Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Just a few bad apples.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

I can see Russia from this blog!

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Han shot first.

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Naturally gregarious and alpha

It’s a tarp!

The Math Demands It!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

This Blog Goes to 11…

Word salad with all caps

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I personally stopped the public option…

Not all heroes wear capes.

No one could have predicted…

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Also, too.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Open Thread: Have We Discussed That GAO Report Yet?

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Schiff Statement on GAO Decision that Trump Broke the Law

Washington, DC – Today, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the lead House Manager for the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, issued the following statement:

“Today’s decision by the Government Accountability Office that President Trump broke the law when he withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of vital military aid to Ukraine demonstrates once again that the President violated his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed as he put his personal and political interests above the interests of the nation and its security.

“President Trump illegally withheld U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to get the Ukrainian president to help him win reelection, another indication of the extreme lengths to which the President would go to coerce a foreign power into helping him cheat to win. The President was willing to violate the law in withholding security assistance from an ally at war with Russia, a gross abuse of the powers of his office, acts for which he was impeached.

“In its opinion, GAO states that ‘faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.’  President Trump’s conduct is all the more egregious because he was not withholding the funds for a policy reason at all, but for the corrupt purpose of seeking foreign help in his reelection campaign.

“As it has with the House, Trump’s State Department and OMB have ‘failed, as of yet, to provide the information’ GAO needs to complete its investigation.  As GAO opinion states: ‘All federal officials and employees take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution and its core tenets, including the congressional power of the purse.’

“Now, the Senate will have the opportunity to act on its oath.”

The usual suspects are talking about how this is no big deal (!!) and the Hannity talking points that GAO contributes to Democrats and Socialists. I cannot make this stuff up, but will not link to that garbage.

It’s time for every journalist to get a microphone in front of every Senator and ask them what they think of the GAO report and get it on the record. I’m sure we’ll get more McSally moments.

Open thread

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Leaving it all on the field

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In a series of arcane rituals in a building that still has “cloak rooms,” Nancy Pelosi handed over the articles of impeachment to Mitch McConnell. She’s done her job by investigating and putting all the facts and testimony she was able to obtain in the face of unprecedented and unlawful obstruction on the table. Pelosi honored her obligation to the U.S. Constitution.

Now McConnell will do the opposite, ignoring his Constitutional obligations and doing everything in his power to bury and obfuscate the extraordinarily damning evidence against Trump and keep new evidence from being considered in the Senate trial, even as more material that exposes the scale of Trump’s criminality and corruption spills into public view in the media.

Since the deeply corrupt and cynical McConnell controls the process now, our best hope is to extract the highest possible political price from Republicans for shielding the administration’s criminal activities. Will we get witnesses? Not if McConnell can prevent it, but the strain is showing:

The House Managers will be reading the charges aloud in the Senate any minute now. Pelosi is under no illusions about what will happen next, so she’s leaving it all on the field and calling the whole corrupt bunch out:

Good for her. I’m represented by two corrupt Republican shit-stains in the U.S. Senate, but despite the futility of appealing to their nonexistent sense of duty, I plan to do so anyway. I also plan to convert my disgust for the sleazy, corrupt criminals who’ve captured our government into inspiration to kick them out at every level. That’s how regular people like us can leave it all on the field.

Open thread.

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The GOAT

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I like Ken Jennings. He reminds me of some of the Mormons and ex-Mormons I knew back when I lived in Wyoming. The vast majority of them were good people: genuinely kind, reasonable and smart. He’s a fierce competitor, but also a really good sport. So it was nice to hear that he won the Jeopardy Greatest of All Time championship.

Here’s another reason to like him:

However, Jennings didn’t hold back on another tweet that went viral on Wednesday. Presidential contender Mike Bloomberg’s Twitter account wrote, “Remember, tonight’s winner goes on to face defending champion Ken Jennings. #DemDebate.” Jennings said that when he saw another Bloomberg ad on TV throughout the broadcasts, he was “rolling his eyes” that the Democratic candidate was spending millions to barely crack the polls instead of using that money to help climate change. So he tweeted back, “Remember, defending champion Ken Jennings wants you to vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.”

Open thread.

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At Least Somebody Is Doing It

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Breaking:

MOSCOW — Ukrainian authorities announced a probe Thursday into possible surveillance of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch before she was dismissed from her post by the Trump administration.

The statement by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry followed the disclosure of new documents in the impeachment case against President Trump. The material included exchanges between Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, and others about the need to push Yovanovitch from her post.

Some douchebags decided that they were going to start a surveillance project on one of our ambassadors, perhaps in preparation for an assassination attempt, and we’re not the first country to launch an investigation? Jesus, how can the he-man Republican superhawks, ready to launch a fucking war at the drop of a god damned hat, live with themselves? If a Democrat had done this, the emasculation rhetoric would make spring castration on a Dakota ranch seem like a kiddie rodeo. But not these disgusting, compromised, subservient, traitorous fucks in the Trump administration — they just bend the knee.

(If there’s been any statement from the State Department at all on the latest Yovanovitch revelations, I haven’t seen it.)

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On The Road – Dorothy A. Winsor – Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Good morning, everybody,

Today we return to DAW’s fantastic trip. I so want to hit these places. I need to spend some serious time in South America before I get too much older!

 

Next we went to Montevideo and then Buenos Aires. They’re close together. Both of them are on the same river with BA farther inland.

Montevideo was my favorite stop on this trip. I had no expectations. I’m not even sure I could have said it was in Uruguay, but it was charming. For one thing, it was easy. You walked off the ship, straight into town, whereas the other cities all had big, working ports that were far from anything.

In Buenos Aires, as in Montevideo, the guide talked a lot about soccer. I gather the first FIFA World Cup took place in Montevideo, though the guide moaned about how many games they’ve lost since then.

On The Road - Dorothy A. Winsor - Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina 2
Montevideo, UruguayDecember 2, 2019

This is the Legislative Council building. The Uruguayan flag is the one on the left.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Some GOOD News

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As any Californian could tell us, the danger is nowhere near over yet. But it’s a temporary reprieve!

Much more detail from the Guardian.


(If you have other donation suggestions, post in the comments.)

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Impeachment Inquiry Open Thread: Early Reviews of the Parnas Interview

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Such Little Money

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Assuming it is all true, as Adam discussed earlier, the part of the interview that stood out to me was the fact that Toensing and DeGenova were willing to do all this for a million dollars and a hundeed grand a month in “expenses.”

It just strikes me as a such a paltry sum to sell out your country. I mean, don’t get me wrong, a million dollars is a lot of money. But they’re already old and rich and have enough money to spend the rest of their lives living comfortably.

Is this just the endgame for every right wing grift? A couple million? That’s what you work for? They’re like remora fish, just hanging around the sharks settling for orts.

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The Parnas Interview: Information, Misinformation, Agitprop, and a Terrible Interviewer

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I’ve watched the Rachel Maddow interview with Lev Parnas. I’m not impressed. I’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to do the substance before I get into format/process.

The information that Parnas presented was a mixture of accurate information, misinformation, and agitprop. For instance, we already know, from previous reporting that has been verified by subsequent reporting, that Giuliani had a strange fixation on the Ukrainian black ledger that implicated Manafort. So it isn’t surprising when Parnas presented that in one of his answers. Nor was it surprising when he made it very clear that it was never about corruption, it was just about Vice President Biden, his son Hunter, and getting dirt on them for political purposes in the 2020 election. This too has been reported on extensively and verified in subsequent reporting. As was the information about the quid pro quo given to Ukrainian President Zelensky And the information about trying to get a deal cut for Dmitro Firtash in exchange for his help. And I have no doubt, despite his attempt to get ahead of things on Fox News tonight, that Congressman Nunes is up to his eyeballs in this meshugas.

But there was also misinformation and agitprop. Let’s start with AG Barr. We know from reporting that Toensing and DiGenova met with AG Barr to try to get the charges dropped against Firtash. But we also know that Barr rebuffed them. However, we also know from the Memorandum of the Conversation for the second phone call in July 2019 between the President and Ukrainian President Zelensky that the President told President Zelensky that he would have AG Barr follow up. This prompted the Department of Justice spokesperson to issue a statement that AG Barr had no idea what this was about and was not involved. That said, we know from the Intelligence Community whistleblower’s complaint that the whistleblower asserted that AG Barr was involved. Whether this was in reference to the President’s statement that he’d have the Attorney General follow up in the July 2019 phone call or based on some other information the whistleblower has is unclear. So some of this is accurate and confirmable, some of it may be accurate, but is not currently confirmed, and some I’m not sure could ever be confirmed.

As for the answers regarding erstwhile Republican congressional candidate Rob Hyde, I find it hard to believe that Parnas was more concerned about him when he was drunk at the bar at a Trump property than when he was texting Parnas that he had a US ambassador under surveillance and wanted to know if money was available to move on her. I’m also not buying Hyde’s answers in his interview with Sinclair’s Eric Bolling this evening. He’s in a lot of trouble, has a history of making terroristic threats, and has something of a drinking problem.

The releases of the information that Parnas has turned over to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are all interesting. And like tonight’s interview some of that information is accurate and true, some is disinformation, and some is agitprop. The proof will be in the vetting of that documentary information, just as it will be in the vetting of the information Parnas provided this evening. It is important to remember that Parnas is alleged to be a low level member or associate of post-Soviet and Russian organized crime. He is only as credible as his statements and documentary evidence can be verified.

And that’s where I get to the format/process problem. I’ve conducted semi-structured interviews as part of my work for the US Army and I’ve trained Soldiers on how to do them to collect information and intelligence. I’ve mentioned before that over a four to five month period I interviewed around 50 sheikhs, imams, and other local elites and notables using a semi-structured format across central Iraq (Baghdad Province and parts of Anbar, Wassit, and Diyala Provinces). I’m a huge fan of putting the subject of the interview at ease and letting them tell you their story – the true parts, the false parts, and the parts that fall in between. But there is a difference between doing that, and being prepared to ask sound follow up questions rooted within the context of the answers and information you’re being provided, and credulously just eating it up while looking focused and concerned. And this means asking questions like: “how do you know?” and “can you provide verification for that?” or “do you have documents about that?” or “who else should we talk to in order to verify that?”. I’m not qualified to judge whether Maddow’s interviewing process made for compelling television, but from an information gathering standpoint it was a failure. Maddow was far too credulous and failed to ask the necessary follow on questions. I will make an important caveat: she may have been prevented from doing so by agreement with Parnas’s attorney about the format of the interview. But, if that was the case, then it should have been disclosed. I’ve seen Maddow do far more adversarial and far better interviews with friendly guests. This was not one of her best outings.

Open thread!

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Second-Wave Feminism Open Thread: E! R! A! (A Sentimental Cheer)

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Of course, nothing will happen while Trump & McConnell are in charge. That can be changed, too.

(I’m of the conviction that, when it comes to Chief Justice Roberts, one should remember Finley Peter Dunne’s wise words from the last Gilded Age: “The Constitution may or may not follow the flag, but the Supreme Court follows the Election returns.”)

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Murderous Douchebags Open Thread: A Note on Translation

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From a native Russian speaker (who emigrated to America in his teens):

Sounds a lot like a Michael Cohen analog, actually — talk like a made man, act like a cheap shyster offering payoffs funded by a second mortgage.

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Confederacy of Douchebags

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Betty has a good substantive post below about the Parnas docs, whatever happened with Yovanovitch (spoiler: all bad), etc. My less substantive comment: my God is this Hyde guy a fucking douche.

I can’t tell which one is Hyde in the photo above – the MAGA yarmulke overwhelms my optical cortex. Maybe one of you with more experience with douche signifiers can give me a hand. (By the way, this is from a TPM Prime post, for which Josh Marshall earned the whole $50 or so that I pay every year for the biggest bargain in media on the Internet.)

Open thread.

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The Parnas Document Dump

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I was distracted last night with the debate and cooking dinner and arguing with my husband about the thermostat and having a glass or five of red wine because I was COLD, so I first started trying to make sense of the Parnas document dump this morning. I confess I am still agog. This take by Charlie Pierce makes sense to me:

As it turns out, Marie Yovanovich was even braver than she looked in front of the House Intelligence Committee. And, as it turns out, Speaker Nancy Pelosi really knows what she’s doing. At the end of the day on Tuesday, just as the Democratic presidential candidates were taking the stage in Des Moines and the president* was taking the stage in Milwaukee, the House Democrats unleashed the hounds. They dumped a whole truckload of ugly from the files of Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s great and good “associate” and, apparently, one of the great sleazebags of the western world.

Also released were a bunch of texts from a Trumper in Connecticut named Robert Hyde. He was in touch with Parnas, and there were text messages between the two in which Hyde seemed to indicate that, at the very least, Yovanovich was being monitored—which, I will grant you, sounds a bit grandiose coming from a landscaper from Connecticut. Nevertheless, this stuff is positively ominous.

Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ! The ambassador’s account of being told to hop on the next plane for “security reasons” always seemed like a strange and unexplained facet of the hatchet job on Yovanovich’s reputation. This certainly puts an even more chilling spin on Trump’s “she’s gonna go through some things” comments on the “perfect call.”

Here’s another bizarre fact in this thoroughly crazypants scenario: the Connecticut landscaper/hit-man purveyor was Baker Acted (involuntarily taken into custody by authorities under Florida law for a psych eval) at Trump’s Florida golf club last year. David Corn at MoJo:

According to an “incident/investigation” report filed by the Doral, Florida, police department, on May 16, 2019, an officer was dispatched to the Trump National Doral Miami to deal with a “male in distress fearing for his life.” That man was Hyde. The report noted that Hyde explained to the police officer that “he was in fear for his life, was set up and that a hit man was out to get him. Mr. Hyde spoke about e-mails he sent that may have placed his life in jeopardy. Mr. Hyde explained several times that he was paranoid that someone was out to get him.”

The report stated that Hyde cited “a variety of different names, contacts and provided information in reference to why he felt his life was in danger.” After being taken into custody by the police, according to the report, “Mr. Hyde continued to act paranoid telling us not to stop next to certain vehicles…[H]e explained that he was scared due to several painting workers and landscape workers trying to do harm to him because they weren’t working. Additionally Mr. Hyde explained that his computer was being hacked by Secret Service. And then went on to further explain that the secret service [sic] was arrival [sic] on the premises watching him.”

What in the wide world of fuck? It’s tempting, if only for the sake of one’s own sanity, to surmise Hyde is just a random nutbag who wasn’t really commissioned by the president’s personal attorney to at least surveil — if not actually harm — a U.S. ambassador abroad. But, as in the case of Rudy Giuliani’s henchmen, including Parnas, there are tons of photos of Hyde with Trump, Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka, Giuliani, etc. Hyde has also donated tens of thousands of dollars to Trump and other Republicans. It seems to be a pattern, no?

Anyhoo, even aside from the increasingly alarming and accumulating evidence that Trump is running the federal government for his personal and political benefit via mafia-style shakedowns and intimidation tactics, the Parnas document dump blows multiple absurd impeachment defenses right out of the water. Here’s an excerpt of Neal Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer summarizing that aspect in The Post:

Americans who have been wondering why President Trump has taken the extraordinary step of trying to block every document from being released to Congress in his impeachment inquiry need wonder no longer. The new documents released Tuesday evening by the House Intelligence Committee were devastating to Trump’s continuing — if shifting — defense of his Ukraine extortion scandal, just days before his impeachment trial is likely to begin in the Senate. These new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging: that he was really fighting corruption when he pressured Ukraine on matters related to the Biden family; that Hunter Biden should be called as a witness at the Senate impeachment trial; and that there’s no need for a real, honest-to-goodness trial in the Senate.

They’re right, although the evidence the House Democrats cobbled together in the face of unprecedented obstruction suggested that weeks ago, and Trump’s enablers have been unmoved. Still, WTF, fellow citizens? The wily Pelosi — who will go down in history as one of the most effective and consequential Speakers of the House ever — will transmit the articles to the Senate today.

As MisterMix noted, Pelosi has already boxed McConnell in (boxed turtle?) on summary dismissal and witnesses — either he allows a trial with witnesses, or he presides over such a flagrant cover-up that it may cost him his gavel, which is certainly more precious to him than that son of a bitch Trump.

I’m speculating here, and maybe I’m totally wrong, but won’t people want to get to the bottom of this shit, even at least some Republican voters in red states? Perhaps not, but maybe?

In any case, can this latest Parnas business be raised in the trial? It’s material to Trump’s claims, as Katyal and Geltzer argue, so I don’t see why not. Also, I don’t know which shoes will drop off the centipede next, but is it possible the House Democrats have even more stuff under wraps? I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all, and it’s way too early for wine.

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Impeachment Managers Named

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As follows:

Pelosi on Wednesday selected seven House members to serve as impeachment managers in the Senate trial, including Schiff (D-Calif.) and Nadler (D-N.Y.).

The group will argue that Trump abused the power of his office, obstructed Congress and should be removed from office. Countering that argument will be Trump’s defense team, which is expected to be led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

Besides Schiff and Nadler, Pelosi named as managers Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Sylvia Garcia (D-Tex.), Val Demings (D-Fla.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.).

Of those, the one who I am most excited to see is Jeffries. He was amazing, direct, completely prepared, and succinct during the earlier House procedures.

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