Daily Check-In 09/18/18

Tuesday, September 18th.

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Here’s why what Trump is proposing with exposing sources is dangerous.

There’s a difference between declassifying documents while keeping identities and methods redacted vs. full on declassification without redaction.

In the first, which is what we got back in July when the Carter Page FISA application was released with blocks of text blacked out ( Daily Check-In 07/20/2018), showed a completely by-the-book process but hid several key parts, mostly regarding intelligence sources. Those sources didn’t work on just the Carter Page case, but are working on other cases as well, as needed. Those sources could be anything from intercepted phone calls and texts to actual spies talking to US and Allied spy agencies.

What Trump’s trying to do is expose all of the methods and spies used to gather evidence against Carter Page. Even if the names are left out, the events can be reverse engineered to show who was the spy.

For example, let’s say that Carter Page and 5 people were in a room talking about the Rosneft deal. Out of those 5, one of them took notes on the Criminal Fucking Conspiracy and told the CIA what they saw. These details were originally redacted, but the unredacted version gives details that only these 6 people would know. It won’t take them long to reverse engineer who talked to the CIA, and that person would be as good as dead.

It’s not just real people, either. If the UK secretly hacked the cell phone of the Rosneft board member who negotiated with Carter Page, releasing this info would burn that source. That board member would destroy their phone and get the IT department to do a full and complete sweep of the building.

That’s why this is a big deal.

COHEN, NEW YORK, EMOLUMENTS, AND OTHER LAWSUITS

Stormy Daniels’ tell-all book on Trump: salacious detail and claims of cheating

I sincerely apologize for this in advance.

A copy of the book, Full Disclosure, was obtained by the Guardian. In it, Daniels describes her mounting disbelief as Trump began to win primary contests in 2016 for the Republican presidential nomination. Former castmates whom she had not heard from in years, but who had heard her story about sleeping with Trump in 2006, would call her up to marvel at the news.

“It will never happen, I would say,” Daniels writes. “He doesn’t even want to be president.”

But as Trump kept winning, Daniels writes, she began to think she might be in danger. The story she had to tell about Trump seemed more sensitive the more he won. And she had already been threatened once, years earlier, and warned never to tell the story about Trump, she has claimed.

Those moments of fear and doubt – and Daniels’ decision on the eve of the election to sign a $130,000 hush agreement – hang around a detailed description of Daniels’ alleged tryst with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California. In the book, Daniels writes in sometimes excruciating detail about the president’s genitals and describes her disgust with herself for letting the scene play out.

She continued to answer Trump’s many phone calls over the next year in hopes that he would make good on his promise to put her on his reality television show, The Apprentice, Daniels writes. Trump even suggested that a cheat could be arranged to allow her to survive through more episodes of the show, she writes.

“We’ll figure out a way to get you the challenges beforehand,” she quotes him as saying. “And we can devise your technique.”

“He was going to have me cheat, and it was 100 percent his idea.”

No, not that.

The crux of the book, however, follows Daniels’ decision to go public with her story about Trump just before the election, after years of hiding the affair, she writes, from her then-husband. Going public meant that she and her daughter would be less vulnerable to attack, she reasoned. She recounts a story she has told elsewhere, of being approached by a large man in a gym parking lot in 2011 and warned not to tell the story about Trump. Trump has said the parking lot story is “a total con job.”

No, not that either.

The memoir narrates Daniels’ first experiences as a stripper while still in high school, and how she broke into the porn industry, through which she rose to become an award-winning director, writer and star.

It was in that role that Daniels attended a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California, in 2006, where she and two colleagues greeted golfers between holes. There she first sees Trump: “He had a red cap, a Trump crest as a placeholder for the MAGA slogan not one of us could see coming.”

Trump’s bodyguard invites Daniels to dinner, which turns out to be an invitation to Trump’s penthouse, she writes, in a description of alleged events that Daniels has disclosed previously but which in the book are rendered with new and lurid detail. She describes Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small”.

Close. Disgustingly close.

“He knows he has an unusual penis,” Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…

A toadstool.

“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart…

Toad

WHY?????? WHHYYYYYYYYYY????

“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”

Aside from being happily married, this is why I would never fuck a porn star. But mostly because my A-game isn’t even her warm-up. This would be like playing catch with Tom Brady or fighting Ronda Rousey. It’s the greatest achievement of your sports life, but for them it’s a pity play with some crazy fan.

Daniels’ alleged relationship with Trump included one moment in 2007, she writes, in which she is with Trump in a hotel room watching a Shark Week broadcast on cable television when he receives a phone call from Hillary Clinton, then running against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Then, to make it crazier, Hillary Clinton called,” Daniels writes. “He had a whole conversation about the race, repeatedly mentioning ‘our plan’…

“Even while he was on the phone with Hillary, his attention kept going back to the sharks.”

What in the actual fuck? The timing is a bit nuts, but not completely out of the question. At the time, Trump was still a Democrat, at least in name. He didn’t leave the party until the black guy won. Just like a lot of other old racists that I know.

Since I described Trump’s unimpressive, mushroom shaped flaccid tiny little pecker, here’s some eye bleach.

Box of puppies

Starbucks Kitty

Pittie

Pair

Now, here’s a question for you as we head for the November midterm elections, sure to be seen as a referendum on the president: Could Donald Trump be a one-man version of either Enron or Lehman Brothers, someone who cooked “the books” until, well, he imploded?

Since we’ve never seen his tax returns, right now we really don’t know. What we do know is that he’s been dodging bullets ever since the Justice Department accused him of violating the Fair Housing Act in his operation of 39 buildings in New York City in 1973. Unlike famed 1920s mob boss Al Capone, he may never get done in by something as simple as tax evasion, but time will tell.

Rest assured of one thing though: He won’t go down easily, even if he is already the subject of multiple investigations and a plethora of legal slings and arrows. Of course, his methods should be familiar. As President Calvin Coolidge so famously put it, “the business of America is business.” And the business of business is to circumvent or avoid the heat… until, of course, it can’t.

TRUMP THE MUSHROOM DICKED RUSSIAN ASSET

Kavanaugh

Fuck them. They didn’t have to leave their home and go into hiding because of these allegations, like Dr. Ford’s family.

TRAITOR TOTS

FIGHTING BACK

IMMIGRATION

U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.

The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.

In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.

The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

COLD WAR 2.0

#NEVERAGAIN

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

SCOTUS AND #METOO – THE KAVANAUGH RAPEYTIME ADVENTURE SERIES

Absofuckinglutely. Maybe, just maybe, if someone was afraid of a sexual assault they performed as a kid would haunt them the rest of their lives, they might not do it in the first place. Besides, like I said yesterday in Daily Check-In 09/17/2018, this “Boys will be boys” bullshit only applies to white men in privileged upbringings. The same old white men using this excuse today would be lining up to try a 17 year old black male as an adult for the attempted rape of a 15 year old white girl.

Tanya Harrell was working at a McDonald’s in New Orleans, making $8.15 an hour, when a co-worker approached her and then touched her “in my private areas,” she says. “He was very aggressive. And I just never thought that he would do something like that.”

When Harrell tried to report the incident to her managers, “they didn’t take it very seriously,” she told the Cut. Then, she says, a different co-worker forced her into a bathroom stall at work. He “did a lot of uncomfortable things towards me,” she recounted, emotion building in her voice — including, she claims, exposing himself to her. “When I was telling him to stop he didn’t stop,” she said. “I almost got raped, I got assaulted, I got treated unfairly … he didn’t show me no respect.”

After what happened when she reported the first incident, she didn’t even bother speaking up. “The owners really don’t care,” she said. “I really feel like they don’t care at all.”

In May, Harrell and nine other McDonald’s employees filed a federal complaint against the company. Four months later, they say they haven’t received any response — so today, they’re going on strike to protest what they describe as the company’s inability, or unwillingness, to prevent sexual harassment in its restaurants. Today’s action is not just bold, but historic, advocates say: This is the first-ever nationwide strike against sexual harassment, and it’s led by working-class women of color in a moment of reckoning that tends to be dominated by accounts of the wealthy and privileged.

Today’s action will take place during the lunchtime rush, in ten cities simultaneously: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Durham. This is wholly unprecedented, according to Annelise Orleck, a professor of history at Dartmouth College. “A multi-state strike on the same day at the same time? Yes, this is the first,” she told the Cut. “We’re starting to see strikes again being considered viable options among workers … This strike is a sign of a very different kind of labor movement” — one that’s “led by women of color.”

“There’s a lot going on among workers,” she added. “It’s not just a handful of actresses in Hollywood.”

The ten women behind the May sexual-harassment charges, which were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with the help of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, say they experienced lewd comments, propositions, groping, and even sexual assault while working at the fast-food chain. They also say that when they reported what had happened to them, they were ignored, if not retaliated against.

But these charges have yet to get McDonald’s attention, it seems. “They have not reacted at all,” Harrell said.

Tara Strong: Triggered

I’m officially triggered. I’m furious. I’m speaking now mostly to the women coming out in defense of #Kavanaugh. How absolutely dare you. Just because someone is a “nice guy”, a pillar of the community, a good husband, father, or basketball coach, does not mean he never assaulted anyone. Just because he didn’t attack you doesn’t mean he never attacked anyone. Super seemingly nice people do horrible things. It’s incredibly hard to step forward and speak your abuse story. I myself have not yet done that. It’s even harder when someone is respected, seemingly a good person. The fact is, not ONE person publicly shaming #ProfessorFord was there. Not ONE of you can say what definitively took place. How dare women film commercials or sign their name professing what a great man he is. Not ONE of you were there. Don’t get me started on the Men. You know who you are, dudes who know they have their own skeletons, terrified that one day their victims will bravely step forward. She deserves to be listened to. She deserves to be treated with respect and kindness. She deserves to be believed. I’m shaking. Shame on #GOP trying to sweep this under the rug. None of you were there.None of you felt her fear. None of you have ANY RIGHT to come to his defense.The hypocrisy of the #GOP rushing through this candidate is despicable, & so is every single person who comes to his defense. #IBelieveChristine

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

ELECTION 2018

The Supreme Court today denied a stay, and lifted a temporary stay by Chief Justice Roberts, in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s (CREW) landmark dark money case against Crossroad GPS and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This decision, following similar decisive decisions by the district court and court of appeals this week, means that effective immediately, anyone making more than $250 in express advocacy ads — ads that tell viewers who to vote for or against — must now disclose the identities of all contributors who gave more than $200 in a year. They must also identify who among those contributors earmarked their contributions for express ads. Because of this decision, the contributors for a major category of dark money spending this fall will have to be disclosed to the public.

HURRICANES

ENVIRONMENT AND SCIENCE

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

IN OTHER NEWS…

RUMOR MILL

That’s it for Tuesday. I’m thinking of shifting some sections around, and also looking to get back to some regular story posts.

I’m not sure what’s coming around the bend this week, but there’s two points I’ve seen.

First, the Kavanaugh nomination has gone sideways faster than a drift car. Rumors are floating around that the GOP expected a sexual harassment or assault allegation to arise at some point, but not this one. They had that letter of 65 women ready to go too fast. Plus, character witnesses from the school across town saying that he didn’t try to rape any of them is a pretty shallow thing. Also, Kavanaugh’s story has already changed. One spokesperson said that the two were just having some rough play, but that counters his earlier claims that he was never at the party. We’re only a couple days in, and it’s gone weird. Trump’s general silence on the matter is interesting as well. No 4AM tweetstorms calling her out, no rushing to Kavanaugh’s defense, and no full-throated support for him. We’ve gotten Trump’s standard don’t-believe-the-woman response. It’s almost like they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Second, the Carter Page push. Why now? Why make this push to out all of these sources now? Remember, Manafort flipped on Friday ( Daily Check-In 09/14/2018), and the first thing he did on Monday (Daily Check-In 09/17/2018 ) was order this release. He’s desperate and grasping at straws. He can’t fight this in court, he’s tried firing Mueller, Rosenstein, and Sessions multiple times and failed, and his allies now the minute the Democrats win the House, his number is up. They’ll tie him up in investigations from now until the heat death of the universe, even after Impeachment. His only shots at avoiding a disgraceful exit are hoping the Supreme Court rules that he’s above the law, or that there’s enough doubt about the investigation due to sources getting blown or witnesses not being able to show up. With Kavanaugh looking like things might blow up for him, his only other tactic is blow everything up. I mean that in the metaphorical sense, hopefully not the literal one.

Thank you, and have a good one.

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

3 thoughts on “Daily Check-In 09/18/18”

Laura says:

September 20, 2018 at 1:01 pm

Your eye bleach helped. A lot. Like a lot, a lot.

LikeLiked by 2 people

Pingback: Daily Check-In 09/21/2018 – None of this is Normal
Pingback: Daily Check-In 01/15/2019 – None of this is Normal

Daily Check-In 09/18/18

Published by noneofthisisnormal

3 thoughts on “Daily Check-In 09/18/18”

Leave a Reply to Laura Cancel reply

Share this:

Like this:

Published by noneofthisisnormal

3 thoughts on “Daily Check-In 09/18/18”

Leave a Reply to Laura Cancel reply