50 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

  1. jace, lovely. thank you. according to wiki the title was taken from 1st verse of poem by Verlaine which is also lovely in its own way read along with the music:
    Clair De Lune
    Your soul is as a moonlit landscape fair,     Peopled with maskers delicate and dim, That play on lutes and dance and have an air     Of being sad in their fantastic trim. The while they celebrate in minor strain     Triumphant love, effective enterprise, They have an air of knowing all is vain,—     And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise, The melancholy moonlight, sweet and lone,     That makes to dream the birds upon the tree, And in their polished basins of white stone     The fountains tall to sob with ecstasy.       ~~  ORIGINAL FRENCH  ~~ Votre âme est un paysage choisi Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
    …..

  5. Jace

    Thank you for another Sunday delight.  Love the description on this one:

    Masques et bergamasques, Op. 112, is an orchestral suite by Gabriel Fauré. It was arranged by the composer from incidental music he provided for a theatrical entertainment commissioned for Albert I, Prince of Monaco in 1919.

    Right now the world needs more incidental music for entertainment …

  6. Jace…  lovely indeed… thanks!

    Thinking of trumpty dumpty and the way he’s treated McCabe reminds me of Michelle Obama’s speech where she said…  “being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”

  7. more crimes pile up for Mueller to pursue

    the guardian:

    Staff claim Cambridge Analytica ignored US ban on foreigners working on elections

     

    In the 2014 midterm elections and the Trump campaign, firm was staffed mainly by young Britons and Canadians

     
    Cambridge Analytica employed non-American citizens to work on US election campaigns in apparent violation of federal law, despite receiving a legal warning about the risks.
     
    The company’s responsibilities under US law were laid out in a lawyer’s memo to the company’s vice-president, Steve Bannon, British CEO Alexander Nix and Rebekah Mercer, daughter of billionaire owner Robert Mercer, in July 2014. It made it clear that most senior and mid-level positions involving strategy, planning, fundraising or campaigning needed to be filled by US citizens.
     
    “Any decision maker must be a US citizen or green card holder,” the memo, seen by the Observer, warned. It also provided a brief legal history of cases involving foreign involvement in election campaigns, drawn up by a lawyer at the firm founded by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
     
    “To the extent you are aware of foreign nationals providing services, including polling and marketing, it would appear that unless it is being done through US citizens, or foreign nationals with green cards, the activity would violate the law.”
    […]
    Employees working for Cambridge Analytica in the US at the time claimed that rather than tackling the problem, management appeared to ignore it.
     
    “Mercer’s lawyer told a fairly stunned group meeting that it wasn’t allowed,” said one non-American employee who was based in the US at the time. “I’m not sure what, if anything, CA did to act on that knowledge.”
     
    Two employees confirmed that they were still answering ultimately to Nix throughout the mid-term election campaigns that ended in November 2014. In total, more than a dozen foreigners, including Britons and Canadians, filled strategic roles in campaigns across the US.
     
    “We were really speaking directly to the voters in a number of states,” said one former employee, who served on a team with several people who were not US citizens or green card holders.
     
    It is understood that some were working on tourist visas. Another ex-employee claimed that they had been provided with letters to give to US border control officials where needed, stating that they would not be working there.
    [….continues…]

  8. wapo:
    [….]
    Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) announced Saturday afternoon that he has offered McCabe a job to work on election security in his office, “so that he can reach the needed length of service” to retire.
     
    “My offer of employment to Mr. McCabe is a legitimate offer to work on election security,” Pocan said in a statement. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of American democracy and both Republicans and Democrats should be concerned about election integrity.”
     
    A spokeswoman for McCabe, Melissa Schwartz, didn’t immediately rule out a job with one of the most liberal members of Congress, which might only need to last for a day or so for him to get his full retirement benefits: “We are considering all options.”
     
    Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) tweeted that he’d consider hiring McCabe, too.
    It’s not immediately clear if getting fired from the FBI on a Friday and going to work on Capitol Hill on a Monday would solve McCabe’s problems for certain, though at least one former federal official with knowledge of retirement rules says it probably would.
    McCabe’s team is confident that he had at least 20 years of law enforcement work under his belt — defined as carrying a weapon or supervising people who do — which made him eligible to retire on his 50th birthday on Sunday, with full retirement benefits.
     
    With those 20 years, he would need to just go to work with the federal government for another day or so in any job he pleases, whether that’s as a election security analyst for a Wisconsin congressman or a typist for a day, to get full benefits, said the former official who spoke to The Fix. The job doesn’t matter so much as the fact that he’s working within the federal government with the same retirement benefits until or after his 50th birthday. (Though this former official stressed that it would probably look more ethical if McCabe worked for at least a pay period rather than just one day.)
    [….]

    On Saturday evening, a spokesman for Pocan said they hadn’t yet heard from McCabe on his job offer.

  9. patD – The UK has offered Americans access to any info Cambridge Analytica had on its servers.  ~You know C A is on the up-and-up when Steve Banananazi is involved.~ Somebody has filed a suit to see how they could determine how C A arrived at his voting profile.

    jace – A cheerful piece.  I can just see Mueller and his team busily going through documents and interviewing folks with this as background music.

    Do we get the  Hallelujah  Chorus when Trumpsky is charged or do we have to wait until he’s actually removed from office?

     

  10. Happy Birthday to Andrew McCabe.  Take that job.  You can get your pension and Trumpsky’s goat at the same time!

    You can tell who isn’t controlled by red mafia money; they are the elected officials who aren’t afraid to speak out and act out against Trump.  The rest of them need to go.

  11. Best line of the night was the trump administration is what you get when a 12 year old wishes to be president on a Zoltan game

  12. Found this joke over in the comments section of huffpo this morning…

    Question: What’s the difference betwwen a garbanzo bean and a chickpea? Answer: Donald Trump never had a garbanzo bean on his face. Putin has something on Trump. Its either money or that chickpea thing.

  13. I wonder if SFB would be able to do a jig to Jace’s well chosen Faure. Perhaps if he had help from his favorite blonde?

  15. the guardian
    US congressional investigators want the head of data firm Cambridge Analytica to testify again before their committee, under subpoena if necessary, after a whistleblower claimed the company exploited Facebook and received millions of people’s profiles that were taken without authorisation.
     

     
    Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called for the company to be “thoroughly investigated” and said Facebook must answer questions about how it came to provide private user information to an academic with links to Russia.
     

    […]
    “This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users, whether it acquired that information illegally and whether it sought to abuse that information in support of President Trump’s political campaign in the United States or Brexit in the United Kingdom,” he told the Guardian.
     
    “The company has repeatedly touted its ability to influence voters through ‘psychographic’ targeting and has claimed it was the fundamental reason that Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Indeed, it may be that through Cambridge Analytica, the Trump campaign made use of illegitimately acquired data on millions of Americans in order to help sway the election.”
     
    The data was collected in early 2014 through a Facebook app that purported to be a psychological research tool called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan separately from his work at Cambridge University, the Observer reported. Hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. Kogan was also an associate professor at St Petersburg State University and received grants from the Russian government to research Facebook users’ emotional states.
     
    Schiff said: “Reports that an American professor with links to Russia was at the centre of this illicit transfer of information raises further questions, which the committee must investigate. Despite our request, and as set out in our status report, the committee has not had the opportunity to talk with numerous Cambridge Analytica personnel who may have knowledge of this and other issues – they must now be brought in for interviews.”
    he congressman called for Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, to return “if necessary under subpoena”, noting that he had only spoken to the committee via video link on a day when members were interrupted by votes.
     
    “The committee would also greatly benefit by hearing from the whistleblower named in today’s report, Christopher Wylie, and we plan to reach out to him in the coming days,” Schiff said.
    [….continues…]

  17. We installed a cabinet for a nice older German couple the other day and while I was in the room with the cabinet, The Other was outside the door and happened, making conversation, to ask what their family back in Germany thought of Trump.  The lady went off on a TEAR about what a horrible person, etc….and once I picked up the drift of her views, I called out, “Schweinhund!”    The lady comes running in, “Ja! Ja!  Schweinhund!”

  18. I could have said “Scheisskopf”, but that would have been unseemly.

    At last that semester of German paid off.

  20. We need to take a good hard looooong look at ourselves.  How could 40% of Americans think SFB is a good idea?

  21. I don’t guess it could be as simple as that 40% of Americans are as dumb as a bucket of dirt, could it?

  22. And now democrats are busy chewing on Nancy Pelosi’s leg again…..

    Oh, good……let’s watch em lose this damn thing again.

  23. It could be that but even if that’s true — why did they pick him — for entertainment value?  contempt of politics?  seeing nothing that impacts them?  Why?

  24. He sold them a bill of goods, like Mr. Haney, and they bought it.

    but several different factors, such as the southern strategy, blame the poor, the immigrants, the Elites, rip on education and science, guns, guns, guns, abortion, BIBLE……emboldened white supremacists..( why do white supremacists always seem so un-supreme?)……a terrible mix of toxic rhetoric….make fun of a handicapped guy, make fun of Rosie O’Donnel, grab em by the [………..], make up silly nicknames to get all the fools in town on your side, (they love silly schoolyard nicknames, puts him at their level and makes them feel at home.)……BLAME THE BLACK GUY………”everybody in the world has been cheating us”……..

    ……..it’s a hot mess of…….of………crippling national paranoid schizophrenia.

  25. Sturg

    I think the Nancy P thing is entirely a gooper construct.   No one has ever mounted a serious challenge to her and I think it’s more about Steny Hoyer keeping them away.

  26. Oh yes of course it begins from the deep well of GOP hatred, it just is disconcerting to see it caught up and batted about as if it were some kind of badminton game…….

    Chatter creates buzz and buzz can lose elections.
    Loose lips sink swift boats.

    Part and parcel of the Blame the Competent Woman syndrome.

  27. So if Corker and Flake are going to run against SFB — how are they going to motivate the not-SFB goopers to get out and vote?

  28. Will the greedy old perverts get involved in taking down SFB if he fires Sessions? Or will they need to have Rosenstein fired? Or will it take the firing of Mueller?  If they don’t do it in 2018, will the Dems take them out and take over the House and Senate in November?  I have a feeling that the republicans are going to be gone.  But, I am not sure the Dems will survive as long as there is a concerted effort by the Sanders people who appear to be working hard to destroy the party.  The Dems reliance on caucuses instead of primaries leaves it vulnerable to destruction.  To take over the Congress means the Dems have to be united and strong.  Not splintered by Sanders people running as Dems.

  29. BB

    Where are you seeing that?  In California the state party has always been left of the majority — thus the party ‘s lack of support for DiFi despite her over whelming popular support.

  30. If the dems do take the house and senate, GOP are going to be in “Is Paris Burning? ” mode from November to January.

  31. One thing…..if the dems do take it…..it might will have been worth it to have endured 4 years of president carbuncle if that’s what he wroughts….

    maybe.   if they take it.

  32. I think sanderites have run their course…..everybody’s onto em…..

    “The World” knows that a loose cannon can sometimes mount the podium, ( how’s that for a metaphor, eh?) but they’re going to be paying close attention to whether and how America corrects the situation.

  34. Fine the mercer crime family and the c.a. execs until they have to sell their fillings and kidneys.

    Then lock them up until the sun turns black.

    4,500 bits (a c.a. exec boast) per person X 50,000,000 people = 225B!LL!ON bits.

    $1 damage/bit = $225B!LL!ON$. That could deplete the mercer crime family.

  37. Ted Liu just poured cold water all over the poll about Nancy P –pointing a. Ryan polls worse and b. Nancy P is good at what she does

  39. kgc, yeah what’s behind that (found religion?  money?) and what’s the likelihood of recovery from his affliction….  also what’s the rate of recidivism for that kind of thing?

  40. KGC – I am wondering how many of the less rabid republicans running in leans r or D districts start confessing their sins and asking for distance from SFB.

  42. The Trey Gowdy thing is odd unless he is planning on running again in the future and this is a chance to put some distance between himself and SFB

    He hasn’t renounced anything and he is careful not to offend any goopers but he does make his opinion known and he is not following the party line

  43. BB

    A lot of the people who might have done that are not running again.   And a lot of people are in safe districts.   When you look at the win in Pa and realize that often the Republican ran unopposed.  The last time the district voted for president was John Kerry.  Women and blacks need not apply.
    I think the best any gooper who wants to survive 2018 is get out of the way.

     

  44. Trumpsky’s tweet about McCabe’s firing being  a “great day” and the timing of the firing proves it was just revenge for something Put-ey’s lap dog didn’t like. He can never keep his thoughts to himself.  He may make Mueller’s job even easier if he incriminates himself during his daily twit storm.

    I feel like I’m getting breaking news addiction.  I get a little twitchy when the headlines don’t change.

     

  47. Lovely Jace, thanks again.

    Geez, Microsoft auto downloaded a security update and I haven’t been able to log in all day. Finally found the setting where I could whitelist the site. Hope no one else had this issue.

  48. Maybe when Trumpsky was talking about putting miners to work, maybe he was talking about data mining.

    Does he realize that firing Mueller would not make his (and his family’s) problems go away?

  49. Go back into your hole Liz Cheney.  Being against torture is not being for terrorists.  Torture is terrorism and is not the American way.  By her either-or logic, if Liz Cheney is pro-torture, I’d say she is un-American.

    So glad to see Rand Paul and others are going to try to block Pompeo and Haspel.

    Nice to see that Lindsey Graham’s testicles have descended, again.  The more who speak out against Trumpsky, the better.  They shouldn’t fear his base in future elections.  Just don’t talk down to them and, with the exception of the alt-right, they will gladly look for someone else to address their concerns.

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