American culture that never enjoyed the dominant - sometimes arrogant - behavior of the United States, Castro was a quaint middle finger aimed at Washington DC.

What happens next with Cuba, and with the United States, is anyone's guess. But the last four/eight years had seen encouraging signs that relations between the neighboring nations were finally opening.

Trapped in the reality that the global economy can no longer let nations isolate themselves, Cuba under Raul Castro began undergoing various economic reforms aimed at lifting US sanctions. Obama, sensing the opportunity of being the President who ended 50-60 years of Cold War hostilities with Cuba, did lift enough sanctions to signal approval. Both sides made outreach efforts to open up Cuba to travel, which is supposed to allow air travel with regular flights to Cuba and back (there are still some restrictions on who goes and why, but the rules have so many loopholes involved that if you can give the State Dept. a decent excuse they'll let you go). And as of last March, Obama promised that the whole embargo on Cuba will end (although arrangements haven't actually finalized yet).

This could be a huge coup for Obama if he could, within the last two months of his Presidency, work out a final deal with Cuba that would see an end to this sorry and painful split between two neighboring nations. He doesn't have much time, because with Trump entering the Oval Office in January there's no telling how this could go FUBAR. The Republicans, left to their own agenda of petty grievance and bullying habits, could easily refuse sensible compromises and push for even harsher sanctions to try and break the Communists still in control in Cuba.

If Raul cares for his brother's legacy - that some semblance of an independent Cuba still stands apart from the United States even as they reconcile into a partnership that could benefit both nations - he should deal with Obama as soon as possible. If they can get something figured out by Christmas, that would help.

Any deal with Trump would likely involve terrible Trump-owned casinos and massive corruption on a scale even Batista never signed off on. And waiting on a wingnut-led Republican Congress to do anything sane or legal is a bad idea no matter what.

It's turning out 2016 is a historic year all right. Sliding into outright horror if the right people in charge of things don't do what makes the most sense. Just saying, Raul, you'll get a better deal from Obama than anybody else. And Obama wants to get this deal made, he wants to leave office on a high note. Whatever the sticking point is, take a step back and recognize what can be done to fix it, and get the deal done.

History is waiting. The year isn't over yet.