|
Former Trump Campaign Aide Burns Everything Down in Epic Series of Cable News Interviews |
 |
|
Tuesday, 06 March 2018 09:40 |
|
Rupar writes: "On Monday afternoon, former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg did three different television interviews - one with MSNBC, and then two with CNN - in which he explained why he doesn't plan to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena ordering him to testify on Friday before a federal grand jury investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election. Each of them was an unmitigated disaster."
Sam Nunberg. (photo: Amir Levy/NYT)
ALSO SEE: Former Trump Aide Sam Nunberg's Mueller
Meltdown Leaves Friends Petrified
ALSO SEE: Who Is Sam Nunberg? The World
Wants to Know.
Former Trump Campaign Aide Burns Everything Down in Epic Series of Cable News Interviews
By Aaron Rupar, ThinkProgress
06 March 18
"All he had to say was, 'yeah, we met with the Russians.'"
 n Monday afternoon, former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg did three different television interviews — one with MSNBC, and then two with CNN — in which he explained why he doesn’t plan to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena ordering him to testify on Friday before a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Each of them was an unmitigated disaster.
Nunberg is not necessarily the most reliable narrator. He was fired from the campaign for racist Facebook posts and at times has been at odds with Trump, who sued Nunberg for $10 million, alleging he violated a confidentiality agreement.
Nevertheless, Nunberg made a number of explosive claims during the interviews. Here are the highlights.
Nunberg says he thinks Mueller has the goods on Trump
Nunberg said that he came away from an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team persuaded that they may “have something” on Trump.
“I think they may… I think that he may have done something during the election,” Nunberg told MSNBC. “But I don’t know that for sure.”
Nunberg offered a similar comment to CNN.
“I suspect that they suspect something about him… The way they asked about his business dealings… it just made me suspect that they suspect something about him,” he said.
Nunberg says Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians
Nunberg told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he believes Trump knew about a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between top campaign officials and a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised to provide the campaign with dirt about Hillary Clinton.
“All he had to say was, ‘yeah, we met with the Russians. The Russians offered us something, and we thought they had something, and that was it,'” Nunberg said. “I don’t know why he went around trying to hide it.”
Last summer, Trump helped craft a misleading statement about the meeting. During an interview with the New York Times, Trump denied having any knowledge about it.
“No, I didn’t know anything about the meeting,” Trump said.
Nunberg says Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page was colluding with Russia
During his second interview with CNN, Nunberg told Jake Tapper that foreign Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page “was colluding with Russia,” but he downplayed the significance of it.
“He was not really an adviser, Jake, come on — do you really think he was an adviser? He was a name on a list,” Nunberg said.
During the campaign, Trump mentioned Page by name as one of his foreign policy advisers. Trump-supporting Republicans in Congress have recently accused the FBI of abusing its authority in obtaining a FISA warrant to surveil Page.
Nunberg thinks it’d be funny if he got arrested
Nunberg repeatedly expressed amusement at the idea that he’ll be arrested for refusing to comply with the grand jury’s subpoena.
“I think it would be funny if they arrested me,” he told MSNBC’s Katy Tur.
Nunberg later asked Tapper for legal advice.
“Do you think should I cooperate? Should I spend 80 hours going over my e-mails, Jake?” he asked.
“If it were me, I would,” Tapper replied. “Just my opinion. Because it sounds like pain, but he is the special counsel and he does have the long arm of the law.”
Nunberg says he’s too busy to go through his emails
Nunberg framed his refusal to comply with the subpoena around his frustration that Mueller’s team is asking for a complete record of his emails with other Trump campaign aides, including Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, going back to November 2015.
“The subpoena is absolutely ridiculous,” Nunberg told CNN’s Gloria Berger. “Why should I hand them over every email I’ve had with Steve Bannon since November of 2015? Give me a break.”
During his interview with Tapper, Nunberg said: “I think Mueller has enough on Trump. He doesn’t need me to start giving him information on Stone and Bannon. Jake, I communicated with Roger Stone and Steve Bannon 15 times a day. So I have to spend 80 hours going over e-mails?”
Nunberg says Mueller is honing in on Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow
Nunberg said that his interview with Mueller left him with the impression that investigators are honing in on Trump’s 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant.
“They probably want to know about Miss Universe 2013, if I had to guess,” Nunberg told CNN, in response to a question about why he thinks Mueller’s team wants him to testify before a grand jury.
Regarding the Steele dossier’s claim that Trump took part in lewd sexual escapades with Russian prostitutes during that trip, Nunberg said Trump’s personal bodyguard told him that one of Trump’s Russian contacts, Emin Agalarov “offered to send women up to Trump’s room [in Moscow] but Trump didn’t want it. He’s too smart for that, he didn’t want it.”
Mueller thinks Trump ‘is the Manchurian Candidate’
Nunberg told CNN that his impression is that Mueller “thinks that Trump is the Manchurian Candidate,” but he said he doesn’t agree with that assessment.
“Mueller thinks that trump is the Manchurian Candidate, and I will tell you I disagree with that,” Nunberg said during his first CNN interview.
During a White House news briefing that occurred after Nunberg’s MSNBC interview, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Nunberg’s comments.
“I definitely think he doesn’t know that for sure because he’s incorrect,” Sanders said. “As we’ve said many times before, there was no collusion.”
 |
|
The Clowns Are in Charge: Why Italy's Election Result Should Alarm All of Us. |
|
|
Tuesday, 06 March 2018 09:32 |
|
Mounk writes: "The past few years have amply demonstrated that populists in North America and Western Europe can occasionally cobble together surprising majorities. Now, the Italian case shows that they have astounding longevity - and can become absolutely dominant in a country that had long been considered a consolidated (if admittedly chaotic) democracy."
Matteo Salvini. (photo: Radio Sound Piacenza)
The Clowns Are in Charge: Why Italy's Election Result Should Alarm All of Us.
By Yascha Mounk, Slate
06 March 18
 he just-concluded Italian election is a watershed moment in the remarkable rise of populism.
The past few years have amply demonstrated that populists in North America and Western Europe can occasionally cobble together surprising majorities. Now, the Italian case shows that they have astounding longevity—and can become absolutely dominant in a country that had long been considered a consolidated (if admittedly chaotic) democracy.
Italy’s political landscape is so baroque that it’s pointless to explain the ins and outs of the country’s many rival parties and movements. But Fonderie Creative, a group of Italian graphic designers, has done a very nice job of summarizing the most important movements in advance of the election.
With The Simpsons as a helpful cheat sheet, here’s what you need to know about yesterday’s results:
• Krusty the Clown, aka the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), came out as the strongest political party, taking about one-third of the vote nationwide. Radically critical of all existing political institutions, the Five Star Movement has recently started to deploy more anti-immigrant rhetoric, has received sizeable support from Russian sources in the past, and is seemingly run by a shadowy PR firm. Although its leaders pledged that they would stay in opposition, they are now demanding to take a role in the government.
• Snake Jailbird, aka the Lega Nord (Northern League), took about 18 percent of the vote. Founded as a separatist party that advocated for the independence of the country’s affluent north, the League has, under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, transformed itself into a hypernationalist and virulently xenophobic party in the mold of France’s National Front. When a former candidate for the party shot six African migrants in the city of Macerata in the middle of the campaign, Salvini pointedly refused to condemn him.
• Mr. Burns, aka former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, took 14 percent of the vote. Berlusconi, a self-made billionaire who dominated Italian politics from 1994 until his ignominious fall from power in 2011, is simultaneously an ideological moderate whose economic and social policies are largely within the bounds of ordinary Italian politics and an institutional radical who has weakened the Italian judiciary to keep himself out of jail.
In case you’ve been counting, Krusty, Jailbird, and Mr. Burns have nearly two-thirds of the vote between them. Poor Springfield.
How this sorry cast of characters is actually going to rule Italy is anybody’s guess. The Five Star Movement’s short record of government at the local and regional level has been an unmitigated disaster, and they lack realistic coalition partners. Before the election, many commentators assumed that a “center-right” coalition between Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Salvini’s League might rule the country. The center-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) could conceivably lend this government informal support. But because Salvini has taken more votes than Berlusconi, and would therefore lead such a government, this would essentially amount to a Social Democratic party helping to make a far-right extremist the prime minister of the country—which would set a terrible precedent for other parts of Europe, and be all but certain to destroy the party. (There’s also another horror scenario: a coalition between the most extreme and euroskeptic parties, Five Stars and the League; but at least for now, Salvini seems to have ruled this possibility out.)
The most likely outcome, then, is protracted negotiations that lead either to an unstable and short-lived government or to new elections. Italy has always been chaotic; now, it is to all intents and purposes “ungovernable,” as a daily newspaper headline read Monday.
This, then, is the kind of politics you get when trust in liberal democracy hits rock bottom, mutually hostile anti-system parties proliferate, and ideologically coherent coalitions become impossible. Welcome to 21st-century Europe.
The consequences for Italy are likely to be tragic. The country is not only unspeakably charming and beautiful; it also retains real economic strengths, including a vibrant manufacturing sector in the north. But its history of corruption and over-regulation has, for many decades, been sapping its strength. While Italy had a higher per capita GDP than the United Kingdom as recently as the early 1990s, it has barely experienced any growth in the past decades and now lags far behind.
During an unusual period of reasonable leadership by the center-left Democratic Party since 2013, the country has been finally starting to recover. This year, Italy’s GDP was forecast to grow by 1.5 percent. Now, investors are going to think twice about pouring more money into the country, and the possibility of a crisis of confidence that would make Italy’s high public debt unsustainable once again looms on the horizon.
The most depressing manifestation of the twin crisis of omnipresent corruption and sluggish growth has been a widespread feeling of hopelessness among young Italians. Youth unemployment is very high. Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are largely given to the children of friends and relatives. Even highly qualified doctors or lawyers need to go to humiliating lengths to procure employment, and often fail. Every year, tens of thousands of the most ambitious and talented young Italians leave the country.
This dire situation makes it perfectly understandable that so many young people around the country have decided to vote for the Five Star Movement, which has best captured their anger at the status quo and their cynicism about a rigged political and economic system. But the dysfunction that Krusty the Clown will bring to Rome is also likely to deepen their malaise. As in so many other countries, populists in Italy have thrived by railing against failings that are all too real but are likely to implement solutions that only serve to aggravate them.
It is tempting to think of the rise of populism as a self-correcting mechanism. On this account of the current situation, these parties rise because traditional elites have failed to deal with public frustrations. Their entry into politics either pushes traditional parties to get their act together or empowers newcomers who can do better. Over time, the system stabilizes.
But the Italian case suggests that the rise of populism may, instead, be self-radicalizing. While it is true that populists rise because traditional political elites have failed to deal with public frustrations, their success makes it even more difficult for moderate parties to deal with them. Instead of helping to address the root causes of public anger, populists make them more acute, and voters grow even more agitated. Over time, the system becomes even more chaotic.
There is also another important lesson the world can take from the Italian election, as the important (and as yet unpublished) work on the pathways of populism by Jordan Kyle makes clear: When Berlusconi fell from grace in 2011, Italy seemed to turn away from populism. But in truth, the cancer just metastasized. Now, an even more aggressive form of it is ravishing different parts of the body politic all at once.
Similarly, it is tempting to think that things will go back to normal if Donald Trump leaves the White House in 2020. But as the experiences of Italy and many other countries around the world show, it is not enough to beat an authoritarian populist to free a country from the threat of strongman rule. Anybody who wants to save liberal democracy has to resolve the deep reasons for public frustration about the political system, not just combat its most immediate and glaring manifestation.
|
|
|
I've Seen the Hidden Horrors of High-Speed Slaughterhouses |
|
|
Tuesday, 06 March 2018 09:30 |
|
David writes: "If you care about animal welfare or food safety, this news will concern you: the nationwide expansion of a risky US Department of Agriculture (USDA) high-speed slaughter program is imminent. But the good news is there is still time to stop it."
A risky U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) high-speed slaughter program would allow facilities to increase slaughter speeds and shift responsibility of food safety oversight into the hands of slaughter plant employees. (photo: Gerry Broome/AP)
I've Seen the Hidden Horrors of High-Speed Slaughterhouses
By Scott David, Guardian UK
06 March 18
There is still time to stop an imminent program that would allow facilities to increase slaughter speeds, while reducing the number of trained government inspectors
 f you care about animal welfare or food safety, this news will concern you: The nationwide expansion of a risky US Department of Agriculture (USDA) high-speed slaughter program is imminent. But the good news is there is still time to stop it.
The USDA is now accepting public comments on its proposed rule that it euphemistically dubbed the “Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection”. As a former undercover investigator who worked inside a pig slaughterhouse operating under the pilot project that was, at the time, called HIMP,” I’ve seen firsthand the hazardous and cruel nature of this controversial program and can say with certainty that it’s anything but “modern”.
This expanded program, formally called the New Swine Slaughter Inspection System (NSIS), would allow facilities to increase slaughter speeds, while reducing the number of trained government inspectors on the lines. In other words, the responsibility of food safety oversight is largely shifted into the hands of slaughter plant employees. Combine this with faster speeds on the kill floor and the result is problems that can – and do – go unnoticed.
For nearly six months, I worked undercover inside Quality Pork Processors (QPP), no typical pig slaughterhouse. An exclusive Hormel Foods supplier, QPP kills about 1,300 pigs every hour operating under the high-speed pilot program. That’s more than 21 pigs per minute, making QPP one of the fastest pig-killing facilities in the nation.
QPP has widely been considered a model for the USDA’s nationwide expansion of the pilot program through NSIS, but when no one thought the public or USDA was watching, behind the slaughterhouse’s closed doors, I documented pig carcasses covered in feces and abscesses being processed for human consumption, and workers – under intense pressure to keep up with high line speeds – beating, dragging, and electrically prodding pigs to make them move faster.
NSIS may also allow higher numbers of sick and injured pigs too weak even to stand (known as “downers”) to be slaughtered for food. As documented on my hidden camera, these animals endured particularly horrific abuses as they were forced to the kill floor in a desperate attempt to keep the slaughter lines moving as fast as possible.
I even documented a supervisor sleeping on the job when he was in charge of overseeing the stunning process to ensure pigs were effectively rendered unconscious before their throats were slit.
One QPP employee even said to me on camera, “If the USDA is around, they could shut us down.”
That, in a nutshell, is the underlying problem with this initiative: it’s a program that largely allows the slaughterhouse to police itself.
Though I’ve witnessed these horrors firsthand, I’m far from the only one warning of the dangers of NSIS. USDA whistleblowers, labor unions, and even members of Congress have expressed their objections to this program.
A 2013 report by the USDA’s own Office of the Inspector General stated that “since FSIS did not provide adequate oversight, HIMP plants may have a higher potential for food safety risks,” concluding that this “program has shown no measurable improvement to the inspection process”.
In 2016, a letter from 60 members of Congress to the USDA stated “the available evidence suggests the hog HIMP will undermine food safety,” and that “rapid line speeds present some of the greatest risks of inhumane treatment as workers are often pressured to take violent shortcuts to keep up.” The letter further states: “We are concerned that these new rules are being pushed by the industry to increase profits at the expense of public health.”
More than a quarter of a million people have signed a petition against the pilot program’s expansion through NSIS, and earlier this month, a coalition of 35 animal, worker, environmental, and consumer protection organizations also urged the USDA to drop the proposal.
At a time when consumers are rightfully demanding more transparency in the food industry, the USDA’s so-called “Modernization” program is a big step backward.
Halting the expansion of the dangerous pilot program and bringing it to an immediate end is the only conscientious and compassionate choice for the USDA, a federal agency that has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to put animals, consumers, and workers above powerful pork industry interests.
To sum it all up in the words of a USDA whistleblower who worked as an inspector at QPP: “It’s no longer meaningful for consumers to see that mark indicating that their product has been USDA-inspected.”
|
|
War and Peace Abridged |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 05 March 2018 14:50 |
|
Rosenblum writes: "Professionals understand how terrorists operate. Those we need to fear most find ways to come in the front door. Others are already here. Slamming our doors to all desperate refugees and qualified immigrants only creates yet more extremists ready to devote their lives to making us pay."
Michael Morrell. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
War and Peace Abridged
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
05 March 18
o riff on the NRA’s moronic mantra: missiles don’t kill people, stone-cold demagogues kill people. The issue is not whether we should fear new Russian supernukes. It is why Vladimir Putin so pointedly boasts about them.
Here is Michael Morell, who knows whereof he speaks:
“There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that after the invasion of Georgia, the invasion of Ukraine, the intervention in Syria, the meddling in our election, the attack last week by Russian mercenaries on U.S. forces in Syria, that we are again in a Cold War.”
And this time, he adds, we are fast approaching hot conflict. Both sides reached mutually assured overkill decades ago and kept the lid on. Today, chest-bumping bullies – one far tougher and savvier – could trigger the unthinkable.
Putin says Russia would join China to defend North Korea, if attacked. He sloughs off U.N. officials’ accusation of war crimes in Syria. For starters.
I’d be less troubled if Morell still had his old job, acting CIA director. After 30 years out in the real world watching human behavior shape geopolitics, his soft-spoken guidance helped steer politicians clear of folly. But in Washington today, competence is a drawback.
Now he is a private consultant, one of those CBS News experts whose wisdom is too often lost among uninformed babble. I’ve seen the CIA up close at its worst and best since the 60s when it handed the Congo to Mobutu. He is the real deal.
As the presidential campaign neared showdown, Morell abandoned neutrality. Having seen Hillary Clinton in action, he trusted her to make sensible decisions. Trump’s amateur-hour simplicities scared him silly.
Putin’s greatest threat is democracy, Morell says, and if he can undermine it in the United States and Europe, he is stronger at home. Discord in America weakens its ability to act abroad. Without sanctions that bite and oversight of social media, he concludes, Putin will amp up his cyber-meddling in 2020.
It gets worse.
After Bashar al-Assad gassed civilians in 2013, Morell urged a targeted strike smack on his doorstep to get his attention and then tough negotiation in face-saving secrecy. Instead, Barack Obama waffled and let the Russians weigh in.
Now Putin dominates the Middle East backgammon board. The more Trump leans toward Israel and Saudi Arabia, the more Iran’s proxy zealots crank up the heat. And Russia’s priorities do not include protecting America from terrorism.
In a CBS News interview last week, Morell warned of the blowback:
“ISIS has for some time said that they want to acquire weapons of mass destruction and to use them and they’ve actually been able to manufacture chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria and use them on the battlefield.
“I think we need to be more worried about them making it here. This stuff is difficult to transport, it’s difficult to get it by customs and immigration. I think it’s more likely that they send the recipe here to their followers and they make it here.”
That, he concluded, is relatively easy. It takes only a degree in chemistry and a few basic elements.
Plenty of other seasoned analysts echo Morell’s fears, basing assessments on hard data and trusted sources in the thick of things. But Trump demoralizes them, tuning them out and listening to his inexperienced ideologues.
Professionals understand how terrorists operate. Those we need to fear most find ways to come in the front door. Others are already here. Slamming our doors to all desperate refugees and qualified immigrants only creates yet more extremists ready to devote their lives to making us pay.
In the long run, America’s challenge is China, with its insatiable need for raw materials and strategic metals along with its global efforts to quash free expression and human rights. Smart diplomacy and sensible politics can work out coexistence.
More immediately, we need to stop two megalomaniacs intent on comparing penis size before this gets out of hand, and they end up blowing a chunk out of the planet.
|
|
onald Trump once said
he identified with Ayn Rand’s character Howard Roark in “The
Fountainhead,” an architect so upset that a housing project he designed
didn’t meet specifications he had it dynamited. 
