Tag: Politics

Daily Check-In 12/27/2018

Thursday, December 27, 2018

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON – A mobile phone traced to President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016, at the height of the presidential campaign, leaving an electronic record to support claims that Cohen met secretly there with Russian officials, four people with knowledge of the matter say.

During the same period of late August or early September, electronic eavesdropping by an Eastern European intelligence agency picked up a conversation among Russians, one of whom remarked that Cohen was in Prague, two people familiar with the incident said.

…

Both of the newly surfaced foreign electronic intelligence intercepts were shared with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter said. Mueller is investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether Trump’s campaign colluded in the scheme. Mueller also is examining whether Trump has obstructed the sweeping inquiry.

McClatchy reported in April 2018 that Mueller had obtained evidence Cohen traveled to Prague from Germany in late August or early September of 2016, but it could not be learned how that information was gleaned.

If the foreign intelligence intercepts are accurate, the big questions now are whether Cohen has acknowledged to investigators that a meeting in Prague occurred, informed them what transpired and revealed what, if anything, he told Trump about it.

Four people spoke with McClatchy on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of information shared by their foreign intelligence connections. Each obtained their information independently from foreign intelligence connections.

The story they’re talking about was released on Daily Check-In 04/13/2018, but the new part is McClatchy has more sources and each source is independent of one another.  So they’ve got four spooks saying that an Eastern European Nation **coughRomanianscough** were listening to the Russians and caught them talking about meeting with Michael Cohen.  Even better, one of Cohen’s phones was caught pinging a cell tower in a suburb of Prague in 2016.

Here’s the thing with cell phone towers.  If your phone has even the slightest amount of battery charge, it’s going to try to get a signal.  It will send a request out to any nearby cell phone towers, and if one is available, it will respond with a time to return the message.  Since we’re dealing with electricity and the speed of light, this happens in milliseconds.  If there’s only one tower in range, there will be a record saying the phone is a certain time away, which can be calculated to a distance pretty easily, but all that means is that the phone is a certain distance from one tower.  Most places, like a major city like Prague, will have multiple towers for the phone to ping.  When multiple distances from known points are calculated together, that is called triangulation.  The triangulation is usually accurate to within 50 feet.  It’s not enough to find it in your apartment, but accurate enough to find what building it’s in.  We’re not even talking about GPS yet, either.

The phone, the tower, and the provider all have a record of this transaction.

I wonder who he supposedly met.

It said Konstantin Kosachev, a longtime member of the Russian Senate and chairman of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee, “facilitated” the gathering.

Wow.  The same person that Rand Paul met on behalf of the Russian Government also worked on the Cohen Prague meeting.  What a coinkidink.

Jan Neumann, the assumed name of a former Russian intelligence officer who defected to the United States years ago, said that Cohen’s electronic cell tower trail appears to reflect sloppy “tradecraft.”

“You can monitor and control cell phones in Europe same as you do it here in US,” Neumann told McClatchy. “As long as the battery is physically located in the phone, even when it’s turned off, the mobile phone’s approximate location can be detected and tracked. Any attempt to use an app, to get mail, send texts, connect to a Wifi network, your phone and your location will be detected.”

“It would not be very professional to take your phone to a secret meeting,” said Neumann, who has consulted for the U.S. intelligence community. In this case, he said, “it would be more logical to leave it turned on and connected to a WIFI network in a hotel in Germany.”

It was during the same late August-early September time span in 2016 that an Eastern European intelligence agency eavesdropped on a conversation in which a Russian official advised another that Cohen was in Prague, two of the sources said.

The sources could not definitively pin down the date or dates that the intelligence indicated Cohen was in the vicinity of Prague. Cohen has insisted that he was in Southern California with his son from Aug. 23-29, 2016, but his public alibis have not been so airtight as to preclude flights to and from Europe during the relevant period.

-McClatchy, citing 4 sources, says Cohen was in Prague-area in Summer 2016 -2 sources tell me that another major news org has confirmation. -Cohen tweets he has never been to Prague -WSJ says Cohen told them he went to Prague in 2001.

Greg Gordon of McClatchy told a colleague of mine 10 days ago, “We publish what we have nailed down to an editor’s satisfaction…I can’t help noting that I was a Pulitzer finalist and also contributed to our Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the Panama Papers three years ago.”

McClatchy has updated their story to include Cohen’s recent denials. Privately to me, a source tells me that they “absolutely” stand by the story.

This is one of the last major pieces from the Steele Dossier that hasn’t been completely confirmed yet, along with the Rosneft sale and the Pee tape.  Even though we’ve seen things pointing to those parts, we haven’t gotten hard confirmation from the mainstream press yet.

Yet.

I guess you could say that we’re making… Prague-ress on this story?

How about that this story… Czech’s out?

The Pun Jar is now at $250.

Most likely, this is a nude selfie of the troll, but it might be worse.  Much worse.  Like Chris Christie or Sam Clovis naked worse.

 

 

 

 

SHUTDOWN: DAY 6

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Whitaker

 

Mercer

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

IMMIGRATION

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

STUDENT ISSUES

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

ELECTIONS

  1. NEW: FEC filings released today reveal Cindy-Hyde Smith is NOT honoring requests from corporations for refunds of their campaign contributions. Union Pacific, Boston Scientific, Walmart, Leidos, AT&T, Pfizer, Ernst & Young, Facebook and Walgreens did not get their money back
  2. Two entities, MLB and Amgen, were able to reverse their contributions but only by canceling their checks. (Cattlemen’s Association refund appears unrelated.)
  3. Hyde-Smith did return money from the majority owner of the San Francisco Giants and his wife. (They are major GOP donors so perhaps there was pressure from above.) She also returned 5K to Peter Zieve after a http://Popular.infothat showed he was an outspoken racist
  4. Hyde-Smith is not legally obligated to return the money, but it may make it harder for her to raise money in the future. It’s like a clothing store that stops accepting returns. She’s strapped for cash. Only about 60K on hand and another election in 2020.
  5. I’ll be continuing to closely monitor this story in 2019. We’ll see who donates when they think no one is watching. To support the independent journalism that forced these companies to repudiate Hyde-Smith, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Popular Information Original research and fresh insight into the political news that matters most. popular.info          

 

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for Thursday.  I’m planning on doing a retrospective piece this weekend along with Friday’s Check-In.  As far as next week, I’d like to not carry anything across the year change, so the weekend and Monday will be one post, then New Year’s Day for another.

There’s also some housecleaning I need to do with this site.  I’d like to get that done as well.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 12/26/2018

Wednesday, December 26, 2018 and the Christmas Holiday.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Roberts on Sunday temporarily halted a contempt order the company is facing for resisting the subpoena, including the fines the company is accruing for defying the subpoena. Roberts’ order is public, but it provided no new details about the case. His move came after the company on Saturday requested the stay, in a filing that is noted in the court’s docket but is not available to be read publicly.

Roberts on Sunday ordered briefing on the matter due by noon on Dec. 31. It is possible those filings will be under seal.

Previously, an appellate court panel upheld the subpoena, in a vaguely worded judgement. The court revealed that the case had been brought by an unnamed company, owned by “Country A,” that had claimed that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act made the company immune from the subpoena. The appellate court affirmed a district court’s decision that said the matter fell within an exception in the law for commercial activities.

Even during a holiday, we still get some Mueller case news.  As far as I know, this is the first time that the Supreme Court will hear a case under seal.  Of course, that’s as far as I know.

 

SHUTDOWN

As of this post, the government has been shut down for almost a week, with no end in sight.  There should be some opportunities for negotiations on Thursday and Friday, but if nothing happens by then, I wouldn’t expect it to end until after the new Congressional session starts on January 3rd.

 

TRADE WAR, HEALTH CARE, & ECONOMY

In the past week, the stock market has started to tank based off of the activity of the last year with the tariffs and the last couple weeks with Trump and Mnuchin being dumbasses at best.  Last week was especially harsh.  Personally, my tiny little portfolio dropped 10 percent IN ONE WEEK.  That’s bad.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A INDIVIDUAL-1

I’m not going to go into the whole Santa thing.  Insulting a child for believing in Santa Claus on Christmas Eve should be a major faux pas in a regular universe, but in this timeline it’s not even the worst or stupidest thing of the week.

For the first time since becoming President, Trump visited troops in something resembling a war zone.  At first I wasn’t sure if this was real or not.  Then, I saw the stories about Trump screwing up.  That was enough proof.

That’s the kind of world we live in.

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRAITOR TOTS

Whitaker

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

IMMIGRATION

 

SCOTUS 

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

STUDENT ISSUES

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for the last few days.  I stayed off of Twitter for the last couple days.  It was quite refreshing.  I plan on writing a 2018 retrospective piece in the next couple days.

We’re in the lull of the holidays, but things still happen.  Thursday’s post will include a little something about Cohen’s visit to Prague.  Looks like there’s some …. Prage-ress on that front.

The Pun Jar is now at $243.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 12/21/2018

Friday, December 21, 2018 and the weekend.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Jill Stein

And now, the obligatory picture of Jill Stein…

img_5419

 

Flynn

 

Whitaker

So, after the Cohen guilty plea came out, Trump lost his shit on Whitaker and asked him why he didn’t stop the attorneys in SDNY from naming him as an unindicted co-conspirator.

Obstruction of Justice exhibit #4,398, 209.

 

Reality Check

 

Working During the Shutdown

 

Mystery Subpoena Case

Assuming that SCOTUS hears the case, they’ve never taken one on before that was sealed this tight the whole way up.  That we know of.

 

 

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Here’s the thing with this newest shutdown: Nobody wins in the United States.  If the Democrats cave and give in to the wall, they lose their high ground and will screw themselves in the future with the next shutdown when Trump says he wants more money, which he will.  The only reason he won’t is if he’s gone by February, and that feels a little soon for his ouster.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

ISIS, Syria, Turkey, Mattis, Et. Al.

As much as I hate saying it, everything is connected.

Erdogan wants three things following the Jamal Khashoggi murder.

  1. Mohammed Bone Saw to face charges in the murder.
  2. Gulen sent to him for other crimes.
  3. The U.S. out of Syria.

Since Trump, Kushner, and Pompeo are accessories to murder after the fact, Option 1 isn’t happening.  And as much as Trump want to send Gulen to Turkey, we have this thing called Due Process, so Option 2 is out.  That leaves Option 3.  Trump will order the U.S. out of Syria to cover up his crimes.

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

 

TRAITOR TOTS

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

SCOTUS & COURTS

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

IMMIGRATION

GoFundMe, GoFuckYourself

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PRIESTS & RELIGION

 

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for the last few days.  This post is very light on the explanations and editorializing because, quite frankly, I’m running out of time.  I’m posting this on Christmas Eve, and I have about 6 hours of cleaning to do in about 2 hours.  It’s not impossible, it’s just a pain in the ass.

I’ll be back in a couple days.  I’ll cover the Christmas holiday and Boxing Day on one post.  I’ll also try to get a couple essays done this week.

Happy Holidays everyone.

To those who Christmas is your thing, Merry Christmas.  If you prefer to celebrate the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Saturnalia, Mithras, Yule, Kwanza, Diwali, or Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday, then enjoy your thing.

Yes, I know that Ramadan moves based off of the Lunar calendar and is currently in the Summer and Diwali is in October.  Screw it, I’m putting them in the list in case I missed anyone.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

 

 

 

 

Daily Check-In 12/20/2018

Thursday, December 20, 2018.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Fuckery at the Treasury

This is bad.  Real bad.  There are four stories rolled into this bombshell from BuzzFeed News.

  1. The Russians were able to convince people in the Treasury Department to hand over sensitive financial documents to anonymous Gmail and Hotmail accounts.
  2. There are people in the Treasury that are at best idiots and criminally negligent, and at worst spies for Russia.
  3. There is an interoffice battle between all of the various investigative groups inside and outside of the Treasury that has devolved into a pissing contest.
  4. Things are so fucked that career officials feel the need to go to the press with their concerns because no one they work for or with gives a fuck.

Remember the FinCEN official that leaked Paul Manafort’s SAR to a BuzzFeed reporter after it disappeared from the official system?  (Daily Check-In 10/17/2018)  The following section speaks to Point 4.

The report indicates that there is some turmoil behind closed doors at FinCEN:

At least 10 FinCEN employees have filed formal whistleblower complaints about the department. The whistleblowers say they tried multiple times to raise concerns about issues they believed threatened national security, but that they faced retaliation instead of being heeded. Some of FinCEN’s top officials quit in anger. One senior adviser has been arrested and accused of releasing financial records to a journalist.

The arrested and accused adviser referred to in that last line was Edwards. Remarkably, Edwards is said to have raised her concerns about Russian efforts to access confidential bank records of Hillary Clinton supporters in the Summer of 2016, months before the election.

Edwards reportedly spoke with “six different congressional committee staffers to air her concerns.” Then, in July and August 2018, she purportedly met with “staffers of one of the Senate committees investigating Russian interference during the presidential campaign.” It was then that she claimed that FinCEN “withheld documents revealing suspicious financial transactions of Trump associates that the committee had requested.” Edwards and an unnamed colleague reportedly had “lawful documented evidential disclosures of violations of law, rule, and regulations, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority, and substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

Holy fuck on a fuck fig newton, this is bad.  She went to her boss, her boss’s boss, HR, the Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel (Different from Mueller), several Congressional staffers and at least one Senate staffer, and NOTHING?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Everyone either ignored her, blew her off, were covering shit up, or too worried about how things would look for them if the news got out that people at FinCEN sent financial records for Hilary Clinton supporters and enemies of the Kremlin to anonymous email addresses associated with Russia instead of the secured system they’re supposed to use.

Wait, what the actual fuck?

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Yeah, it gets worse.  Much, much worse.

The first chapter in this extraordinary chain of communications began in late 2015, when a unit of the Treasury Department called the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes entered into an agreement, named the ISIL Project, that called for Russia and the US to share information on financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS.

…

Even more concerning: Documents show senior officials within the Terrorist Financing unit were communicating with Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than using the standard secure channels.

When she found out, FinCEN’s chief of staff was stunned.

“They sent this to a GMAIL account? Is that normal?” she asked in an email to a half dozen colleagues on Nov. 28, 2016.

The chief of staff was responding to Treasury colleagues who were discussing with Rosfinmonitoring the outlines of their agreement to track terrorism financiers.

“Unfortunately, Rosfin does prefer throwaway gmail accounts as their preferred method to communicate,” a FinCEN intelligence official responded.

This is some absolutely terrible OpSec.  FinCEN has a secured communication line that everyone in the world uses to keep the documents secure.  If Jordan wants a copy of a report, they log in to the system and request it from FinCEN.  They get what they need, and that’s it.  The information stays in the system.

Email is not secure.  Even a “secured” email is very weak.  And sending an attachment to an email guarantees that no one will have control over it from that point on.  Once an email is sent, the recipient can do with it what they want.  We normally trust people to not be dicks with that mail, but every so often someone does something dickish.

The Russians are the definition of being dicks with email.  Just ask the DNC, John Podesta, the RNC, and Westinghouse.

In reference to the second point, there are some ridiculously naive people working in the Treasury Department, and that’s a best case scenario.  In a worst case scenario, they’re actively committing espionage against the United States of America.

But don’t worry, it gets worse.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

Let me break this down to show how absolutely fucked up this scenario is.

A few weeks before the June 9 Trump Tower meeting between Team Trump and Natalia Veselnitskaya’s team Rosnefmonitoring asked for and likely received sensitive financial documents for investors tied to HRC.  Around this time, Aras Agalarov hears about this from the Russian equivalent of the Attorney General, who wants to pass along this information to their asset in the United States, Donald Trump.  Aras calls Emin who contacts Rob Goldstone who emails Donnie Jr. who says “If it’s what you say it is, I love it.  Especially later in the summer.”

What am I saying?  I’m saying that it’s highly possible that someone at FinCEN or another Treasury Department team sent the Russians the “dirt” they claimed they had on HRC for their meeting with Team Trump.

That covers points 1 & 2.  For point 3, well…

In May 2017, a bomb exploded at an Ariana Grande concert in northwest England and killed 23 people. The following month, knife-wielding terrorists attacked pedestrians near London Bridge.

Because the US has access to the largest set of financial records in the world, the British turned to the Americans for help. In the first frantic moments following an attack, FinCEN’s financial databases can reveal important information about the killers, others in their network, or whether another plot is imminent.

FinCEN analysts sprang into action, racing to their headquarters in Northern Virginia to begin searching for clues on a Saturday night. But when they arrived, they discovered that everyone on duty had been locked out of the classified networks that they depended upon. They couldn’t open links from the FBI about the suspected terrorists they were supposed to be chasing and they couldn’t trace the suspects’ funding.

That night, two dozen FinCEN employees learned that the digital keys they needed to unlock classified data had expired without warning. The suspects remained on the run in London, but FinCEN was unable to help track them.

The office that administered those security keys was OIA, FinCEN’s rival department.

Staffers were furious.

“We have escalated the critical problem to key individuals,” one of the whistleblowers wrote in an email, “and we still DO NOT have the ability to complete our mission or fully protect the American people.”

OIA blamed the FinCEN employees for forgetting to update their permissions. But more than a dozen FinCEN officials said they saw the incident as retaliation for their earlier power struggle. OIA had sent its own staffers an email weeks earlier reminding them to apply for new keys, but had not sent that same email to anyone at FinCEN. OIA officials blamed that oversight on “time” and “resource restraints.”

The divide grew, and made its way to Congress, where Republican Steve Pearce, chair of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance, demanded answers. The Treasury Department’s inspector general stepped in again to investigate, and concludedthat OIA had done nothing wrong — though he did acknowledge the strained relationship between OIA and FinCEN.

The whistleblowers told BuzzFeed News they have largely given up on seeing anyone at FinCEN, OIA, and TFFC held accountable for the chaos that they say has torn the Treasury apart over the past two years.

“It is very hard to measure the sum total of the damage done,” said one of the whistleblowers, a senior FinCEN official. “We are treading water right now.”

I know I’m bouncing around, but so does this article.  This final point is that the Treasury Department is an interdepartmental clusterfuck manned by a handful of petty dicks getting into a pissing contest with each other, and this pettiness and desire to not look like complete and total fuckups creates the atmosphere that everything is a clusterfuck.

There’s one good side of this article.  The authors of this piece, Leopold and Cormier, are in contact with Mueller’s team and wouldn’t release this piece unless they got the go-ahead.  If this is making the press, something big is about to drop like a Hamilton Mix-Tape.

 

Whitaker’s Refusal of Recusal

Here’s the short, short version; Matt Whitaker asked the DOJ Ethics Advisors if he should recuse from the Mueller Investigation.  They said “Recuse.” He didn’t like that answer, so he kept bouncing around until he found someone that said yes.  He then took that yes, ran to reporters and said “See, I can haz Mueller.”  It took a couple hours for the news to come out to straighten this out.

 

Barr Should Be Barred

Looks like we’ll have to relive this mess in a few months.

 

Roger’s Testimony

I talked about this yesterday (Daily Check-In 12/19/2018), and I’m honestly surprised they did this.  I was expecting things to go downhill faster than an alpine skier losing an edge.

 

 

COLD WAR 2.0

Syria, Afghanisatan, and Mattis

This is bad.  The only person in the United States that thinks this is a good move is Tangerine Tojo.

Gee, I wonder how this can get worse.

Oh, fuck.

Fuck.

FUCK.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Defense Secretary James Mattis has resigned. Here’s the letter:

This might be the most “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” letter I’ve seen in quite a while.

I’ll talk more about Mad Dog’s “Retirement” in the Coda.

 

 

 

COHEN, NEW YORK, AND THE OTHER LAWSUITS

 

TRUMP THE RUSSIAN ASSET A.K.A. INDIVIDUAL-1

Shutdown

 

TRAITOR TOTS

 

FIGHTING BACK

 

RIGHT WING TERRORISM & WHITE NATIONALISM

 

#METOO & WOMEN’S RIGHTS

 

IMMIGRATION

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

TRADE WAR AND ECONOMY

 

GOP: THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

ENVIRONMENT & SCIENCE

 

CONGRESS

 

ELECTIONS

 

THINKING AHEAD

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

IN OTHER NEWS…

 

RUMOR MILL

 

That’s it for Thursday.  Fuck.  I’m not sure how to react with Mattis’s firing.  He was the last adult in the room.  At least, the last one who isn’t a complete sycophant.  He’s kept an air of normalcy around the White House.  No matter how nutty things got with Trump, at least Mattis was there to keep things under control.  But abandoning Syria was a bridge too far for him, and he resigned.  His letter skipped all of the “It was an honor to serve for you” and the similar platitudes.  The nicest part in that letter was “Dear Mr. President.”

On one hand, I’m worried about what will happen.  On the other hand, this might be the final straw.  If putting up with Trump is too much for a guy named “Mad Dog” then expect some pushback from the establishment Republicans.  At least those that aren’t completely compromised.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur