Month: April 2019

That is the question.

I’ve heard lots of opinions on this, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I have some thoughts.

First, I’m going to start with what Mueller says (emphasis mine), “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

That was page 220 of the report. Mueller clearly stated that Trump was corrupt, and that he believes that only congress has the power to deal with it.

I believe that congress needs to start the impeachment process after they have Mueller testify before them in regard to his report. I think it’s important for the American people to hear from Mueller exactly what he found. I also have a suspicion that Barr may have imposed a time constraint on Mueller in order to help Trump. There are too many things that weren’t addressed in this report: Cambridge Analytica; Trump’s server that was only communicating with Alpha Bank; Eric Prince. There are several others, but you get the point.

Mueller makes clear in the report, that he couldn’t establish collusion because of all of the obstruction: the use of encrypted messaging; the deletion of emails; the destruction of evidence. I think it’s important to have him lay all of that out for everyone to hear. If he was given a deadline by Barr, that’s also something we need to hear, as it would be clear evidence that the obstruction continues.

Why do I think impeachment is crucial? Because if we don’t impeach, we don’t have a democracy. We didn’t investigate and prosecute the Bush administration for their crimes, and now we have Trump. Every time the rule of law isn’t imposed, our democracy disintegrates. The decision of whether to impeach or not can’t be a political calculation because that’s exactly how you get a banana republic.

I’m going to go ahead and address all of the political calculations I’ve heard in favor of not impeaching anyway, even though my key point stands. First let me start with the Clinton comparisons. I have issues with this on so many levels, starting with the fact that making that comparison furthers the republican framing that they’re the same. They’re not remotely the same, and you should stop claiming that they are. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair. We’re already two fucking affairs and two cover ups into Trump and no one gives a shit. We didn’t give a shit that Clinton lied about his personal life then, and no one seems to give a shit that Trump is lying about his personal life now (myself included, cause I’m consistent that way). This is about working with a foreign government to manipulate our elections and then covering up those crimes.

When you make (or allow) the Clinton comparison, you’re helping republicans in furthering the “both sides are the same” narrative they so desperately need. That’s how you get a disaffected electorate that doesn’t bother to show up to vote. STOP IT! This kind of short term thinking is why democrats need to run preternaturally charismatic candidates like Obama and Clinton in order to win, while republicans win with human garbage like George W Bush and Donald Trump.

If you insist in blowing up the electorate and warping the rhetoric by making the Clinton comparisons, I’d like to point out that you’re doing it all wrong. For one thing, Bill Clinton’s approval ratings were never as low as Trump’s for any sustained period of time. He never stayed under 50% for more than five months. Trump has never even sustained a 45% (his high) approval rating for more than a week. So right off the bat, you’re making an apples to horseshoes comparison. Secondly, republicans were very shrewd in impeaching Clinton and you missed it. They weren’t interested in ending the last year of Clinton’s presidency. They were interested in damaging the democratic party, and that’s exactly what they did since republicans swept the next eighteen years of election cycles either in congress, local and state races or the presidency. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats just while Obama was in office. If your argument is, “we can’t impeach Trump because look at what happened to Clinton”, you’re making a completely backward case. Forcing America to talk about Bill Clinton’s sex life for a year caused Al Gore to run away from him, thereby costing him an election he should have handily won. I promise you that republicans don’t remotely regret impeaching Clinton and that they would do it again in a hot minute, and they should. It was a giant win for them.

The next argument I hear is that impeaching Trump will make him so popular that he will definitely win the 2020 election. That is pure conjecture, based in literally nothing, and it’s not a point to be taken seriously (see the Trump approval rating link above). If we’re going to do the utterly baseless conjecture for craven political calculation thing, then here’s what my crystal ball sees: If democrats don’t impeach Trump, then a lot of people will stay home because it will seem like there’s no difference between the two parties.

How’s that for rectally generated political analysis? Was that as good for you as it was for me?

I never realized how much easier it is to talk politics out your ass! Turns out that all of these years of doing research and looking at historical context was a total waste of time. I should have just been making “observations” based on literally nothing this whole time, because people apparently find that more compelling than methodically building an argument to support my perspective.

But let’s go back to my central point: The decision of whether to impeach or not can’t be a political calculation because that’s exactly how you get a banana republic. And that’s it. That’s the entirety of the reason why we should leverage the checks and balances written in our constitution to preserve what’s left of our democracy.

 

Disgusting!

Puh-leeeze. This is the narrative that the establishment democrats are going to peddle in order to smear Bernie. I think it’s a terrible mistake both morally, and as a strategy.

Let’s start with the strategic error. They’re pushing the republican narrative that democrats hate people for being rich. Not only is that bullshit, but it sets republicans up to take the opposite position: loving someone simply for being rich (even if they’re not willing to prove they’re rich). Republicans worship wealth and power so much that they don’t care when that wealth and power is made at their expense. It’s a wholly irrational position, just like loathing someone simply for being rich would be. That would not be the position of the vast majority of democrats, although I fear that it will be soon thanks to what the establishment is trying to do to Bernie. I don’t hate rich people just because they’re rich. I hate it when rich people don’t pay their fair share in taxes. I hate it when rich people game the system in order to take our tax dollars (in the form of subsidies) to add to their already obscene wealth. Nobody hates Steve Jobs for being rich because his wealth came from making things that people wanted to buy. I’m still pissed at him for not paying his damned taxes and robbing the social security trust fund by paying himself in capital gains, but I never hated him for being rich. Nobody hates Warren Buffet. He’s a wholly self made billionaire who didn’t make his fortune on the backs of other people.

I’m going to veer off course for a minute to say that I don’t believe that any society should allow billionaires to happen. Billionaires are toxic to a society because they can’t spend a big enough percentage of their money to actually help an economy. Millionaires on the other hand, are great for societies and I’m all for creating more of them. Millionaires are in that sweet spot of having enough money to spend on significant amounts of consumer goods and investing just the right amount to help seed businesses. But millionaires aren’t rich enough to play fast and loose with their investments, since it can all disappear overnight. They are not (for example) rich enough to create mortgage backed securities or naked credit default swaps. I believe that our tax code should be designed to stop anyone from becoming a billionaire, just like it was for nearly forty years. We need a top tax rate of 90% not only to prevent billionaires from happening, but also to force reinvestment in American companies. There’s no point in looting a company if you’re going to have to pay 90% of what you loot back to the government.

Back to Bernie. He made a couple of million dollars by writing books that people want to read. QUELLE HORREUR! You want to know what his tax returns actually show? That he’s an honest politician. Thirty years in congress and until two years ago, he didn’t bring in any money that he didn’t earn in his paycheck. How much is Mitch McConnell worth, and why? How about Dianne Feinstein? Can anyone explain to me how she and her defense industry executive husband are worth $94 million dollars? Bernie doesn’t have any significant income from investments because in thirty years, he didn’t steal enough from you to invest. That’s what his tax returns show, and anyone who tries to spin it another way is a partisan hack.

And the charges of hypocrisy against Bernie are laughable. If Bernie had changed a single one of his positions in order to grow his new found wealth, then he would be a hypocrite and I would be leading the charge in pointing out his hypocrisy. You wanna know who built the middle class in America by betraying his class? FDR. He was a really fucking rich guy who shanked his friends by giving the working class The New Deal.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I haven’t decided who I’m voting for yet, and probably won’t until after we’ve seen a few debates and some fully formed platforms. I have some hard “NOs” and I’m starting to form a short list, but most of the candidates are on my “maybe” list until I see some detailed agenda items from them. Bernie, who I voted for in the last primary (check my FB or Twitter feeds from July – November 2016 before you get your panties in a bunch) is on my short list. He has a fully baked platform (which includes six different proposals for paying for Medicare For All) that addresses most of my priorities. The fact that he took 43% of the votes in the last primary with no money, no comb, and no tailor demonstrates that he’s very viable, as do his individual contributor numbers from this year. But for some reason (which I’m working out) I find myself looking for reasons to cross him off my short list. I will expand on that when I publish my vetting piece on him in the next week, but that’s where I am right now. So far, no one has come up with anything empirical to help me cross him off my list. And frankly, every nonsense charge that is hurled at him, the more convinced I become that there aren’t any substantive reasons not to support him.

Until that happens, I would be satisfied if democrats could just resist the urge to permanently become the party that hates rich people who earned their money the honest way, just because of how much they earned and not because of how they earned it. This is a position that will stick for decades. It’s short sided, simple minded, and is being created just for political expedience.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I have some thoughts. Thoughts that I deliberated, challenged, challenged again, and then formed.

I want to start by sharing my thoughts on Assange as a person. To bottom line it: he’s not a good guy. He is a narcissist with some serious delusions of grandeur. Like James Comey and Michael Avenatti, he fancies himself the arbiter of all that is true and righteous. That always takes someone down a bad road, and they inevitably get themselves into trouble. But how I feel about him as a person is a separate issue from how I feel about his arrest.

On principal, I’m all for WikiLeaks and organizations like WikiLeaks. Exposing the dirty little secrets of governments around the world is, in the main, a good thing. If we had a WikiLeaks in the early 50s when the CIA was working with MI6 to install the Shah in Iran, the situation in the whole of the middle east would be very different (in a good way) right now.

As with all things, principal and practice seldom align. Assange went horribly, horribly wrong when he picked a team in our (or any) election and started using his platform to affect the outcome. Dumping 40,000 utterly worthless Clinton campaign emails on the day we learned of Trump’s pussy grabbing had no journalistic value whatsoever. There was literally no there there. I know, because I skimmed all of them. 50% – 70% of those emails were daily press clippings. Yawn. Then there was some shit talk about Bernie, and a risotto recipe. There was no news and very little “dirt”. The only purpose of that dump was to sponge up a week or a month’s worth of news cycles with distortions and flat out lies, and to deflect from Trump’s issues.

That was the day that Assange and WikiLeaks turned into yet another craven propaganda outlet. It’s basically Breitbart now.

But here’s the thing: in order to protect a free press, we need to accept the fact that with honest journalism comes a significant percentage of propaganda and lies. You really can’t have one without the other. Protecting the press means swallowing some bitter pills. I can’t think of anything more important to our democracy than protecting and advocating for a truly free press. The reality of the situation is that in doing so, we have to protect scumbags like Julian Assange. Let me be clear: I don’t think of Assange as a journalist. He practices precisely no journalistic standards and has no interest in providing context or verifying his sources. I think of him as journalist-adjacent. His proximity to journalism means that he must be protected in order to give journalists all the room they need in order to bring us the news.

The charges that have been brought against Assange are dangerous and I can’t bring myself to root for a conviction, no matter how despicable I think he is. This is about playing the long game, and the short term satisfaction isn’t worth the potential damage a conviction might do to the first amendment.

I will say this though: I took immense pleasure in seeing that Assange, who is a couple of years younger than me, looks at least twenty years older than I do. By the end of this whole thing, he’s going to look like The Doctor in the Doctor Who episode when The Master aged him like 8,000 years. That makes me happy, and it doesn’t hurt my long term self interest so YAY!

I’ve got my already bitchy panties in a bunch this morning so I need to rant. We had a story a couple of days ago of a woman, Lucy Flores who described an inappropriate touching incident with Joe Biden that made her feel very uncomfortable. Here’s what she said:

“As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”

I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.

By then, as a young Latina in politics, I had gotten used to feeling like an outsider in rooms dominated by white men. But I had never experienced anything so blatantly inappropriate and unnerving before. Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

Our strange interaction happened during a pivotal moment in my political career. I’d spent months raising money, talking to voters, and securing endorsements. Biden came to Nevada to speak to my leadership and my potential to be second-in-command — an important role he knew firsthand. But he stopped treating me like a peer the moment he touched me. Even if his behavior wasn’t violent or sexual, it was demeaning and disrespectful. I wasn’t attending the rally as his mentee or even his friend; I was there as the most qualified person for the job.”

I added the emphasis on that last paragraph. Lucy Flores never claimed that this was a sexual assault. She is describing an incident that she felt was inappropriate and then sharing how it made her feel. And she’s been attacked relentlessly by “liberals” on Twitter for it. Claims that she’s a “Bernie Bro” trying to hurt Biden because she wants to help Bernie, pictures of her with her hands on Bill Clinton have been posted with claims that perhaps she’s the sexual assaulter, and a picture of her with Bernie where he has his hand on her shoulder. It’s all been quite despicable.

I earnestly don’t understand how so called liberals can behave this way. These people are dismissing this woman’s feelings because they’re still fighting proxy wars over the 2016 primary. I can’t think of a more craven reason to demean a woman than that. At least Trump supporters aren’t claiming to be anything but neanderthals, proudly standing behind Trump, Kavanaugh, and Roy Moore. But these people are the ones who claim to be “woke” supporters of #metoo.

Now there’s another woman with another story. Amy Lappos has a similar story that I won’t get into because you can look it up and that’s not the point of this post. I do want to share one quote that I think is important from her, “Biden’s statement in response to Lucy’s article was not only disturbing, it was disgusting.” This is apparently what prompted her to tell her own story.

She’s not going to be the last. Wanna know how I know? Because we’ve seen Biden being too touchy with our own lying eyes. Google “Biden creepy” with a custom date range that starts any time and ends before Lucy Flores came out with her story. You will find several videos. He’s got a history here.

Am I saying that this should disqualify him from being president? No. Am I saying that no one should vote for him because of it? No. You need to make that decision for yourself. But you have to do it honestly, and by acknowledging that Biden is sometimes an inappropriate toucher. He’s just a little too familiar and friendly in his touching for some people. You can’t deny that. Do I think this rises to the level of sexual assault? I personally don’t, but I certainly wouldn’t dismiss anyone who feels that it does.

The truth is that I think that some of this is generational, and that Biden genuinely doesn’t feel as if he’s done anything inappropriate. But that’s my problem: his inability to (after several women have spoken out over the decades) acknowledge that his barometer isn’t the only relevant barometer in gauging these situations. He doesn’t seem to even be considering the idea that his behavior makes some people feel uncomfortable. That troubles me.

None of this may trouble you, and that’s a perfectly reasonable position to defend. But attacking every woman who has had an uncomfortable interaction with Biden because you don’t want to defend that position in an intellectually honest way is just flat out despicable.

Sadly, there seem to be a lot of despicable “liberals” running around who are only “woke” when it’s politically convenient for them.

I’ve been seeing tons of posts on social media this morning about a poll that shows that only 29% of Americans believe that Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, 32% say Trump has been exonerated on obstruction….blah, blah, blah. This is all pointless speculation, and it’s not even based in the Mueller report.

I have no idea what Mueller found, or didn’t find. None. The only concrete thing I learned from the Barr summary is that Mueller didn’t find enough to establish that Trump colluded with Russia to win an election. But that leaves me with more questions than answers. The top-of-mind question for me is how do Fredo Jr’s emails regarding the meeting in Trump Tower not clearly demonstrate collusion? I can accept that they may not, but I need to understand the reasoning there because that always looked like the smoking gun to me. Perhaps I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. Perhaps Mueller is looking for a much higher bar. I don’t know. I need to see his report in order to understand where my assumptions went wrong.

I have thoughts about what the report may contain, but those thoughts are (if I’m being honest with myself) purely speculative and conveniently bolster what I’ve believed for the past two years. I do not know what is in the Mueller report and neither do you.

It’s time to stop speculating about exoneration or guilt. The work has been done and with the glaring lack of sworn testimony by anyone in the Trump family, it seems to be a fairly thorough investigation. I am still at a loss as to how this investigation could be complete without the subjects of the investigation giving testimony, but here we are.

We know that we have nearly two years worth of investigative materials to look through. Let’s look through all of that before making assertions. How’s that for an insane idea? I think it’s reasonable to assume that Mueller found a lot that he referred to other prosecutors. It’s not reasonable to insist that you know what the nature of those referrals is. It’s also not reasonable to insist that we have a “total exoneration”. If that were true, Trump would have used his FEMA alert powers to send the full report to all of our phones in lieu of any summary by Barr.

My point is that we just need to focus our efforts on releasing the report to the public. Let’s dispense with the speculation. We need to see the report. Congress has not even seen the report, which is the first step. The truth is that we may never see the full Mueller report, or even a redacted version. The Nixon report wasn’t released to the public until forty years after it was completed. But we need to push for making the full report public because by pressing that issue might get congress an unreacted version in the next few months. That’s realistically the best we can hope for.

At the very least, I would like to see the executive summary that Mueller almost assuredly included with the report. An executive summary that Barr chose to use one (or part of one) sentence from.

Yes, I have many questions, but I don’t have any answers and claiming that I (or you) do just makes us sound ridiculous. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize and get the full report to congress. We can figure out what happens after that.