With former National Security Advisor General (ret.) Michael G. Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI, we have still not seen evidence of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 election. So why all the lies that have given fuel to allegation? Special Counsel Robert Mueller has tons of evidence that Donald Trump and others have tried to end the investigation which could give rise to obstruction of justice charges. But, if as they insist, there was “no collusion,” why not just tell the truth? Why fire FBI Director James Comey? Why go to senior senate leaders and ask them to end their investigation into the Russian interference if there is no connection? Actions speak louder than words and the actions Trump has taken feeds the meme the administration is hiding something. As it stands now, the is more than sufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction (pdf).
Trump’s refusal to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin leads one to wonder just what Putin has on Trump. Just how accurate is that Russian dossier?
It now appears that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is more deeply involved than he claims, as is Trumps eldest son, Donald Jr. They are the mostly likely be the ones to fall next. As, two former White house ehic chiefs speculated in a New York Times op-ed, this could also lead to Vice President Mike Pence, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin all having some legal liability. It may even lead directly to Trump:
Finally, Mr. Flynn’s cooperation could also place Mr. Trump himself in real jeopardy. ABC News has reported that Mr. Flynn will say Mr. Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians.” If that is so, it opens a Pandora’s box of questions for the president. Is that a reference to the calls about the sanctions, or something else? How many times did Mr. Trump do that, when, and about what? How can we square that with the president’s denials of knowledge about the Flynn contact with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, or any contact with Russia? The possible answers range from bad to worse to fatal for the president.
Kushner has already met with Mueller’s investigative team in November with the focus on Flynn’s meeting with Russians in December 2016. It has been speculated then that the real target was Kushner, himself. Analysts wondered why Kushner’s lawyer, Abbey Lowell, wou,ld have let his client talk to Mueller.
“I’m sure Flynn gave them information about Kushner, and they wanted to test that information before it became apparent that Flynn was cooperating, because it was less likely [Kushner] would cooperate after it became clear that Flynn was probably accepting a plea deal,” Nick Akerman, an assistant special prosecutor during the Watergate investigation, told Newsweek.
“Flynn probably gave them very specific information about Kushner’s activities. If you get information about Kushner that is incriminating, the first thing you do is call his lawyer and say, ‘I want to speak with your client,’” Akerman continued
One source told CNN that Mueller’s team spoke to Kushner to see if he had information that could exonerate Flynn.
But Akerman says it’s likely the special counsel is investigating Kushner’s involvement in helping the Russians use data analytics to target voters via social media during the 2016 election. Kushner’s handling of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which may have been presented to Kushner and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. during a meeting with a Russian lawyer in the Trump Tower in June last year, could also be an issue of special interest.
Meanwhile, others suggest that the Mueller investigation might want to know why and how Flynn became involved in the Trump transition team.
“Kushner apparently had a role in bringing Flynn onto the transition after [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie was pushed out,” Andy Wright, a former associate counsel to President Barack Obama and a professor at Savannah Law School, told Newsweek. “Part of that could be tracing Flynn’s inclusion into the inner circle and know what Flynn represented in terms of his business contacts and contacts with Russia and Turkey.”
First, it was former foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos who took a plea, then former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates were indicted, now Flynn. Clearly Mueller, who is a seasoned prosecutor, is building his case from the bottom up. With the Flynn’s plea to lying to the FBI, Mueller is sending a clear message to other persons of interest, he will find the truth to the lies one liar at a time.
President Trump over the summer repeatedly urged senior Senate Republicans, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to end the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, according to a half dozen lawmakers and aides. Mr. Trump’s requests were a highly unusual intervention from a president into a legislative inquiry involving his family and close aides.
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the intelligence committee chairman, said in an interview this week that Mr. Trump told him that he was eager to see an investigation that has overshadowed much of the first year of his presidency come to an end.
Then this morning the news broke that former White House National Security advisor General Michael T. Flynn was entering a guilty plea to a single count of lying to the FBI and would cooperate with Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and court records indicate he was acting under instructions from senior Trump transition officials in his dealings with the diplomat.
Flynn’s admission to the charge Friday in federal district court in the District could be an ominous sign for the White House, as Flynn is cooperating in the ongoing probe of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election. His plea revealed that he was in touch with senior Trump transition officials before and after his communications with Kislyak — rebutting the idea that he was a rogue operator. [..]
Flynn admitted in his plea that he lied to the FBI about several December conversations with Kislyak. In one, on Dec. 22, he contacted the Russian ambassador about the incoming administration’s opposition to a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal and requested that Russia vote against or delay it, court records say. The ambassador later called back and indicated Russia would not vote against it, the records say.
In another conversation, on Dec. 29, Flynn called the ambassador to ask Russia not escalate an ongoing feud over sanctions imposed by the Obama administration, court records say. The ambassador later called back and said Russia had chosen not to retaliate, the records say.
Flynn admitted as a part of his plea that when the FBI asked him about his dealings with the Russians on Jan. 24 — four days after Donald Trump was inaugurated — he did not truthfully describe the interactions. But perhaps more interestingly, he said others in the transition knew what he was up to.
According to an ABC News report, Flynn is prepared to testify that it was Trump who tols him to contact the Russians during thecampaign.
Prosecutors have said that they will decide how effectively Flynn is cooperating as part of a plea agreement. Lying to the FBI carries a sentence of up to five years. It will be interesting to see what kind of sentence he gets, and he will get one.
Flynn could also be charged under the rarely used Logan Act that bars U.S. citizens from interfering in diplomatic disputes with another country. Under the deal, Flynn’s son, Michael G., will not be charged at this time. It will be interesting to find out who are the two transition officials who gave Flynn his marching orders and who else will be implicated.
Some of us are smiling inside right now over the irony of this. The man who said that if he did a tenth of the things Hillary Clinton had done he’d be in jail, and who loudly led the crowds chanting “lock her up,” is the one facing jail time.
On Thursday morning, The New York Times revealed that Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has been lying for months about Republican tax plans. Mnuchin has repeatedly claimed the existence of a Treasury report that — unlike every independent, nonpartisan assessment — found that these plans would pay for themselves, increasing growth and hence revenues so much that the deficit wouldn’t rise. But there is no such report, and never has been; Treasury staffers weren’t even asked to study the issue.
Also on Thursday, John McCain — who has delivered sanctimonious lectures on the importance of “regular order” in the Senate — declared his support for the G.O.P. tax bill. Remember, Senate leaders rushed this bill to the floor without holding any hearings or soliciting expert testimony (and tax policy is an area where you really, really need to hear from experts, lawyers and accountants even more than economists). In fact, at the time McCain declared his support, some key provisions were still secret, so they could be presented for a vote with no time for debate.
…
He didn’t even wait for an analysis of the bill’s economic impact by the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s own scorekeeper — the only official assessment, since the Trump administration was, as I said, lying when it claimed to have its own analysis.
Later that day the joint committee delivered its predictable verdict: Like all other reasonable studies, its review found that the Senate bill would do little for U.S. economic growth, while directly hurting tens of millions of middle-class Americans, blowing up the deficit, lavishing benefits on the wealthy and opening up new frontiers for tax avoidance. But thanks to the moral collapse of McCain and other supposedly principled Republicans, at the time this column was filed the bill nonetheless seemed on track to clear the Senate.
…
Mnuchin said his department had a study showing great effects on growth; that was a lie. Donald Trump says the bill is “not good for me”; that’s a lie. Senator John Cornyn said, “This is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses”; that was a lie. Senator Bob Corker said he wouldn’t support a plan “adding one penny to the deficit”; that was a lie.
In other words, this whole process involves a level of bad faith we haven’t seen in U.S. politics since the days when defenders of slavery physically assaulted their political foes on the Senate floor.
…
(I)t is not, at a fundamental level, a story about Donald Trump, bad as he is: The rot pervades the whole Republican Party. Some details of the legislation do look custom-designed to benefit the Trump family, but both the broad outlines and the fraudulence of the sales effort would have been pretty much the same under any Republican president.
…
Just about every G.O.P. member of Congress, including the sainted John McCain, is willing to put partisan loyalty above principle, voting for what they have to know is terrible and irresponsible legislation.
…
So what will it take to clean out the rot? The answer, basically, is overwhelming electoral defeat. Until or unless that happens, there’s no telling how low the G.O.P. will sink.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that CEOs from Cisco Systems, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, and Amgen have publicly told their shareholders that they intend to use the money to provide dividends to shareholders or to purchase their own stock in the hopes of driving its price higher.
“We’ll be able to get much more aggressive on the share buyback” after a tax cut, Cisco’s Kelly Kramer was quoted as saying.
Those individual companies’ statements are in line with research conducted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch which surveyed 302 companies in July and found that 65 percent of CEOs who responded said that they preferred paying off debts compared to 35 percent who said they would spend their tax cut money on investment.
Such actions make sense from a business perspective since the overwhelming majority of large American businesses have no shortage of cash on hand thanks to record profits, lower employee costs thanks to automation, and the still-low interest rates from the Federal Reserve.
…
Companies also are paying a lower share of the tax burden than ever before, according to several analyses. In 1967, corporate taxes constituted about one-fourth of federal revenues but in 2016, they amounted to just over 5 percent.
The Republican “tax plan,” now divided between an already-passed House bill and the newly minted Senate legislation, is a shameless nightmare of lies and greed the likes of which have not been seen by any living person on the North American continent. It has no peer in the modern era.
If reconciled and signed by Trump, this legislation will leave tens of millions of people beaten, baffled and bereft. With this bill, they establish a permanent inheritor class whose wealth will be so vast and untouchable that they can buy every election — local, state and federal — from here on out. This is not simply a tax bill: It is the last stage of a corporate coup that has been slow-walking its intentions for decades.
…
The overwhelming majority of the tax cuts are given to the wealthy and to corporations. The rest of us get a tax increase a few years from now to pay for this gift to the rich.
Medicare will be slashed by $250 billion over 10 years, again to pay for the vast sums being sent up the ladder.
This bill gives more than $500 billion to foreign investors over the next ten years, clearly making America great again in the process. Know any poor or middle-class folks who could use half a trillion dollars right here at home?
The bill is also an attack on education: College loan deductions are eliminated, and deductions for teachers who have to buy their own school supplies are gone.
On Thursday, the Koch network warned the Senate not to add an amendment that would help poor families eat, if doing so increased corporate taxes in any way.
The individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act is eliminated, which basically means the ACA itself is eliminated, depriving millions of affordable health insurance. People will die because of this one — you can count on it.
Churches have been barred from endorsing candidates and getting directly involved in politics since 1954. The House version of this tax bill would eliminate that restriction, which is already widely ignored by a number of highly political churches and religious organizations. This provision opens a huge campaign finance loophole for the GOP. Can’t give any more to a candidate? Give to some right-wing megachurches with audiences in the tens of thousands and have them endorse your candidate. Praise the Lord and pass the plate.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of the crew that defected during the ACA repeal tussle earlier this year. She has decided, this time around, that destroying the ACA and gutting Medicare are fine with her because in return, the oil and mining industries get to ravage the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, just like they’ve always wanted.
…
There are 52 individual Republican senators who traveled 52 different paths to arrive in that chamber this morning, but all of them came for the same single reason: to pass some version of this bill and deliver a payday to their paymasters. That sorry goal has been accomplished.
They didn’t care about the deficit, the country, freedom, you, me or anything else. This was their magnum opus, their purpose in life. Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, they were prepared to die in the shallows or be eaten by bears to get this done. Perhaps worse, they have spent the last year coddling and protecting Donald Trump so they could get his signature on this disgrace. That’s how important this was to them — and to those who hold their strings.
The network news people are wondering aloud if passage of this bill is now a “hollow victory” given the news of Flynn’s guilty plea. Leave it to TV to deliver a perfection of absurdity on a genuinely shattering day. Flynn is a bagman, just another bug on the limousine windshield. The ones who fill the bags will be popping corks all over the world tonight. The worst people have won, again. All the rest of us can do is bleed.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama; Former communist official Sergei Kirov is assassinated in Leningrad; Beatlemania arrives in America; Actor and director Woody Allen is born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
Three months ago, The Washington Post reported that even as Donald Trump ran for president, he pursued plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The next day, The New York Times published excerpts from emails between Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian organized crime, and Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and Sater’s childhood friend, about the project. Sater was apparently an intermediary between Trump and Russia, and in a Nov. 3, 2015, email to Cohen, he made the strange argument that a successful deal would lead to Trump’s becoming president. Boasting that he was close enough to Vladimir Putin to let Ivanka Trump sit in the Russian president’s desk chair, Sater wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”
These stories were, at the time, bombshells. At a minimum, they showed that Trump was lying when he said, repeatedly, that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” Further, Sater’s logic — that Putin’s buy-in on a real estate deal would result in Trump’s election — was bizarre, suggesting that some part of the proposed collaboration was left unsaid.
But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.
It is certainly difficult to keep track of the cast of characters as this investigation plays itself out, especially the Russian cast. It even tripped up MSNBC host Rachel Maddow in her attempts to keep track of them all.
As Ms.Goldberg noted, “there is no longer any question of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the extent of the cooperation, and precise nature of it, remain opaque.”
“For the record, we have on our list of people connected to Russian government in contact with the Trump Team: Russian ambassador, Russian banker, Russian excon, recollection oligarch, another Russian banker,Russian lawyer, Russian billionaire’s son, Russian prime minister, currently-connected academic, Russian foreign ministry guy, Russian president’s fake niece, the head of a sovereign wealth fund and Ike Kaveladze, the money-laundering poster child, he goes on our chart there next to the Russian lawyer and the Russian lobbyist. He, too, with the little box around him there — he, too, was at that Trump Tower meeting.
“So that’s my correction. it’s not 18, it’s 19. It’s quite a roster. And there could, of course, be more, more than a year after the election, more like a year-and-a-half since the FBI started their counterintelligence investigation into the links between Russia and the Trump campaign, we are still adding to the list of Russian figures who successfully made contact and got themselves involved at one level or another with the Trump campaign and Trump transition.
“Last night, thanks to reporting by The Intercept, we told you about the latest Russian name added to that list, the CEO of the multi-billion dollar investment fund. He flew to the Seychelles Islands to meet Erik Prince, founder of the controversial Blackwater, and brother of Trump secretary Betsy DeVoss. The Washington Post reported they were in the Seychelles to discuss setting up a back-channel communication between the Trump team and the Putin team.. Erik Prince insists the meeting had nothing to do with Donald Trump, but this Russian government investment fund that he admits he might have crossed paths with in the Seychelles, they’re under sanction in the United States.
“That limits the kind of business Americans can do with that firm. If he was not meeting with the CEO about Donald Trump, they are a sanctioned firm, what exactly were they meeting about? We were reporting on that last night. Today we heard from the Russian sovereign wealth fund. It’s a fund called the Russian Direct Investment Fund. They did not like the way we described American sanctions against them. They did not like that I suggested it might be illegal for Erik Prince to do business with them as a sanctioned entity.
“There are particular careful ways in which an American might be able to invest in Russia alongside the sanctioned fund — although doing so while complying with sanctions is admittedly quite tricky. So banks and funds for the most part don’t touch investments with this kind of a sanctioned entity. But you know, maybe Erik Prince would and so, therefore, I’m happy to make that sanctioned entity, maybe you can figure out how to do business alongside without violating sanctions. Maybe.
“But it doesn’t make that meeting with Eric Prince any less weird. Because the CEO is the 19th Russian person to have successfully made contact with the Trump camp during the Trump campaign and the transition. The 19th we know of so far. As of this week, it is still growing.
“I am assuming we will have to get a bigger wall.”
Can that possibly be true? That a roomfull of CEOs gathered by the Wall Street Journal can indicate that this bigly great again economy boosting Republican Tax Cut Cut Cut will have absolutely no effect at all on their decisions to produce more, hire more people, provide better wages?
I like to provide context but unfortunately the full video is not embeddable though it can be seen at this link to C-SPAN. Cohn is the first speaker so you don’t have to plow through the full hour unless you want to.
Thirty seven of 38 Economists? That’s like a bad Trident commercial.
Only one economist — Stanford’s Liran Einav — said that he was “uncertain” if the bills would exacerbate America’s debt-to-GDP ratio. But after the survey’s release, Einav said his response had been a mistake, and that he actually agrees with the economists who expect the debt ratio to soar. (Four other economists in the IGM panel didn’t answer the question one way or the other.)
“I did it too fast and didn’t read the question properly,” Einav said in an email.
(The survey results mirror an episode in May, in which 35 of 37 economists concluded the tax cuts would not pay for themselves in terms of their impact on the federal budget. The two who disagreed later said they misread the question and had meant to answer with the majority.)
It’s worse than that, these are Chicago School Economists, the worst sort of rattle shaking Shamen, the exact kind of people who should be applauding. The reality is that debt levels don’t matter at all unless you have to pay more to borrow (the United States Federal Reserve chooses to pay interest, the almighty “Market” is prepared to pay for the privilege of holding Treasury Notes) or you see erosion in your currency’s ablity to buy imported goods (the U.S. Dollar stands at record levels).
So the Post is totally misguided about why the Republican Cuts Cuts Cuts are bad and reinforce the thinking that could make them even more harmful (well, in addition to giving Billionaire Plutocrats and Multinational Megacorporations even more money to buy Politicians and the Stenographic Media) which is irrational debt panic will allow Republicans (and some Democrats) to dismantle the few portions of our “Social Safety Net” that remain (Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, Veteran’s Benefits).
The result is not only that the vast majority of citizens are poorer but that they’re actually factually going to start dying in the streets.
Do you really want to live in the Central African Republic (average income $659 a year)?
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Pink Floyd releases its best-selling album “The Wall”; Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Dick Clark born; World Trade Organization’s meeting met by 40-thousand protesters; (
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.
It was announced yesterday by federal prosecutors in New York that Iranian, Turkish billionaire Reza Zarrab had plead guilty to charges that he had violated US sanctions against Iran and would testify against his co-defendent.
Zarrab’s plea deal was unsealed, and he admitted to seven charges listed in a superseding information filed in the case on Oct. 26, 2017.
The seven-count superseding information, filed under seal on Oct. 16 2017, charged Zarrab with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The new charge relates to his bribery attempts while in a U.S. prison. [..]
Zarrab’s cooperation with federal prosecutors raised speculation that he was also cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Flynn, because it seemed unlikely prosecutors would offer a plea deal to Zarrab in exchange for his cooperation for the comparatively lower-profile trial of Atilla.
Today, Zarrab testified at the trial and dropped a shoe on two Trump cronies
Rudy Giuliani and Michael Mukasey tried to broker a prisoner exchange between the United States and Turkey to free their Turkish client, Reza Zarrab, he testified in Manhattan federal court Wednesday.
Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader, was the architect and main facilitator of a cash-for-gold scheme to help Turkey buy Iranian oil and evade sanctions.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is a long-time friend of Trump who was considered for several Cabinet posts. Mukasey was attorney general under President George W. Bush.
Giuliani and Mukasey avoided mentioning the “central role” of Iran in the charges against Zarrab on filings submitted to the court about their work and said the case had no serious implications for U.S. national security. Judge Richard Berman slammed the omissions as “disingenuous” earlier this year. (Giuliani previously called Iranians “suicidal homicidal maniacs.”)
The speculation continues whether Zarrab is also cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump camapign’s connection to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
President Johnson names commission to investigate JFK’s assassination; U.N. passes resolution calling for the British Mandate of Palestine to be partitioned; First flight over the South Pole; Natalie Wood, Cary Grant and George Harrison die.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
One can go to war alone, but you can’t build peace alone.
Or at least it wasn’t back in the day. What day? How about 1981? That’s when Henry Walton Jones Jr. exploded their heads and melted their faces.
Close your eyes Marion, Clio rears. They say every time a Nazi dies an angel gets it’s wings. It’s really not at all hard to understand, they are the definition of genocide (though the highest crime according to Robert H. Jackson was aggressive war).
Let’s remember what happened. They systemically and industrially murdered well over 6 Million Jews and millions of others for the “crime” of being other. Sick people, poor people, Communists, Slavs, Roma. I don’t mean by that statement to diminish the special animus they had for Jews, simply to illustrate that their hatred was boundless and unlimited.
But the trains ran on time.
For anyone to express the slightest sympathy for these demons in human form is to embrace the mark of Cain, the brother killer (notably associated with dark skin color by the way for the biblically inclined).
Indeed much of popular culture is focused around how much we despise Nazis. Take this example from the Blues Brothers (commonly considered a light hearted comedy)-
When writing stories about Nazis, there are a few questions that are worth asking. For example, what is it that makes someone want to follow an ideology that led to the death of millions of people in Europe? Why is there hate? Does the subject realize that by following an arbitrary list of physical and genetic characteristics, one can easily possess one that could cause them to become the pariah in a genocidal and fascistic mindset? Should Americans punch them?
The piece shouldn’t, on the other hand, be spending more time on how Nazis are just like us, when you think about it.
Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.
Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.
But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”
It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.
In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.
…
If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.
And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.
“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?
Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”
He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”
…
“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.
“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”
…
After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”
In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”
Amazing. They don’t look like Nazis. They love their dogs (or cats) until they put them and their children down in a Götterdämmerung of defeat (see Goebbels).
It’s all about how the White Race can survive in the face of the Mudbloods says Voldemort.
And a pineapple slicer? Please. I’m tempted to send them one because it’s a useless piece of crap.
Anyway it was followed shortly by this one by the same author that doesn’t help much
To me, that question embodies what good journalism should strive for, as well as the limits of the enterprise. Sometimes all we can bring you is the words of the police spokesman, the suspect’s picture from a high school yearbook, the acrid stench of the burned woods.
Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader.
I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect. What I had were quotidian details, though to be honest, I’m not even sure what these add up to. Like other committed extremists I have known, Mr. Hovater had little time for a life beyond his full-time job and his line of activism. When he is not doing those things, he likes to be at home with his girlfriend (now his wife) and their cats.
Mr. Hovater was exceedingly candid with me — often shockingly so — but it seems as though his worldview was largely formed by the same recombinant stuff that influences our mainstream politics. There were exceptions, of course: I saw, on his bookshelf, two volumes of Helena Blavatsky’s “The Secret Doctrine,” 19th-century work of esoteric spiritualism whose anti-Semitism influenced Nazi thinking.
But even if I had called Mr. Hovater yet again — even if we had discussed Blavatsky at length, the way we did his ideas about the Federal Reserve Bank — I’m not sure it would have answered the question.
What makes a man start fires?
Gee. All you got was this I heart Hitler T-Shirt? Sucks to be you I guess.
“The National Editor of The New York Times” (I put that in quotes so you understand just how egotistical and self-important he is) thinks this a sufficient “apology” (I put that in quotes because it’s ironic)-
We assigned Richard Fausset, one of our smartest thinkers and best writers, to profile one of the far-right foot soldiers at the rally. We ended up settling on Mr. Hovater, who, it turned out, was a few years older than another Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with murder after the authorities said he drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Ms. Heyer.
Our reporter went to Ohio to spend time with Mr. Hovater and submitted several drafts and updates in between assignments that included Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama. The story finally ran online Saturday.
Whatever our goal, a lot of readers found the story offensive, with many seizing on the idea we were normalizing neo-Nazi views and behavior.
…
Our reporter and his editors agonized over the tone and content of the article. The point of the story was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think.
We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere.
We understand that some readers wanted more pushback, and we hear that loud and clear.
I find myself forced to stop right here and say “bigot”? That word appears exactly once. Anti-semite and racist are not used at all. Indeed this is what The New York Times has to say-
“There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.”
I have sooo many Black and Jewish friends.
“You know who had nice manners?” Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. “The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis.”
Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?” asked Karen Attiah, an editor at The Washington Post. “Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC are coping?”
We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.
“We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers.” That’s not an apology, that’s an insult.
* * * * *
That’s what Kurt Vonnegut used to call a cat’s ass trophy. He actually factually fought Nazis and was captured and survived the bombing of Dresden. I don’t condone it, it’s just an example of what we did to Nazis (we also firebombed Tokyo causing more deaths than Fat Man and Little Boy combined).
Now, because our Government suppressed the truth about the Shoah I can’t claim they were motivating influences of the average G.I. Joe in what is called the “good” war, but it sure pissed off a lot of people afterward and rightly so. The Totenkopfverbände would sort people into two lines, those they would kill instantly (women and children) and those they would work to death. Those marked for extermination were stripped naked so they couldn’t hide any valuables and crammed into rooms where they were poisoned with Cyanide, hundreds at a time. The ones selected for work (I won’t call them lucky) unpacked the dead bodies and checked for gold fillings before carting them off to burn in furnaces.
“Very fine people.” But then again he also supports pedophiles.
Let me warn you in advance that while I’m a good natured and mellow guy for the most part (despite my detractors) there are bright lines.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Pacific Ocean; British prime minister Margaret Thatcher resigns; Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is beaten to death; The Grand Ole Opry makes its radio debut; Comedian Jon Stewart born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
If your regime is not strong enough to handle a joke, then you don’t have a regime.
The reason I hate doing pieces like this is I feel compelled to revisit the counter-intuitive ways that money is not what you think it is and deficits and debts don’t really matter but what you buy does.
Money is an artificial construct that facilitates economic transactions. That’s it. It’s only other value is as a collectable, dust gathering, knickknack. If you have the ability to create as much as you want to out of thin air and get anything you desire with this imaginary fiction (sovereign currency) there is no limit to the actual items you can possess (roads, bridges, universal health care). The only practical constraint is dealing with scarcity when someone has something that you need but can’t produce yourself and is unwilling to surrender it for the price you want to pay. This is called inflation or trade, or in extreme cases war, but hey, that’s what you have armies for.
There is absolutely no indication the United States has inflation sufficient to even erode the vast pile of cash Multinational Monopoly Megacorporations and Plutocrat Billionaires have stuffed in their mattresses let alone give them an incentive to invest in productive enterprise (making things, doing things, paying their employees more).
Throwing $2+ Trillion at them (the official lie is $1.5 Trillion) is not going to change their collective minds. It’s pocket change, it falls in the rounds.
It will have no macroeconomic effect at all (do you call a best case .02% increase significant?).
What the Republican tax cut does is make everyone’s lives more miserable, and to a measurable degree. Please ignore the Debt/Deficit madness in this piece and consider instead the nice things we “can’t afford” as a society so a select few you can practically count on the fingers of one hand can buy fake Leonardos.
The Senate Republican tax plan gives substantial tax cuts and benefits to Americans earning more than $100,000 a year, while the nation’s poorest would be worse off, according to a report released Sunday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
…
Democrats have repeatedly slammed the bill as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the poor. In addition to lowering taxes for businesses and many individuals, the Senate bill also makes a major change to health insurance that the CBO projects would have a harsh impact on lower-income families.
By 2019, Americans earning less than $30,000 a year would be worse off under the Senate bill, CBO found. By 2021, Americans earning $40,000 or less would be net losers, and by 2027, most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off. On the flip side, millionaires and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 would be big beneficiaries, according to the CBO’s calculations.
…
The main reason the poor get hit so hard in the Senate GOP bill is because the poor would receive less government aid for health care.
The Senate Republican tax bill eliminates the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance or else pay a penalty. The CBO has calculated that health insurance premiums would rise if this bill becomes law, leading 4 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2019 and 13 million to lose insurance by 2027.
Many of the people who are likely to drop health insurance have low or moderate incomes. If they drop health insurance, they will no longer receive some tax credits and subsidies from the government. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the other official nonpartisan group that analyzes tax bills, put out a similar report showing how lower-income families are hurt by the loss of the health-care tax credits. But the CBO goes a step further than the JCT. The CBO also calculates what would happen to Medicaid, Medicare and the Basic Health Program if the Senate GOP plan became law. The CBO is showing even worse impacts on poor families than the JCT did.
You normals are miserable ingrates. You should be kissing your masters’ asses for the privilege of being alive- slackers.
