AdamSmith

The Russia scandal has gone from phony war to heavy shelling Gone are the days when we need to debate about what constitutes ‘collusion’ and whether that’s any standard to judge the Trump campaign Richard Wolffe, The Guardian Indictments do strange things inside a White House. They twist the minds of an already neurotic nest of frenemies, turning suspicions into paranoia, press leaks into prosecutorial intelligence and financial concerns into colossal legal bills. Normal life ceases (if it ever existed) for everyone from the president down, as the indictments grow in number, the grand juries call ever more witnesses, and impeachment looms ever closer. Welcome to the first year of the Trump presidency, in which our protagonists have already proved themselves wholly incompetent in a succession of crises. There may be Black Sea ferries that leak as much the Trump White House, but they still run a tighter ship than this gang. Lest we forget, this is a president who wanted Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci to run his clean-up operation. So who cleans up now that the Trump campaign is the subject of so many investigations? The indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, along with the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos, have now taken the whole Russia scandal from phony war to heavy shelling. Gone are the days when we need to debate about what constitutes “collusion” and whether that’s any standard to judge the rogues’ gallery that peopled the upper ranks of the Trump campaign. We just moved far beyond the false equivalence with Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which so dominated the media coverage of her campaign, the final days of the election and a significant proportion of presidential tweets forevermore. It turns out that “mistakes” on legal disclosure forms, “misremembering” facts in front of federal agents, and distracting “stories” on Fox News do not constitute much of a legal case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its former director Robert Mueller, who now enjoys the title of special counsel. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a great idea to try to stop the Russia investigation by firing the FBI director who succeeded Mueller. Across the street from the White House, at FBI headquarters, they might consider that obstruction of justice. But first, the facts we learned today. Papadopoulos is not a janitor-like figure in this enterprise, even though we barely knew his name. Here’s one Donald J Trump describing his foreign policy aide, at the point in his campaign when unkind souls were suggesting he didn’t have any foreign policy aides. “George Papadopolous, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy,” Trump told the Washington Post editorial board, alongside four more names that represented his foreign policy team. “We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.” This excellent guy was, according to his guilty plea, tasked with improving US-Russia relations. With that mission in mind, he pursued meetings with a Kremlin-connected professor in London, who promised that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”. Over several months, Papadopoulos was diligent in working his Russian contacts, including the Kremlin’s ministry of foreign affairs, as he tried to organize a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Within a month of Trump calling him an excellent guy, Papadopoulos was emailing not just his fellow Trump aides but also a “high-ranking campaign official” with a very kind offer for Trump himself. To wit: “Putin wanting to host him and the team when the time is right.” A few months later came an alternative offer: if a trip was too difficult, perhaps “a campaign rep” could make a meeting? If not, Papadopoulos kindly offered to make the trip himself in an “off the record” capacity. His unnamed “campaign supervisor” told him he should go ahead, but the trip never happened. For some reason, Papadopoulos lied to FBI agents about the “extent, timing and the nature of his communications” with the Russians, according to his guilty plea. Now, instead of a five-year prison term and a $250,000 fine, Papadopoulos is looking at less than six months in prison and less than $9,500 in fines. There are many ways you could describe this sequence of events. Collusion would be the mildest word. There are also many ways that Trump and his inner circle have flatly lied about such collusion. In addition to being tired of winning, America might now be tired of hearing such lies. “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING,” screamed the president-elect on Twitter, just nine days before his inauguration. Just in case you didn’t catch that the first couple of dozen times, President Trump tweeted on Monday morning: “Also, there is NO COLLUSION!” Tweeting in ALL CAPS doesn’t quite match a couple of federal indictments and a guilty plea. But when that’s all you’ve got left, you may as well let loose. Trump attempted to claim that the news about Manafort and Gates was so much blah blah “before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign”. Nice try, Mr President. Let’s set aside the 12 counts of the indictments, including “conspiracy against the United States”, money-laundering, tax evasion and failing to register as a foreign agent. Let’s set aside the alleged $75m in payments through offshore accounts, laundered by Manafort into property to hide the income from the prying eyes of the US government. Let’s even ignore the fact that Manafort ran the Trump campaign as its chairman, for no salary. During that time, he fended off a potentially disastrous delegate challenge at the nominating convention in Cleveland, where he also oversaw the rewriting of the party platform to be solidly pro-Russia and astonishingly anti-Ukraine. For now, let’s just focus on the essential promise of the Trump campaign. Even more than making America great again, Trump talked endlessly about his corrupt opponent. He trashed Clinton at every turn for her emails, warning gravely that her presidency would be crippled by FBI investigations, especially in the closing days of the contest. “Lock her up” was the rallying cry of his entire general election, based on this supposedly serious FBI inquiry. Only now, the shackles are on the other foot. We always knew that Trump accused others of his own failings. Even Lyin’ Ted Cruz, in a rare moment of honesty, accurately described Trump as a pathological liar and a serial philanderer. Now Trump can serve out the remainder of this presidency living the life he predicted for Hillary Clinton. Making his final case to the voters before his election, Trump said the FBI investigations would trigger “an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis” because of “a criminal massive enterprise and cover-ups like probably nobody ever before”. He’s rarely been so right and so wrong at the same time. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/30/russia-scandal-phony-war-heavy-shelling

Better recording...

P.S. She died of severe COPD, caused by brown lung from those 57 years in the cotton mill. But that only at age 96. Her cousin who farmed all her life lived to 103. Thus my stated intention to live forever!

That water looks like piss... Just saying!

There is a view that when drugs loosen inhibitions, then one behaves MORE as one truly is, not less.

Also, I must say: Your view that a woman of her age can't do this suggests that your family must have been awfully sort of soft, physically. My mother's and father's families were cotton-mill and farm folk, so they did not have that option. My maternal grandma managed a big vegetable garden, planting and cultivating and fertilizing and weeding on her hands and knees and then harvesting, until the age 90. And she did that AFTER she got home from her 7am-3pm shift at the local cotton mill. (From age 15 to 73 [!] she worked in the local cotton mill as a 'winder tender', managing this big and very fast-running machine that wound the just-manufactured thread onto cardboard bobbins, she pushing this big iron-framed collection cabby up and down a track on the floor, picking those filled bobbins off and putting new empty ones one. And as the thread would always be breaking, she could tie a square knot with one hand in half a second.) (And also, just coincidentally, had the entire King James in memory. And perfect recall, to boot--any day, indeed close to any moment, of her life in memory. She showed me how to live, and think. I cannot remotely approach her.) (And recite the alphabet backward, just as a stunt that she found funny. ) (She only got to go through school through the 9th grade, having to go to work after that. But she always said she wished she could have become a lawyer, like Lincoln, "to be able to help people.") I know about the physical challenges of gardening, because as a little boy I did all that garden work by her side. Son of a bitch! That was hard physical labor. She said to me, "This is nothing compared with having to chop cotton," i.e., weed it. Which she had do to starting at age 13, to support her family after her papa passed. "Whoever thought up that the South should subsist on that crop ought to be damned to Hell for all time." When she was 15, she eloped with her boyfriend, to get away from her evil mama. It worked.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find Out What It Means to Scalia By David Auerbach Slate.com 6/26/2015 Justice Scalia ties Justice Breyer for assertive dissents, but he is vastly stingier with his respectful dissents. Words may have lost all meaning to the Supreme Court, as Antonin Scalia suggested Thursday in his dissent from the King v. Burwell decision to uphold health care subsidies, but there’s one word that has a meaning quite particular to the Supreme Court: respectfully. It is a long-standing tradition that Supreme Court dissents often conclude with the gracious words “I respectfully dissent.” So it was taken as a grave sign of incomity in 2000 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg concluded her stinging minority opinion in Bush v. Gore with a bare “I dissent,” the Supreme Court’s equivalent of a glove slap to the face. On Thursday, Scalia likewise eliminated respect from his King v. Burwell dissent, concluding his torrent of outrage with “I dissent.” (Even though Scalia thinks that today's marriage equality decision was a descent into "the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie," that was not enough to provoke an "I dissent" from him, signaling that same-sex marriage might not upset him quite so much as health care subsidies.) I wondered how often such disrespectful dissent occurred in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court. Law professor Stephanie Tai helpfully pointed me to a Harvard Law Review note, “From Consensus to Collegiality: The Origins of the ‘Respectful’ Dissent,” that charts the history of dissents both respectful and less so. The convention is one that’s only been around for 50 years, but in that time it has become a quite durable one, making departures from it quite striking. The note, by New York attorney Chris Kulawik, takes its inspiration from ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. In How to Do Things With Words, Austin discussed certain speech acts as “performative utterances,” statements that draw their meaning not just from the semantics of their words but from the social context in which the words are uttered. The classic example is “I do,” in a marriage ceremony, which has a network of implications and commitments far beyond what the two words would mean in any other context. Another example would be when Scalia referred to Ginsburg as “Goldberg” the other week, a seeming slip of the tongue to which some imputed more sinister significance. Likewise with “I respectfully dissent” and “I dissent,” which in the patois of the Supreme Court take on the implications of a courteous response and a furious retort, respectively. In the early history of the court, dissents were polite, defensive, and even apologetic, stressing the focus on consensus. “In any instance where I am so unfortunate as to differ with this Court,” Justice Bushrod Washington pleaded in U.S. v. Fisher (1805), “I cannot fail to doubt the correctness of my own opinion. But if I cannot feel convinced of the error, I owe it, in some measure, to myself, and to those who may be injured by the expense and delay to which they have been exposed, to show, at least, that the opinion was not hastily or inconsiderately given.” By the 20th century, dissent had become enough of a norm not to require such hand-wringing, though it was still comparatively rare. But by 1950, dissent was both common and far more prominent: Dissents were not just expressions of disagreement but judicial statements. With the Warren Court taking on ever more divisive social issues, the court tried to mitigate its own divisions by embracing a “norm of collegiality,” embodied by the respectful dissent. Chris Kulawik The “respectful” dissent as we know it today emerged on the Warren Court in 1957, especially in the opinions of Charles Whittaker, followed closely by other justices. As with its immediate predecessors, “The respectful dissent is the dominant speech act of the Roberts Court,” being used in 70 percent of dissents. The remainder either have no dissenting speech act whatsoever, or, more rarely, contain what Kulawik terms “assertive dissents,” which “withhold respect where convention requires it.” Of the years 2005–09 that the note covers, most justices hewed to the respect norm, topped by the studiously polite David Souter and the newest appointee Sonia Sotomayor. Chris Kulawik We recall that Ruth Bader Ginsburg performed a notorious nonrespectful dissent in Bush v. Gore. Yet a closer look reveals this to be typical behavior of the atypical Ginsburg: She never respectfully dissents. She believes the respectful dissent to be disingenuous when “you’ve shown no respect at all.” Ginsburg also disputes the intrinsic significance of her assertive dissent in Bush v. Gore. She would rather, it seems, be analyzed on substance than performance; she consciously omitted “I dissent” from her otherwise excoriating Hobby Lobby dissent. Ginsburg’s bluntness separates her from the other judges, whose performative dissents require more interpretive argle-bargle. Most justices reserve the assertive dissent for the most controversial and consequential of cases. John Paul Stevens, usually quite respectful, used “I emphatically dissent” in his Citizens United dissent, his sole assertive dissent. In the 2007 Parents Involved in Community Schools desegregation case, Breyer concluded, “I must dissent.” As Kulawik writes, “an assertive dissent is ultimately an act of protest, a signal from one Justice to the world at large that the majority opinion does not deserve legitimation — that the majority has acted impermissibly and produced significant costs for political society.” Under this interpretation, it is Scalia who protests the most. He ties Breyer for assertive dissents, used in his Defense of Marriage Act (U.S. v. Windsor) and Guantánamo (Boumediene v. Bush) dissents, but he is vastly stingier with his respectful dissents, marking him as the most substantively disrespectful of the justices if we disqualify Ginsburg, who thinks the whole business meaningless. (Perhaps this helps explain why Scalia and Ginsburg have somehow managed to remain friends despite agreeing more frequently over Italian opera than they ever do in English.) Like the philosophies of W.V.O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and the later Wittgenstein, Austin’s philosophy was a rejoinder to the logical positivist idea of meaning, which posited that meanings of statements could be specified atomically and precisely. Perhaps surprisingly, Scalia’s textualist philosophy invokes this holistic and sometimes squishy perspective: “Words, like syllables, acquire meaning not in isolation but within their context,” he wrote in K Mart v. Cartier (1988), uncannily echoing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist maxim, “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is nothing outside context”). “Context always matters,” Scalia repeated in his King v. Burwell dissent. Such linguistic indeterminacy may be correct (I happen to think it is), but it makes Scalia’s supposedly precise textualist philosophy no less vague than the philosophy of an evolving “living Constitution” to which Ginsburg subscribes. Perhaps this is what Scalia meant when he said of Ginsburg, “She's a really good textualist.” In that context, textualism, I respectfully submit, is just another act of interpretive jiggery-pokery. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/06/26/the_surprising_history_of_the_respectful_dissent_at_the_supreme_court.html

Putting aside your exquisite choice of language , I wouldn't bet against the Notorious RBG on very much of anything. That is to say of your post: "I dissent."

You know, that wouldn't be a bad name for a new, timely & topical R&B act... * The Indictments *

Hard to decide if I want Twitter to ban him, or instead leave him free to keep tightening his own noose.

And AWAAAY we go!

There is a town named 'Boring' in, I think, Idaho. In a job I long ago held that involved scanning many states' newspapers (for certain state-level legislative news, in the pre-Internet era), I randomly came across this delicious headline: Crash Kills Boring Man

That you are still here after all those air hours does suggest such.

"FREE" verse. How (soon to be ) ironic!

Mueller blows NAHHTHING. Dinna werry. Just wait.

Fruit of the Tree of Eternal Life alas was only just out of reach. I have not however rejected the soil. On my way outdoors in a few minutes now to put to use a newly purchashed battery-powered (curse that unwieldy orange extension cord previously required) Black & Decker weed trimmer. OTOH, maybe that is to reject the soil? In any event, I do definitely trample serpents under my heel whenever the occasion presents.

I would probably say a 'J author' function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahwist

Thanks. Old signature now displaying is entirely sufficient.

Flynn has, pretty clearly, already turned State's Evidence. He is today Mueller's Best Buddy. ....take it from Your Source.

Pistol squats and push-ups: how Ruth Bader Ginsburg stays fighting fit The supreme court justice’s personal trainer details her regimen in a new book: ‘If you think she’s tough on the bench, you should see her at the gym’ https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/oct/29/ruth-bader-ginsburg-workout-bryant-johnson-book

Note even the subtextual anal-penetrative erotic character [/b] of 'The Rhine gives its gold to the sea. Das Rheingold!

I promise to go up to Butner Federal Correctional, about 50 minutes' drive north of where I sit right now, and bring them all nice homemade chicken salad sandwiches, at least once a month. I'll even bring one for that nice Mr Madoff, just a few cells up the row.