How Many House Republicans Does It Take to Commit Treason?

The answer is apparently thirteen.  Here they are, the majority members of the ironically titled Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who are prepared to give aid and comfort to our enemies if only it will protect Donald Trump from the law. The press keeps referring to them collectively, by the name of the committee. They should be outed and shamed.

Our allies (maybe we should start referring to them as "former allies") will not share intelligence with a country that can't keep a secret.

By the way, treason is an impeachable offense.


Devin Nunes, Chairman
22nd District of California

Mike Conaway
11th District of Texas

Peter King
2nd District of New York

Frank LoBiondo
2nd District of New Jersey

Tom Rooney
17th District of Florida

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
27th District of Florida

Michael Turner
10th District of Ohio

Brad Wenstrup
2nd District of Ohio

Chris Stewart
2nd District of Utah

Rick Crawford
1st District of Arkansas

Trey Gowdy
4th District of South Carolina

Elise Stefanik
21st District of New York

Will Hurd
23rd District of Texas

Sunday Morning Tweets

Truth in Advertising

Saturday night, guests at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., were greeted by projections on the hotel entrance.

Also projected were "Pay Trump bribes here", "Emoluments welcome", and "we are all responsible to stand up and end white supremacy”.  Read more here

Meanwhile, a New York bookstore has seen a marketing opportunity:

As long-time readers will know, this is a classy blog, and we don't use words like that here.

Today's Tweets

Katherine Felton Miller DeGenaro 1941-2017

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.

You were loved, Kay.  Take a bow.

How Not to Prevent War with North Korea

A former Swedish Prime Minister tweets about Trump:

It's funny. It's true. But it's a dare.

Two Ways This Could End

From my friend, Claudia, who found this on a former friend's Facebook page:

And from Twitter:

I'm not so sure about "GOP recovers". How many failures can they send us?

We're About to Find Out

If you're like me, when you were in school and read about the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, you wondered what you would have done.

For "Bells of St. Mary's" and "Going My Way" Fans

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.

More here.

Tweets Worth Reading

John McCain‏Verified account @SenJohnMcCain Jul 20

I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support - unfortunately for my sparring partners in Congress, I'll be back soon, so stand-by!

8,947 replies 27,696 retweets 175,114 likes

 

Laurence Tribe‏Verified account @tribelaw 13h13 hours ago

Memo to Trump: Anyone you pardon can be compelled to testify without any grant of immunity, and that testimony could undo you.

Matthew Yglesias‏Verified account @mattyglesias 14h14 hours ago

Earlier today it came out that the Secretary of State was caught violating sanctions on Russia and it was like a third-tier story.

  Laurence Tribe‏Verified account @tribelaw 5h5 hours ago

What must drive Trump totally batsh*t is being left in the dark while swarms of G-men pore over his decades of shady deals. Loss of control!

409 replies 4,162 retweets 13,441 likes

 

Jessica Valenti‏Verified account @JessicaValenti Jul 20

Jessica Valenti Retweeted Sam Thielman

Looks like the First Lady of Japan pretended not to speak English for nearly 2 hrs to avoid talking to Trump

 

  Matthew Gertz‏Verified account @MattGertz 3h3 hours ago

Bob Mueller is such an anti-Trump partisan hack that Trump was considering him for FBI director.

41 replies 1,344 retweets 4,147 likes

Patrick Petrelli‏ @PatrickPetrell1 14h14 hours ago

Replying to @RVAwonk

If it's not Mueller, it'll be the NY AG who bring it all down. Trump can't pardon for state crimes.

 

Juliette Kayyem‏Verified account @juliettekayyem 16m16 minutes ago

We have this tendency to think the cover-up is worse than the crime. But I think we should actually look at the crimes. @CNN

 

Transparency

Or were there? We'll see.

The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism

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.

Shifting fundamentals.

He forgot about hating Hillary.

A Must-See (All is Not Gloom and Doom)

Well, it all IS all gloom and doom, actually, but we can still laugh once in a while.

Go here.

[Sorry, the link is no longer active. Nothing to see here. Move along.]

Gilbert and Sullivan Take on Trump

I Got Nothin' to Say

From the Washington Post:

Saying "Duh!" is an Insult to Morons

Donald Trump prepares for his speech before Congress.

Donald Trump actually said this: "“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

 Ladies and gentlemen, that was the President of the United States speaking.

I Think His Name Was Originally Muëller

Donald Trump tweeted a congratulatory message to him, praising his appearances on the Sunday talk shows.

Does Trump = Hitler?

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.

He concludes an interview with Slate with this:

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 19^th-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 19^th century, and in the post- or late-20^th 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.

Meanwhile, there's this:



And then there's this:

It's Only Gonna Get Worse. For a While, at Least.

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.

Just So We Know

The estimated additional security costs for Melania living in New York City are twice the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

h/t to Ryan Chapman