This is a blog about history and politics, mostly.
Comments are welcome, and comment moderation has been turned off. To comment on a post, click on the word "Comments" below the post. You will be asked to type some letters you see. The purpose of this is to ensure you are a human being and not a spam machine.
Of course, you may be a human being and a spam machine. We'll be the judge of that.
For Kay, who told me that in spite of everything, her life had been "a good ride".
The thing she liked least about the thought of dying, she added, was not knowing how her children and grandchildren were doing. I hope she was wrong about that.
If you are (or once were) a fan of the Bing Crosby films Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and Going My Way (1944), which seemed to run on television a lot in the 1960s, you might remember a boys' choir in both movies.
Going My Way
Can you spot Carl "Alfalfa" Spitzer of Our Gang?
It was the choir of Old St. Mary's Church in Chicago, and they sang (with member changes) from 1904 until 1967, when the choir was disbanded. Nevertheless, the choir alumni still got together to sing, beginning in the 1970s.
But time marches on, and the boys became geezers. Next month the alumni choir will sing it's last performance.
As you've read, the governor of Alabama, who claimed that God had elevated him to his position, has been forced to resign due to a sex scandal involving a "top aide and former beauty pageant contestant whom he had taught in Sunday school in Tuscaloosa."
I guess schadenfreude is called for. The New York Times has a good story about the whole business here, in the course of which an Alabama historian and ordained Southern Baptist preacher makes the following observation:
The idea that moral hypocrisy hurts you among evangelical voters is not
true, if you’re sound on all of the fundamentals.... Being sound on the fundamentals depends on what the evangelical
community has decided the fundamentals have become. At this time, what
is fundamental is hating liberals, hating Obama, hating abortion and
hating same-sex marriage.
In early December we had a couple of posts with the title, "Kicking off the Holocaust". Here and here. It's hard to raise the question of whether Trump has fascist tendencies without a built-in alarm going off. "How can you even make that comparison?" your inner voice scolds you.
Luckily, we have the testimony of somebody who knows Nazi Germany pretty well, British historian Richard J. Evans, author of an authoritative trilogy on the Third Reich. Evans is cautious about what he says, but confirms similarities.
I think it is a critical moment, and a lot of it goes back to the credit crunch and the economic
crisis of 2008, and the feeling of a lot of people that they’ve been
left out, that globalization has harmed them, or they’ve not seen an
improvement in living standards or reductions in social and economic
inequality. I think one of the lessons of 19th-century Europe
is that peace and prosperity are best guaranteed by international
collaboration. There was an arrangement between different states called
the Concert of Europe in the 19th century, and in the post- or late-20th century, it’s the European Union. I think it is a disaster that Britain has chosen to leave the European Union at a time when you have a very
unpredictable administration in Washington with no guarantee that it
will in any way protect or look after our interests, when America is
effectively abdicating its role as leader of the free world.
Not just abdicating, but almost consciously or actively trying to undermine the idea of Europe.
Yeah, it’s spurning international agreements and organizations just as Hitler left the League of Nations in 1933. I think it’s a dangerous moment for Britain, and I think it’s a huge miscalculation to leave the European Union.
On January 5 we asked "The Question on Everybody's Mind": What did Trump know about the Russian contacts, and when did he know it?
Since then, you've probably engaged thoughts about Trump that last year you would have considered more suited to the conspiratorial ravings of a left-wing Infowars site.
Well, you're not alone. In a column called The Spy Revolt Against Donald Trump Begins, a former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer reports what he is hearing from contacts still in the government. It is not pretty.
Some excepts:
Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems
of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess
troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic
competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold
intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.
[snip]
It’s debatable whether Flynn broke any laws by conducting unofficial
diplomacy with Moscow, then lying about it, and he has now adopted the
customary Beltway dodge about the affair, ditching his previous denials
in favor of professing he has “no recollection of discussing sanctions,”
adding that he “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”
That’s not good enough anymore, since the IC knows exactly what Flynn
and Kislyak discussed.
In pretty much every capital worldwide,
embassies that provide sanctuary to hostile intelligence services are
subject to counterintelligence surveillance, including monitoring phone
calls. Our spy services conduct signals intelligence—SIGINT for
short—against the Russian embassy in Washington, just as the Russians do
against our embassy in Moscow. Ambassadors’ calls are always monitored: that’s how the SpyWar works, everywhere.
Ambassador
Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being
intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military
intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t
realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally
arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange
affair.
[snip]
There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies
have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s
Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new
commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has
frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing
it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in
the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the
president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.
In light
of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep
secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence
from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the
president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency
official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the
“good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For
decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only,
containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks,
however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot
keep their best SIGINT [signals intelligence] secrets.
[snip]
What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence
official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the
Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation
Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the
president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not
much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry
frustration.
The whole article is here. Bolded parts are my own emphasis.
Does this picture creep you out as much as it does me?
No, not the seditionists who seized Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. But a good guess!
Click on it for a better view.
No, it's not Steve Bannon ending his first day of work in the West Wing, either, though you are excused for thinking so.
The guy sitting at the desk is Valery Bolotov, the former head of the Russian-speaking militia in Ukraine: a different Putin Puppet. He was to be a witness in the international investigation of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight #17, which was brought down by a Russian missile over Eastern Ukraine.
Bolotov died today, aged 46, in Moscow of a "heart attack".
Some people are suspicious.
[By the way, hats off to the photographer who took this shot. He/she knows how to take a group portrait.]
Okay, we've had our march, and it's good to know we're not the only sane people left in America. But now what?
Here's what!
We need to focus like a laser on the 2018 elections: in the House, in the Senate, in the state legislatures. The Democratic Party has done a terrible job being a national party. It focuses only on the Presidential election and leaves the rest to the Republicans, who've been cheerfully collecting enough state legislatures to amend the Constitution or call a Constitutional convention.
We've got to stop them. We've got to build a Democratic Party that's as strong as it was in FDR's day.
Here's a two-step suggestion for getting started:
First, read this. It'll fire you up like you've never been fired up before.
Then, go to a web site called Swing Left. Swing Left was put together by a group who are not professional political people, but are pretty savvy in the use of technological tools.
At Swing Left, you put in your zip code, and it identifies the Congressional swing district nearest to your home. A swing district is one that could go either way in any given election. Many are Democrat-represented districts and need to be defended. The rest are Republican-represented districts that can be and need to be flipped.
Then, you pledge to help make sure that district votes Democratic in 2018 by giving them your email address. They send you weekly information about what's going on in the district, give you ideas on things to do to help, and let you know how to make contributions directly to the Democratic candidate there. What could be easier?
I have signed up to protect the nearest swing district to me, which is currently held by a Democrat, and to help win two swing districts nearby, currently held by Republicans. Oh, it would be so sweet to send them home.
Everyone got up unusually early for a Saturday. It was the day of the Women's March in Chicago, January 21, and BAM wasn't going to miss it. [BAM is the name the three girls are referred to by themselves and others, when they are referred to as a group. I'll refer to them here only by their initials.]
The 3 Feministas take it to the streets.
Under light jackets they wore white, they said, as a tribute to the suffragettes of a hundred years ago, on whose shoulders they consciously stood. B's t-shirt references the SCOTUS Angels, an allusion to the female members of the Supreme Court.
March organizers had originally planned for 20,000 marchers. The night before, the prediction was raised to 50,000. But by the time BAM arrived at the neighborhood El station, all trains heading downtown were packed. It was already clear this crowd was going to be WAY more than 50,000.
There was a point when nobody else could get on.
M and B managed to grab a seat when someone got off, and one sat in the other's lap. A stood the whole way down. (As did the chaperone, need we say?) They alighted near the Harold Washington Library and, amazingly, immediately found friends from school. Their friends had made ... er, um ... uh ... let's call them "kitten" ears. They're actually called something else, a reference to one of Donald Trump's favorite pastimes when a TV celebrity (and, for all we know, even now). They had made extras and gave them to BAM. After some excited chatter, the group was off for the march assembly point.
Walking under the El on the way to the March.
It was just a matter of following the flow of the crowd, and in no time at all BAM found themselves separated from their friends and in the middle of a crowd (later to be reported as 250,000 souls) that was going nowhere.
And that's where they stood for about an hour and a half. For a while, other marchers' signs were enough to keep everyone amused.
Clicking on a picture enlarges it and makes it easier to read.
While waiting for the march to begin, various chants started up in the crowd, including several initiated by BAM. The young marchers became intoxicated with their power. Well, no, not really. But they appeared to be enjoying it.
After a while, there was a slow but perceptible flow of movement toward the lake. A good theory was that the group just to the north of us (see aerial photo) was moving out, and BAM would come in behind them. But after about 10 minutes of shuffling, people in the crowd started pointing back towards the west, indicating BAM would be marching into the streets.
What no one knew until watching the news that night was that the entire march route was already effectively filled with protesters – there was no open space to march TO! The police had advised the organizers it would not be safe (not to mention possible) to have the march. The organizers then cancelled the march and retroactively made it a rally or demonstration.
All of which was totally unknown to about 250,000 people ready to march.
Presumably, somewhere people started moving off the parade route and going home, creating room for the crowd in Grant Park (see aerial shot) to take their place. This created enough movement for the Grant Park folks to move onto the streets – designated marching streets and otherwise – creating the sensation of ... wait for it ... MARCHING!
And march BAM did:
As did all those around them:
State Street (🎶that great street 🎶)
Finally, the chaperone suggested that any time BAM wanted to head back home would be okay. And within 10 minutes they were on their way to the El station. This time, though, they boarded early enough that there were seats for all three.
As the train passed the cross streets, it was clear the march had taken over the Chicago Loop.
Shot from the moving El.
A few notes about the March:
The crowd was wonderful – friendly and cheerful.
Early-on, we spotted some counter-demonstrators heading for the march. We never saw them again, and there was no trouble at all. Chicago Police reported there were no arrests.
The chaperone, being an old fart, believes that minds are not changed by vulgar language and images – in fact, they are reasons to shut your mind to the message – and unfortunately there was some of both on a few signs. Too bad about that. But let's face it: Trump set the tone.
BAM witnessed very little littering. We came across one sign on the ground. M picked it up and leaned it against a building so it could be read by passers-by.
M's parents should know that I saw her slip a five dollar bill to a grateful homeless man. I'm sure they're proud of her, as B's and A's parents are proud of their girls, and of their girls' friends.
We've received hundreds of letters and calls from people asking, "When is Sempringham going to update its data on persons listed as prostitutes in the U.S. Census to take into consideration the recently released 1940 Census?"
J. Edgar Hoover was not listed as a prostitute in the 1940 Census.
Well, we undertook a study of this very issue last year, but quickly discovered that we couldn't trust the raw data we were getting from Ancestry.com. There are 440 people in the 1940 census whose occupation includes the word "prostitute," using the Ancestry search engine, but a closer look makes it clear that something has gone awry.
Because searching the 1940 U.S. Census is free to non-subscribers, you can reproduce our results.
Type "prostitute" into the "occupation" field, and no other search terms, and you will receive the list of 440 workers in the "sex industry", as it's called today. But click through to the actual records, and you will be surprised.
Ruth Flickinger, a 73-year-old living in Pittsburgh, is described as a "prostitute nurse" in the index, but a look at the original records reassures us that she was a "practical nurse". Her grandchildren are relieved, no doubt, but perhaps a tad annoyed.
Jay Ingram, listed as a "prostitute inspector" in Los Angeles, is actually a "parachute inspector" at the airport.
Joseph John Jr., of Aurora, Indiana, is not a "prostitute mail carrier", he is a "substitute mail carrier".
John Kaszuba's wife in Chicago will be relieved to hear he is not a "prostitute laborer" but a "painting helper".
And that's just going through the first six people listed in Ancestry's indexed records.
What happened? We have three hypotheses:
The optical character reading software Ancestry uses is version 1.0.
The census entries were indexed by someone making $2 a day, for whom English was not a first language.
The records were indexed by a 400-pound person sitting on a bed somewhere.
But who knows?
Whatever the answer, you can see that this important research we have undertaken is not as easy as it seems. We have to stop laughing long enough to get the data written down. This may take some time.
Iris Luella Dement sings her song, "Let the Mystery Be". Lyrics below.
Everybody is wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
So it's all the same to me
Think I'll just let the mystery be
Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
Think I'll just let the mystery be
Everybody is wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
So it's all the same to me
Think I'll just let the mystery be
Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
And I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
And I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
I choose to let the mystery be
Everybody is wondering what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
Think I'll just let the mystery be
Think I'll just let the mystery be
We always get more hits if we make liberal use of the word "prostitutes". Apparently the people Googling "prostitutes" are legion.
But this is a legitimate use! Bloomberg reports that we have a judgment on what country has the best prostitutes in the world, and it comes from none other than former Village People groupie, Vladimir Putin:
Trump
is “a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with
beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in
the world,” Putin said. “I find it hard to believe that he rushed to
some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly
the best in the world.”
Vlad loves to relive his years as a Village People groupie.
Of course, if Vlad ever does decide to use the videotapes that don't exist, he will be "shocked! shocked!"
The rules of the Prostitute Olympics require Putin to turn in his score cards within two weeks.
The
sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are
arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits,
Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to
carnival culture.
The
first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of
sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not
real. It doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it.
It’s just combative display.
This
is a resolution I’m probably going to break, but I resolve to write
about Trump only on the presidential level, not on the carnival level.
I’m going to try to respond only to what he does, not what he says or
tweets. I really wish some of my media confreres would do the same. [Italics are my emphasis.)
The problem with this is that the carnival culture is not just his tweets, it's his whole life, including "the presidential level". God help us.
British reporting about Christopher Steele, the MI6 agent who collected the dossier on Donald Trump:
Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and
American intelligence officials after concluding that such material
should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries.
However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly
frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence
from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up,
that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump,
focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It is believed that a colleague of Mr Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal
reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the
end also continued with the Trump case without being paid.
Mark Salter, John McCain's former chief of staff, writes:
If any of the allegations are true, and if our worst fears about
Trump’s temperament are realized, no one with power or influence today
will be remembered for whether they tinkered with Medicare reimbursement
rates or lowered the corporate tax rate or disapproved of a Supreme
Court appointment or won a Pulitzer Prize or had the highest ratings on
cable television.
They will be remembered for whether they tried to protect the country
from the grave harm Trump could do or whether, by negligence or active
support, they helped him do it.
In the upper right is Aleksandr Bastrykin, a Russian spy who was sanctioned by Obama. In the lower left is a picture of Obama, with the caption "Bye-bye, Obama!"
David Corn talks about his October meeting with Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who may have saved the western world:
After speaking with the former counterintelligence official, I was able
to confirm his identity and expertise. A senior US administration
official told me that he had worked with the onetime spook and that the
former spy had an established and respected track record of providing US
government agencies with accurate and valuable information about
sensitive national security matters. "He is a credible source who has
provided information to the US government for a long time, which senior
officials have found to be highly credible," this US official said.
Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post catalogs some things we know about Trump, exclusive of Christopher Steele's memo or the declassified version of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on Russian involvement in the presidential campaign, including:
Throughout the campaign, Trump repeated slogans and conspiracy theories —
“Obama invented ISIS,” “Hillary will start World War III” — lifted from Sputnik,
the Russian propaganda website. Was this just Trump campaign chief
Stephen K. Bannon borrowing ideas, or Manafort using tactics he
perfected in Ukraine? Or was there deliberate linkage?
She concludes:
Information doesn’t have to be secret to be shocking. Trump doesn’t have
to be a Manchurian candidate who has been hypnotized or recruited by
foreign intelligence. It’s enough that he has direct and indirect links
to a profoundly corrupt and violent foreign dictator, whose policies he
admires, whose advisers he shares and whose slogans he uses. That’s
kompromat enough for me.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on
to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care
for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his
orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations.
And then — “150 years of investment in education and social progress later” — President-Elect Donald Trump:
Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got
“swamped” (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So
much for being a movie star – and that was season 1 compared to season
14. Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported Kasich
& Hillary.
The Russian
government was in touch with members of President-elect Donald Trump's
political team during the U.S. election campaign and knows most of his
entourage, one of Russia's most senior diplomats told the Interfax news
agency on Thursday.
Accused
by defeated Democratic contender Hillary Clinton of being a puppet of
President Vladimir Putin after praising the Russian leader, Trump has
dismissed suggestions he had anything to do with the Russian government
during the campaign.
But in
comments that could prove politically awkward for the president-elect,
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said there had indeed
been some communications.
"There
were contacts," Interfax cited Ryabkov as saying. "We are doing this and
have been doing this during the election campaign."
Such
contacts would continue, he added, saying the Russian government knew
and had been in touch with many of Trump's closest allies. He did not
name names.
On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ... sent Comey a fiery letter
saying the FBI chief may have broken the law and pointed to a
potentially greater controversy: "In my communications with you and
other top officials in the national security community, it has become
clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and
coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian
government…The public has a right to know this information."
Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker writes for the Washington Post and is syndicated, according to Wikipedia, in more than 400 outlets.
Today she writes [my emphases]:
What is so obviously a conspiracy of Russian leadership, hackers and spies,
Trump has repeatedly dismissed as lousy intelligence. Why would he do
such a thing? Is it that he’s so thin-skinned he can’t tolerate anyone
thinking that he might have benefited from the cyberattack? Or is it
that he knew about it in advance and doesn’t want to be found out? This
is how conspiracy theories get started. Then again, sometimes a
conspiracy is just a conspiracy — and a fool is just a fool.
Consider
what we know: Our best intelligence indicates that Russia was behind
the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. Trump, who has long
expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin (once a KGB
agent, always a KGB agent), has his doubts.
Obviously,
Trump wants to preserve the narrative that he won fair and square. And,
clearly, claims of Russian interference would muss his ego. But is that
it? Ego and narrative?
Consider further: Trump would rather
make common cause with our fiercest geopolitical adversary (hat tip Mitt
Romney) than take the word of our best people. Moreover, he has said he
won’t receive daily security briefings and reportedly plans to reduce
our security agencies.
Pray tell, whose side is this man on? When was the last time you had to ask that question about a president-elect?
On Friday,
Trump met with real American spies and others who attempted to explain
things to him, leaving open the question: Can Trump learn? From his
statement following the meeting, it doesn’t seem so.
On Thursday,
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee that the agency is “now even more
resolute,” and that Trump is damaging American intelligence (not to be
confused with the absence thereof, to wit, Trump). To top things off,
former CIA director James Woolsey quit Trump’s transition team Thursday in protest against being bypassed.
In
sum, when the president-elect persists in a state of denial, siding
with the enemy against his own country’s best interests, one is forced
to consider that Trump himself poses a threat to national security.
In Russia, they’d just call it treason.
Meanwhile, Trump said a week ago that he knew things about the email hacking that others didn't know, and that he would share that information with us on Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. Guess what never happened!
The
Trump campaign knew in advance about WikiLeaks’ plans. Days before the
Podesta email release began, Roger Stone, a Republican operative working
with the Trump campaign, sent out an excited tweet about what was
coming.
But
in an interview, Mr. Stone said he had no role in the leaks; he had
just heard from an American with ties to WikiLeaks that damning emails
were coming.
Over the holidays, a person I know started speaking favorably about "Republican values". I was dying to ask just what "Republican values" are, but it was the holidays, and really, I didn't see any plus side to blowing up the relationship.
Joe Biden says, "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value."
Which is only broadly related to this post, the purpose of which is to point you to David Brooks's column this morning.
It concludes:
I’ll
be curious to see if Trump’s public rhetoric becomes operationalized in
any way. For example, I bet his bromance with Putin will end badly. The
two men are both such blustery, insecure, aggressive public posturers,
sooner or later they will get in a schoolyard fight.
It
will be interesting to see if that brawl is just an escalating but
ultimately harmless volley of verbiage, or whether it affects the
substance of government policy and leads to nuclear war.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder (New York: Crown, 2017
"Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization: to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people. They put a face on globalization, arguing that its complex challenges were the result of a conspiracy against the nation.
Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Naziism, or communism in the twentiety century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.
