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And we’re all out of bubblegum.

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Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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All the President’s Henchmen

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Maddow on AM Joy yesterday:

Me too, Rachel. The Trumps and their mobbed-up flunkies are an extreme danger to the republic and must be defeated. But GOP establishment figures like Barr, who’ve proved willing to go to any lengths to keep the con going, are a more insidious menace.

Some connected and elected Democrats vouched for Barr when Trump nominated him. They figured a long-term DC player could be trusted to protect institutions instead of subverting them on behalf of the demented conman. It was a bad bet.

The hot tub salesman who filled the AG job on an acting basis was an unqualified numpty, but at least he was impeded in his corruption by lack of familiarity with the job. Not so Mr. Barr. Consider a small sample of Barr’s inappropriate actions since his confirmation:

  • Lied about the contents of the Mueller report before its release
  • Held a press conference just prior to the Mueller report release to lie about it some more
  • Buried the whistleblower report and unlawfully failed to transmit the complaint to the FEC
  • Dismissed IG investigations that cleared Trump’s perceived enemies and reopened investigations
  • Undermined relationships with allies to investigate “deep state” conspiracy theories
  • Obstructed investigations into corrupt attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census

Parnas is a shady character with his own agenda, so it makes sense to treat his unverified claims about Barr or anyone else with skepticism. But as Maddow points out, Trump did mention Barr as well as Giuliani during the phone call with Zelensky to advance the extortion scheme.

Speaker Pelosi gets it. She called Barr a “rogue attorney general” and one of “the president’s henchmen” the other day at a press conference (clip included in another post). She’s right:

Does anybody think that the rogue attorney general is going to support–appoint a special prosecutor? No, because he’s implicated in all of this. This is an example of all of the president’s henchmen, and I hope that the senators do not become part of the president’s henchmen.

Pelosi’s remarks about Barr didn’t get the attention they deserved because of the media circus around Trump’s impeachment. But it was reassuring (for me, at least) that she chose to make them.

Because only a portion of one half of one branch of government is currently acting as guardians of the Constitution the entire government swore to uphold, it’s a heavy lift to ask the House Dems to investigate the attorney general too. But no one else is going to shoulder that load. It’s up to the Speaker.

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Election Year Open Thread: What A Coincidence, Guys!

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The media starts talking about Warren’s sterling debate performance, and suddenly it occurs to her competitors that she could very well be a useful second banana…

Still looking for the offer from Buttigieg’s team, but maybe he’s young enough not to automatically assume that any woman would automatically be flattered to be offered a job as his backup. Because Bernie and Biden both have the feeble, misogynistic ‘in my day’ excuse. Unlike, I suspect, the Bernie / Biden staffers who thought it would be smart marketing to put it out there at this point in the race…

Clownshow Mike, demonstrating their ‘rationale’:

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Repub Venality Open Thread: But Rod Rosenstein Had Only the *Best* Intentions!

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There is nobody within the Trump orbit who isn’t compromised. Another ‘with only the best intentions’ criminal steps forward in this week’s Friday night doc dump, per Politico:

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the release to the media of text messages between two highly placed FBI employees who exchanged criticism of then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department has revealed in a new court filing.

Rosenstein also said in the court filing submitted shortly before midnight Friday that he made the decision to share the messages with the press in part to protect FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page from the drip effect of incremental releases of the texts by lawmakers or others…

Strzok and Page filed separate lawsuits against the Justice Department last year, alleging that the release of their text messages violated the Privacy Act — an almost half-century-old statute that safeguards information federal agencies hold about private individuals.

Despite the litigation, until Friday it remained unclear just who at Justice gave the final OK to give about 375 Strzok-Page texts to journalists — including a POLITICO reporter — on the evening of December 12, 2017.

In a formal declaration submitted as part of the government’s defense to Strzok’s suit, Rosenstein owned up to being the one who made the call. He said he did so in part because the texts’ public release by members of Congress was inevitable in connection with testimony he was set to give to the House Judiciary Committee the following day…

Rosenstein, who stepped down from his position as Justice’s No. 2 official last May, said in his new submission that his aides initially suggested he might want to delay sending the texts to Congress until after his House testimony. But the veteran prosecutor said he concluded it would be “inappropriate” to hold them back, even briefly, for that reason…

While Rosenstein said the disclosure to the media was aimed at putting the messages in context, Strzok and Page have noted that the set of fewer than 400 texts sent to the Hill and shared with reporters that night was just a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of messages the pair exchanged on work topics as well as personal matters…

Rosenstein’s statement does not indicate whether he consulted with Page, Strzok or their attorneys to seek their views on the planned release, but he had them informed that night that the disclosure was forthcoming. The former DOJ No. 2 official said he did have one of his top aides confirm with Justice’s top privacy official that the disclosure would not run afoul of the Privacy Act…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from his senior role on the Trump-Russia probe after learning of the texts in the summer of 2017. Page, who worked on the earlier stages of the investigation, had already moved on to another assignment.

The FBI fired Strzok in 2018, while Page ultimately resigned from the agency.

In a statement published last month by the Daily Beast, Rosenstein argued the Justice Department was not responsible for the criticism Page has endured. However, without getting into detail or directly challenging Trump, the former DOJ official said some of the attacks on her had gone too far…

Sure, I gave a known character assassin a powerful metaphorical gun, along with the names & addresses of a couple of tempting victims. But you can’t blame me for the fact that he killed them! I only did it to protect them!

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Some Of Our Government Still Works For Us

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The National Archives has an exhibit on suffrage and women’s protests. A big photo of the Women’s March greets visitors. But some things are missing. Criticism of Trump is blurred out. References to women’s anatomy (OMG vagina!) are blurred out.

Let’s hear from the reporter.

Historians and museum curators have been unanimous in saying that the National Archives should not be in the business of altering documents. Most of us can recognize that, just from that sentence.

The National Archives listened!

Kudos to the National Archives!

And open thread!

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Repost: Ben Afquack

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So ICYMI, I broke the blog. Seemed the cute kitteh photos were the culprit. Watergirl said the only fix was to trash it, then dump the trash. It. Was. That. Bad. LOL

Here is Ben Afquack again. I may try the photos again later to see if I fixed the issue – in a post I can quickly trash if it does it again.

Enjoy!

BTW – it took me weeks to convince Penelope Pearl she was actually a duck.

Open thread

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ICYMI Open Thread: The Impeachment Images

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(It’s not so much fun when they’ve got your boy in the spotlight, huh, Chief Justice?)


(Gonna be a loooong weekend for the Oval Office Occupant’s handlers… )


Prediction: The Repubs are not gonna worry about saying anything stupid. Quite the contrary.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Let This Be A Good Omen

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… Clinton appeared at the press tour in support of the Hulu four-part documentary series “Hillary,” which details the former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State’s time on the 2016 Presidential campaign trail through never-before-seen footage. The series also features interviews with Bill and Chelsea Clinton, as well as friends and journalists.

She fielded a range of questions from the audience, including what she feels the most important message of the series will ultimately be.

“I think the most important message is we are…in a real struggle with a form of politics that is incredibly negative, exclusive, mean-spirited, and its going to be up to every voter, not only people who vote in Democratic primaries to recognize that this is no ordinary time,” she said. “This is an election that will have such profound impact so take your vote seriously. And for the Democratic voters, try to vote for the person you think is most likely to win because at the end of the day that is what will matter. And not just the popular vote, but the electoral college too.”…

“It wasn’t so long ago that we actually had a President that we didn’t have to worry every morning when we woke up about what was going to happen that day, or what crazy tweet would threaten war or some other awful outcome,” she said.

“You can disagree with the facts, but there are facts,” she continued. “You can choose not to vaccinate your children but there are facts. You can choose not to believe in climate change, but there are facts. And somehow we’ve got to shoulder that responsibility not only at a political leadership level but literally at the citizen, activist, concerned human being level.”

 
Elsewhere, the end of the beginning.…

… The deadline for voting is still over a month away. But the chance to participate in the state’s first presidential primary since 1992 — and cast a ballot before first-in-the-nation contests have their say — was enough to motivate some voters to brave frigid temperatures and a looming snowstorm to show support for their candidate of choice.

“We can’t afford to wait,” said Sean Duckworth, a Joe Biden supporter who attended an early vote rally for a range of Democratic candidates in Ramsey County. “We need change now, and he’s the person who is best able to do it, so I’m here to vote for him.”

Votes in Minnesota won’t be counted until after the polls close March 3. And some other states, including New Hampshire, have already started accepting absentee ballots for voters who can’t make it out on Election Day. But Minnesota’s election calendar and early voting laws mean the state can “confidently say we’ll be the first state in the country to open up the presidential contest to all eligible voters,” said Secretary of State Steve Simon…

“There’s some kind of special magic to the idea of getting to be one of the first people to cast your vote,” said Mitchell Walstad, a Warren supporter. “I thought it would be kind of fun, to go make a tweet out of it … and have an opportunity to show my support and do it in a loud fashion.”

In Duluth, City Council Member Arik Forsman joined a handful of Klobuchar supporters who showed up at City Hall right as early primary voting opened Friday morning.

“I think she has a really great track record in Minnesota of bridging that rural/urban divide,” Forsman said.

In South St. Paul, two local officials showed up at the polling place early Friday to not only cast ballots for the primary but to symbolically mark the city’s legacy as the first place in the U.S. where women voted after the 19th Amendment went into effect in 1920, officials said…

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Late Night Scary Nature Open Thread: Coyote Lucky

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I say Max, having proved his valor, should now retire with full honors. The Washington Post has a good write-up:

… What the coyotes didn’t know was that Max is a seasoned street life veteran. He survived alone in Long Beach before being adopted by his current family nearly four years ago, Maya Gurrin, his human, told The Washington Post. Max has probably seen and been involved in scuffles for which he has no words — or meows…

Gurrin and her husband, Eliot, saw some tails wagging through a glass door, and decided to go outside to investigate the noise.

“We thought it was a raccoon,” she said. “We went out and saw that he was surrounded by them. The coyotes hurried off when we went out there.”

Max walked back inside unfazed and unsullied.

“He wanted to go right back outside like a psycho,” Gurrin said…

Since his brush with death, Max has been inside, but the Gurrins know that they can’t keep him indoors forever, based on experience…

[T]he Gurrins are working out a compromise that would ensure Max’s safety and give him the freedom to smell the outdoors in the form of a catio or cat patio, which is an enclosed outdoor structure for cats still tapped into their wild side.

Max is very intelligent, according to Eliot, who said Max can open doors with horizontal handles.

“He’s a weird mix of friendly, of independent and loud and sensitive,” he said. “He’s a very hard cat to define. He’s super smart.” …

We’ve always done our best to ensure that our cats are indoor-only companions, but it can be difficult to outsmart a street-hardened rescue. We inherited six-pound Maine-Coon-type Kishkan when her previous owners moved to a country with a six-month pet quarantine. She’d come to live with them (despite one partner’s mild ailurophobia) by the simple expedient of waiting at their door & strolling in whenever it was opened. When they finally broke down & accepted their fate, their vet discovered she’d already been spayed, but nobody responded to their flyers. She was at least six years old when she came to live with us, and she lived another eight years before succumbing to kidney disease… despite regularly taking advantage of the dogs’ potty breaks to dart out for a walkabout. And she regularly brought back mice, voles, and baby bunnies to leave on the back stoop, just to show that we were not the boss of her.

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Friday Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Pray for the LSU Team Members

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Even the three big dumb white dudes bro’ing each other are gonna end up with nightmares, remembering this.


I am reminded of a friend who referred to ‘That childhood moment in the car when you realize Daddy cares more about his booze than he does about your safety… ‘

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Consent of the governed or a Political GIGO loop

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This paragraph by Amy Walters is not crazy and therefore it is extremely problematic in what it says about our society’s political feedback mechanisms:

 

The other important reality of this era is the degree to which national polls have become less helpful in assessing Trump’s electoral college strength. A president sitting at 42 percent approval, with “strong disapproval” outweighing “strong approval” by 10-12 points is not going to win the national popular vote. But, that doesn’t mean he can’t win the Electoral College.

Open thread for depressing thoughts this afternoon….

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Breaking: Big Dumb Baby Big, Dumb, A Baby

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As some of you may have noticed, the President has taken to displaying a map of his unspeakably huge electoral victory.

What I didn’t know until yesterday is, it’s not even a map of his election!

Obviously a county map is stupid anyway–land doesn’t vote!–but good lord.

Open thread! Anybody got exciting plans for the long weekend? I’m seeing Weathering With You tomorrow, which I’m looking forward to. Aside from that, I’ll probably be binging The Expanse, and playing the Metal Gear Solid 2 remaster I just bought.

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Repub Venality Open Thread: Money Changes Everything Memories

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Two weeks out from the 2016 elections, a first-time donor born in Ukraine lit up the map of the Republican Party with a $50,000 cash donation to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.

By cutting just one check to Trump Victory Committee — well before he became a central figure in the impeachment of the president he helped elect — Lev Parnas left an indelible mark on two national and 20 state Republican entities.

Trump Victory subdivided his contribution into $33,400 for the Republican National Committee and $2,700 to Trump, the then-maximum allowable donations. The remainder went to GOP entities crisscrossing the country from New York to California, each receiving a modest sum of $661.90.

Official paperwork from the donation lists Parnas an employee of the Fraud Guarantee, the same company Parnas used to hire Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani in a relationship that has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors.

Three years later, down to the same month, the Justice Department on Oct. 10 unsealed an indictment of Parnas for using a straw donor and laundering foreign money into U.S. elections. Federal prosecutors claim he and his Fraud Guarantee co-owner, Igor Fruman, used the shell company Global Energy Producers to funnel $325,000 in foreign cash into America First Action, a Trump super-PAC.

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Nevertheless…

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Yes, I can hear you rolling your eyes so hard. But this is *my* happy place!

… Warren launched her campaign at a relative low point. She was polling in the single digits nationally and still trying to overcome recriminations over her decision to release a DNA test in attempt to rebut attacks over her claims of Native American heritage. Despite this, top operatives still flocked to join her campaign.

Her team was able to sort and sift through résumés, making a concerted effort to make hires based on finding candidates the team thought would be suited for the positive, ego-free workplace culture it was trying to build. One model for this approach was “The Cubs Way,” a book about how the Chicago Cubs finally won a World Series, as a guide for how to build an organization. The result is a staff devoted to its candidate, disinclined toward drama, and very disciplined.

The team has also built out its presence in the states holding primary contests in March and planned ahead to be able to take advantage of any momentum from early states. In contrast with past campaigns, in which staffers in states like Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t know their next assignment until after votes had been cast, these staffers have already been told their next destination. Further, Warren’s campaign has also consistently avoided issues with the nitty-gritty of qualifying for ballots in every state, which can often trip up campaigns. She was one of only two candidates to file a full delegate slate in Illinois…

Warren spent much of the race as the policy candidate, turning “I’ve got a plan for that” into an applause line on the stump to emphasize her intellectual bona fides.

Ian Sams, a Democratic strategist who was a top aide on Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, told Insider that Warren “successfully demonstrated proficiency, skill, and knowledge through her policy agenda, which blotted out ability for media to scrutinize anything but policy” and “forced her rivals to focus almost exclusively on policy.” He added, “The thing about her policy is that it’s all pretty popular.”…

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Open Thread: Late Night Notes on Lev Parnas

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Per an unreliable narrator:

But look how happy he was, at Mar-A-Lago!:

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