It Offends Me, Rudy

 

Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles. Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the whole time." It's a lovely post.

Rudolph Giuliani in a NewsMax interview last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):

Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports are murderers! 

The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written statement in which he said:

Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

The Worst Gets Some Convictions

 

I get it about the reading disability, but he should be able to ask one of his lawyers www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 30, 2024 at 1:53 PM

You'd think he'd have figured some of it out by now: It's illegal to falsify business records in New York State. Just three or four months ago Trump was found liable for $355 million worth of falsified business records, has he forgotten about that? That was a civil case (for Trump; it was a criminal case for his company and its CFO Allen Weisselberg), and the thing that made it important was the sheer magnitude of the crime, but it's basically falsifying business records, the financial statements Trump put out for the bankers and insurance brokers who needed to know how much risk he posed:

falsifying business records, and conspiring to falsify business records, in order to issue a false financial statement and commit insurance fraud. (In some cases, notably that of his primary lender Deutsche Bank, the corporate culture was so corrupt that they didn't care how much of the company's money they were throwing away, but that doesn't make it OK, as they try to tell you by calling it a victimless crime.)

Today's verdict was in a criminal case, and involved a tiny amount of money in comparison (though it would be an awful lot of money to me, and pretty much everybody I know), but it too was all about falsifying business records, at bottom, the records of Trump's payments to his New York fixer Michael Cohen, disguising them as a regular attorney retainer—

Bad January 6 Takes

Image by Quinta Jurecic.

Jason Willick, opinionist, in The Washington Post:

The strongest part of Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment has its own weaknesses

You see, the indictment makes a whole big deal of how Trump totally had a First Amendment right to tell all the lies he wanted about the 2020 election, and yet:

Yet the bulk of the indictment is devoted to recounting instances where Trump did just that. It summarizes at length his false tweets, his false retweets, and his false statements to supporters, advisers, state politicians and his own vice president. The indictment shows that after losing the 2020 election, the former president launched a malicious campaign of political lies.

Trump’s many lies, the indictment says, were “integral to his criminal plans” to overturn the 2020 election. But if Trump “had a right” to lie about the election, by the indictment’s own admission, then which acts make him subject to prosecution? The charges are at their weakest for failing to clearly disentangle the two.

Sit down, kid, and I'll see if I can explain.

You see, in our happy constitutional republic, may God bless it, we actually have many rights. For instance every American individual has a right (discovered by Justice Scalia in 2008—apparently it was right there in the Second Amendment all the time! it just looked like it was saying something completely different) to keep and bear firearms for personal use. And yet we do not have a right to take our firearm to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and shoot some random person dead with it. How, you ask, can that be? Because your right to keep and bear firearms does not mean you are allowed to use it to commit crimes, such as homicide. So keep it in your pants.

The same goes for your God-given right under the First Amendment to tell all the fool lies you want. You can! But you cannot use a lie to commit a crime, such as libel or perjury. I bet you already knew that, if you thought about it. So does Trump, for that matter: for example, Trump never sat in a courtroom under oath and told the judge that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He saved that, wisely, for his patsies in the press and his rally audiences.

He's not so good on the defamation side, having just lost $5 million last April for his lies about the author E. Jean Carroll, and being likely to lose more in the near future.

In the same way, you also cannot use a lie to commit fraud, and Trump seems to have some trouble grasping that. For instance, if you own a multilevel marketing scheme disguised as a university, you are allowed to brag to your friends, falsely, about what a great university it is, but not to the rubes who are shelling out the money for the worthless classes. When you lie to them about the quality of the classes and they believe you to the extent of giving you the money, you are setting yourself up to be forced to pay a $25-million settlement, as then-President Trump finally did in the Trump University case in 2018, after he'd exhausted all the avenues of appeal.

Lies are to fraud what guns are to homicide. Constitutionally speaking. You can keep and bear them, absolutely, but you need to watch what you do with them. 

That's why Trump's lies about the 2020 election are mentioned in the indictment, because of what he used them for. He falsely claimed that he had won the election ("by a lot") and Democrats had fraudulently stolen it, not just for fun, or wounded pride, but as an essential part of his conspiracies to defraud the United States and to obstruct and disrupt official proceedings and to deprive people of their rights. Allegedly. He had to tell his lies to make these things, the things with which he is charged in the indictment, happen.  

The lies he told are listed in the indictment because they are the weapons he used (and there is no "stand-your-ground" exception). The caution about First Amendment free speech rights is provided in the indictment to make it clear that Trump's charges have nothing to do with that. Obviously the prosecutorial team knows that Trump's lawyers will claim his free speech rights are being assaulted, so they are carefully foreclosing that as a defense. If you really can't understand that, you need to look for another job.

Titting vs. Tatting

"Tit for tat" was the title of a Thomas the Tank Engine episode where Bert gets splashed by some visitors and their car, and decides to pay them back. You can watch it, but you really don't have to.

As the forces of justice close in around Trump, I've been noticing the concern trolls coming out with a warning, "Don't go too far," addressed to various people, like the Jack Goldsmith column Tom covered the other day ("The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences" no-paywall gift link):

The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the [Justice] department for our politics and the rule of law. It will probably inspire ever more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposing party, to the detriment of sound government.

Oh noes, not investigations of presidential actions by future Congresses! Anything but that! Spare us!

Or shall we say this has already started, at the beginning of this year, with Gym Jordan's tit for Jamie Raskin's tat, and it's not going anywhere? I submit that's not because it's not aggressive enough. Rather, it's because it has nothing going for it in the way of facts, as is shown in the gap between what Jordan and Comer claim on Fox News and what they've been able to show in their respective committees, which is basically nothing—it may have plunged to its nadir last week, when they claimed Hunter Biden's former partner Devon Archer would provide specific evidence of Joe Biden's corrupt participation in their dealings but publication of the transcript showed clearly that, though he certainly didn't have anything nice to say about Hunter, he'd firmly insisted Joe Biden was not involved. (What's the rule about not asking the witness any questions unless you know what the answers are going to be?)

That Bar Won't Lower Itself

Hi Ben, you know how you were able to learn this? Because the interested parties publicly acknowledged it at the time.

It's Thomas's concealment of his and Mrs. Thomas's financial interests that breaks the law. https://t.co/xCIlueOUB6

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 14, 2023

Of course you know what Shapiro's doing here: not trying to demonstrate that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans, but rather that Republican bad things aren't really bad, because Democrats do them too. Look at that Biden! Sweetheart deal! Though it struck me as less than convincingly corrupt, if the value of the Biden house rose by a factor of six in a 20-year period, and a vacant lot not at all in a 5-year period. Why shouldn't that happen? should it have risen by 150% (i.e., one fourth of 600%) because house prices and land prices always change at a perfectly even and commensurable pace? Do they? How about if, while the lot remained undeveloped over the 5 years, they did some work on the house over the 20? What if they did a lot of work? 20 years is a while!

In fact, hard as it may be to believe, Eric got it wrong; it was a real mansion, 10,000 square feet and originally built by the Delaware Du Ponts, but a fixer-upper: in serious disrepair and slated for demolition when Biden picked it up in 1975 (when his salary was $44,600, not $174,000), and he renovated it extensively over the 20 years he lived there. And since, although Ben Shapiro and Eric Trump are evidently unaware of this, inflation exists, you should note that when comparing the prices: in constant 2020 dollars, he paid $895,014.87 for the house in 1975 and sold it in 1996 for $1,990,669.22, so far from sextupling in value, it had not quite doubled.

And even that's not the thing I was wanting to say, which is that even if this deal smelled as bad as Justice Thomas's deals with the billionaire sugar daddy who paid for him and Mrs. Thomas to go on an all-stops-out luxury vacation every year (both side they were vacationing together, but the description of the Indonesian holiday suggests Crow didn't go on that one), set up Mrs. Thomas in her own rightwing think tank where she paid herself a six-figure salary out of the funds he supplied, and bought the house Thomas was raised in by his grandparents so his mother could go on living there without paying any property taxes, along with a some properties on the block including the one next door where his mother felt the tenants were too noisy—even if it smelled that bad, it wouldn't have been illegal, and nor would the money Thomas took.

Because that's not the crime in Thomas's behavior (as far as we know, because nobody's proved it was all bribed): the crime is failure to report it.

And Biden reported it all, as he was required by law to do, and Thomas just didn't. And it doesn't matter in the least how deep and personal and satisfying his friendship with Mr. Crow was; he should have reported the transportation, the direct money and real estate gifts, and the wingnut welfare funding, regardless. 

There's a lot of this going on, trying to persuade the rubes that their boy was charged with a crime they weren't charged with—the most thorough effort has been the one saying Donald Trump was busted for bonking a porn star, which is idiotic and of course a bald lie: he was busted for falsifying business records of the payments his company made to silence the porn star (and maybe the Playboy Centerfold model as well, in a superseding indictment, because it was David Pecker who paid for that and they did interview him), in order to hide them from the public, because he didn't want voters to know in such detail about his bonking habits so soon after the appearance of the pussy-grabber tape; because the money the three of them (Pecker, Cohen, and Trump) spent on it consisted of illegal campaign contributions and illegally unreported loans, illegally structured and laundered in hope they wouldn't get caught.

Nobody's going to arrest you for consensual bonking! We're following the money!

And finally, there's Representative Empty Greene:

 No, Margie. His name is Jack, for starters. But not that there's anything especially wrong with white, male, Christian, or even antiwar (though this old hippie doesn't believe Empty Greene is really antiwar). That's shit that can happen to anybody. Texeira was arrested and charged for stealing sensitive military information and sharing it with people who didn't have the security qualifications to look at it.That's espionage. That's spying. And when Trump was doing it it was spying too. Don't tell me he was just doing it for entertainment, because that doesn't matter.

Literary Corner: Who Is Your Retribution?

Yoon Lee, "Retribution (Bud)", 2014, from a 2015 show at Pierogi Gallery, New York. 

You Remember It Just Like I Do

By Donald J. Trump, President of the United States (Semi-Retired), with Stephen Miller

This is Political Persecution
and Election Interference
at the highest level in history. From the time
I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,
and even before I was sworn in as your President
of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats -
the enemy of the hard-working Men and Women of this Country -
have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy
the Make America Great Again movement.

You remember it just like I do:
Russia, Russia, Russia;
the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine;
Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2;
the illegal and unconstitutional
Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen
in their obsession with trying to "Get Trump,"
but now they've done the unthinkable -
indicting a completely innocent person
in an act of blatant Election Interference.

Never before in our Nation's history
has this been done. The Democrats
have cheated countless times over the decades,
including spying on my campaign,
but weaponizing our justice system
to punish a political opponent,
who just so happens to be a President
of the United States and by far
the leading Republican candidate
for President, has never happened before.
Ever.

Let's just say for starters he doesn't "just so happen" to be a President of the United States. 

From the Gerth to the Moon

 

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon in the Greek animated version by Angelos Spartalis.

Jeff Gerth opens his massive report on "The Press Versus the President" (24,000 words, according to David Corn of Mother Jones) novelistically:

The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.

“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.

Actually it was Baquet (speaking that August to a group of staffers angry at the paper's restrictions on words like "racist" and "lie") who was fictionalizing: it doesn't seem particularly important, but the hearings in which Mueller testified under subpoena on July 24 2019, House Judiciary in the morning, House Intelligence in the afternoon, were not when the New York Times readership learned that the special prosecutor would not be prosecuting the president; they'd learned that exactly four months earlier. March 24, when Attorney General Barr issued his four-page report on Mueller's report. Mueller's report itself was released to the public, in redacted form, on May 18. What Mueller said no to on July 24 was any questions, more or less, asking him to say anything beyond what was in the report—he was really determined not to say anything that wasn't already public. 

For the Record: Trolled Again

Via.

It's a little self-indulgent on my part to run this whole idiotic thread, but it's about some misinformation in the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case which seems to be leaving a lot of people really confused.

Includes every scrap of paper the president happens to write a note on. They can't keep a running catalogue.

— Fully Weaponized Monster (@Yastreblyansky) December 8, 2022

Oh, yeah, I wasn't even thinking of the classified ones but of the whole mess. But who exactly is "they"? NARA wasn't informed of the TS docs, and was very surprised and disturbed to find them in the first shipment of boxes. Then they notified DOJ.

— Fully Weaponized Monster (@Yastreblyansky) December 8, 2022

Good News, Maybe

Kash air guitar dance moves. Vvia India Abroad.

This is something I landed on completely by chance, and I have no idea who else knows about it, except to the extent that the Establishment Media don't seem to, or at any rate they aren't talking about it, involving Mr. Kash Patel, the Devin Nunes staffer who ended up playing a peculiarly ambiguous role in the Trumpery, alongside the equally ambiguous Ezra Cohen-Watnick, of getting cycled into Trump administration jobs where nobody wanted him or seemed to know what he was supposed to be doing, leading to a certain amount of paranoia in which I myself was, not to put too fine a point on it, participating, especially after Mark Esper suddenly got fired as secretary of defense (on 9 November, 2020, shortly after the November 2020 election) and Patel suddenly got posted to the Pentagon as chief of staff to Esper's acting replacement, Christopher Miller, and we all started wondering why (Trump had floated the idea of making him deputy director of the FBI before, and acting CIA director after that).

As with so many other still-mysterious aspects of the Trump presidency, there’s a riddle at the center of Patel’s many activities. Beyond the basic goal of advancing Trump’s personal agenda, was there a larger mission? Was there a systematic plan, for example, to gain control of the nation’s intelligence and military command centers as part of Trump’s effort to retain the presidency, despite his loss in the November 2020 election? Or was this a more capricious campaign driven by Trump’s personal pique and score-settling without a clear strategy?

I was imagining things less grand and horrifying than that; I was thinking of him and his fellow minions rifling through the files drawers of DOD and pulling incriminating documents, to keep them out of the hands of the huge investigations that would no doubt be engulfing them all  after President-elect Biden was sworn in. Maybe something like the documents he was wishing for in February 2021:

For the Record: Debt Ceiling

This is something I started contemplating in July that's really starting to come into focus, and I'd never quite finished the story:

A thing people aren't realizing: Congress has NOT been voting to raise the debt ceiling over the past 8 years. McConnell made them vote to "suspend" it. There is actually no debt ceiling right now (until the current suspension expires at the end of the month). Which means...

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2021

It actually expired end of July, October is when Treasury runs out of short-term fixes. https://t.co/vyzPGOys0D

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2021

Which means...

There's still work to do

 

Sheriff's deputy Jason Meade, left, and the late Casey Goodson, right, via Atlanta Black Star.

Sometime last night, following up in The Times on the story of the 16-year-old in a Columbus foster home who was shot dead by police just a few minutes, as it happened, before the announcement of the verdict in the murder of George Floyd—Ma'khia Bryant, who was apparently having a conflict with a couple of other girls in the home and had threatened them with a knife, which would be a bad thing, though not a capital crime to be punished without trial, right on the spot—I noticed, down toward the end of the story:

Columbus has been gripped by tension over police shootings since early December, when Casey Goodson Jr., 23, was shot to death at the entrance of his home by a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy assigned to a fugitive task force.

If the Creek Do Rise, What Else Will? Protect Yourself!

 

Lindsay Graham, in his hypothetical, is fully armed, watching all his neighbors get killed by a gang. https://t.co/vlbEWUn0Gt

— A.R. (Ancient Router) Moxon (@JuliusGoat) March 28, 2021

Central, South Carolina (pop. ca. 5,385), home of Senator Lindsey Woolsey Graham, isn't in central South Carolina, but up in Pickens County in the state's far northwest, and not exactly in a hurricane zone, or prone to earthquakes or volcanoes

Pickens County, SC, via Wikipedia.

but that doesn't mean it's without its perils, as people learned last year in nearby Easley, and and all along the Calhoun Memorial Highway (Route 93) pretty much every year, when the spring rains come and the creeks rise.

Perfect

 

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty, via Center for American Progress, December 1980.

A year or so ago Rectification Central was exercised about the meaning of the word "perfect" as in 

“It was a warm, friendly conversation,” he said, referring to his conversation with Zelensky. “There was no quid pro quo. There was nothing. It was a perfect conversation.”

In what sense was it "perfect"? Without fault or flaw? Is a quid pro quo an "imperfection" that you should avoid, if conversational perfection is your aim? If you're an artist of conversation, would perfection be the standard you aim at? Perfection in some particular aspect, or overall? Who says something like that, about a phone call, and what do they have in mind?

Anyway this morning somebody on NPR—I think it was my girl Nina Totenberg—gave me the clue to what Trump actually meant, by comparing it with the incitement speech Trump gave to the Capitol rioters before their rampage on 6 January, as he described it 

So if you read my speech --
and many people have done it,
and I've seen it both in the papers
and in the media, on television --
it's been analyzed, and people thought
that what I said was totally appropriate.
And if you look at what other people have said --
politicians at a high level -- about the riots
during the summer, the horrible riots in
Portland and Seattle, in various other --
other places, that was a real problem --
what they said. But they've analyzed
my speech and words and my final
paragraph, final sentence and everybody,
to the T, thought it was totally appropriate.

(The theme in the middle section there is the official bothsides line with which the Republicans have approached the achievement, according to which the looting that took place on the edges of the Black Lives Matter marches in Minneapolis and New York in the first days after the murder of George Floyd and the occasional trash fires around the federal courthouse in Portland. were exactly the same as the murderous assault on the Capitol building—"you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM," said Louie Gohmert on 1 January—though if you don't recall Governor Kate Brown advising anti-fascist agitators to march down to the courthouse, telling them "if you don't fight like hell you don't have a country any more," I think your memory is accurate.)

Whoever it was said it was "a perfect speech", the way the Zelenskyy call was "a perfect conversation", and I realized he meant he thought it was unindictable—that he'd delivered his illicit message with such perfect subtlety that the cops would never be able to finger him for it, with the majesty of Don Vito and his perfect quid pro quo message

Area Republican: "Donald Trump never even mentioned violence!"

Don Vito Corleone: "I just made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2021

That he'd committed the perfect crime. He hoped.

Refund the police? Prefund the police? Confound the police!

Jean Cocteau, "Le Barman du Boeuf sur le Toit" (Bartender of "The Ox on the Roof" aka the Nothing Doing Bar), from Cocteau's scenario for a ballet to the score by Darius Milhaud, via Musica Brasiliensis. In the course of the scenario, if memory serves, there is a police raid, and the bar swiftly turns into a bucolic, innocent "milk bar" (section in slow waltz tempo with massed polychords around 7:00 to 9:20) and the baffled police leave them alone, after which the samba music starts up again.

Here's the thing. People want police. They do not want police who commit crimes. They do not want police who are on the take. In particular, they do not want police who kill children, or anybody. White people don't really want police to kill black people, though they often don't mind as much as they should. They want police who are good, and protect them from crimes. Black people want police to protect them from crimes too—that was a major impetus behind that famous crime bill back in 1994, that the African American community in cities wanted more police than their local governments were willing to pay for. 

Stingy local governments run by white people were shorting Black neighborhoods of policing, out of what was sometimes known in those days as "benign neglect", or maybe not so benign. They just didn't want to spend the money, and some people thought the federal government ought to pitch in. That was the reason a crime bill existed.

As it turned out, the crime bill did indeed provide enormous federal funding—for 100,000 cops. But it did nothing to ensure that the new cops in the inner city neighborhoods had any understanding of the neighborhoods they were going to be working in, and led to a lot of cops acting like occupying forces of a foreign invasion, some corruption, and quite a bit of violence. That was not a good thing. (The other aspect, the Republican part of the bill as it were, the new rules on criminal sentencing, the absurd differentiation between smoked cocaine and snorted cocaine as different kinds of "crimes" and the "three strikes" rules inviting states to adopt them, were a different kind of problem, though by no means a less serious one.)

Small Ball

Seven Springs Estate near Mt. Kisco; after local authorities refused to let him build a golf course and 15 private houses on the estate, Trump used not-developing it as a conservation easement charity deduction, probably inflating its value, while writing off the property taxes as a business expense. Photo by Craig Ruttle/AP, with a report on how New York attorney general Letitia James is looking at the setup from a criminal standpoint.

Total Fake News

by Donald J. Trump

I didn’t call on you. I’m talking
to him. You should be more respectful
of this gentleman. You’re very rude to him.

But I will tell you that I look forward to
releasing that. I look forward to
releasing many things. I’m going to
release many things, and people will
be really shocked. But the New York Times
has been doing — it’s fake story after
fake story. I’ve never seen anything like it.

And people understand it, and people —
that’s why the — the media has such a
low approval rating now because of
what they’ve done. It’s really a shame.

Well, then, that's not fake news, is it? In a unique feat of reporting, The New York Times has uncovered evidence backing up one of Trump's most idiotic-sounding claims: that audit that his taxes are always under, year in and year out, really exists—

Coverup Is Everywhere

National Archives photoshopped blurring of a protest sign, via Vos Iz Neias.

I didn't even notice whether Governor Whitmer had mentioned the criminality of the White House occupant in her response to the State of the Union address of Individual no. 1, whose writers didn't of course find time to mention it at all. It turns out that she did allude to the Senate trial and Chairman Schiff's hopeful slogan at the very end:

As we witness the impeachment process in Washington, there are some things each of us, no matter our party should demand. The truth matters, facts matter, and no one should be above the law. It’s not what those senators say tomorrow, it’s about what they do that matters. Remember, listen to what people say but watch what they do. It’s time for action.

Meanwhile, the ongoing Trump administration violation of the Presidential Records Act goes way beyond the Stalinoid doctoring by the National Archives of a picture of the Women's March and the president's personal habit of tearing his own papers to pieces and throwing them out—White House staffers who tried taping them back together were fired, historian Matthew Connelly tells us in an opinion piece for The Times:

Thanks, Mitch

Image via123RF.

Impressed by this observation from Jonathan Chait:

McConnell’s desired process of muscling through a wildly unpopular vote to suppress all evidence, followed by a vote to acquit, would rob the outcome of much of the legitimacy Republicans crave. It is instead widely and accurately seen as a cover-up...

McConnell may have finally made the miscalculation we've been dreaming of, that will shock voters out of their feeling that nothing seriously wrong has been going on, as I keep saying with reference to the Watergate scandal, when public support for impeaching and removing Nixon shot up from around 48% to 57% in a couple of weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 24 July that Nixon had to hand over the original White House tapes to Congress (he'd given them edited transcripts in April and the polling had hovered just below a majority for the three months).

They didn't get the story of how the CREEP and the Mitchell Justice Department and the Casey CIA and mad Nixon and his lieutenants had worked to create a kind of secret government inside the government to punish Nixon's enemies and reward his friends—very many people, maybe most, continued to suppose the "third-rate burglary" of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel was the whole of the crime—but they could see there was a coverup. And, as they say, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," meaning not that the coverup was worse than the crime but that the coverup was the perspicuous index of how bad the crime was, if you couldn't quite follow the latter.

The Mustache Sings

I will point out for no good reason except Joanie will like it if she shows up that I knew Shashi Tharoor, now for some years the Congress Party's greatest Twitter exponent, very slightly when he was UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore—he used to play cricket with some friends of mine. This is a picture of John Bolton hating on him and anxious to stop him from becoming UN Secretary General, via DNAIndia.

So fired National Security Advisor Bolton apparently confirms the bribery attempt, not calling it a "drug deal" in his literary effort (man doesn't know a catchy phrase when he sees it, even when he made it up himself); Haberman and Schmidt for NYTimes inform us:

WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

"Could undercut" LOL. Could confirm what all the evidence tends to show.

Looks like Bolton dishes on Pompeo (for knowing there was no basis to claims against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and passively allowed Trump to do what he wanted without ever backing her up) and Barr (Bolton asked Barr why Trump had included Barr in his "talk to Rudy" advice to Zelenskyy; Barr has denied having heard about that call until a month later). And Mulvaney (for lying about whether he listened to Trump-Giuliani discussions).

The White House evidently suggesting that it knew Mr. Bolton only for a very short time and maybe he was the coffee boy—and inevitably admitting what he said was true but regretting that he was naughty enough to say so and hang on to the documentation:

In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.

The Strongest Possible Case

Really finding myself irked by this Democrats-in-disarray story I heard on NPR and apparently traces back to Politico, about the "moderate" freshman Democrats who unexpectedly jumped on the impeachment train in September when the Ukraine whistleblower story emerged and now want to control the narrative:

Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of more than three dozen Democratic candidates who flipped GOP-held seats in 2018, made clear Wednesday that she thinks Ukraine is where the impeachment probe should stay focused.

“I know that there's some people who are interested in kind of a kitchen sink approach — let's throw all kinds of things in there because we can and talk about all the things we're concerned about regarding the president,” she told reporters.

“We have been taking the country down this road on this very targeted issue of Ukraine and the issues around the president using his office for personal and political gain,” Slotkin added. “And that's what I think we should focus on.”

I don't know how many of these there are, but if they think the alternative is a "kitchen-sink" approach, they aren't paying attention. It's weird that Slotkin seems to have no idea what a broad category could be represented by "the president using his office for personal and political gain" in application to Trump—that would really be a kitchen sink, ranging from the foreign and domestic emoluments violations to having the White House Communications Director plug his and his daughter's tchotchkes on live TV, to say nothing of using Twitter to make the stock market jump up and down, from which somebody is surely making a profit.