User-Supported News Commentary Hosted by Craig Crawford
Hillary At The Grammys
https://youtu.be/DjbysQgJ64Y
Grammy Awards 2018 (Jan. 28, CBS)
Author: craigcrawford
Trail Mix Host. Lapsed journalist, author & retired pundit happily promoting nothing but the truth for Social Security checks.
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Sometimes it is nice to expand ones reading venues. This is an interesting article regarding the history of the KGB/FSB/SVR/GRU and the use of “active measures”. Worth reading and considering what is happening to America at this moment.
So, I guess everyone is OK with her, despite the way she handled sexual misconduct in her campaign, not to mention giving cover to her serial-predator hubby for years?
“despite the way she handled sexual misconduct in her campaign”
BiD, weeks of docked pay and ordered counseling for the perp (plus listening, believing, retaining and praising the victim for speaking up) was imho appropriate punishment for rubbing shoulders, kissing foreheads and sending unwanted emails. like franken, this guy as far as we know is not a rapist, serial predator or serious perpetrator of sexual violence and abuse. not equivalent to wynn and Weinstein.
is this that kettle full of water they’re preparing to boil and we’re the frogs not yet feeling the heat? just has the smell of pravda and rt about it
reuters: Trump security team sees building U.S. 5G network as option
“We want to build a network so the Chinese can’t listen to your calls,” the senior official told Reuters.
“We have to have a secure network that doesn’t allow bad actors to get in. We also have to ensure the Chinese don’t take over the market and put every non-5G network out of business.”
When Donald Trump and Mike Pence handed Carrier a boatload of money in 2016 to save a handful of jobs in Indiana, many people shuddered. When Carrier pocketed the cash and fired some of the workers a year later, the skeptics nodded knowingly. But when Amazon dangles the opportunity to host its HQ2, asking the most progressive mayors on the planet to bend over backward to lavish it with corporate welfare, many excuse it away as required to compete for the jobs and investment this project will bring. It isn’t. It is a disgrace.
The roster of mayors in Amazon’s 20 finalist cities reads like a who’s who of leading Democrats: New York’s Bill de Blasio, Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, Washington’s Muriel Bowser, Pittsburgh’s Bill Peduto and Newark, N.J.’s Ras Baraka. At home they’re all about fighting inequality and gentrification, creating affordable housing, increasing the minimum wage, and generating “inclusive” prosperity. But they apparently have no problem forking over hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases billions, to a corporate giant led by the world’s richest man. Is it any wonder many cities have kept the terms of their Amazon offers under wraps?
America’s leading cities should say no to this kind of reverse Robin Hood. A good model is Toronto, an HQ2 finalist whose bid to Amazon offers little in the way of tax incentives, while proposing that the city make much-needed local investments in its workforce, transit and other areas.
At heart the HQ2 competition is a ruse. Amazon without a doubt already has a very good idea of where it wants to put its new headquarters. The map of the 20 cities on the short list has clusters that give away the game. New York City and Newark are next to each other. So are the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Md. Clearly, Amazon wants to be in either the New York metro region or Greater Washington. ( Jeff Bezos, not coincidentally, has homes in both.) Those five options are in four separate states, plus the capital—and states are the entities likely to contribute the most money to incentive packages.
Amazon’s plan is surely intended to pit those five cities and states against each other to come away with the biggest deal.
Will America’s progressive leaders stand by as Amazon picks the public fisc? They don’t have to. These big-city mayors must know one another. They could take the high road and organize a mutual nonaggression pact, pledging to renounce incentives for Amazon and compete on the merits.
It’s often said we’d be better off if mayors ruled the world. If the mayors on Amazon’s short list want to stay true to their progressive roots, they should stand together instead of allowing Amazon to divide and conquer.
Mr. Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto, distinguished fellow at New York University, and editor at large for the Atlantic’s CityLab. His most recent book is “The New Urban Crisis” (Basic Books, 2017).
When I was a kid, Mom taught me to memorize my name, address, phone number, and her name so that if I got lost or scared I would be able to recite this information to a police officer, and he could help me get back to my mom. You may all have a similar memory, and may have done this for your kids as well. I don’t have kids, but I would have passed on that lesson – a police officer is your friend and he will help you when you are lost or scared.
I still believe that. Naively, perhaps. But that has been my experience to date with police.
But then my entertainment choice punches me straight in the gut, and reminds me that there is a significant segment of my fellow humans who must learn a different lesson.
Grey’s Anatomy. Yes, we watch it. We like it. We enjoy it as entertainment.
But the most recent episode punched us in the gut and slammed our heads against the wall. A 12 year old boy who had forgotten his house key was shot by a police officer, who thought he was breaking and entering a middle class home. The child later died in surgery. He was African American, he was a child, he was a member of a loving family, and he died because he forgot his key and was trying to get into his own home with no expectation that this was an action for which he could be killed. He was 12 years old.
Later in the episode, Dr Bailey (portrayed by the incredibly talented Chandra Wilson) told her husband (portrayed by Jason George) that it was time to have “the talk” with their own tween son Tucker. They had to find a way to tell a wide eyed innocent child how to remain calm and follow the instructions of police, and not do anything to provoke a reaction, and not make any sudden moves, and never ever to run from a police officer.
Can you even imagine? Can you? Because I just can’t.
I was taught to find the police when I was lost or scared. Young African American children are being taught how to preserve their very lives when facing the police.
In the United States of America.
I know this intellectually. I know this because I have seen it on the news. I know this because I hear the speeches.
But I can’t know it the way African Americans know it. Because I’m a middle aged white male who was always taught that police protect us. Police are friends. Police will keep you safe.
I’m sad that this is not as simple as I learned it when I was a child.
I’ve had “the talk” with my adopted AA crack-baby grandson on several subjects. He’s now 23 and a wonderful young man who is comfortable in his shoes no matter where they might take him. And, it’s been more than five years since he was last busted. Grandpa didn’t bail him out but did add money to his jail telephone account so that he could sort things out with his parents. Why did I add to “the talks” that I knew Sue and her hubby were giving him? It’s because I love my grandson and it’s the NCO in me.
Flatus – I was on the receiving end of some NCO talks myself from my stepdad, as well as some outstanding talks from my grandfather. I still remember those lessons.
I guess the idealist in me wants those talks to be for others what they were for me – lessons on how to give my best effort in all things, that failure is just another opportunity and not a character judgment, that if you give your best then there is very little to regret.
Oh – and how to grill a steak because Grandpa said every man should know how to do that and do it well.
Now that McCabe is stepping out of the picture what will the next step be? Put another one of the SFB clan in the office? Or use the SotU speech to fire the rest of the DOJ and FBI? This is still early in the day so the moron can do even more damage to America.
The Memo shows Trump’s own deputy AG approving surveillance of a Trump campaign aide?
Ed touched on this Times story in his last post but it’s worth another thread. Finally, I think, we have a solution to the mystery of why there’s been so much grumbling about Rod Rosenstein lately. There was a leak to the Daily Beast last week claiming that he figures prominently in Devin Nunes’s memo; there was a piece at CNN alleging that Trump has been “venting” about Rosenstein in the past few weeks, saying things like “let’s fire him, let’s get rid of him”; and he’s been part of the nightly White House communique to MAGA nation via Sean Hannity’s show. Why now? Why are Trump and his top cronies suddenly so irritated with the deputy AG when they have more prominent whipping boys available in Comey, Andrew McCabe, and even Jeff Sessions?
The likely answer: Because the memo’s going to show that Rosenstein, Trump’s own handpicked deputy at the DOJ, concluded last spring that there was indeed probable cause to believe there was a Russian agent inside Trump’s campaign tent, namely, Carter Page. That doesn’t mean the original FISA application in 2016 that kickstarted the Russiagate investigation wasn’t illegitimate, but if Trump’s own guy did in fact confirm a year later that he thought surveillance of Page should be continued based on the evidence he’d seen, that’s a bad narrative for the president. It’s not a “witch hunt” if there really are witches per Trump’s own DOJ appointee. Someone who’s seen the memo probably leaked this information to the White House, knowing that Rosenstein’s interest in Page is a big problem for Trump’s spin on the investigation. So Rosenstein’s credibility had to be attacked, immediately. Wouldn’t be the first time TrumpWorld sprang into action to try to discredit “problematic” DOJ officials.
A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it. The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry. The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The McCabe thing is obviously personal to SFB – it is the type of thing he would do–take someone who is leaving in a month and push them out so they can’t receive maximum retirement benefits.
I think he simply had the opportunity to depart without changing his effective date of retirement in March nor his projected retirement pay. Also, it gives him the opportunity to use the annual leave that he has accrued over the past couple of years; this makes sense in a use it or lose it environment.
The move is effective Monday. Mr. McCabe had already been planning to retire upon his eligibility in a matter of weeks.
It is not clear if his early departure is for personal reasons or a reflection of the criticism.
Last month, word of Mr. McCabe’s plans drew a response from Mr. Trump, who in a Twitter post characterized the move as “racing the clock to retire with full benefits.”
– CBS’S JULIANNA GOLDMAN (@juliannagoldman): “Source tells @CBSNews’s Pat Milton that McCabe was forced to step down. He’s currently on leave and will officially retire in March.”
We know “KIllary” would be so much worse than what we have now. Lord knows enough of the Faux Spews memes and Russian bots retweeted constantly by the Bernie Bros told us often enough while Media screamed “EMAILS” in the A block of every news program.
We sure as hell dodged a major bullet there didn’t we.
now that you claim you won’t be running for office again, I’d like to thank you for so many of the awesome things you’ve done over the years. First, let me thank you for all those drugs you and Bill had flown into Mena… like man… so much great shit. By the way… bet you were on some of that stuff when Benghazi happened. Thank you so much for trying to do something about the excess population with all those enemies you and Bill had eliminated… especially Vince Foster. And eliminating people’s pets… brilliant! And hacking into political opponents websites… again, brilliant! I know that there’s lots more I could thank you for… but maybe I’ll save that for my next letter.
Sincerely, someone who never met a conspiracy he/she didn’t like.
ps… make sure you get Chelsea to join the Illuminati too… like mother, like daughter.
pss… I heard you are responsible for this year’s flu vaccinations kerfuffle… awesome sauce!
Sarah Huckabee Sanders Joins The Trump Crime Parade By Covering Up Witness Tampering
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied to the American people as she stood at the podium and denied that Trump had anything to do with the retirement of Andrew McCabe, who is a key witness in the obstruction of justice investigation against the president.
[video] Transcript of the exchange: Q: The president didn’t play a role in Andrew Mccabe stepping down?
SHS: He was not part of this process and we would refer you to the FBI where Christopher Wray serves as the director, as I said last week. And I’ll repeat again today the president has full confidence in him and has put the decisions at the FBI in his hands.
Seth Abramson’s sources are telling a different story:
@SethAbramson BREAKING: All indications are that Trump—via agents in Congress—has forced the retirement of a key witness against him in an Obstruction case that could lead to impeachment. Worse, it’s part of a coordinated, illegal effort to intimidate, punish, and discredit adverse witnesses.
The White House is lying to the American people as they are working to kill an active federal investigation into the president. This is more than a matter of the press secretary telling another lie. The White House Press Secretary is knowingly engaging in a presidential cover-up of witness tampering. McCabe is an important witness in the obstruction of justice investigation.
The President silenced a key witness into retirement, and his press secretary lied to the American people about a potential crime. The more they try to cover it up, the more crimes that Trump and his team of accomplices commit.
wapo CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin: ‘I regret my role’ in Hillary Clinton false equivalence
So long as President Trump continues disgracing the Oval Office, thoughtful people will probe their own role in helping him get there.
Such appeared to be the motivation behind a mea culpa issued by CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin on comedian Larry Wilmore’s “Black on the Air” podcast. In a discussion of presidential politics, Wilmore argued that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, was the victim of a “coordinated attack” coming from Republicans. “Benghazi was … the expression of that attack. In fact, what’s his name, was it [former Rep. Jason] Chaffetz who actually kind of agreed that that’s what they were doing, was weakening her as a candidate.” (Wilmore may have been referring to Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who said in 2015, ““Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”)
No question about the attack on Clinton, responded Toobin, citing “all that bogus stuff about the Clinton Foundation” — perhaps a reference to the Uranium One story or even to the pre-election reporting of Bret Baier — later withdrawn — that there would be an indictment relating to the foundation.
“And I hold myself somewhat responsible for that,” continued Toobin, a steady presence on CNN since 2002. “I think there was a lot of false equivalence in the 2016 campaign. That every time we said something, pointed out something about Donald Trump — whether it was his business interests, or grab ’em by the p–––y, we felt like, ‘Oh, we gotta, like, talk about — we gotta say something bad about Hillary.’ And I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading, and I regret my role in doing that.”
hose comments drive at one of the great media brain-busters of all time. On the one hand, media organizations in the run-up to November 2016 exposed and covered the hard-to-count scandals and outrages that Trump had generated over decades as a self-absorbed real-estate mogul: the thousands of lawsuits, the mistreatment of women, the ambient lies, the racism, the stiffing of contractors, Trump University, the false promises of charity and much, much more. On the other hand, those same media organizations pounded away at Hillary Clinton’s email story. And many of them — CNN prominently included — gave Trump generous helpings of airtime for the rallies early in his campaign.
A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the campaign’s final months, the media’s aggregate coverage performed pretty much as Toobin described to Wilmore. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” wrote Thomas Patterson in the Shorenstein study.
Whatever his regrets about campaign coverage, Toobin has been anything but soft on President Trump. Just after the abrupt firing of FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017, Toobin appeared on CNN’s air to declare, among other things, that it was a “grotesque abuse of power by the president of the United States. This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.”
Wilmore told Toobin, “Well, America says, ‘Apology accepted.’”
For those who were around during the Watergate hearings and the year leading to Nixon flying off California, there were periods where you could feel the change in how things were moving. How things were about to blow up. Kicking McCabe out now, the day before the SotU, must be an act of a deranged man. Is SFB about to destroy his run? Yeah, it smells like it.
And today CNN has rewound the ten year old story about Hillary and is now in the high 30s of the reporting while doing stories on a Wynn harassment story from two days ago about three times.
Jamie, hopefully Jeffrey will remind his colleagues of the false equivalency thingy and get them to focus on the real issues that beset us all….. and especially the media who, like the lawyers, will be the first to fall in the dictatorship to come.
nytimes: Secret Memo Hints at a New Republican Target: Rod Rosenstein
A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.
The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.
The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative. But in their
efforts to discredit the inquiry, Republicans could potentially use Mr. Rosenstein’s decision to approve the renewal to suggest that he failed to properly vet a highly sensitive application for a warrant to spy on Mr. Page, who served as a Trump foreign policy adviser until September 2016.
A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.
[….continues…]
re sotu response, might as well make it a greek chorus according to this excerpt from wapo: As Democrats announced last week, third-term Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) will give their official response to the president’s Tuesday night speech, delivering it from his home state and skipping the pomp in Congress. Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a member of the Democrats’ 2017 landslide class in the state legislature, will give a Spanish-language response — also official.
There’ll be a response from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), too, differing from the official speeches in that the senator, for the second year, will give a retort to the speech itself. (Typically, respondents write their speeches ahead of time with only vague ideas of what’s in the presidential address.) And there will be at least two more progressive responses. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) will respond to Trump at the top of a BET news special, and former Maryland congresswoman Donna F. Edwards, who’s running for Prince George’s County executive, will deliver an address on behalf of the Working Families Party. All of them are to Kennedy’s left on a few issues, such as marijuana legalization.
Let us adopt an official non-repugnant pronunciation for names ending in —stein. They are pronounced stine. The second vowel has the long emphasis. Stein like a beer stein. Let us not strip them of the dignity of owning their own names. That’s what repugnants do.
A ticket for Trump’s State of the Union mistakenly spells Union as “Uniom.”
(Provided to NY Daily News)
A typo fit for a spell check-challenged President.
Members of Congress and their aides were shocked to find out that tickets to President Trump’s highly-anticipated Tuesday night address say “State of the Uniom” — not “State of the Union,” a senior Democratic congressional staffer told the Daily News.
more from the above link: Capitol Police officers will visit congressional offices Monday afternoon to give out new, correctly-spelled tickets to those members who picked up typo-ridden ones, the source said.
The Government Publishing Office, which is in charge of printing SOTU tickets, did not immediately return a request for comment. Trump has a history of grammatically questionable tweets. His administration has also had a hard time with the English language, repeatedly misspelling the word “attacker” in a list of “under-reported” terrorist attacks that the White House released last February.
Another official White House statement from last January said Trump had plans to visit Israel in order to “promote the possibility of lasting peach” in the region.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die.
If you are in the food as medicine group I highly recommend tart cherry juice on a regular basis.
When Mr. Cracker started drinking it after a gout attack, a friend brought over about a gallon – so we invented a drink named after our friend which is tart cherry juice and champagne The Donny!
As a Member of the House Judiciary Committee, I read the partisan, classified Nunes House Intel memo. I can't talk about it. However, here's an analogy.
Remember Geraldo Rivera and the infamous Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults? It's like that, but Geraldo Rivera has more integrity.
I liked the Fire and Fury sketch at the Grammies and having Clinton at the end was a good punch line. I thought they handled the Trump protests very well
Just popping back in by great good luck. I’m having a nasty pneumonia attack. Almost bought the farm. Now, everybody, sanitize your screens and go get the pneumonia shot, dammit !
Love it. ?
Sometimes it is nice to expand ones reading venues. This is an interesting article regarding the history of the KGB/FSB/SVR/GRU and the use of “active measures”. Worth reading and considering what is happening to America at this moment.
So, I guess everyone is OK with her, despite the way she handled sexual misconduct in her campaign, not to mention giving cover to her serial-predator hubby for years?
They should have let Oprah read it, instead.
Atta girl Hillary!…. keep tweaking SFB’s nose…
and also of those who cannot stand you…
blueINdallas,
Having Secretary Clinton read it was perfect because she sticks in his craw.
James Comey would be my First Runner-Up.
“despite the way she handled sexual misconduct in her campaign”
BiD, weeks of docked pay and ordered counseling for the perp (plus listening, believing, retaining and praising the victim for speaking up) was imho appropriate punishment for rubbing shoulders, kissing foreheads and sending unwanted emails. like franken, this guy as far as we know is not a rapist, serial predator or serious perpetrator of sexual violence and abuse. not equivalent to wynn and Weinstein.
I think it would have been great for O and Hillary doing a twin reading.
is this that kettle full of water they’re preparing to boil and we’re the frogs not yet feeling the heat? just has the smell of pravda and rt about it
reuters: Trump security team sees building U.S. 5G network as option
“We want to build a network so the Chinese can’t listen to your calls,” the senior official told Reuters.
“We have to have a secure network that doesn’t allow bad actors to get in. We also have to ensure the Chinese don’t take over the market and put every non-5G network out of business.”
From this morning’s Journal. I agree totally:
pinion
Commentary
Mayors, Say No to Amazon
City leaders should pledge to compete on merits, not incentives.
By
Richard Florida
Jan. 28, 2018 4:42 p.m. ET
87 COMMENTS
When Donald Trump and Mike Pence handed Carrier a boatload of money in 2016 to save a handful of jobs in Indiana, many people shuddered. When Carrier pocketed the cash and fired some of the workers a year later, the skeptics nodded knowingly. But when Amazon dangles the opportunity to host its HQ2, asking the most progressive mayors on the planet to bend over backward to lavish it with corporate welfare, many excuse it away as required to compete for the jobs and investment this project will bring. It isn’t. It is a disgrace.
The roster of mayors in Amazon’s 20 finalist cities reads like a who’s who of leading Democrats: New York’s Bill de Blasio, Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, Washington’s Muriel Bowser, Pittsburgh’s Bill Peduto and Newark, N.J.’s Ras Baraka. At home they’re all about fighting inequality and gentrification, creating affordable housing, increasing the minimum wage, and generating “inclusive” prosperity. But they apparently have no problem forking over hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases billions, to a corporate giant led by the world’s richest man. Is it any wonder many cities have kept the terms of their Amazon offers under wraps?
America’s leading cities should say no to this kind of reverse Robin Hood. A good model is Toronto, an HQ2 finalist whose bid to Amazon offers little in the way of tax incentives, while proposing that the city make much-needed local investments in its workforce, transit and other areas.
At heart the HQ2 competition is a ruse. Amazon without a doubt already has a very good idea of where it wants to put its new headquarters. The map of the 20 cities on the short list has clusters that give away the game. New York City and Newark are next to each other. So are the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Md. Clearly, Amazon wants to be in either the New York metro region or Greater Washington. ( Jeff Bezos, not coincidentally, has homes in both.) Those five options are in four separate states, plus the capital—and states are the entities likely to contribute the most money to incentive packages.
Amazon’s plan is surely intended to pit those five cities and states against each other to come away with the biggest deal.
Will America’s progressive leaders stand by as Amazon picks the public fisc? They don’t have to. These big-city mayors must know one another. They could take the high road and organize a mutual nonaggression pact, pledging to renounce incentives for Amazon and compete on the merits.
It’s often said we’d be better off if mayors ruled the world. If the mayors on Amazon’s short list want to stay true to their progressive roots, they should stand together instead of allowing Amazon to divide and conquer.
Mr. Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto, distinguished fellow at New York University, and editor at large for the Atlantic’s CityLab. His most recent book is “The New Urban Crisis” (Basic Books, 2017).
When I was a kid, Mom taught me to memorize my name, address, phone number, and her name so that if I got lost or scared I would be able to recite this information to a police officer, and he could help me get back to my mom. You may all have a similar memory, and may have done this for your kids as well. I don’t have kids, but I would have passed on that lesson – a police officer is your friend and he will help you when you are lost or scared.
I still believe that. Naively, perhaps. But that has been my experience to date with police.
But then my entertainment choice punches me straight in the gut, and reminds me that there is a significant segment of my fellow humans who must learn a different lesson.
Grey’s Anatomy. Yes, we watch it. We like it. We enjoy it as entertainment.
But the most recent episode punched us in the gut and slammed our heads against the wall. A 12 year old boy who had forgotten his house key was shot by a police officer, who thought he was breaking and entering a middle class home. The child later died in surgery. He was African American, he was a child, he was a member of a loving family, and he died because he forgot his key and was trying to get into his own home with no expectation that this was an action for which he could be killed. He was 12 years old.
Later in the episode, Dr Bailey (portrayed by the incredibly talented Chandra Wilson) told her husband (portrayed by Jason George) that it was time to have “the talk” with their own tween son Tucker. They had to find a way to tell a wide eyed innocent child how to remain calm and follow the instructions of police, and not do anything to provoke a reaction, and not make any sudden moves, and never ever to run from a police officer.
Can you even imagine? Can you? Because I just can’t.
I was taught to find the police when I was lost or scared. Young African American children are being taught how to preserve their very lives when facing the police.
In the United States of America.
I know this intellectually. I know this because I have seen it on the news. I know this because I hear the speeches.
But I can’t know it the way African Americans know it. Because I’m a middle aged white male who was always taught that police protect us. Police are friends. Police will keep you safe.
I’m sad that this is not as simple as I learned it when I was a child.
I’ve had “the talk” with my adopted AA crack-baby grandson on several subjects. He’s now 23 and a wonderful young man who is comfortable in his shoes no matter where they might take him. And, it’s been more than five years since he was last busted. Grandpa didn’t bail him out but did add money to his jail telephone account so that he could sort things out with his parents. Why did I add to “the talks” that I knew Sue and her hubby were giving him? It’s because I love my grandson and it’s the NCO in me.
Flatus – I was on the receiving end of some NCO talks myself from my stepdad, as well as some outstanding talks from my grandfather. I still remember those lessons.
I guess the idealist in me wants those talks to be for others what they were for me – lessons on how to give my best effort in all things, that failure is just another opportunity and not a character judgment, that if you give your best then there is very little to regret.
Oh – and how to grill a steak because Grandpa said every man should know how to do that and do it well.
I just hope she doesn’t get any ideas about running, again. The Clinton/DNC cabal is the reason Donny is the one giving the SOTU tomorrow night.
You know that had Bernie handled the situation like Hillary did in her campaign, you folks would be screaming from the rafters.
It seems that some have had their heads up her bum for so long that they can’t tell they her poop stinks, too.
Now that McCabe is stepping out of the picture what will the next step be? Put another one of the SFB clan in the office? Or use the SotU speech to fire the rest of the DOJ and FBI? This is still early in the day so the moron can do even more damage to America.
wonder if the memo talked about below also has something to do with McCabe deciding to leave early.
from hot air:
The Memo shows Trump’s own deputy AG approving surveillance of a Trump campaign aide?
Ed touched on this Times story in his last post but it’s worth another thread. Finally, I think, we have a solution to the mystery of why there’s been so much grumbling about Rod Rosenstein lately. There was a leak to the Daily Beast last week claiming that he figures prominently in Devin Nunes’s memo; there was a piece at CNN alleging that Trump has been “venting” about Rosenstein in the past few weeks, saying things like “let’s fire him, let’s get rid of him”; and he’s been part of the nightly White House communique to MAGA nation via Sean Hannity’s show. Why now? Why are Trump and his top cronies suddenly so irritated with the deputy AG when they have more prominent whipping boys available in Comey, Andrew McCabe, and even Jeff Sessions?
The likely answer: Because the memo’s going to show that Rosenstein, Trump’s own handpicked deputy at the DOJ, concluded last spring that there was indeed probable cause to believe there was a Russian agent inside Trump’s campaign tent, namely, Carter Page. That doesn’t mean the original FISA application in 2016 that kickstarted the Russiagate investigation wasn’t illegitimate, but if Trump’s own guy did in fact confirm a year later that he thought surveillance of Page should be continued based on the evidence he’d seen, that’s a bad narrative for the president. It’s not a “witch hunt” if there really are witches per Trump’s own DOJ appointee.
Someone who’s seen the memo probably leaked this information to the White House, knowing that Rosenstein’s interest in Page is a big problem for Trump’s spin on the investigation. So Rosenstein’s credibility had to be attacked, immediately. Wouldn’t be the first time TrumpWorld sprang into action to try to discredit “problematic” DOJ officials.
[…continues…]
The McCabe thing is obviously personal to SFB – it is the type of thing he would do–take someone who is leaving in a month and push them out so they can’t receive maximum retirement benefits.
Why doesn’t SFB chock on his own bile?
I think he simply had the opportunity to depart without changing his effective date of retirement in March nor his projected retirement pay. Also, it gives him the opportunity to use the annual leave that he has accrued over the past couple of years; this makes sense in a use it or lose it environment.
The move is effective Monday. Mr. McCabe had already been planning to retire upon his eligibility in a matter of weeks.
It is not clear if his early departure is for personal reasons or a reflection of the criticism.
Last month, word of Mr. McCabe’s plans drew a response from Mr. Trump, who in a Twitter post characterized the move as “racing the clock to retire with full benefits.”
http://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-nation/2018/01/29/FBI-Deputy-Director-McCabe-stepping-down-retiring-trump/stories/201801290098
– CBS’S JULIANNA GOLDMAN (@juliannagoldman): “Source tells @CBSNews’s Pat Milton that McCabe was forced to step down. He’s currently on leave and will officially retire in March.”
Is this the real Christopher Wray?
Yes BiD
We know “KIllary” would be so much worse than what we have now. Lord knows enough of the Faux Spews memes and Russian bots retweeted constantly by the Bernie Bros told us often enough while Media screamed “EMAILS” in the A block of every news program.
We sure as hell dodged a major bullet there didn’t we.
Where’s the sarcasm emoji.
First, he came for Comey, & they didn’t speak out b/c they were Trump apologists
Then, he came for McCabe, & they didn’t speak out b/c they were Trump apologists
Next, he’ll come for Rosestein & they won’t speak out b/c they’re Trump apologists
Last, he’ll come for Mueller…
Dear Hillary,
now that you claim you won’t be running for office again, I’d like to thank you for so many of the awesome things you’ve done over the years. First, let me thank you for all those drugs you and Bill had flown into Mena… like man… so much great shit. By the way… bet you were on some of that stuff when Benghazi happened. Thank you so much for trying to do something about the excess population with all those enemies you and Bill had eliminated… especially Vince Foster. And eliminating people’s pets… brilliant! And hacking into political opponents websites… again, brilliant! I know that there’s lots more I could thank you for… but maybe I’ll save that for my next letter.
Sincerely, someone who never met a conspiracy he/she didn’t like.
ps… make sure you get Chelsea to join the Illuminati too… like mother, like daughter.
pss… I heard you are responsible for this year’s flu vaccinations kerfuffle… awesome sauce!
Found It. Sharing with RR
Jamie, take your pick ~~~~~
politicususa:
Sarah Huckabee Sanders Joins The Trump Crime Parade By Covering Up Witness Tampering
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied to the American people as she stood at the podium and denied that Trump had anything to do with the retirement of Andrew McCabe, who is a key witness in the obstruction of justice investigation against the president.
[video]
Transcript of the exchange: Q: The president didn’t play a role in Andrew Mccabe stepping down?
SHS: He was not part of this process and we would refer you to the FBI where Christopher Wray serves as the director, as I said last week. And I’ll repeat again today the president has full confidence in him and has put the decisions at the FBI in his hands.
Seth Abramson’s sources are telling a different story:
@SethAbramson
BREAKING: All indications are that Trump—via agents in Congress—has forced the retirement of a key witness against him in an Obstruction case that could lead to impeachment. Worse, it’s part of a coordinated, illegal effort to intimidate, punish, and discredit adverse witnesses.
The White House is lying to the American people as they are working to kill an active federal investigation into the president. This is more than a matter of the press secretary telling another lie. The White House Press Secretary is knowingly engaging in a presidential cover-up of witness tampering. McCabe is an important witness in the obstruction of justice investigation.
The President silenced a key witness into retirement, and his press secretary lied to the American people about a potential crime. The more they try to cover it up, the more crimes that Trump and his team of accomplices commit.
Bernie Sanders will be offering his own response to the State of the Union, at the same time as the Democratic one.
Can this greedy glory hound followed by the delusional and gullible do anything more to help destroy the Democratic party?
wapo CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin: ‘I regret my role’ in Hillary Clinton false equivalence
So long as President Trump continues disgracing the Oval Office, thoughtful people will probe their own role in helping him get there.
Such appeared to be the motivation behind a mea culpa issued by CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin on comedian Larry Wilmore’s “Black on the Air” podcast. In a discussion of presidential politics, Wilmore argued that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, was the victim of a “coordinated attack” coming from Republicans. “Benghazi was … the expression of that attack. In fact, what’s his name, was it [former Rep. Jason] Chaffetz who actually kind of agreed that that’s what they were doing, was weakening her as a candidate.” (Wilmore may have been referring to Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who said in 2015, ““Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”)
No question about the attack on Clinton, responded Toobin, citing “all that bogus stuff about the Clinton Foundation” — perhaps a reference to the Uranium One story or even to the pre-election reporting of Bret Baier — later withdrawn — that there would be an indictment relating to the foundation.
“And I hold myself somewhat responsible for that,” continued Toobin, a steady presence on CNN since 2002. “I think there was a lot of false equivalence in the 2016 campaign. That every time we said something, pointed out something about Donald Trump — whether it was his business interests, or grab ’em by the p–––y, we felt like, ‘Oh, we gotta, like, talk about — we gotta say something bad about Hillary.’ And I think it led to a sense of false equivalence that was misleading, and I regret my role in doing that.”
hose comments drive at one of the great media brain-busters of all time. On the one hand, media organizations in the run-up to November 2016 exposed and covered the hard-to-count scandals and outrages that Trump had generated over decades as a self-absorbed real-estate mogul: the thousands of lawsuits, the mistreatment of women, the ambient lies, the racism, the stiffing of contractors, Trump University, the false promises of charity and much, much more. On the other hand, those same media organizations pounded away at Hillary Clinton’s email story. And many of them — CNN prominently included — gave Trump generous helpings of airtime for the rallies early in his campaign.
A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that in the campaign’s final months, the media’s aggregate coverage performed pretty much as Toobin described to Wilmore. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans,” wrote Thomas Patterson in the Shorenstein study.
Whatever his regrets about campaign coverage, Toobin has been anything but soft on President Trump. Just after the abrupt firing of FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017, Toobin appeared on CNN’s air to declare, among other things, that it was a “grotesque abuse of power by the president of the United States. This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.”
Wilmore told Toobin, “Well, America says, ‘Apology accepted.’”
oops, here’s the link to the above wemple op ed at wapo
For those who were around during the Watergate hearings and the year leading to Nixon flying off California, there were periods where you could feel the change in how things were moving. How things were about to blow up. Kicking McCabe out now, the day before the SotU, must be an act of a deranged man. Is SFB about to destroy his run? Yeah, it smells like it.
And today CNN has rewound the ten year old story about Hillary and is now in the high 30s of the reporting while doing stories on a Wynn harassment story from two days ago about three times.
Jamie, hopefully Jeffrey will remind his colleagues of the false equivalency thingy and get them to focus on the real issues that beset us all….. and especially the media who, like the lawyers, will be the first to fall in the dictatorship to come.
nytimes: Secret Memo Hints at a New Republican Target: Rod Rosenstein
A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.
The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.
The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative. But in their
efforts to discredit the inquiry, Republicans could potentially use Mr. Rosenstein’s decision to approve the renewal to suggest that he failed to properly vet a highly sensitive application for a warrant to spy on Mr. Page, who served as a Trump foreign policy adviser until September 2016.
A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.
[….continues…]
Jamie, your 2:01 post about “First, he came for Comey,..McCabe…next Rosenstein..” is like that Christie mystery
re sotu response, might as well make it a greek chorus according to this excerpt from wapo:
As Democrats announced last week, third-term Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) will give their official response to the president’s Tuesday night speech, delivering it from his home state and skipping the pomp in Congress. Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a member of the Democrats’ 2017 landslide class in the state legislature, will give a Spanish-language response — also official.
There’ll be a response from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), too, differing from the official speeches in that the senator, for the second year, will give a retort to the speech itself. (Typically, respondents write their speeches ahead of time with only vague ideas of what’s in the presidential address.)
And there will be at least two more progressive responses. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) will respond to Trump at the top of a BET news special, and former Maryland congresswoman Donna F. Edwards, who’s running for Prince George’s County executive, will deliver an address on behalf of the Working Families Party. All of them are to Kennedy’s left on a few issues, such as marijuana legalization.
Just got Dad home from hospital. We are now in recovery mode. Toby excited to have him back.
Let us adopt an official non-repugnant pronunciation for names ending in —stein. They are pronounced stine. The second vowel has the long emphasis. Stein like a beer stein. Let us not strip them of the dignity of owning their own names. That’s what repugnants do.
Ben Platt’s Leonard Bernstein tribute on Grammys was amazing, singing Somewhere. Watched it with hospital staff, nearly all immigrants. Really cool.
Craig… great news!
Toby… who’s a good girl… you’re a good girl!
Tickets to President Trump’s first State of the Union address contain glaring spelling error
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A ticket for Trump’s State of the Union mistakenly spells Union as “Uniom.”
(Provided to NY Daily News)
A typo fit for a spell check-challenged President.
Members of Congress and their aides were shocked to find out that tickets to President Trump’s highly-anticipated Tuesday night address say “State of the Uniom” — not “State of the Union,” a senior Democratic congressional staffer told the Daily News.
more from the above link:
Capitol Police officers will visit congressional offices Monday afternoon to give out new, correctly-spelled tickets to those members who picked up typo-ridden ones, the source said.
The Government Publishing Office, which is in charge of printing SOTU tickets, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Trump has a history of grammatically questionable tweets. His administration has also had a hard time with the English language, repeatedly misspelling the word “attacker” in a list of “under-reported” terrorist attacks that the White House released last February.
Another official White House statement from last January said Trump had plans to visit Israel in order to “promote the possibility of lasting peach” in the region.
let’s hear it for their UNIOM made
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,I’m sticking to the union ’til the day I die.
Craig, you folks rock!!
Out of the hospital always better
If you are in the food as medicine group I highly recommend tart cherry juice on a regular basis.
When Mr. Cracker started drinking it after a gout attack, a friend brought over about a gallon – so we invented a drink named after our friend which is tart cherry juice and champagne The Donny!
Jamie,
“Can this greedy glory hound followed by the delusional and gullible do anything more to help destroy the Democratic party?”
Nothing I can think of – CDS strikes again.
Just bleached all toilets and sinks per doctors instructions. Now I know how hospitals get their smell.
Don’t know if this will work, but worth a try
woo hoo, I learned a new trick. You can copy and paste a tweet.
CDS?
So glad your Father is better, Mr Crawford.
Give Toby an extra treat from us – we won’t tell.
I liked the Fire and Fury sketch at the Grammies and having Clinton at the end was a good punch line. I thought they handled the Trump protests very well
Jamie, Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
My best wishes to Dad, Craig !
Just popping back in by great good luck. I’m having a nasty pneumonia attack. Almost bought the farm. Now, everybody, sanitize your screens and go get the pneumonia shot, dammit !