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

Bad Lip Reading

We don't usually like the "bad lip reading" videos, but this one was pretty good:

Disquieting

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.]

Well Put

Can't get this any clearer. It's a tweet from Pence a year ago.

Starting to Feel Comfortable?

Charles P. Pierce writes in Esquire:

You want a scary number? Here's a scary number.

33.

That's the number of state legislatures over which the Republican Party now has complete control.

You want a scarier number?

34.

That's the number of state legislatures required now to call a new constitutional convention under Article V of the Constitution.

Every state should have a web site like Swing Left that identifies the swing legislative districts in the state. C'mon Dems, let's get moving.

Still Pissed? Do This!

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.

Are you ready, Charlie?

BAM Takes to the Streets

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.