Most Memorable Thing About Trump's Speech Is It Will Soon Be Forgotten
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
Thursday, 01 February 2018 15:08
Rather writes: "I debated whether to post about the State of the Union because I think that for all the time and attention it receives nothing really changed."
Dan Rather. (photo: CBS)
Most Memorable Thing About Trump's Speech Is It Will Soon Be Forgotten
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
01 February 18
debated whether to post about the State of the Union because I think that for all the time and attention it receives nothing really changed. I wonder what the ratings will end up being. Do the President's supporters care what he says in a forum such as this? Does the majority of the country who disapprove of the President want to spend an evening hearing him lecture to them?
But I figured if I took the time to watch, I might as well say something. Because I think the most memorable thing about the speech is that it will probably soon be forgotten.
This was an informercial for Donald Trump and his Republican Party. For make no mistake, there is no distance between the GOP and the Party of Trump. He owns it, and the members of Congress know it. Almost to a man (and they mostly are men), they pay fealty to their leader.
As a newsman, I found no real news except tough talk on immigration (no surprise) and increased sabre rattling with North Korea (disquieting, but no surprise). So much of what ails us, as a people, as a nation, as a world went unsaid. And also left unsaid was the shadow that looms over all that has transpired in the last year and a half - the specter of Russia and now a criminal investigation.
Presidents uplift. This one does not. Presidents speak to our common ideals. This one does not. Presidents seek to expand their base. This one does not.
On style points, I thought it was well delivered, as far as that goes. Some analysts with amnesia may say that the President was presidential. But the storm clouds still gather, an itchy Twitter finger awaits, and the State of the Union is far from united.
Michael Wolff and Donald Trump Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45609"><span class="small">Addy Baird, ThinkProgress</span></a>
Thursday, 01 February 2018 14:51
Baird writes: "Michael Wolff, embraced by the #resistance for his questionably-sourced book Fire and Fury, which documented the tumultuous first year of the Trump administration, has proved yet again that he's actually just as craven as the man at the center of his 'reporting.'"
Author Michael Wolff. (photo: Jessica Kourkounis/Getty)
Michael Wolff and Donald Trump Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
By Addy Baird, ThinkProgress
01 February 18
You don't have to have Wolff on your television show.
ichael Wolff, embraced by the #resistance for his questionably-sourced book Fire and Fury, which documented the tumultuous first year of the Trump administration, has proved yet again that he’s actually just as craven as the man at the center of his “reporting.”
On Thursday morning, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski tossed Wolff off her MSNBC show after he denied having pushed rumors that President Trump is having an affair with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, a lie he has shamelessly pushed in the wake of his book release. Wolff first insinuated as much on Real Time with Bill Maher last month. In an interview with Maher, Wolff said Trump was having an affair right now, but that he didn’t have enough information about it to put it in his book.
“You just have to read between the lines,” Wolff said. “Now that I’ve told you, when you hit that paragraph, you’ll say bingo.”
Haley was forced to publicly deny the speculation, but Wolff couldn’t let it go. On Wednesday, he told TheSkimm that Haley had “embraced” the rumor. And then, one day later on Morning Joe, Wolff denied ever having propagated the lie at all.
“I didn’t go after her,” Wolff said, when he was asked about having pushed the rumors about the affair, “and secondly, what I certainly … meant was I found it puzzling that she would deny something she was not accused of.”
Asked if he regretted having inferred Haley was having an affair, Wolff denied ever having done so — despite having done so — saying, “I didn’t infer anything about Nikki Haley. What I inferred was that … many of the people around the president believe he is still involved with various women.”
Brzezinski wasn’t having it.
“I’m going to go as far as to say you might be having a fun time playing a little game dancing around this, but you’re slurring a woman. It’s disgraceful,” Brzezinski said.
Wolff continued to protest his innocence, saying, “[Haley] has been accused of nothing. She has decided to deny what she’s not been accused of. Certainly I didn’t accuse her of this.”
Brzezinski asked if he was kidding, adding, “You’re on the set of ‘Morning Joe,’ we don’t BS here,” which is not true, but mostly beside the point, and then she kicked him off as he stammered.
“If you don’t get it, if you don’t get what we’re talking about, I’m sorry, this is awkward, you’re here on the set with us, but we’re done,” she said. “Michael Wolff, thank you, we’re gonna go to break now.”
Wolff, charmer that he is, decided to take to Twitter, claiming he was forced to say what he said by Brzezinski and then she kicked him off anyway.
“My bad,” Wolff tweeted, “the President is right about Mika.”
Trump has used his platform to say a number of nasty things about Bzezinski, calling her “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and saying she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” in a series of tweets last June.
To be invited on a show with the purpose of being thrown off...is the new television.
Wolff went on like this for a while, continuing to argue that Haley is denying an affair she was never accused of, even though she was definitely accused of it.
Also, can someone tell Wolff how to thread his tweets?
And let me repeat: Nikki Haley has chosen to vociferously deny something she was not accused of.
Brzezinski didn’t have much to say following the ordeal. Her only comments so far have come on Twitter, where she retweeted CBS News correspondent Bianna Golodryga saying “personally attacking fellow journalists is not ok,” and complimenting Brzezinski as “fair and respected,” adding, “Thank you.”
The important thing, beyond the juicy drama of early morning MSNBC talk news, is that it’s an important reminder that Wolff has a lot in common with the president he writes about: flexible ethics and an insatiable desire for attention.
There are materially bad things happening in the world, and some people who are engaged in revealing the bad things Trump and those around him are doing are mostly interested for their own gain. Wolff is one of those people, and him and others like him have outsized influence in the public sphere. His book revealed some new information but when the media spotlight began to fade, he was more than willing to engage in rumor and innuendo. This cheap, tawdry, wild-eyed approach reinforces the smears Trump levels daily against the news media, who are mostly obsessed with accuracy and toiling in obscurity.
You don’t have to listen to him or have him on your television show.
FOCUS: Democrats and Progressives Push US War Machine in Vermont
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Thursday, 01 February 2018 13:18
Boardman writes: "Opposition to basing the F-35 in a residential neighborhood is at least as old as the mindless official support, and the opposition has been much more articulate, thoughtful, and detailed."
F-35 fighter jet. (photo: U.S. Air Force)
Democrats and Progressives Push US War Machine in Vermont
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
01 February 18
Donald Trump loves the F-35 and so does Burlington City Council – that is the real state of the union
his is a story primarily about corrupt practices by the Burlington City Council, in its headlong determination to force a neighboring city to be the base for a weapon of mass destruction, the nuclear capable F-35 fighter-bomber (in development since 1992, first flown in 2000, still not reliably deployable in 2018, at a cost of $400 billion and counting). Yes, the premise itself is corrupt: Burlington owns the airport in South Burlington, so South Burlington has no effective say in how many housing units Burlington destroys in South Burlington to meet environmental standards for imposing the quiet-shattering F-35 jet on a community that doesn’t want it and won’t benefit from it. The entire “leadership” of the state of Vermont, mostly Democrats, has spent more than a decade making this atrocity happen, with widespread media complicity. And you wonder how we got Trump as President.
Opposition to basing the F-35 in a residential neighborhood is at least as old as the mindless official support, and the opposition has been much more articulate, thoughtful, and detailed. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat and Burlington native, has been enthusiastic about militarizing his hometown from the start, treating it as if it should be seen as an honorable piece of pork from the military-industrial complex. Independent senator Bernie Sanders, like Democratic congressman Peter Welch, has hedged slightly in his support, but neither has come close to a cogently articulated position, much less opposition. Governors of both parties have been cheerleaders, especially Peter Shumlin, who took a junket to Florida to listen to an F-35 and decided it wasn’t all that loud (which was shortly before he decided universal healthcare wasn’t all that necessary). Democratic mayor Miro Weinberger, a self-described person-who-builds-things, capsulizes the ostrich view of the F-35, saying, “I think this decision was made a long time ago, and I have not heard a compelling reason to reopen it.” He’s like everyone else in Vermont leadership who has chosen to challenge the Pentagon’s Big Muddy argument (“the big fool said to press on”), regardless of how bogus Pentagon claims have become and despite their lack of compelling reasons to base the F-35 in Vermont.
After decades of falling behind schedule, the Air Force still doesn’t have an F-35 ready to deploy in Vermont before September 2019, if then. With this in mind, F-35 opponents at SAVE OUR SKIES FROM THE F-35s decided to try to get the F-35 question on the ballot for the Burlington town meeting on March 6, 2018.
After drafting the petition, the SOS organizers presented it for approval as to form by the Burlington City Attorney Eileen Blackwood. Blackwood approved it. Volunteers gathered almost 3000 signatures in support of the petition, as approved by Blackwood. In the ordinary course of event, an approved petition with sufficient signatures goes on the ballot as presented.
That’s true even for petitions like the one from the Burlington Anti-War Coalition in 2005 calling for Vermont to bring US forces home from Iraq:
Full Resolution: “Shall the voters of the City of Burlington advise the President and Congress that Burlington and its citizens strongly support the men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces in Iraq and believe that the best way to support them is to bring them home now?”
The city council supported this resolution, it passed in every ward in the city (as well as in 46 other Vermont towns), and it had 65.2% voter support in Burlington. That was easy in 2005, but thirteen years later, with a city council dominated by people calling themselves Progressives and Democrats, the idea of resisting the war machine became, somehow, troubling to at least three city councilors: Republican Kurt Wright, up for re-election, Independent David Hartnett, and council president Jane Knodell, a Progressive whose re-election to the council in 2013 was based in part on opposition to the F-35. She later voted against Progressive proposals to bar the F-35 from Burlington International Airport or to delay any basing decision. A tenured professor of economics at the University of Vermont, Knodell is considered by one fellow councilor “probably the smartest person at the table.” She has acknowledged a desire to be mayor.
Confronted with a resolution that they opposed, Wright, Hartnett, and the “smartest person at the table” decided to abort the democratic process, and to do it dishonestly. They decided, without getting a single citizen’s signature, to put their own petition to the voters, with diametrically opposed effect. They made the city attorney wobbly. The process could hardly have been more corrupt in its intent. None of the three councilors responded to an email inquiry asking, “What are you thinking?”
The SOS petition endorsed by almost 3000 voters is simple and direct:
“Shall we, the voters of the City of Burlington, as part of our strong support for the men and women of the Vermont National guard, and especially their mission to ‘protect the citizens of Vermont,’ advise the City Council to:
1) request the cancellation of the planned basing of the F-35 at Burlington International Airport, and
2) request instead low-noise-level equipment with a proven high safety record appropriate for a densely populated area?”
The SOS website offers 20 support notes and eight citations supporting the rationale of the petition. The Vermont National Guard mission – “protect the citizens of Vermont” – comes from the Guard’s website. SOS argues that “citizens of Vermont” includes the people, mostly poor and/or immigrant, whose houses are being destroyed and lives disrupted for the convenience of a warplane with no relevant mission in the region.
Knodell, Wright, and Hartnett started their hatchet job by chopping out the clause about the Guard’s mission protecting Vermonters. They didn’t say why, just let the collateral damage lie there. They lied by adding a clause at the end, “recognizing there may not be alternate equivalent equipment,” a lie of intent saved from being bold-faced by the inclusion of “may.” This is the Pentagon’s position, that there is no Plan B, but that’s absolutely dishonest. The only reason there’s no Plan B is because the Pentagon has stalled on the issue for years. They could make a Plan B tomorrow if they so chose. The Knodell amendment looks like a deliberate poison pill added in perfect bad faith. That impression is reinforced when you get to the preambulatory “whereas-es” the Knodell team put before the resolution to weaken it further, but enough already.
The Knodell team didn’t just run afoul of honest behavior and reasonable democratic practice. Their plan to put their own resolution in place of a properly prepared one looked to be illegal as well as unconstitutional.
This set up a confrontation for the city council meeting of January 29, at which F-35 opponents were prepared to object to Knodell chicanery loudly and strongly. The outcome was an anticlimax. The council voted 10-2 (Knodell for it) to accept the SOS resolution as presented. Only Wright and Hartnett dissented. Media coverage of the triumph of reasonable due process varied from straightforward to vaguely mocking to somewhat peevish to rather trivializing. None of the coverage talked about the attempted corruption procedure leading up to the vote, much less the corrupt cultural morass that the F-35 successfully masks with its stealth capability. As currently assessed by the Pentagon, the F-35 can’t shoot straight and has more than 200 other deficiencies, but Australia is going ahead buying 100 of them. An Australian military strategic thinker observed dryly: “It’s disappointing that there’s still deficiencies turning up fairly regularly in an aircraft that we’re already going to get about ten years later than we originally thought.”
The March 6 vote on the resolution is only advisory, so even if there is overwhelming support for an alternative to the F-35, what are the odds of such a democratic choice prevailing? This is the Trump era. He’s asking for the next budget to have $716 billion in military spending, and Vermont seems to think getting some of that money is more important than anything else.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Thursday, 01 February 2018 12:06
Pierce writes: "There is too much energy being expended in too many directions here for there not to be something seriously wrong at the bottom of this affair."
Too many people are risking too much skin for this to be merely about "politics."
or a time, the optimists in the president*’s camp were pitching as a worst case scenario that Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election would end up at worst delivering obstruction prosecutions with no underlying offenses—essentially, that some underlings, in an effort to help out the president*, were too vigorous in their efforts, and less than vigorous about telling the truth. I mean, hell, it’s an argument. It’s the “third-rate burglary” argument gussied up for our times, but it’s an argument nonetheless. However, that dog no longer chooses to hunt.
It was quite a night. First, The New York Times puts longtime Trump confidante – and White House communications director—Hope Hicks right in the middle of things.
The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Mr. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request. Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
The, Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, announces that committee chairman—and ranking White House lawn ornament—Devin Nunes barbered the text of Nunes’s now-infamous memo before sending it to the White House. In other words, Nunes passed along a document that the committee had not given him permission to release. From CNN:
In a letter to Nunes, Schiff said that his staff discovered Wednesday evening that the memo sent to the White House was "materially different" than the version on which the committee voted. The White House is currently reviewing the four-page classified memo after the committee voted on Monday night to make it public. "It is now imperative that the Committee Majority immediately withdraw the document that it sent to the White House," Schiff wrote. "If the Majority remains intent on releasing its document to the public, despite repeated warnings from DOJ and the FBI, it must hold a new vote to release to the public its modified document."
The reply from the Nunes camp seems…less than adequate.
A spokesman for Nunes responded to Schiff's letter by calling it an "increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication of the memo," saying changes were made that were "minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the Minority themselves."
Is it even necessary any more to point out that, if he so desired, the president* could declassify those parts of the memo that are classified and release the thing in 10 minutes? The only people keeping the memo from being released are the people bellowing the loudest about releasing it at all.
These two stories obscured the revelations late Wednesday afternoon that open conflict had broken out between the White House and FBI director Christopher Wray over the release of the memo. It is Wray’s considered opinion that the memo is a crock. From CNN:
Wray sent a striking signal to the White House, issuing a rare public warning that the memo about the FBI's surveillance practices omits key information that could impact its veracity. The move set up an ugly confrontation between Wray and Trump, who wants the document released. "With regard to the House Intelligence Committee's memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it," the FBI said in a statement. "As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."
All of which, in combination with the complete surrender of the Republican congressional leadership to this fairy tale, leads to the inevitable conclusion that there is more going on here than political damage control. People are breaking too much rock over this matter for that to be the case. People are risking too much to keep the cover story aloft. The original Watergate cover-up was not designed to shield the burglars; it was to keep a lid on five years of crimes and dirty tricks. There is too much energy being expended in too many directions here for there not to be something seriously wrong at the bottom of this affair.
It might be Russian ratfcking. It might be dirty money being cleaned through the First Family’s” business. It might be a complex combination of both. But not even this president* is dumb and/or arrogant enough to risk a massive constitutional crisis simply to save himself a little embarrassment concerning the circumstances of his election. Even I give him the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Schiff writes: "Even during the most difficult of times, when Congress had seemingly lost the capacity to govern and partisan storms raged across Capitol Hill, the intelligence committees remained largely insulated from the nation's increasingly self-destructive politics. No more."
Rep. Devin Nunes. (photo: Getty)
Rep. Nunes's Memo Crosses a Dangerous Line
By Rep. Adam B. Schiff, The Washington Post
01 February 18
ven during the most difficult of times, when Congress had seemingly lost the capacity to govern and partisan storms raged across Capitol Hill, the intelligence committees remained largely insulated from the nation’s increasingly self-destructive politics.
No more.
On Monday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) moved to release a memo written by his staff that cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department — all while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods. He did so even though he had not read the classified documents that the memo characterizes and refused to allow the FBI to brief the committee on the risks of publication and what it has described as “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” The party-line vote to release the Republican memo but not a Democratic response was a violent break from the committee’s nonpartisan tradition and the latest troubling sign that House Republicans are willing to put the president’s political dictates ahead of the national interest.
The reason for Republicans’ abrupt departure from our nonpartisan tradition is growing alarm over special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. In a matter of months, the president’s first national security adviser and a foreign policy adviser have pleaded guilty to felony offenses, while his former campaign chairman and deputy campaign manager have also been indicted. As Mueller and his team move closer to the president and his inner circle, a sense of panic is palpable on the Hill. GOP members recognize that the probe threatens not only the president but also their majorities in Congress.
In response, they have drawn on the stratagem of many criminal defense lawyers — when the evidence against a defendant is strong, put the government on trial. The Nunes memo is designed to do just that by furthering a conspiracy theory that a cabal of senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department were so tainted by bias against President Trump that they irredeemably poisoned the investigation. If it wasn’t clear enough that this was the goal, Nunes removed all doubt when he declared that the Justice Department and the FBI themselves were under investigation at the hearing in which the memo was ordered released.
This decision to employ an obscure rule to order the release of classified information for partisan political purposes crossed a dangerous line. Doing so without even allowing the Justice Department or the FBI to vet the information for accuracy, the impact of its release on sources and methods, and other concerns was, as the Justice Department attested, “extraordinarily reckless.” But it also increases the risk of a constitutional crisis by setting the stage for subsequent actions by the White House to fire Mueller or, as now seems more likely, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, an act that would echo the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre.
As multiple investigations work to unearth the full truth, the president has lashed out with Nixonian ferocity at the Justice Department, the FBI, congressional investigators and the media.
However, unlike President Richard Nixon, who waged his Watergate fight without the same kind of vocal allies, Trump not only has an entire media ecosystem dedicated to shielding him from accountability but also senior Republicans on the Hill who have cast aside their duty to uphold the law and perform oversight in favor of protecting the Trump presidency — no matter the cost. Nunes may have wielded the committee gavel here, but the ultimate responsibility lies with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who lacked the courage to stop him.
Ryan, who has never served on the Intelligence Committee, seems not to understand the central bargain underpinning the creation of the intelligence committees after Watergate. In exchange for the intelligence community’s willingness to reveal closely guarded national secrets to a select group of members and staff for the purposes of oversight, the committees and the congressional leadership pledged to handle that information responsibly and without regard to politics.
That contract has now been spectacularly broken by the creation of a partisan memo that misrepresents highly classified information that will never be made public. Intelligence agencies can no longer be confident that material they provide the committee will not be repurposed and manipulated for reasons having nothing to do with national security. As a result, they will be far more reluctant to share their secrets with us in the future. Moreover, sources of information that the agencies rely upon may dry up, since they can no longer count on secrecy when the political winds are blowing. This is a grave cost for short-term political gain.
The obscure rule that the majority has relied upon contemplates a responsible president who will consult with the agencies affected and reject a misleading and partisan declassification effort. Sadly, this is not something we can expect from the current occupant of the Oval Office. He will have to answer for his actions. But there will be no avoiding congressional complicity in the shattering of yet another norm of office, check and balance.
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debated whether to post about the State of the Union because I think that for all the time and attention it receives nothing really changed. I wonder what the ratings will end up being. Do the President's supporters care what he says in a forum such as this? Does the majority of the country who disapprove of the President want to spend an evening hearing him lecture to them?
ichael Wolff, embraced by the #resistance for his questionably-sourced book Fire and Fury, which documented the tumultuous first year of the Trump administration, has proved yet again that he’s actually just as craven as the man at the center of his “reporting.”
his is a story primarily about corrupt practices by the Burlington City Council, in its headlong determination to force a neighboring city to be the base for a weapon of mass destruction, the nuclear capable 
or a time, the optimists in the president*’s camp were pitching as a worst case scenario that Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election would end up at worst delivering obstruction prosecutions with no underlying offenses—essentially, that some underlings, in an effort to help out the president*, were too vigorous in their efforts, and less than vigorous about telling the truth. I mean, hell, it’s an argument. It’s the “third-rate burglary” argument gussied up for our times, but it’s an argument nonetheless. However, that dog no longer chooses to hunt.
ven during the most difficult of times, when Congress had seemingly lost the capacity to govern and partisan storms raged across Capitol Hill, the intelligence committees remained largely insulated from the nation’s increasingly self-destructive politics. 
