Open thread Wednesday.

It's open thread Wednesday field hands, and I need your thoughts on a few things.

Does Sean Hannity and his network now have a serious credibility problem? 

Do you believe president trump when he says that he has been tough on Russia? 

Is Nikki Haley going to run against trump in 2020?  ("I don't get confused") 

Why is the story of white terrorist found guilty of plotting to blow up an apartment complex full of African immigrants getting so little press?

Will trump fire Robert Mueller? The Pittsburgh police department seems to thinks so. 

Should the new climate of little or no regulation in Washington be blamed for that recent Southwest Airlines crash that killed one person? 

Did the New York AG take away trump's pardon power with their latest move?

Finally, will Michael Cohen give up his boy, Donald trump, to the feds?

BREAKING NEWS.

Remember that "secret society" conspiracy that FOX VIEWS and right-wingnuts in Washington have been trying to push for the past few days? Well....

"Could someone please explain to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) how conspiracies work?

Johnson was one of a number of Republican lawmakers who lit up right-wing media with accusations that a “secret society” of FBI agents was conspiring to investigate fake charges of collusion between Donald Trump and Russia. Their evidence? A text from FBI lawyer Lisa Page to Peter Strzok, an agent with whom she was having an affair, which allegedly talked about it.

Conservatives got very upset about this secretive cabal, using it as more evidence that the FBI is a hotbed of an anti-Trump “Deep State.” Johnson was out front in this effort, taking to Fox News to claim he had heard about this secret society from an FBI informant. And also that this is really true, he is not a crank.

Then the full text from Page was released:

'Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.'

It seems obvious that if you are a member of a secret society, you are not going to call it “the secret society.” Furthermore, if you are two FBI agents in this secret society actively plotting against the president from within the government, it seems highly likely you know better than to text about it on your FBI-issued, government-owned phones. 

Clearly, Page's text was a dark joke. And after two days of hollering about it, even Johnson was forced to admit to CNN on Thursday morning that “it's a real possibility” the text was written in jest.
For additional context, The New York Times reports that the mention of “calendars” referred to a gag gift of Russian-themed calendars that were to be given to agents working on the Russia investigation. Page sent the text the morning after Trump's election in what appears to be a stab at gallows humor.'' [Society]

Remember when trump's peeps said that the president had no intention of firing Robert Mueller? 
Well.....

"A late night bombshell courtesy of reporters over at the New York Times with no respect for the 9-5 workday revealed that President Donald Trump ordered the firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller back in June 2017.

According to the Times, the president tried to fire Mueller last year but let up on the demand after White House counsel Don McGahn protested the move and threatened to quit.

McGahn reportedly “told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency and would incite more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation.” Wow, smart guy.

That was apparently enough to quell Trump’s frustration with the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, as the White House maintains to this day that they do not intend to fire Mueller.
Safe to say, the report that Trump ordered the firing of Mueller — coupled with the stunning detail that Mueller actually found out that the president tried to fire him! — was enough to send Twitter into a meltdown." [Source]

Stay tuned.

Who do you believe?

President trump has now called James Comey a liar, and he has volunteered to testify under oath to refute what James Comey said while he was under oath.

The question now is which one of these two men do you believe.

The president?

"There’s a high bar to accusing someone of committing a “lie,” and we don’t do it lightly.

A lie isn’t just a false statement. It’s a false statement whose speaker knows it’s false. In these instances, the president — or his administration — have clear reason to know otherwise. Reporters are understandably cautious about using the word — some never do, because it requires speculating on what someone is thinking. The cases we call "lies" are ones where we think it's fair to make that call: Trump is saying something that contradicts clear and widely published information that we have reason to think he's seen. This list also includes bullshit: speech that is — in its academic definition — "unconnected to a concern with the truth.

trump's words: "The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process."

Lie: Trump posted the above tweet just hours after FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers began testifying about Russian interference in the 2016 election in favor of Trump. Comey testified that the FBI came to believe that Russia was using “active measures” to hurt the Clinton campaign and help the Trump campaign.

“They wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her and help him,” Comey said. “Putin hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.”

Trump's tweet — and the video clip included with it — is a selective portion of the hearing where Nunes was asking Rogers if he had evidence Russia changed vote tallies in specific states.

Trump's words: “We got 306 because people came out and voted like they’ve never seen before so that’s the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said during a news conference on Feb. 16.

Lie: Trump actually won 304 electoral votes, because two electors refused to cast their vote for him when the Electoral College met.

Several former presidents have also received more electoral votes than Trump. George H. W. Bush won with 426 electoral votes in 1988. Bill Clinton won 370 votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996, and Barack Obama won with 365 votes in 2008.

When a reporter at the news conference called Trump out for spreading false information, the president said, "Well, I was just given that information. I don’t know. I was just given…We had a very big margin."

Trump's words: Trump tweeted on Sunday, "While on FAKE NEWS @CNN, Bernie Sanders was cut off for using the term fake news to describe the network. They said technical difficulties!"

Senator Sanders was on CNN's Erin Burnett Out Front on Feb. 10, discussing Trump's travel ban and controversy surrounding National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, among other topics.

Lie: During the interview, Burnett showed Sanders a clip of Trump responding to a reporter's question following news that Flynn called the Russian ambassador to the US before the inauguration to discuss previously-imposed sanctions. In the clip, Trump says he has "not seen the report."

Burnett then asked Sanders if it's a problem that the president did not know about the report, in which Sanders criticized Trump for dismissing negative news as "fake news."

CNN PR tweeted a transcript of the interview, which reads:

Burnett: "He says he knows nothing about it, hasn't seen any of these reports. Is that a problem?"

Sanders: "Well, I don't know, maybe he was watching CNN fake news, what do you think?"

Burnett: "You don't buy it?"

Sanders: "That was a joke."

Burnett: "I know it was a joke. I'm saying, you don't buy what he said, obviously?"

Right after Burnett acknowledged that Sanders was joking when he called CNN "fake news," the audio cut out and CNN went to a commercial break. When the show returned, Burnett picked up her interview where they left off and Sanders went on to say it's "not a joke" when "you have a president who attacks people in the media who make critical remarks of him — which is what their jobs is — as providing 'fake news.'"

rump's words: Trump again claimed there was widespread voter fraud during the November election, this time telling senators “thousands” of people were bussed in from Massachusetts to vote in New Hampshire.

Trump made the unsubstantiated claims in a closed-door meeting with 10 senators Thursday to discuss his Supreme Court nomination, Neil Gorsuch, Politico reported.

Trump blamed “thousands” of people who were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to vote illegally in New Hampshire during the meeting, which was also reported by the Associated Press.

Lie: Officials at New Hampshire’s secretary of state office, US Attorney’s Office, and Massachusetts’ attorney general’s office told BuzzFeed News there was no evidence to support the president’s claim.

“We have not seen any evidence of busloads of out-of-state voters coming across the border to vote in New Hampshire elections,” David Scanlan, deputy secretary of state for New Hampshire, said. Read more here.

rump's words: Trump tweeted at 6:57 a.m., "Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie), now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?"

At 8:17 a.m., Trump added, "Chris Cuomo, in this interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave 'service' in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!"

Blumenthal was interviewed on CNN Thursday morning, following his statement from the previous day, in which he said the president's nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Gorsuch, said Trump's recent attacks on the judiciary are "disheartening" and "demoralizing."

Lie: Cuomo asked that exact question. His question to Blumenthal was, "What is your response to the president of the United States, who says you should not be believed because you misrepresented your military record in the past?" [Source]

There is lots more where that came from, but I think you get the picture.

James Comey?

James Brien Comey Jr. (born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who served as the seventh Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from September 2013 until May 2017.^[2] Comey has been a registered Republican for most of his life, but is now independent.

Comey was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from January 2002 to December 2003, and subsequently the United States Deputy Attorney General from December 2003 to August 2005 in the administration of President George W. Bush. Comey appointed Patrick Fitzgerald to be the Special Counsel to head the grand jury investigation into the Plame affair after Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself.

In August 2005, Comey left the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and became general counsel and senior vice president of Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland.^[3] In 2010, he became general counsel at Bridgewater Associates, based in Westport, Connecticut. In early 2013, he left Bridgewater to become a Senior Research Scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security Law at Columbia Law School. He served on the Board of Directors of HSBC Holdings until July 2013.^[4]

In September 2013, Comey was appointed Director of the FBI by President Barack Obama.^[5] In that capacity, he was responsible for overseeing the FBI's investigation of the Hillary Clinton email controversy. His role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, particularly with regard to his public communications, was highly controversial.^[6] His decisions have been regarded by a number of analysts, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, to have likely cost Clinton the election.... [Source]

 

I think we have read enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Jeff is in charge, and we should all be worried.

    All this talk about trump's firing of the FBI director has caused us to overlook another very important and troubling story: The actions of Beauregard Sessions throughout this sad saga.

The Attorney General was to recuse himself from anything having to do with the Russia investigation of team trump, and yet we are learning that he participated in  trump's decision to remove Comey and will be helping trump search for his replacement.

This is the same Attorney General, mind you, who has been moving at warp speed since taking office to remove gains made in Civil Rights over the past 50 years.

I don't always like to quote the good Reverend but he is right when he says the following:

"Sessions has set out with a vengeance to transform the Department of Justice into a Department of Injustice. He’s been hindered by the incompetence that characterizes this administration. He’s home alone in his department, with no nominations offered for the heads of top DOJ units – the civil rights, criminal or national security divisions. His deputies – Nos. 2 and 3 in the DOJ – have been nominated but not confirmed.

That has slowed but not stopped Sessions’ efforts to rollback basic rights. He’s reversed the Justice Department’s position of challenging voter identification laws; he deems the Voting Rights Act too “intrusive.” Now the DOJ will intervene in favor of states that pass discriminatory measures to restrict access to the ballot. The right to vote – the fundamental right of a democracy – will now depend on the willingness of judges to stand up for the truth, as U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos did in ignoring the DOJ intervention and ruling that the Texas ID law was “passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory purpose.”

Sessions has issued orders to revive the old, failed war on drugs. The promising bipartisan efforts to reform sentencing provisions to end the mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders are to be abandoned. Sessions wants to revive private prisons and insure them a steady stream of prisoners. People of color, particularly young African American men, will be the greatest victims of this injustice." [Source] 

And let's not forget why Sessions had to recuse himself in the first place. He lied to congress under oath about his contacts with the Russians. Think about that for a minute. The chief law enforcement officer in our country lied to congress under oath!

Sadly, I am afraid it's only going to get worse from here, because racists and those meaning to roll back gains in civil rights are becoming more emboldened, and they are acting in ways that hark back to a time when people of color were second class citizens. This is not the time to have an attorney general in office who sympathizes with those of that ilk.

Yes, we have to pay attention to trump and all that he is doing, but remember, it's just as important to watch the man he put in charge of deciding what is just and what isn't as well.

*Pic from slate.com

The F word.

 I was listening to Van Jones and some other political pundits chop it up on CNN this morning, and Jones was lamenting the fact that the president is being too "lawyerly" in his assessment of the threat that Isis poses to the United States.

He needs to be more forceful as he addresses this issue, and he needs to say with no uncertainty what a serious threat Isis has become to our homeland. I am paraphrasing, but that was the gist of what  he and the others panelists were saying.

Now here is the thing, and this will upset the fear mongers among us, but the truth is that Isis does NOT pose an existential threat to the United States.  Russia poses an existential threat. North Korea poses an existential threat. China poses an existential threat. But Isis (sorry right-wingnuts) does not.

You would never know this of course given the climate of fear and consternation that has been gripping the country. The leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination is calling on us to set up a data base to track Muslims, and he wants to round up their family members and kill them if they are related to terrorists. And, believe it or not, the leader of a large university is calling on his student body to arm themselves and shoot Muslims when they dare to step on his campus.

I wasn't around Germany in 1933, but I can imagine that this is what it felt like.

Benito Mussolini; Fumimaro Konoye; D. F. Malan; Adolf Hitler; Donald Trump. All these men have something in common. If you pay close attention to what is happening in America , I am sure that you can figure out what it is.

The Fascist and his friends.

This is how one MSNBC contributor feels about the GOP's sudden crush on the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

"Fox News’ Eric Bolling may prefer shirtless, gun-toting Vladimir Putin to the fully-clothed, bike-riding Barack Obama, but according to Rachel Maddow, there’s another reason why conservatives are flocking to the Russian president. On her show Friday night, Maddow revealed that an anti-gay rights group called The World Congress of Families will be hosting their 2014 meeting at the Kremlin in Russia.

As Putin’s 'becoming a hero to literally fascist groups in Europe for him being super anti-gay,' Maddow explained, 'Vladimir Putin, and Russia under Putin are also becoming kind of a north star for anti-gay forces here at home in the United States.” Some on the Christian right are even suggesting that one Russia passed anti-gay laws, “people from the west would begin to emigrate to Russia the same way russians used to emigrate to the United States and Europe. American conservatives should move to Russia.'

But, as Maddow said, those extreme conservatives were 'just ahead of their time.' Following Putin’s scathing op-ed in The New York Times, the rest of the right have chosen him to be their 'new hero.”'

'It is not just the far, far, far right, anti-gay right anymore,' Maddow said. 'It is the right in general. Both in Congress and in the conservative media peanut gallery, who have decided real Americans should show how much they love our country by maybe moving to Russia. Because Vladimir Putin is the kind of strong and decisive leader that we want and we love.'

After playing a montage of conservatives praising Putin this week, she compared it to the “NC-17″-style love they used to feel for Sarah Palin. But unlike Palin, or President Ronald Reagan, Maddow told the right that Putin is “not that into you.”

'Seriously, I know you guys hate President Obama, so it feels good to have a man crush on somebody else,' Maddow concluded, 'but this guy is a president of Russia. Zip it up, you guys, seriously. Have some respect.”' [Source]

And this is how the Russian leader feels about "American exceptionalism"

So does the GOP hate Obama more than they love America? I think they do.

But enough of this geo-politics, I have a fight to watch.

Will republicans call for their "drop squad" to get Colin?

I just saw Colin Powell on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, and the news will be that he has not yet decided to endorse O and that he supports Gay marriage. This is unfortunate, because that really isn't news at all. The man is a republican, he should not be endorsing O. He should give his own party's candidate a look first. And I would expect Powell, who seems to be a decent human being, to support Gay marriage.

The republican candidate is Mitt Romney, and what Powell had to say about his comments on Russia should be the real news that came out of the CNN interview. Romney said, and I am paraphrasing here, that Russia is our number one geo- political foe, and the fact that O gave certain assurances to their leader is troubling.

Powell, in so many words, said that this is rubbish. According to Powell O was doing exactly what he should do, and Russia is not our enemy. He called Romney's foreign policy advisers "far to the right" and extreme on Morning Joe on MSNBC, and he (Powell) should know, because some of them actually worked for him. Powell also said that Romney needs to be more mature and realistic when talking about foreign policy.

Good luck with having that happen. This is political season and Mitt Romney is more interested in twenty second sound bites to his base than a real serious discussion about foreign policy. Let's just hope that he knows better and that if and when he gets into office he will just drop another line on his Etch A Sketch.

Finally, one more thing about Mitt: Today he unveiled his plan to reform education here in America, and you will be forgiven if you never heard about it because the press was not invited.

"..Like most of Romney's policy proposals, the education platform is pretty vague.

It largely focuses on a federal voucher program to allow low-income and disabled students to attend charter and private schools, falling in line with generally accepted GOP talking points about school choice.

But the plan fails to address expanded federal involvement in education, a major issue for the GOP's conservative base. While Romney does propose reforming some parts of the No Child Left Behind Act and consolidating "duplicative and overly complex" Department of Energy programs, he doesn't even come close to the radical cutbacks and wholesale DOE elimination favored by the growing social conservative/Tea Party/Constitutionalist wing of the Republican Party.
That may be why the campaign opted to unveil the plan during Romney's speech to the Latino Coalition's annual small business summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — a decidedly odd audience and location for a speech on education policy. The speech wasn't broadcast live, and was timed to coincide with President Obama's Air Force Academy commencement speech, virtually guaranteeing that Romney's news got limited airtime." [Source]

And here I thought that education was important. Anyway, it looks like the Etch A Sketch strategy is in full effect.