It's Too Obvious He's Putin's Puppet

As I've been saying for a very long time, the collusion between the Trump Regime and the Kremlin has always happened right out in the open.

Despite whatever else may be going on behind closed doors, there's been plenty of evidence right before our eyes, ever since then-candidate Donald Trump, at a speaking engagement on the campaign trail, publicly invited Russia to hack the State Department to access Hillary Clinton's emails.

That was two years ago next month, and, in the interim, the open collusion has continued as Trump has obstructed justice to derail the Russia investigation; has denied Russia intervened in the election; has unilaterally overruled the legislative branch to Russia's benefit; has removed staff that don't toe his line on Russia; has refused to enforce sanctions on Russia; has called for Russia to be reinstated to the G-7/8; has blamed Obama for Russia's annexation of Crimea, but not Putin; has repeatedly praised Putin and sought a meeting with him, which has now been officially scheduled; and in countless other ways generally downplayed Russian aggression and pursued foreign policy that benefits the Kremlin, while domestically trying to stymie any attempt at accountability for his disloyal actions.

All while we wait interminably for "proof" of his collusion from investigators.

Today, there are two more important stories demonstrating the collusion that continues to happen right out in the open.

1. Trump Privately Floats Plan to Make a Deal with Putin on Syria. (snip)

2. Trump Is Trying to Destabilize the European Union. (snip)

To pretend this is not collusion with Russia is to inexplicably believe that Trump continually makes decisions that coincidentally are also exactly what Putin wants and coincidentally serve Putin's agenda, and that's just a lucky break for the guy who intervened in the election which landed Trump in the very position to make those decisions.

Imagining this is mere serendipity beggars belief. None of this is an accident. It's collusion. And it is happening right out in the open, so brazenly that reasonable people are convincing themselves that they can't possible be witnessing what they actually are.

It reminds me of what we kept saying about 9/11-- how fucking BLATANT they were about it. It was too obviously an inside job and frame-up for anyone paying attention, but they put it in our faces because there was nothing we could do about it.

We're Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore

The salient fact about US politics is that the right has been going steadily more crazy for decades -- breaking the law, disregarding norms, sinking into a hermetically sealed media bubble filled with paranoid conspiracy theories, seeking to disenfranchise opponents, etc.

At every stage, it gets worse. Norms & values we thought inviolate are crapped on, lawlessness becomes more brazen, ugly prejudices we thought buried, or at least suppressed, roar back to the surface. And with every increment, the question re-presents itself: What should the rest of us do?

The ~25% of Americans who believe & want horrible, illiberal shit ("deplorables," you might call them) have taken over the GOP. They are driving it toward fascism as fast as the system will allow them.

What's the right response? For years, lefties have been warning about this devolution of the GOP, going back to Reagan. They have been dismissed as crazy partisan hippies, condemned as "uncivil," told they are part of the problem, because being mad about illiberalism is just like illiberalism.

The question has always been, where do you draw the line? At what point in the GOP's devolution do we say: OK, that's too far. We're no longer in Normal Politics. We're in a crisis situation, on the verge of losing our democracy. Where is the line?

The most insidious thing about the descent into illiberalism is that it is incremental. There's no dramatic moment, no Rubicon. Every step seems bad, but only a little worse than the previous step. Smart autocrats are careful not to provide that moment. As this slide into illiberalism has continued, the mainstream DC establishment, including the sorts of Very Serious People that write major newspaper editorials, have *helped prevent that moment*.

They have normalized, normalized, normalized, greasing the skids. When lefties have tried to draw a line, create a moment, force a reckoning, the establishment has united in a single voice to say: calm down. Let's be civil & work together. Let's not raise our voices or be shrill. Both sides do it. We're still in Normal Politics.

Now here we are with a president who very openly pines for tyranny, explicitly disregards laws & norms, is nakedly racist, lies as often as he breathes, and oh yeah, is now JAILING TODDLERS TO DETER LEGAL IMMIGRATION.

By jailing toddlers, Trump has potentially made a mistake. Instead of incremental illiberalism, this seems like a jump, something to shock the conscience. It is yet another opportunity for a Moment, a time for the rest of us to say: no. This is not normal. It's not ok.

That what's the owner of the Red Hen was doing by refusing to serve Sanders: saying, No. This is not just a normal political dispute that can remain confined to the political sphere. You cannot support this & still expect to be treated like a normal, decent person.

The owner was trying to draw a line, disrupt the normal daily patterns of civility & accommodation, create a Moment around which people can rally to echo the message: No. This is not normal, not "just politics."

We must stop pretending it is; we must snap out of hypnosis. And so, right on cue, the Very Serious People ride to the rescue of the aspiring tyrants, saying, yet again: Calm Down. Let's not get crazy here. Let's not be RUDE. Heavens no. We must retain our decorum at all costs.

WaPo editors say that accepting incivility (gasp) is a "slippery slope." But that gets it exactly wrong. WE ARE ALREADY ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE.

It's a slope that leads to illiberalism, violence, & collapse. It's a slope greased accommodation & civility. What the Red Hen owner (& others) are trying to do is jerk us awake, push of OFF the slippery slope.

They're trying desperately to draw a line, to cease the slide. And every time they try -- even now, even to this day, even with toddlers in cages -- the MSM scolds them. The Very Serious People who serve as tone police in DC need to decide what they value more: democracy or civility.

Because we're just sliding, sliding, sliding down this slope, pretending all the while that things are still Normal.

To get off the slide ... will, almost by definition, require a break with Normal. It will require some sand in the gears, some raised voices, some violations of decorum and precedent.

I dunno if restaurant service is the right mechanism, or even a good one. No one knows. The WaPo editorial board, like the MSM establishment more generally, has been utterly fucking useless in slowing our slide to illiberalism.

They've done nothing but obscure what's happening behind a veneer of Normal. They have failed.

But for the luvagod ... ... the very least they can do is refrain from concern trolling citizens who are (RIGHTLY) in a panic about the loss of their country.

Maybe the agents of this cruelty, the ones lying on its behalf, should feel a little discomfort. There are worse things in the world.

Mueller!!!

The Mueller investigation is, I suspect, coming to a head.

I don’t claim I know how it will turn out.

The president has an enormous amount of power and his flunkies in Congress promise they’re about to end Rod Rosenstein’s bend-don’t-break defense by impeaching him (though Rosenstein and Chris Wray have just thrown more documents out to slow the Republicans).

It’s certainly possible that Trump will make a last ditch effort to undercut the Mueller investigation and that effort will be competently executed and none of the secondary fall-back defenses Mueller has put into place will work.

For now, though, the Trump team seems intent on a delay and discredit strategy, which won’t stave off any imminent steps. So we shall see whether Trump succeeds in undercutting the investigation.

I keep thinking, “that’s why they play the game,” but this is no game.

There are a number of reasons I think Mueller’s investigation is coming to a head. But consider one detail. I’ve long explained that Mueller seems to be building a series of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States indictments that will ultimately incorporate the entire Russian operation (and may integrate the Trumpsters’ international self-dealing as well).

As Mueller’s team has itself pointed out, for heavily regulated areas like elections, ConFraudUs indictments don’t need to prove intent for the underlying crimes. They just need to prove,

(1) two or more persons formed an agreement to defraud the United States;

(2) [each] defendant knowingly participated in the conspiracy with the intent to defraud the United States; and

(3) at least one overt act was committed in furtherance of the common scheme.

Let’s see how evidence Mueller has recently shown might apply in the case of Roger Stone, Trump’s lifelong political advisor.

We already knew that Stone had communications that he did not immediately disclose with Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks. With both, Stone has contributed to and reinforced claims the entities were not Russian operations, though his conversion about the source of the Hillary emails was pretty sudden and curiously timed.

Now we know that in May, Stone had lunch with someone calling himself Henry Greenberg offering dirt on Hillary. His explanation — based only on the texts that Michael Caputo was asked about in a Mueller interview — is not that he didn’t entertain the offer, but that he didn’t take Greenberg up on the offer as made in late May because Greenberg was asking for big money. Both clearly recognized Greenberg as a Russian, therefore a foreigner offering something of value during an election.

Bizarrely, in trying to rebut the import of this exchange publicly, Caputo and Stone are doing nothing more than working the public refs, claiming to assume this was an FBI sting. Mueller knows whether it was an FBI sting, and there’s virtually no way he’d be asking questions about it if it were (particularly if Stone really didn’t take the bait).

In short, Stone has no justification for this he’s willing to offer publicly; instead, he’s just adopting the SpyGate narrative in an attempt to discredit the investigation. And that’s assuming there were no follow-ups or other damning texts that didn’t involve someone willing to leak them to the press.

Et cetera. Bottom line, is there is extensive legal evidence against the Trump team, implicating them in serious conspiracy with Russia to sway the US 2016 presidential election.

We will find it all out soon, hopefully.

US-NK Freak Show

It's all a show... PR and no real steps towards denuclearization. Legitimizing a truly murderous and brutal dictator. Nothing mentioned on human rights.

And those hairstyles... both are disgusting.

But check out this mad video the White House played for KJU:



Kind of creepy all the way around. But what's most disturbing is at 1:48 in, the narrator says "One destiny" and the video shows a missile/rocket flare rising up from planet earth. WTF is that? Is that hinting at a quarantine breakout, perhaps?

Over 500 Days of Kakistocracy

We have a president determined to piss off our allies, even Canada for Christ's sake, over delusional claims of unfair trade practices, while clearly beholden to Russia, and the party in power does NOTHING.

That this is TREASON by Trump and the GOP cannot be emphasized enough.

Oh and look here:

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, brought in at least $82 million in outside income while serving as senior White House advisers during 2017, according to financial disclosure forms released Monday.

It's just so wrong. A true kleptocracy.

What's really depressing is how for now at least, Trump is getting away with the biggest political scandal is US history.

On the lighter side, there does seem to be a semi-amusing historical precedent for Trump: Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Uglier and Uglier

There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump.

Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.

But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims.

“This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”

Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization.

Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents. The human consequences have been horrific. (snip)

Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as 1. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone. In some cases, Jayapal said, the women could hear their kids screaming in the next room.

“Many of them were told by Border Patrol that they would never see their children again,” she told me. America’s immigration system was capricious and cruel before Trump. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently visited an immigrant processing center in McAllen, Tex. Describing how men, women, boys and girls were separated and kept in chain-linked enclosures, he emphasized that the site wasn’t new: “It’s essentially the same construction that was there during Obama,” he said. The difference is that, until recently, the kids’ section held older children who had crossed the border on their own. Now, he told me, the youngest was 4 or 5. These kids are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America.

The administration, Merkley told me, has “decided that treating kids in this fashion would influence the adults not to seek asylum. They would hurt children to influence the parents.”

There are still mechanisms in American government that can stop this evil. Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposed a bill that would keep most families detained at the border together. The A.C.L.U. has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children were taken from them and is asking a federal court for a nationwide injunction to stop family separations.

But for now, what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America, the kind captured in the Martin Niemöller poem that’s repeated so often it’s become a cliché: “First they came …” There is no reason to believe that undocumented immigrants will be the last group of people deemed beyond the law’s protection.

Senator Merkley told me he asked people working in the detention center if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on the children who had been put under their authority. The answer, he said, was, “We simply follow the orders from above.”

Sound familiar???

Ultimately the Nazi holocaust was about racist hatred taken to extreme ends, and we are seeing the early stages of it in Trump's America.

Stargate Archives

For sale!

Reports of the United States Government Sponsored Psi Program, 1972–1995. Volume 1: Remote Viewing, 1972–1984 $95.00

During the Cold War, the U.S. government began testing paranormal claims under laboratory conditions in hopes of realizing intelligence applications for psychic phenomena. Thus began the project known as Star Gate. The largest in the history of parapsychological research, it received more than $20 million in funding and continued into the mid–1990s.

This project archive includes all available documents generated by research contractor SRI International and those provided by government officials. Remote viewing (RV) is an atypical ability that allows some individuals to gain information blocked from the usual senses by shielding, distance or time.

Early work benefited from a few “stars” of RV who were successful at convincing investigators of its existence and its potential as a means of gathering intelligence. Research focused on determining the parameters of RV, who may have the ability, how to collect and analyze data and the best way to use RV in intelligence operations.

Volume 1 Remote Viewing (1972–1984) and Volume 2 Remote Viewing (1985–1995) include laboratory trials and several operational results.

50th Anniversary of the RFK Assassination

Suffice it to say, without going into the details, I'll say the evil PTB had him killed. The bigger question is why?

In the words of the great Charles Pierce:

Ultimately, the great unknowable is whether the country would have taken the turns it took in the 1970s and 1980s, the dangerous detours that have brought us to our present moment, if there had been no guns in the kitchen that night.

The reactionary forces against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement already were gathering force, and it’s not unreasonable to conclude that the Republicans would have formed their dark alliance with the remnants of American apartheid even more swiftly had Nixon been defeated by yet another Kennedy.

I would like to think that Robert Kennedy would have been able to stand against the foul gales that were then rising. I prefer to think that he would have, because I prefer to think of this country as perpetually redeemable.

So many of our wounds are self-inflicted, and, by and large, through our history, we’ve at least made some good faith effort to heal them and to atone to ourselves for having inflicted them in the first place.

That, ultimately, is what Robert Kennedy stood for and, alas, what he died for as well. Wisdom, through the awful grace of God.

"The Press is Failing Us"

Melissa McEwen feels my pain:

I am totally fed up with press coverage of Donald Trump that is rooted in failing to understand, still, who he is.

Or conspiring to pretend that he is something other than what he decidedly, demonstrably is. And has been. For decades.

In some cases, it's just an unwillingness to accept the reality that he is actually as terrible and as dangerous as he actually is, either because it's too painful to contemplate or because that would mean facing up to their own complicity in his ascension to power by having treated him like a joke and failing to take him seriously far sooner.

In other cases, it's an active attempt to enable and protect him, and abet his vile agenda. (I'm looking at you, New York Times.)

In any case, it's fucking depressing. And enraging. And scary.

Even the outlets and/or individual reporters who are doing a decent job of reporting accurately on what he's doing, day in and day out, are still just documenting, without meaningfully conveying to the public how extraordinarily grave a predicament we're in.

It is just a colossal failure by the press to honestly talk about what's happening; how quickly and profoundly the erosion of our public institutions is happening and how difficult all of it will be to restore.

The comprehensive insistence on treating all of this as "bad, but still within normal range" is gaslighting on an unfathomable sale.

We need facts, and we need straightforward discussion of those facts.

He is a liar. He is a manipulator. He is wildly unethical. He has contempt for the rule of law. He is corrupt. He is colluding, right out in the open. He is cruel. He thinks his abuse is wit.

He is an authoritarian. He hates democracy. He is disloyal to the nation he is meant to lead.

The 2016 election was a coup. Everything since has been a consolidation of power behind a white supremacist, nativist, patriarchal despot.

And we can't even begin to address any of that, if we can't even speak about it plainly.

If the people who try to speak about it plainly are demeaned and dismissed as alarmists hysterics crackpots conspiracists bitches.

If being a person who speaks about it plainly is considered somehow worse, more toxic, embarrassing by the political press than being the authoritarian who thrives in a vacuum of accountability.

The only fate worse than being doomed to lose what you value to the crushing oppression of an authoritarian tyrant is to lose it to the echoing memory of that tyrant being called a clown, until it was far too late.

Of course, the press, the media has always failed us, but I thought that was more a problem with them covering up deep unpleasant conspiracies and I thought they would at least wake up for the wholesale dismantling of the rule of law by the president.

But the way the corporate media works is sadly all too susceptible to manipulation by ruthless liars and crooks, and Trump is the master there.

33 of the Day: Civil Asset Forfeiture Edition

This is a good example of a manufactured 33, and a disturbing story overall:

A 64-year-old Cleveland man is suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection after agents strip-searched him at an airport in October and took more than $58,000 in cash from him without charging him with any crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week in Ohio. (snip)

The Kazazi family did not hear anything about their cash or why it was taken until more than a month after it was seized, when Customs finally sent a seizure notice to their home. “This is to notify you that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) seized the property described below at Cleveland, OH on October 24, 2017: $57,330 in U.S. Currency,” the notice states.

“Enforcement activity indicates that the currency was involved in a smuggling/drug trafficking/money laundering operation.”

The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.

Note, the government agents took the exact amount out of the original money to make it now equal to a number with 33 in it.

Also, note the amount of money they took out had another Illuminati/Masonic number in it-- 77.

Nice coincidence there.