When This Is All Over

I hope Matt Gaetz and Devin Nunes are in jail.

It Was Never A Transcript

News media have described the released summary of the Trump-Zelenskyy call of July 25th as a "transcript."  It was never a transcript.  What was so flabbergasting about the whole thing was that the White House somehow thought this redacted document proved that they had done nothing wrong, because Trump never said the words "quid pro quo."  Astute observers noted that this White House has obstructed every single attempt to hold them accountable to the rule of law, and therefore it was highly unlikely that this incredibly damning document was the full story.

Well, guess what? As Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified, the document that the White House released was indeed more favorable than the more damning actual transcript. 

We know the following to be true:
- The released summary of the 7/25 call was damning and included impeachable offenses.
- Trump never voluntarily complies with subpoenas, therefore there is likely a worse, even much worse accounting of that telephone conversation.
- Trump made many disturbing phone calls to foreign leaders, to the point where his Nat Sec team had to hide all of them on a secret server.
- That means actual transcripts - not documents redacted to hide actual crimes - exist of these cringe worthy phone calls.
- It is possible that tapes exist.

At some point, it seems inevitable that either the actual transcripts will be leaked to the House or Trump will have them destroyed.  Either one would be enough to remove him from office in a sane world.

We, sadly, do not live in a sane world.

Rats, Sinking Ships, Etc.

These two pieces are nice pairs.  First, we have a reminder that the critical boob in all this is some hotel developer who landed a diplomatic job with no experience and proceeded to find himself in the middle of perhaps the biggest scandal in presidential history.  Sondland is an idiot who can neither protect his boss or himself. He's in a hole and continues to dig.

The second is a typical Robert Costa piece, whereby he quotes anonymous GOP figures who are tearing what's left of their hair out, but can't figure out how to extricate themselves from Trump's grip on the party.

These are not bright people.  Not in the White House, not on Capitol Hill. Luckily, a considerable part of America wants to be lead by not bright people apparently.

So there we have it.

Can Trump Hold His Base?

These poll numbers from the South should be concerning for Republicans.  The states polled are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.  Of those states, only Virginia voted for Clinton, and they don't like Trump too much, if last night's Nationals game is any indication. His job approval rating in those states is 52% approve, 47% disapprove, 1% who is Donald Trump?

You have to figure that Trump is killing it in Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi.  He's likely floundering in Virginia.  To give you some examples, Trump won 62% in Alabama, 60% in Arkansas, 59% in Louisiana, 58% in Mississippi, 55% in South Carolina and 60% in Tennessee.  He only won 44% in Virginia.

That leaves Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.  In Georgia, Trump only won 50.7% of the vote, though Clinton only carried 45% as Gary Johnson ran pretty strongly in Georgia.  Still, Trump could be under 50% by now. In Florida, he only won 49%.  Same in North Carolina. He won barely 52% in Texas.   Texas.

The problem of course, is that Clinton only earned 47.8% in Florida, 46% in NC and 43% in Texas.  Some of this is because of Hillary Clinton, some is because of the (D) next to her name.  Still, Trump's approval numbers in the part of the country where he should be strongest suggest that there is a pretty decent opportunity to flip Georgia and North Carolina.  I hold out no hope for a free and fair election in Florida. 

Still, if Trump is struggling to keep his approval numbers above water in the South, what does that say about his ability to retain Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Wisconsin?  What about Arizona? 

As the news cycles continue to flay Trump's ego and his polls numbers slowly erode, he will likely rely more on his base instincts to rally the Trumpenproletariat.  That means more of "Trump Unleashed."

It's going to be ugly as the world's most powerful narcissist decompensates on the world stage.

Al Baghdadi

It is undeniably good news that Al Baghdadi is dead.  Of course, Trump's press conference was the usual blend of narcissism, self-aggrandizement and blatant disregard for objective facts that we might expect.

It's striking, but unsurprising that he shared news of the raid with Russia and not Pelosi or Schiff.  What's more interesting is how they found him and the timing. Why - with the Kurds in full retreat - was this the hour we were able to find him?  Who gave us the information and most importantly, have they always known his location? Did the Kurds do it, trying to gain leverage in their bad situation? More ominously, did Russia, Syria or Turkey give Trump this information in order to boost his sagging fortunes within his own party in the wake of his disastrous policy blunders in Syria?  It wouldn't surprise me if the Turks knew where he was all along and only shared it with us, because of the strain their ethnic cleansing has created and to help out Trump, who they know is much more friendly to Erdogan than any other American politician will be.

Worth looking in to.

Cassandra

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of being able to tell the future but also having no one believe her prophecies.

This must be how Hillary Clinton feels every morning.

Obviously, Donald Trump has proven to be everything Clinton predicted he would be, but now we have an interesting example just this week.  In some ways this is the perfect Hillary story.

Hillary Clinton went on a podcast and said that Republicans were grooming a Democrat for a third party run. The NY Times - who has never missed an opportunity to shit on the Clintons - WROTE THE WRONG THING and said that Clinton said the Russians were grooming this anonymous Democrat for the third party run.  She instead was suggesting that Trump was a Russian asset, which he certainly appears to be.

Anyway, Tulsi Gabbard jumps up and screams, "How dare you call me a Russian asset!"  Now, Clinton never mentioned Gabbard by name, but Gabbard knew she must have been talking about her, because she has a long history of affinity for Putin and others like Bashar al Assad. 

Some Never Trump hangwringers like Tom Nichols who have a long history of hating Hillary blame her for the possibility that Gabbard might run third party.  (Third party spoilers seem Trump's only hope of winning at this point.)

So, to recap: Hillary says that there's a Democrat being groomed by Republicans for a third party run, the Times screws up it's reporting, centrists blame Clinton for pointing out something that appears to be true.

Anyway, this morning Gabbard said she's not running for re-election.  She's criticizing the impeachment proceedings on Fox with Fox News talking points. 

She's a Republican.  She has been a Republican.  Hillary basically pointed out that Gabbard is an impostor Democrat, because that's exactly what Gabbard is and always has been. Clinton gets blamed for Gabbard doing the thing that she was always going to do.

I've worried that Elizabeth Warren will be treated the same way Hillary Clinton was, but there really is something especially pathological about the way Clinton has been treated over the past 30 years.

The Party of Fox

Yesterday's illegal and ill-considered storming of a secure facility in the Capitol achieved very little in any meaningful terms.  The witness was finally allowed to testify, they beclowned themselves and there is a possibility of serious repercussions.  At the very least, they should lose their security clearances.

Why did they do it?  To play something on Fox about impeachment that wasn't directly damaging to the president. Trump knew about it.  Cameras were there (including those on their phones, which - again - illegal) and it was entirely pitched to maximize the visuals.  They clearly expected to be arrested so they could make the risible comparison of themselves to MLK.

Also yesterday, Almost A Real Boy Mark Zuckerberg was dragged back and forth across another House hearing room by Katie Porter and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Facebook's brazen stands on spreading lies and how they treat their workers. The two are clearly linked as the Right builds up an information ecosystem that is divorced from reality.  Shep Smith is gone from Fox and whatever attempt they made to report real news is likely right behind him. 

Trump's idiocy was on display last night when he promised to "build that wall" in Colorado.  The crowd cheered.  This is the level of rank stupidity and ignorance that we are dealing with, and it will get worse as the Right retreats into their informational safe spaces where Trump is a uniquely successful president in getting stuff done.  They honestly believe his agenda has matched people like FDR or LBJ or even Reagan.  Trump has passed a massive, regressive, unpopular tax cut and stuffed unqualified, reactionary judges on the bench.  As far as "positive" accomplishments, that's pretty much it. But in the informational biome of Fox News, he's Caesar Augustus combined with Christ.

We know part of how this will end.  Trump will leave office in disgrace, either by election or impeachment and removal (the latter is no longer impossible), at which point Fox and RW Wurlitzer will turn on him, then ignore him. 

These people are high on their own bullshit and they are taking the country with them.

Good Germans

Republicans are nothing if not "good Germans." They know how to follow orders. When they get their ludicrous talking points, they know how to stick with them. Yesterday, Stupid Watergate found its John Dean in Ambassador Bill Taylor, who told us what we already know, but did so with a level of detail that makes a lot of Trump's prefered defenses crumble.

Since the President's conduct has become less and less defensible, Republicans are falling back on a bullshit process argument.  Their argument seems to be...well, I think it is simply to repeat the word process over and over again for Fox News cultists.  This will eventually leak into your Facebook feeds, so get ready for it.

Their argument, if we can dignify it with that term, is that Trump hasn't had a chance to defend himself, and that most of testimony is behind closed doors.  Of course, what we are seeing now is effectively the Grand Jury phase, where prosecutors meet behind those closed doors and present evidence.  Eventually, they will present this evidence to the House and the President can defend himself in the Senate.  That's the process, and it's completely normal to the degree that anything is normal about this.  In fact, unlike a Grand Jury, Trump has people inside the room seeing the evidence against him.

We also have a novel argument being advanced by Matt Whitaker, toilet salesman for people who large genitalia and former acting AG.  His argument was that "abuse of power was not a crime."  This goes back to the argument that there is no crime called "collusion" but rather conspiracy.  Of course, while Trump HAS committed crimes in the Ukraine scandal (campaign finance crimes especially, emoluments more generally), abuse of power is not listed in the US criminal code.  As counterargument: who cares? Abuse of power is EXACTLY what impeachment is for.

The target date for wrapping up the impeachment process was Thanksgiving.  This was likely done to prevent the Senate trial from bleeding over into an election year. If the next month is as bad for the president and the GOP as this past month has been, I don't know how much longer they can keep moving the goalposts to protect him.

Corruption All The Way Down

This summary of the latest revelations about Giuliani's complete skeeviness when it comes to representing bad actors is pretty damning.  Basically, Giuliani (and therefore Trump) were involved with all sorts of shady criminals coming out of the former Soviet Union.

The problem is that the deeper the corruption goes, the harder it is to follow. I consider myself a reasonably capable person, when it comes to understanding complicated stories, but after a certain point, the details bleed into each other and make it hard to understand exactly which oligarch extracted what favor from which Trump official.  This complexity is the wedge that Fox News will be able to use to cast doubts on the charges and impugn the investigation.

That's why the "quid pro quo" is so important.  It's simple. The tangled web of Trump's connections with Ukraine and Russia is complicated.  It would be really nice if we could hear some tapes of Trump's conversations with some of these people.

This Can't Be Said Enough

Trump has confessed to the crimes of which he is accused.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ

This guy...

Hey, pundits, was today the day Trump finally became president?

"You're Fired!"

While I am not supporting Biden at all in the primaries, I thought he had one of the better attack lines back in 2016.  In talking about how Trump got famous through reality TV, Biden wondered how anyone could gleefully express the line "You're fired."

Trump has, sadly, governed very much as his reality TV character.  The louche vulgarian has churned through staff at a truly astonishing rate.  The only remaining members of his original Cabinet are two people too confused to know what's going on (Carson and DeVos), Mnuchin and Sonny Perdue.  Dunno, maybe I'm missing someone who has held on, but I think we are the Nat Sec adviser #4, Chief of Staff #3 and God knows who else.  Is there even a White House Press Secretary anymore?

Anyway, it turns out Trump was going to fire Mick Mulvaney who holds half the jobs in the White House.  "Luckily" for Mulvaney, his role as a co-conspirator has saved his job.

These freaking people...

Anti-Racism

Really good summary of Ibram Kendi's work.

In The Open

Jon Chait engages in a bit of "nut picking" when he singles out a Federalist essay supporting Trump's brazenly corrupt decision to host the G-7 at one of his resorts. The word "emolument" has been thrown around a lot since January 2017, because Trump has failed to do two things: divulge his financial records and divest from his business interests. The slogan "Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm" is fundamentally about the usual standards presidents apply to the separation between their previous business interests and the interests of the American people as filtered through the office of the presidency.

The Federalist is a hack website, as Chait calls it "the Trumpiest of Trumpsites." But this is yet ANOTHER litmus test for Congressional Republicans. This decision is so brazenly corrupt that it requires a response.  And there is plenty of time ahead of this decision to generate a response. Congress could easily pass a bill that upheld the idea that the President should not profit of his presidency and in a sane world it would pass with veto proof majorities.  The fact that it won't is a sterling example of how the GOP has become a congregation of lickspittles kowtowing to Trump's most erratic impulses.

If Congressional Republicans are indeed sick of Trump's act, as whispers suggest, here is an example to curtail his lawless disregard for the office of the presidency.  It does not involve impeachment. It simply stops an action that cannot be justified on any grounds based on precedent or law. But we all know that the GOP won't do shit.

In The End, Will They Care?

The rule of thumb in Trumpistan is that the scandal will unfold like this:

1) Trump is accused of doing something horrible.
2) Trump denies it.
3) The GOP expresses "concern."
4) The details come out and they are really bad.
5) Justifications are advanced that "everyone does this."
6) The GOP moves on and Democrats are left wondering what the hell is going on in America.

The Ukraine scandal is a little different, in that #1 was created by the whistleblower first, but most of this crap happens in public view.

The Turkey scandal feels a little different.  Republicans have shown a repeated ability to be unconcerned with wrong-doing among their political allies.  (see Kavanaugh, Brett)  But Trump's behavior in Turkey does appear to be beyond the Pale. There is no "everyone does it" defense. This makes Munich look like the Battle of Thermopylae. 

Everyone is waiting for the GOP Senate to break with this guy.  Any normal presidency would have ended already.

I just don't know if anything makes a difference with the Republican party right now.

Broken Free Of The Zookeepers

Trump's increasingly blundering moves, especially on PR stunts like the Erdogan letter, the Pelosi picture and ambushing grieving British parents, suggest that there were actually some people in the White House controlling his more erratic and crass impulses.  They are quitting and we are only going to see more and more of this raging bullshit from the Oval Office.

Medicare For All

I agree with Martin Longman here. The politics of Warren and Sanders' plans for a quick move to single-payer aren't great. We've tried that time and time again, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton...they all swung for the fences on health care (well, during Nixon's tenure it was Teddy Kennedy who was swinging for the downs).

Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama are the only two presidents to make significant headway on reforming our health insurance regimen.  They did so by passing the best bill they could and then trying to implement it in a way that insured its popularity.

During the debate, Warren was pressed on whether her plan would raise taxes.  That's a disingenuous line of attack, because it forces her into the following explanation: "Yes, your taxes go up, but your premiums go down, and if you have employer based insurance, your premiums are largely invisible to you.  Plus, if there IS a difference between you premium and the new tax, your employer is likely to pocket it."  An explanation like that is honest, but too nuanced for our Stupid Politics. 

A better and more realistic question for both Bernie and Warren is this: Will you sign ANY bill that can pass the House and Senate, even if it doesn't achieve your stated goals?  That will tell me more about them than a complicated explication of health care funding.

All Crimes, All The Time

The Trump tax return story has largely faded from view, as Trump has managed to delay the release of his tax returns through obstruction and law suits.

However, it looks like some documents are starting to leak out and SURPRISE! Trump was committing fraud.

Bolton

There's been a lot of agita on Left Twitter about accepting John Bolton as an ally in the fight against Trump. For some reason, there are those who think we need only allies who are pure in their past and their motives. That is ridiculous.

There are a few Never Trumpers who mean it.  And there were some Never Trumpers who moved back into his orbit but have since spun out again in the wake of the Ukraine scandal and the Syrian debacle. Yes, Bolton is not your friend.  Neither is Kristol or Walsh or Kasich. 

But the disagreements with those guys are primarily about what policies to enact.  They are inherently ideological and political.  Trump's rank corruption threatens the fabric of our constitutional democracy. Simply beating him in the next election is insufficient.  He must be destroyed and his political brand with him.  It's not enough to purge Trump from the Oval Office, we need to purge Trumpism from our politics. 

And sometimes that means working with odious war criminals like John Bolton.

This Seems Bad

Jon Chait literally catalogs the atrocities.

Is It Happening?

Martin Longman thinks that Trump's dam might be breaking. There are signs that his support among evangelicals - while still ludicrously high - is beginning to slip.  The overall polling numbers are pretty grim for him.

The biggest thing is that low information voters are not the Extremely Online. For anyone who follows politics closely, Trump was a conman and a crook before he rode down that elevator in 2015.  But for people who watch The Apprentice more than the news, Trump was a successful businessman.  Getting angry at the people who thought that isn't especially useful.  The biggest issue for Trump is that he is incapable of growing his base, while meanwhile alienating suburban women. The one pillar of his support that has been unwavering is evangelicals and whites without college degrees.  If he dips anywhere close to 50-50 support from those groups, he will lose Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Impeachment is working.

Hollowing The Institutions Out

Two things are true. 

- Kevin McAleenan was a terrible acting DHS secretary who implemented performative cruelty as part of his job description. 

- His replacement will be worse.

Two other things are true.

- Shep Smith was a good journalist who brought some factual reality to Fox News.

- His credibility was used to legitimate their opinion section.

We don't know for sure why these men are stepping away from the mechanisms of Republican governance.  We don't know if Bill Barr's recent conversation with Rupert Murdoch is tied to Smith's ouster at Fox, for instance.  But it's telling that two basically conservative figures have been forced out of the Executive branch and the party's propaganda organ because they are insufficiently loyal to Trump.

Yes, Smith had a tendency to deflate the GOP's more ludicrous conspiracy theories, but he was largely objective as a news anchor. That objectivity likely cost him his job.

Trump has hollowed out many of the institutions of the federal government.  Most of his Cabinet positions are filled with acting secretaries, because no one will serve the buffoon, when the most important criteria for a Cabinet post is slavish devotion to Orange Julius Caesar.  Now, we look to be on the trajectory of Trump hollowing out the institutions of conservatism.  How long does Norm Ornstein hold on at AEI?  How many other conservative figures get forced out of other institutions like the National Review or the Hoover Institute?  How many GOP Congressmen retire or get primaried?

Trump is turning the GOP into a personality cult, and he's doing it without much pushback.

They deserve the reckoning of history that they will most likely get.

Layers Upon Layers

Martin Longman has been in the weeds of this more than I have, but if he's calling this the biggest scandal in US history, I'd pay attention.  Certainly there is an inordinate amount of smoke surrounding Rudy Giuliani.

It's corruption all the way down.

On Ellen

There's a fair amount of shit being lost over Ellen Degeneres sitting next to George W. Bush at a Cowboys game and not stabbing him to death with her drink straw. The article makes cogent points for why Bush was a terrible, terrible president.  Yes, he probably should be in the Hague answering for war crimes.

But he's not.  And it's not Ellen Degeneres's job to hold a war crimes tribunal in the owner's suite at a Cowboy's game.

If anything, here's another way to frame it:
Disgraced religious bigot who tried to stop same sex marriage is forced to sit next to a wealthier, more popular lesbian and her wife.

There is an exhaustion about purity politics in the age of Twitter and microwaveable outrage.  Just punch a button and get piping hot venom!  So, yes, Bush was terrible.  In some measures he was worse than Trump (though Trump's actions in Syria threaten to dethrone Dubya). But here's the thing.  All these Internet Brave Voices, if you were to sit them down next to Bush or even Darth Cheney, they wouldn't move. They wouldn't launch into a piece by piece diatribe over Bush's many failings as president.  They would sit and stew and maybe leave early.  Few people - when confronted with another actual human being - say the things they saw online.

Ellen has a philosophy of being kind to everyone who crosses her path.  That's her creed.  She has no obligation to live by yours.

Is This A Constitutional Crisis?

Yes.  This is a constitutional crisis.

Standing alone, the refusal to comply with subpoenas is in and of itself an impeachable offense.  If the Courts weigh in and say they have to hand stuff over and they still refuse...where do we go from there?

Krugzilla

Paul Krugman has always been too smart to be employed by the New York Fucking Times.

They Can't Quit Him

Brilliant analysis of why "conservatives" will not quit Trump.  It starts from the position of "Why not Pence?" Many non-conservatives like myself wonder, "Why not just let Pence give you your reactionary judges and regressive taxes? What conservative policies has Trump advanced that Pence couldn't also? In fact, given the shitshow he's currently unleashing in Syria against the Kurds, wouldn't Pence be much more preferable?"

The problem of this line of reasoning is that, well, it's a line of reasoning.

Conservatives Reactionaries don't really care about policy.  Sure, they want to strip away abortion rights and LGBT rights and some other things.  Their view of policy is overwhelmingly negative. They want to strip away certain things that have changed their world in the past twenty to thirty years.  Again, on a fundamental level the "conservative" movement is really a reactionary movement.

Trump is a perfect avatar of this movement.  "Make America Great Again" is the perfect slogan for a reactionary movement that imagines some idyllic past where white men ruled the world with perfect benevolence.  What's more, Trump is a seething mass of resentments and grudges, which is perfect for them. To the Reactionaries, Trump is a "fighter."  They have deluded themselves in thinking that he's fighting for them, when really he's either fighting to enrich himself or simply lashing out in tantrum after tantrum.  But then again, the tantrums are the point.

"Donald Trump hates who I hate" is pretty much the current state of politics in the GOP - outside of those with some modicum of education and perspective. They think that Trump has unlocked some sort of political magic that will allow them to hold on to power.

The reality is much different.  Mitt Romney - who typifies the sort of callow, professional politician that Mike Pence also represents - won 47.2% of the popular vote in 2012.  Donald Trump won 46.1% four years later.  Both numbers represent a shocking reality for the Republican Party.  Outside of the sort of "drawing to an inside straight" that Trump pulled off in 2016, they simply will not be able to reach a majority of the electorate.  Trump, however, at least nurtures the flaming grievances that define so much of their lives.  The piece above references the Kavanaugh hearings, which Reactionaries see as a "win."  In fact, Kavanaugh crystalised the problems for many suburban college educated women who don't burn with the culture war resentments of the Republican base.

The WaPo came out with a poll today that shows that Americans support impeachment hearings by 58-38.  Slightly fewer think he should be impeached at this time (49%), but that 58% number should shock the hell out of Republicans, because all that's happened since the first whistleblower came forward has been additional damning information.  When the dam breaks - and we can feel the foundations shaking - the sheer totality of Trump's criminality will be overwhelming.

Mike Pence is not Donald Trump.  If you're a rational person, you would prefer Pence every day of the week and twice on Sunday.  Not because he's a "better person" but because he's a less-worse person.  He's a bland, theocratic dipshit, but he's unlikely to double down on disastrous policies like a trade war or abandoning the Kurds. He is not so actively friendly towards the world's worst dictators.

The fact that Mike Pence is not a pulsating orange blob of omni-directional rage-tweets actually works against him in the mind of the Reactionary movement.

The Dictatorial Presidency

This is a nice run-down of how Trump has systematically abused the Constitution of the United States by refusing all Congressional oversight. It's obviously been a push-pull act for decades - if not a century - over the proper role of the Congress to oversee the Executive.  There are obvious areas where the presidency has some leeway over what they can do unilaterally. 

What Trump has done has been to willfully and directly violate some statutes and then dared anyone to do anything about it.  With a majority of the Republican electorate behind him, he's inoculated from repercussions inside the GOP, so he feels unbound. Fox News is both the catalyst for his crimes and the shieldwall against accountability. Because Fox basically tells the GOP base what to believe, they will never break with Trump until Murdoch, Hannity and Carlson do.  This has plunged them into an alternative reality with dire consequences for the Republic.

Once the malignant narcissist is gone, Congress will need to assert some control over the White House.  Legal penalties for failing to respond to subpoenas, for instance.  What they can do about Fox News is a far trickier subject. 

The Real Deep State

Just because Trumpistas like to whine about the Deep State doesn't mean there isn't a national security apparatus that can seriously ruin your day.

So far we know of three whistleblowers.  There is apparently one with complaints about the handling of Trump's tax returns, but that one is largely being ignored in the blizzard of revelations over Ukraine.

We now have a second whistleblower on the Ukraine phone call.  While we don't know the identity of the first whistleblower, yet, these are both apparently intelligence officers.  In other words, they work for the CIA, DIA or NSA.  These are serious people who usually only act when they have a plan.  Getting the first whistleblower out there has laid the ground for subsequent revelations.  (That Trump can't stop himself from doing crimes on TV is probably more than they expected.)

Trump's phone calls have been hidden - possibly illegally - on a secret server.  The idea that there are additional, damning phone calls is real.  The other reality is that there are therefore likely to be more whistleblowers, perhaps on calls to other countries. 

This has made Republicans very reluctant to defend Trump in public.  There are some efforts to shift the conversation AWAY from the Ukraine calls, but no effort to defend the actual calls themselves.  Any smart Republican - I assume there are some - will want to stay away from the microphones as long as possible. 

The shoes are dropping like crazy, and no one has an umbrella.

International Kleptocracy

Dan Nexon at LGM makes an important point about the link between most of the shitty things happening in the world today and a broadly undemocratic international wealthy class.  Putin is likely richer than Jeff Bezos, or could be if he wanted to. It's not just the various undemocratic regimes of rich men like Putin, bin Salman or Xi.  It's the fact that they have influence beyond their borders.  Putin and Russian money helped sell Brexit, which is turning Britain into a dysfunctional disaster.

And it extends to these shores.  There are plenty of rich Americans who hide their money and influence from public accountability. They shape laws behind closed doors and hide behind court ruling like Citizens United that were crafted by wealth-serving judges.

Take Warren's wealth tax. While a certain amount of wealth is immobile, much of it is able to move from shadowy banking system to shadowy equity markets without much oversight.  It would not be enough to simply pass the wealth tax, it will have to come with a massive reconfiguration of international financial rules.

After World War II, the US shepherded the Bretton Woods agreement into existence. While it was hardly perfect, it created structures to allow for greater freedom of trade that benefited Europe, the US and developing world countries that needed investment.  Globalization is a popular punching bag for populists of all stripes, but it has been generally a positive development for the very poor. However, traveling with these reforms has been the freeing of capital markets to create an international class of very wealthy people who are immune from the laws of nation states.

That has to change if the world will have a democratic future.

Injustice Department

When they finally drag that bloated orange narcissist from the Oval Office, repairing the damage to the DOJ will be a priority.  After trying to accomplish it with Sessions, Trump finally found his "criminal lawyer" in Barr.  Barr's "Justice" department has routinely shielded Trump from criminal charges.  What should worry them all is that the DOJ is full of lawyers who know what the law actually is.  Presumably, they are stockpiling evidence of how they have been pressured.

Frankly, I would love to see the ABA move to disbar Barr.  There are very few checks on the Attorney General, as long as Trump has his back.  He should be impeached and removed, but we all know that won't happen.  Disbarring him would be a signal to the rest of the lawyers at Justice of what their long term interests are. 

Enjoy The Weekend

What are the odds that either:

A) Trump does not commit another crime on television?

or

B) More evidence of his existing crimes doesn't come out?

A million to one?

A reminder that it's been 11 days since the impeachment inquiry was launched. 

Just 11 days....

China, If You're Listening...

China should open a corruption probe of Donald Jr and Eric Trump.  I mean...Trump asked them to, so they could say that they are simply following his advice.  Pretty good leverage for ending the trade war. 

Plus, that would be some A+ trolling.

He Can't Help Himself

Please stop doing new crimes so that we can properly investigate the old ones!  I mean, maybe his strategy really is simply breaking so many laws that it becomes impossible to hold him accountable for breaking any single law.  Beats whatever Giuliani is likely to come up with.

Kind Of A Big Deal

Bernie Sanders had a minor heart procedure. He had some chest pains, a blocked artery and two stints were inserted. 

The age question is out there for both Biden and Sanders.  Warren isn't that much younger, but her stamina is frankly amazing.  More than any other candidate, Sanders' supporters are inherently suspicious of the primary process and hostile to any criticism of their Messiah.  If health forced him out, that could have a very salubrious effect on the tenor of the secondary stages of the primary, as candidates are whittled down.  I hope he's fine, but I also hope he considers the risks of running an arduous campaign at his age.

Amber Guyger

There was a fair amount of grateful amazement by African Americans that Guyger was convicted of murdering Botham Jean in his apartment.  It certainly seemed an open-and-shut case against her, and the jury's quick deliberation seems to verify that. 

The assumption of many African Americans was that white people can walk into a black person's apartment and shoot them dead and get away with it.  The thing about the Guyger case was just how absurd her defense was.  Who walks into an entirely different apartment and think it's theirs? 

When I heard the verdict, I thought, "Well, of course."  The fact that most African Americans were surprised is both sad and amazing.  It's amazing that they can believe the justice system is THAT screwed up and still abide by its legitimacy.  Compare this to the cryptofascist Oathkeepers who are threatening to kill people if Trump is impeached via constitutional processes and replaced with Mike Pence.

This Will Work

Elizabeth Warren has the best trend lines of any Democratic primary candidate.  She has the most room to grow.  Even some of the Sandernistas like her, and they don't like anyone.

Her overarching message is corruption, but hating on billionaires seems like a winning strategy.

I mean, screw those guys.