Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:

Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.

After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.

Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing:

Limerick

Photo byAP/Jose Luis Magana via The Nation.

There once was a dotard called Trump
Who thought flags were a good thing to hump
Though he only got pally
With flags at a rally
'Cause you can't hump a girl on the stump. https://t.co/YsTx9kgVAM

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2019

Instead the poor flag got wrapped in fascism. It did not look comfortable. https://t.co/biloNjS0xx

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2019

Timeline: Monsignor sets up a Steele trap

Amerigo Vespucci next to a Map of the Americas and East Asia. Detail from Universal Cosmography world Map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published April 1507, via reddit/map porn.

Now that so much material has come out on the Trump-Russia conspiracy that wasn't known or knowable to Christopher Steele, from George Papadopoulos's antics in the spring of 2016 through the Trump Tower "adoptions" meeting of 9 June to the odd fact that Paul Manafort sent some 75 pages of sensitive US election polling data in August 2016 to his old henchman Konstantin Kilimnik to transmit to two very wealthy Ukrainians, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov (the richest man in Ukraine and the man who introduced Manafort to the Party of Regions in 2004-05) from whom he was at the moment expecting a payment of $2.4 million to come in November, though he'd had no money from Ukrainian politicians for well over a year, and if you think that polling data was just for Lyovochkin's and Akhmetov's personal entertainment and wasn't destined for somebody in Russia, I don't know what to tell you (Emptywheel thinks she has some solid evidence that it was going to the Russian Oleg Deripaska as well but refuses to speculate on the thing that interests me, who the end user might be)—

Now, I was saying, that we've heard a couple of hours of the testimony of Michael Cohen that Special Counsel Mueller thinks it's safe for the public to hear, though not the several hours that the House and Senate intelligence committees have heard in secret, to say nothing of Cohen's seven visits to the Special Counsel's office since he offered his guilty plea, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd St. ("The State of Russiagate"), thinks that

it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidate, now-president’s Russia ties.

Literary Corner: New Republican Poetry

"We are already able to reach the notorious hamburgers of San Diego!" Via  Anita Pitsch, Australian National University Press.

Formal elegance meets wry surrealism in some of the new entries, like this Ionesco-like fantasy by Dr. Gorka, from the CPAC conference:

Joe Stalin's Dream

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka

They want
to take your pickup truck,
they want
to rebuild your home,
they want
to take away your hamburgers.

This is what Stalin dreamt
about but never achieved.

Strictly speaking, I don't believe Comrade Stalin had any interest in rebuilding my home at all. I think he would have relished the uncontrollable overheating, the poor ventilation in spite of gaps exploited by wind and rodent, the ceiling fan in which only one of the four light bulb sockets actually works because of some crazy fault in the wiring. He would have seen it as irrefragable evidence of the collapse of the decadent West, as the contradictions of capitalism become too gross to ignore. I don't have a pickup truck, but I doubt he'd be interested in the occasional hamburger I consume, beyond asserting (no doubt falsely) that Soviet hamburgers are much, much better. Just saying.

For the Record: Baron von Troomp and the Mysteries of Authorship

Image via Express, August 2017. The book, from 1893, is real.

A funny word usage of Trump's on the Twitter this morning went toward answering a question Jordan has asked—Steve and I figured out a boringly rational explanation of why Trump believes he himself wrote The Art of the Deal and other books published under his name:

Aside from everything else, Donald thinks books originate as "transcripts" https://t.co/4a7zXBoKPo

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Right. And he has no idea how much work Schwarz had to do with it after the interviews, because he hasn't read it.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) March 1, 2019

Ghostwriters probably gave him copies of their interview transcripts before they started the actual writing, and he gave these to the lawyers tasked with making sure he hadn't said anything that would get him in trouble and washed his hands of them, and felt his work was done. Obviously a man of his responsibilities can't sit down and type the thing, or whatever it is they do, but he's very confident that he authored it.

To Kill a Theater

Darryl Maximilian Robinson as Reverend Sykes in the 2011 staging of Christopher Sergel's To Kill a Mockingbird by the Glendale Centre Theatre of Glendale, California, via.

Heard a note on this on NPR this morning, found a more thorough treatment from Mark Kennedy/AP Entertainment at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

Dozens of community and nonprofit theaters across the U.S. have been forced to abandon productions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" under legal threat by Broadway and Hollywood producer Scott Rudin. The combative move has prompted calls for a boycott of Rudin's work

Rudin is arguing that author Harper Lee signed over to him exclusive worldwide rights to the title of the novel and that Rudin's current adaptation on Broadway — written by Aaron Sorkin — is the only version allowed to be performed.

That means different adaptations have had to be scuttled in such small venues as the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City; Mugford Street Players in Marblehead, Massachusetts; and the Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo, New York, as well as a planned United Kingdom and Ireland tour. They had licensed the rights for a different version, written by Christopher Sergel and licensed by The Dramatic Publishing Company or DPC.

"Rudin's work", as if he'd created the thing, as opposed to scrounging the money from his social circle whose demands for profit are responsible for Broadway prices that make it impossible for most people ever to see a show. That's annoying in itself. And they're not saying Sergel's adaptation (written in 1970 and a staple of high school and college and community theaters all over the US ever since—Sergel himself died in 1993) can't ever be performed again, just that they get to decide whether a particular production can take place or not, since they plan to take Sorkin's play on the road, and the staging by the Mugford Street Players could cut into Rudin's take; if he wants to put it on in the Marblehead neighborhood local audience might think "Oh, we've already seen that" and stay home, I guess.

My Dad Went to Hanoi and All I Got Was This Lousy Evidence That I'm in a Smurfing Conspiracy

Image via Medium.

Smurfing, or structuring, being the crime of making a financial transaction in a one-bit-at-a-time way sequenced and parceled so as to evade reporting requirements, like the $35,000 checks cut by the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen all through 2017 paying him back for his payoff of one of Trump's one-night stands (illegal under campaign finance law whether Trump repays it or not), of which we saw two on TV yesterday, one with Junior's signature on it.

He wasn't lying when he showed us your signature on that Stormy Daniels check, Junior. And that's another one of your little crimes, too, structuring payments, isn't it? You might want to keep your head down for a while.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2019

Poor Junior!

Meanwhile, North Korea. Nicholas Kristof deals out some conventional wisdom ("After the Trump-Kim Failure"):

Whose lies are they, anyway?

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters, via The New Yorker.

Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me (unfortunately). He had other clients also. He was just disbarred by the State Supreme Court for lying & fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time. Using Crooked’s lawyer!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2019

This time it’s different🙄 https://t.co/KmFbYC2k80

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 27, 2019

It's remarkable that these people keep working to discredit Cohen's testimony by reminding us of the crimes Cohen pleaded guilty to—"He's a convicted liar so why should we believe him now?"—as if nobody had any way of finding out what he was lying about when he told the lies for which he's going to jail, or on whose behalf:

The Center of Nowhere, or the Rosy New Deal

Montsalvat. Painting by Alarie-Tano/DeviantArt.

You have to be totally lost before you can find it, so nobody can say where it is, but on a high plain somewhere, could be the kingdom of the Visigoths or Asian Byzantium, where the priests wear long beards and take wives, you'll be in some desolate treeless country and come on a castle of ancient stone, set in a marsh, apparently unguarded; you can cross the drawbridge and enter the yard, and penetrate into the great hall without hindrance, and on certain days you'll see a strange ceremony performed by a company of knights.

In silence, a chief or officiant goes to an aumbrey built into the wall next the fireplace, with the knights behind him, opens up the doors, and pulls out what looks like a wedding cake mounted on a silver charger. It is a wedding cake! But it seems to have been baked centuries ago, it's dull and gray, and it seems unnaturally heavy, as the chief struggles, grimacing, to bring it out the the middle of the hall. There, still in silence, with the knights forming a circle around him, he kneels, changes his grip on the charger so that his palms are underneath, stands again, and lifts it into the air as far as his arms will extend. Extraordinary emotions cross the faces, and some of the men begin to weep. After a few moments, he lowers it again, goes back to the wall as the circle of knights breaks to let him through, and shoves it back into the aumbrey.

At which point the silence finally breaks, the men begin chatting by twos and threes, and if you ask the right questions, you can learn the significance of what you've just witnessed. Or you can go to The New York Times, where David F. Brooks will lay out the catechism for you ("An Agenda for Moderates").

New York Note

Q: Which endorsement are you most proud of?

This may sound corny, but the endorsement I'm proudest of is my mom's.#NYCVotes pic.twitter.com/X1C6YwokrN

— Jumaane Williams (@JumaaneWilliams) February 7, 2019

Tomorrow is a special election in New York City, for the position of public advocate, a weird NYC institution dating back to 1993, in which the designated successor in case anything happens to the mayor is a kind of official opponent of the mayor, a citywide ombudsman or tribune whose main job is to complain to the city on behalf of the citizens and attempt to shame the mayor and city council and city agencies into action.

It's also become a significant factor in electoral politics, in that the last two public advocates have successfully used the job as a springboard to higher things, Bill de Blasio to the mayoralty and Tish James to the post of state attorney general, in last November's election, which is why this election is being held, to fill it until the coming November, when there will be another vote.

It's a nonpartisan contest, though I think in fact there are only two Republicans on the list. and there are 17 candidates, which is just insane; there is a statistical possibility that somebody could win with just 6% of the vote, which is clearly very unlikely, but a win with some horribly low number under 25% and an essentially random result based on the vagaries of turnout is not inconceivable at all, and there are candidates trying unapologetically to work this.

In particular, because my family is on I don't know exactly what list of of Chinese or Asian voters, our mailbox has been full of bilingual Chinese-English fliers from one of the Asian American candidates, Ron Kim, directly appealing to us to vote for "one of us", which really kind of bothers me (that's the Korean; the Chinese guy, Ben Yee, is not doing that at all)—it suggests the possibility that the election could be won by voters of a single ethnic group.

In the same way, one of the Republicans, Eric Ulrich, could quite possibly win just by uniting the tiny minority of Republicans; or Danny O'Donnell, who was a pioneer as a victorious openly gay candidate for the state assembly in 2003 and has served there ever since, could be swept into office by a unified gay vote. Or Nomiki Konst bringing together all the Young Turks fans or just those who have a sense they've seen her name before and she's some kind of celebrity. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these people, other than Konst—O'Donnell in particular has been a fine assemblymember and there's no reason to think he wouldn't be a fine public advocate. Most candidates seem to take very similar policy positions and indeed struggle to distinguish themselves from each other. But I hope whoever emerges from this circus will give a sense of having been backed by a cross-section.

To that end, I've had my eye on two candidates in particular, former city council president Melissa Mark-Viverito and Jumaane Williams, the city council member who was crazy enough to run as Cynthia Nixon's running mate in last year's gubernatorial primary but sober enough to be endorsed by the New York Times for tomorrow. And his mom likes him, as he has pointed out. Williams has been the favorite, and I'll be voting for him because of that, in the hopes of encouraging it to look like a mandate.

How to Fix the Senate

Folks, I think I have this figured out, inspired by a sort of random threadlet from the genial Jamelle Bouie (a New York Times columnist since mid-January, but some of us have admired him since he started out as a blogger for The American Prospect in 2010):

"The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts."

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 24, 2019

"Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense."

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 24, 2019

The quotation is from Federalist 22, and it's written in justification of the novel idea of federalizing democracy in the new Constitution, where the impotent Continental Congress, in which each state had a single vote, like the UN General Assembly, was to be replaced by a bicameral legislature with one house representing the states with two votes for each, and one with a house representing the people of the nation as a whole, divided into constituencies with a population size quota (an idea the House of Commons didn't really evolve to until 1885).

Give Me Little Sign

Here's something curious from David F. Brooks ("The Lawyers Who Did Not Break"):

The S.D.N.Y. investigation seems to be zeroing in on the $107 million Trump inauguration extravaganza. From the hints dropped by the subpoenas, one gets the impression that the inauguration was a shambolic grabfest in which people with money tried to turn it into power and people who suddenly had power tried to turn it into money.

Some legal experts believe the inauguration is being aggressively probed as a racketeering operation — a continuing criminal enterprise, complete with mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and the rest.

So why aren’t the legal authorities wilting? One explanation: institutions and character. The legal institutions instill codes of excellence that are strong enough to take the heat.

I guess the obvious Big Thing here is the acknowledgment of a nexus of criminality in Trumplandia that really deserves investigation, like there's something bad about that. Last May ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"), Brooks was asking  us to consider the bright side of Trump's mob connections:

Look, the Emperor Has No Balls Walls!

Illustration by Nurul Hana Anwar for The Nation, January 2018

President Trump tweeted a time-lapse video of work along the border wall in New Mexico: "Many miles more now under construction."

Brian Williams fact-checks President Trump's claim https://t.co/wGrYTr9xcj pic.twitter.com/I424VVLY5W

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) February 21, 2019

While Trump devotes his time to getting Scavino to put together evidence like this that he's accomplished things he hasn't actually accomplished, his ability to influence, or even monitor what the government does is sinking into the swamp, as Jonathan Bernstein notes at Bloomberg:

Trump's power collapsing as administration officials increasingly ignore his orders: columnist - https://t.co/2QL1ykCISM

— Dan Castro (@DanCas2) February 21, 2019

Pie

I don't know what this is but it has a Facebook page.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Crustorum, has put out a Pi Day column almost a month early ("Is America Becoming a Four-Party State?") on

the most important fault line in today’s Democratic Party — the line between what I’d call “redivide-the-pie Democrats” and “grow-the-pie Democrats.”

and its bothsider Doppelgänger the Republicans are likewise

divided between a “limited-government-grow-the-pie” right — but one that wants to just let capitalism rip — and a “hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge” Trump-led far right [and t]he limited-government-grow-the-pie faction is itself split between the Never Trumpers — who’ve refused to prostitute themselves to Trump’s serial lying, cozying up to Russia and other madness — and those who’ve hitched a ride on Trump’s wagon to get their tax cuts, conservative judges and deregulation.

Personally, I'd say if your pie is growing you should in general discard it immediately.

Weaver Fever postscript

James Stewart as George Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), via.

Actually I do have something further to say about David Brooks today that popped into my head over the teaser line (which he may not have written himself) that is appended to the headline, as is The Times's custom in recent months:

The social renaissance is happening from the ground up.

It struck me at last that the formulation exactly captures the deception in the classic way of Tory prescriptions when they're trying to be thoughtful and kind, in that the "ground" here is, as usual, the squire and the vicar, as I always like to say, the local gentry, and you could include the justice of the peace, and the headmaster of the local school, and the master of the hounds maybe (in New Jersey anyhow), and that nice young George Bailey who owns the bank (unless, as is more likely, it's Mr. Potter); and the "up", the ones who are last to catch on to the Brooksian message, are the more or less democratically elected representatives of the people.

Weaver Fever

The other Weavers.

Last March, the public intellectual David F. Brooks was appointed one of the 35 Executive Directors working under the leadership of the president and CEO and five executive vice presidents of the Aspen Institute, a title that is alleged at www.payscale.com to go with an average salary of $158,579 (at least according to Dr. Google's report),

to spearhead a bold new project aimed at bridging the differences that divide Americans and seeking out a compelling common ground. The project will include a series of workshops in diverse communities across the nation in order to identify unifying themes and promising partners. The initiative’s longer-term goal is to draw attention to organizations that are effectively healing social divisions, to see how their efforts can be applied to the national level, and to create a network and set of permanent structures to allow for planning, dialogue, and action.

The project now has a name, "Weave: The Social Fabric Project", an associate director, a program coordinator, and a program manager, and some territory on the Aspen Institute website, including

Cheap Shots: Saturday Night

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2019

Hmm. You don't suppose the SNL crew is colluding with Russia, do you?

OK, so they make Putin better looking. What else do you have?

Got Paranoia? Puppet Puppet

Via Truiceman.

We're hearing a lot about Andrew McCabe's story, as retailed on CBS Sixty Minutes, of Trump telling his intelligence briefers, "I believe Putin", which doesn't seem like news to me at all—he's been telling us all himself for at least a couple of years. But NPR's interview with McCabe helpfully laid out the context, from which I think we can learn something new, and possibly a whole lot: I think we can tell exactly when and where Putin could have told him this, on an extremely significant day, and in that way corroborate that the story is true and fill in some important details of the conspiracy hypothesis, if you'll follow along:

Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The diplomatic compounds, officially home-away-from-home dachas for Russian diplomats missing their own dachas, were closed on a very specific occasion, on 28 December 2016, as part of the new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retribution for Russia's interference in the presidential election, along with the expulsion of 35 personnel.

For the Record: The Rhetoric of Emergency

Screenshot by BBC, May 2018.

This is linguistically interesting. I believe Trump thinks he has created an emergency the way the officiant creates a marriage by saying "I now declare you man and wife." https://t.co/yHVLr9J6gL

— Yastringent (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2019

Except "I don't need to." Probably advisors have told him he can move money around without the declaration, in the hopes of stopping him from doing it. But he likes it. The emergency makes everything so special.

— Yastringent (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2019

The emergency is still emerging

#BREAKING Trump International Golf Club out of cheese for area man’s omelette. National emergency declared. https://t.co/g6q3eAivTy

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) February 16, 2019

A funny thing happened to Trump on his way to declaring a national emergency in the Rose Garden yesterday, according to Mark Krikorian at National Review—he signed a bill into law that ensured he can't build any wall, at least not for the moment:

That’s because the bill allows the fencing to be built only in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in South Texas. It’s surely needed there [says Krikorian, wrongly], but real barriers are also needed elsewhere, such as the parts of the Arizona or New Mexico borders where there’s only vehicle fencing.

But the Democrats had a reason for this limitation. The bill states: