O Best Beloveds

I’m going to have to step away from the blog for a while. Hopefully, not too long. There are some family issues that need my attention.

Please keep my family in your thoughts.

Love to you all.

RD

Update: My mother, AnnJane Barker Haas, died this afternoon. She was 80. We are all very sad and shaken. I will be taking the next week off for bereavement. Thank you for all your kind thoughts and comments. They really mean a lot to me.

To Ana Navarro

Here’s a tweet from Ana Navarro that has so many things wrong with it I thought we should dissect it together:

Dear Democrats, you have one job: picking a nominee who can earn the support of enough American voters – hopefully including right leaning Independents and Republicans like me, who abhor Trump- required to win the Electoral College. I am begging you, focus. DON’T SCREW IT UP! https://t.co/KJ4Dm6iabA

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) January 27, 2019

Where to begin?

Well, first, there hasn’t been even one primary yet so we have no idea if Democrats are as clueless as Trump voters in 2016.

Second, implied in her plea is that we don’t select another Hillary Clinton. But we have learned in the last two years that Hillary was a good, experienced and successful candidate. She lost because of a massive fraudulent operation carried out by the Russians and others to mischaracterize her and make her email “scandal” to be the equivalent of pedophilia and mass murder. It was meant to sow distrust and it worked brilliantly. And there was absolutely nothing the dedicated hard working canvassers or the candidate herself could do about it.

Third, those same uncommitted and confused voters are still going to be easily confusable in 2020. It is their nature. I have canvassed them and found them to be the most frustrating voters I’ve ever met, particularly middle aged white women. They are as impenetrable as any wall Trump could build. I’m not saying they’re stupid. I’m saying that there is an internal logic flaw that is easily exploitable by whoever gets there first to tell them how the wind is blowing. Let’s just call them The Herd.

If Ana really wants Democrats to win in 2020, she should straighten out the media. That’s the entity that should be more careful about how it influences The Herd. Ana should know this. Once the media has set a narrative, it’s hard to change it. And if the media wants a photo finish horse race, it will find ways to make the election nail bitingly close. That should make Ana very nervous, not the Democrats.

Fourth, there is nothing even remotely normal about the Trump presidency. We don’t like him. Regular Republicans don’t like him. He’s an international embarrassment and generally dangerous. But what I think I’m hearing in Navarro’s plea is that we nominate someone like Reagan and I’m here to tell her that it ain’t never going to happen. The two parties differ in values, priorities and philosophy. The best we can do is nominate someone who wants to improve the country and represent all of us, not just the left.

I’d like to remind Navarro that if Republicans we’re not in charge of government in the last 30 years, they sabotaged any duly elected Democrat who was. They insisted time and again that Democrats negotiate in a bipartisan manner and put everything on the table. Some things can’t or shouldn’t be compromised or pieces cut up and discarded just because Republicans feel oogy about them.

If times are as desperate as Ana thinks they are, and I wouldn’t disagree, her best shot is to suck it up and make a sacrifice in 2020. Howard Schultz has no political experience and if Mike Bloomberg gets in the race, the Democrats will not vote for him. If she thinks everyone else will go for another NY billionaire for president, she should repeat the term “NY Billionaire” a few times to see how it sounds to Joe Bagodonuts in East Jabip, Ohio.

Yes, Ana, 2020 is not going to be fun for you and your friends, just like it wasn’t fun for us in 2000 or during Clinton’s impeachment over a blow job (really?? We impeached a president over oral sex and Trump is a Russian asset and Republicans are quiet?). It wasn’t fun for a large swath of Democrats in the Obama years who saw him cave to pressure to be just the kind of president YOU want. Someone who doesn’t like confrontation, is incapable of doing thought experiments on his policies, puts everything on the table and gave away the treasury to the Wall Street financiers. It wasn’t fun for us when Hillary Clinton lost. The most experienced presidential candidate we’ve ever nominated “lost” to an ignorant toddler. That REALLY sucked. I’m still not convinced that the Rust Belt elections weren’t hacked. It will always be an open question for me.

Rest assured, Ana, we aren’t going to nominate someone like Trump or Kucinich or Sanders. Hopefully, we’ll nominate someone to the left of Obama, who was really a moderate Republican, and you’ll just have to get onboard. But let’s be clear about something: if you and your friends sit it out and Kamala or Lizzy or Kirsten or Amy loses, it will be you who will “SCREW IT UP”.

Now, chill.

Stoned

Here’s a curious tweet:

Trump's Twitter feed has been dead silent for the last 10 hours. 🦗

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) January 25, 2019

Do you think it has anything to do with:

??

Note that the FBI agents in that clip are probably working without pay. AND they invited the media. Not just any media.

CNN

Correction: CNN invited itself. Somebody heard about something coming down from DC and CNN just happened to be in the neighborhood. So, good work CNN.

Anyway, last December Trump said that Roger would never rat on him. A real standup guy is our Roger.

Hmmm… If Stone suddenly starts spilling the beans, does that mean Trump has been… Rogered?

I only ask.

Have at it, O Best Beloveds. Give me your best double entendres.

***************************

Welcome Kamala, Kirsten, Lizzy, Amy(?)

Be afraid, Bernie Bros. Be very afraid. We’ve got four women who are running. Tulsi hasn’t got a chance but she’s nice eye candy, amirite, guys?

I’m waiting for Amy Klobuchar to jump in.

My criteria is going to be who is most presidential. Who will represent MY interests for a change. Who will stand up for the working class, which means anyone who doesn’t live on their investments.

That’s what is important, not whether she ticks all the boxes, though Kamala does seem to have hit the trifecta there.

In fact, I’d like to see even MORE women in the primary. Why not? We’ve seen all men primaries before and no one blinked an eye. It was just assumed that one of us would vote for one of the wide variety of mediocre men.

Yeah, fuck that shit. I want to see Kamala or Amy take Trump out.

I’m voting with my vagina next year. I might even bedazzle it red, white and blue.

The most important thing

Happy MLK Day, everyone! Who here remembers any of his marches and speeches as they happened? I was a little girl back then but I do remember the “We Shall Overcome” song during one march on Washington. That was a very important thing.

I was a military brat during my childhood and I can honestly say that for the vast majority of my school years, most of my 14 schools were integrated. The only exception was in South Carolina and I thought it was very weird that black kids went to a different school. My second grade class picture from San Pedro includes black, Asian and Hispanic classmates and we thought that was normal.

It’s the most important thing to know that you belong. So most of my school years were conflict free towards the end of the civil rights era.

That doesn’t mean that racism or sexism or any other injustice has gone away. It just means that some of us didn’t know anything but integration and equality. It’s one of the few benefits of growing up military.

So I have to assume that the reason that Dickhead von catholic school dude did not enjoy the blessings of a military life where diversity was the norm.

I read his three page apology and it was almost believable (almost). It might have been his perception and who are we to invalidate that?

Well he invalidated it himself when he didn’t bother to remove his MAGA hat. Yes, Dickhead kept that swastika alternative firmly affixed to his empty head throughout that whole scene. You can watch it from many different angles. A lot of people recorded the event and none of those videos validate Dickhead’s account. Not one.

Note the kid in Phillips’ entourage behind his right shoulder if you want to see what fear looks like. They were surrounded by a mob of boisterous and jeering boys.

Dickhead says he was trying to defuse the situation. One can only imagine why he didn’t take off his hat or move away. But no, Dickhead della Eternal Incels stands his ground and blocks the steps to the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous speech. He could have set an example to his friends. But he does not appear to understand the mechanics of defusing a situation or respecting people unlike himself.

This is a failure of his community.

His school sent him there without any instructions on how to behave. It did not rigorously enforce a dress code. It saw no need to caution the students that in their uniforms, they were representatives of their school, diocese and religion. Indeed, his community probably thought the Trump regalia was perfectly acceptable. Everyone seemed to have something MAGA.

The chaperone was aware of the exchange and did not intervene. He just rounded everyone up at the end, when the damage was already done, and whisked then onto the bus.

This was probably the worst possible image Dickhead and his friends could communicate to the country and I think the rest of us have had enough.

We’ve had enough of the taunts and bullying and disrespect and “up in your grill” and insults about what language people speak to each other. We’re incensed that some human beings are unable to be left alone because their skin produces too much melanin or they have the wrong junk. We’re fed up with these MAGA heads threatening kristallnacht on the rest of us if they don’t get to force their ignorant president down our gullets.

No one should accept excuses from this kid or any adults who want to make this image go away. If they want it to go away, they can start by taking off their MAGA logoed “Made in China” paraphernalia and act like decent human beings to other human beings.

It’s time to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

Covington, Kentucky has a lot of soul searching to do. As in, searching for a soul because I’m not sure it has one.

I hope it proves me wrong.

INOCULATION!

Rudy Giuliani was hired for one reason: to immunize the Trump base from revelations of the president’s wrongdoing with respect to Russia. He has no other purpose. He’s not a lawyer here. He’s not a fixer. He’s a party mouthpiece and his job is to give the base enough information in just the right way that it softens the blow for the truth and they dismiss it as unimportant.

“He didn’t know about the payments”

“He knew about the payments but didn’t authorize them”

“He authorized them but that’s not illegal”

“It might be illegal but it’s a minor infraction. Everybody does it”

Now this:

“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign… I have not. I said the President of the United States,”

Next will be:

“Ok, the President was colluding with the Russians but that doesn’t mean he knew what they were going to do.”

Then:

“So he knew what the Russians were going to do but he didn’t authorize it”

“He authorized it but he didn’t know it would be successful”

“It was successful but that doesn’t mean he agreed to do anything for Russia in return”

“Ok, so he agreed to lift sanctions, exit Syria and undermine NATO but that doesn’t mean he’s a Russian asset”

“Sure he’s a Russian asset but that doesn’t mean he knew what he was doing. Everybody knows that Trump is a fucking halfwit. ”

{{facepalm}}

“I got nothin'”

Now we all might be wondering why Giuliani is diving into his fall from Grace. A couple of possibilities:

1.) His recent divorce is expensive and he needs the money.

2.) He likes the attention.

3.) He’s a cynical SOB and he figures the law will catch up with Trump eventually. At least Hillary was never President.

Or all of the above.

*****************************

And now this:

Michael Cohen hired an IT firm to rig early CNBC, Drudge polls in favor of Trump. The contractor, who is also the CIO of Liberty University, says he didn’t get fully paid. https://t.co/zf1cYy8o1g

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) January 17, 2019

Isn’t Liberty University a Jerry Falwell creation? Yes! Yes, it is! Fancy that. The evangelicals were paid to rig a poll (lie to the public), in order to get a very bad, unscrupulous man elected.

Hmmm, that sounds like something that I’ve heard before…

Collateral Damages

Have you ever wondered why Republicans back Trump with their dying breaths? I have a hypothesis.

First, I want to second what I’ve heard so many people say lately. If Donald Trump is a national security risk, as it looks like he is, then it doesn’t matter much what his motivation is. He needs to be removed from office ASAP. We can sort out the whys later.

And it is obvious that the ideas he has floated lately, like pulling us out of NATO, would be a catastrophic blow to the EU, leaving it vulnerable to East Bloc predators.

This sounds to me like a national emergency and Congress should be on top of it. You would think Republican Senators would want to look like heros here. But all we get is crickets regardless as to what Trump is doing.

Now, why is that?

It occurred to me that Trump and the Republican Senators are manufacturing a shutdown and having confirmation hearings as quickly as possible because they are running out of time. Mueller’s investigation is wrapping up soon and they need to zip the report when it’s ready. Bury that baby.

But why should the Republican Senate want to accelerate the US’s demise under Trump’s control? I don’t think it’s because they hate government. No, the US is still a giant cash cow and the free market has never been freer.

Then I thought about what Trump might be afraid of in Mueller’s report. Anything that damages his image is a huge problem. And what could be more problematic than having the whole world discover the extent to which Putin was willing to go to get him elected. It would call into question his legitimacy. He lost the election by 3million votes. I still can’t wrap my head around that. A few thousand maybe. But 3 million seems wildly improbable. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t make statistical sense to me.

Here’s where I think Trump and Putin have Republicans by the short hairs. If Trump is illegitimate, then isn’t it likely that some of the Republicans who ran that year and won are also illegitimate?

Like Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania for example? If the Russians were able to manipulate the vote for Trump, did they also guarantee a Republican Senate and House?

At that point, McConnell’s actions seem explainable. And maybe Ryan’s as well.

Now that I think about it, was that $2 trillion tax cut intended to cripple us? You know, like the way we made Russia spend all that money in the 80’s during the Cold War?

So anyway, that’s where I’m going. They are protecting Trump because they have to protect themselves. The longer they can keep the truth buried, the better. Even if it means keeping a national security threat in the Oval Office and inches from the nuclear football.

Just sayin’.

Stop me if you’ve heard this already

I saw a couple talking heads shows yesterday while I was baking a chocolate cake from scratch. The cake was more fun.

Whenever there was a conservative on, the apparently blessed GOP opinion goes something like this tweet by Geraldo Rivera:

Based on the record, the allegation/suggestion that the #FBI came close to investigating @realDonaldTrump as a Russian spy/asset-if true-says more about anti-Trump bias within the DOJ than it ever does about the president’s actions regarding Russia.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) January 13, 2019

Here’s what I think the GOP is saying. It is simply UNTHINKABLE that anyone would question the motives of the president. The possibility that he is a Russian asset is so improbable that the only reason anyone would investigate him is because the investigators are viciously anti-Trump. There is simply no other explanation.

This reminds me of the lawsuit that Trump was dealing with during the 2016 campaign season where he accused the judge of being biased because he was of Mexican descent.

There are many other examples that are too numerous to tell. But the bottom line is that poor Trump is getting picked on by others because they are envious, deranged or biased. His actions are irrelevant to the treatment he’s receiving. It’s an endless litany of whining about no one liking him.

As a president of the United States and most powerful person in the world (I know. Terrifying) you would think he would just get a dog. You have reached the apex of human achievement without curing multiple sclerosis. The fact that some people are mean should just roll off the back.

But that’s not what this is about. Trump behaves in a manner that is inconsistent with his constitutional oath. And just because he hasn’t been indicted or impeached yet doesn’t mean he hasn’t done anything illegal. So this strategy of portraying himself as persecuted is a strategy that he either has found to work for him in the past or he’s getting advice on how to decimate his opponents by discrediting the very institutions his party will champion when there’s a Democrat in office.

It’s a wonder that so many people still fall for it when they are so unlikely to cut the out groups so little slack for having the disability of being born poor.

Does a supreme fuckup like Trump, having had all the advantages in life, deserve so much sympathy now that the federales know what he’s been up to?

I think not.

YMMV.

**********************************

And now a musical update from Randy Rainbow (South Pacific, IIRC):

Then the scary man got in his unbelievable vehicle…

He’s just making stuff up now. He doesn’t even agree with himself. Here’s what Trump said of asylum seekers yesterday:

They’re driving in and they’re not coming through checkpoints, because you can’t have three or four people in the back with tape over your mouths and your hands tied and drive past someone who is checking out your van…The fact is if we don’t have barriers, walls, call them what you will, very strong barriers where people can not any longer drive right across. They have unbelievable vehicles. They make a lot of money. They have the best vehicles you can buy. They have stronger, bigger and faster vehicles than our police have and that ICE have and that Border Patrol have.

Ok, let’s think through this, shall we?

We are lead to believe that these poor Central American refugees will travel by foot, sometimes with no shoes on, take months to get here and face all kinds of problems on the road. But once they get to the border, they go all Transformer on us and have better vehicles than the US border patrol and all of our military.

To believe this, both of these things need to be true. The refugees are faking the fact that they have no other means of transportation. And they are masters of invention that we really should hire because our rocket scientists are slackers compared to the tech wizards of Guatemala.

Im sure there are people who won’t think this through because kicking libs is so much fun. But why should we treat it as newsworthy? It’s like watching a crash oh unbelievable vehicles.

Rod Rosenstein is leaving

According to ABC News, Rosenstein is expected to leave when the new attorney general is confirmed. That is expected to be Robert Barr. The timeframe is “in the coming weeks”, whatever that means. I’m guessing life with Whitaker is not much fun right now.

Rosenstein was overseeing the Mueller investigation. No idea what happens now. But there have been some interesting things that indicate that the investigation is wrapping up. For instance:

Mueller asked for the grand jury to continue past its expirations date of last week. The grand jury can only be extended another 6 months.

Mueller says he’ll write the report by mid February.

There’s a mysterious foreign company that has been resisting a grand jury subpoena and yesterday Supreme Court Justice John Roberts said it could no longer defy the subpoena and must testify or pay a hefty daily fine.

Yesterday, Paul Manafort’s lawyers forgot to lock their e-document before submitting it to the court and some clever filings watchers were able to peek under the black redaction bars to discover that Manafort had given polling data to Konstantin Kilimnic during his tenure as Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. Manafort says that meeting didn’t take place until after the election, which seems improbable considering the Russians would have less use for it AFTER the election. So, yeah, I agree with Mueller. Manafort probably lied about that. Interesting that the document was unlocked. It’s almost like they wanted it to be discovered. Hmm…

There’s an article in Vanity Fair that reports that Rudy Giuliani says the report will be “horrific”. I’m assuming he means horrific for Trump but he could mean horrific for the rest of us. Who knows. This was followed by someone who knows Giuliani speculating that, “You’re already hearing people speculate Trump could do a deal and resign.”

That would be good. But given that he used his speech last night to raise funds for his re-election, maybe someone might want to clue Trump on what the plan is.

Anyway, it looks like the end is near. I think the revelations are going to rock our world. Whether it will be enough to dislodge Trump remains to be seen.