Congratulations, Stupid.

[JackRiddler]

Are you taking the piss on me?

Lol, I guess that was unavoidable.

But no, I'm saying it was passed from Jeb! to the Never-Trumpers.

Well, McCain would have gotten it as one of the eight privileged recipients.

But as you're saying, it was apparently seen by Corn before election.

The NYT attribution suggests they know it solid, like they saw it before election.

.

[barracuda]

The NYT attribution suggests they know it solid, like they saw it before election.

The memo is dated June 20 (3rd page):

Screen Shot 2017-01-10 at 9.36.17 PM.png

https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... ations.pdf

[seemslikeadream]

Harry Reid saw it way before the election

and then this letter

[JackRiddler]

The NYT attribution suggests they know it solid, like they saw it before election.

The memo is dated June 20 (3rd page):

Screen Shot 2017-01-10 at 9.36.17 PM.png

https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... ations.pdf

Yes, they're all dated pre-election, since they were pre-election reports.

The question is who saw it before the election. We're learning more and more did.

.

[seemslikeadream]

The reports were initially commissioned as opposition research during the presidential campaign, but its author was sufficiently alarmed by what he discovered to send a copy to the FBI. It is unclear who within the organisation they reached and what action the bureau took. The former Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, has lambasted Comey for publicising investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private server, while allegedly sitting on “explosive” material on Trump’s ties to Russia.

Another Democratic senator, Ron Wyden, questioned Comey insistently at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Tuesday on whether the FBI was pursuing leads on Trump campaign contacts with Russia.

“Has the FBI investigated these reported relationships?” Wyden asked.

Comey replied: “I would never comment on investigations … in a public forum.

The Guardian can confirm that the documents reached the top of the FBI by December. Senator John McCain, who was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state, dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source and then decided to present the material to Comey in a one-on-one meeting on 9 December, according to a source aware of the meeting. The documents, which were first reported on last year by Mother Jones, are also in the hands of officials in the White House.

McCain is not thought to have made a judgment on the reliability of the documents but was sufficiently impressed by the source’s credentials to feel obliged to pass them to the FBI.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... a-contacts

[JackRiddler]

Yes, I just posted that above.

From the NY Times coverage:

The appendix summarized opposition research memos prepared mainly by a retired British intelligence operative for a Washington political and corporate research firm. The firm was paid for its work first by Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals and later by supporters of Mrs. Clinton. The Times has checked on a number of the details included in the memos but has been unable to substantiate them.

And checked before the election, pretty obviously.

Who's the firm?

One of these, perhaps?

https://sipa.columbia.edu/sites/default ... irms_0.pdf

[seemslikeadream]

According to CNN, the unverified allegations were contained in a two-page synopsis presented to both President Barack Obama and Trump in conjunction with the classified intelligence report last week by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, F.B.I. Director James Comey, C.I.A. Director John Brennan, and N.S.A. Director Mike Rogers. The claims, based in part on memos compiled by a former British intelligence officer who primarily received the information from Russian sources, include allegations that there was a “a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,” CNN reports. Per the outlet:

One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.

These senior intelligence officials also included the synopsis to demonstrate that Russia had compiled information potentially harmful to both political parties, but only released information damaging to Hillary Clinton and Democrats. This synopsis was not an official part of the report from the intelligence community case about Russian hacks, but some officials said it augmented the evidence that Moscow intended to harm Clinton's candidacy and help Trump's, several officials with knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.
Sources told CNN that it was these same allegations that were included in classified briefings given to members of Congress last year, and which prompted Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to pen a fiery letter to Comey in the weeks before the presidential election, deriding his agency’s decision to release information about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, but not the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/ ... ort-russia

[seemslikeadream]

[JackRiddler]

Watching the Trump press con.

Oh man, have "liberals" (in the sense of those who support the technocratic state), and Clintonists been played. These people want to round up a few million people this year, create a religion-based registry of citizens, unleash police power at all levels, increase the military budget, deregulate all industries, control women's bodies and choices, fuck the press and the Internet, privatize health care, privatize education. They have a cabinet of Exxon and Goldman Sachs, drill baby drill, Wall Street piracy. And possibly Sessions as AG. They won thanks to the undemocratic Electoral College and the suppression of black votes in many states. They hang out with "Alt-Right." And what has been the main "anti-Trump" issue since the election?

Liberals have been played by McCain, Graham, the neocons, the imperialists of all parties, to focus on the supposed Russian threat. To escalate in the Cold War. To look for enemies at home on the basis of whether they are sufficiently expressing faith in the anti-Putin creed and the canard that the "election was hacked" by means of the release of the DNC/Podesta e-mails. They have been played by the Clinton apologetics that refuse to look at the election fixing during the DNC primaries, that refuse to acknowledge how what should have been a landslide was really lost. And now two months have been lost. Instead of talking about the wall, instead of talking about what is about to happen in America, instead of unifying the majority opposition to Trump on the basis of issues that matter to Americans and to the world, we watched these bozos look for Putin under the bed.

Trump is looking great today! As though he's Mr. Sweet Reason on Russia, as though he's been unjustly attacked and victimized by a pack of lies - which may very likely be a pack of lies. It is an absolutely disgusting performance - by the Clintonists and neocons who refused to let go. And of course, "neocon" is a great description of all these bastards in the Trump administration, which will be as faithful to imperialism (with the possible exception of no confrontation with Russia) as the Clintonists would have been. The deep state and the military budget will lose nothing.

.

[JackRiddler]

Unnerving immunization today:

Donald J. Trump
‏@realDonaldTrump
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me.Are we living in Nazi Germany?

[JackRiddler]

Trump won in many way because he understands (or his peeps do, US & Russian) 1. Reality television culture and 2. The Internet.

3. Professional wrestling (principles of kayfabe and displays of heel/jobber dominance).

4. How to stage thrilling appeals to the racism, misogyny, nativism, know-nothingism and desire to see hippies and eggheads and atheists punched that motivates a minimum 30% of the voting public in any U.S. election year dating back to, I don't know, 1877?

And so what to the first 3 points?

That's him and 30,000 other trained professional media bozos in and out of the industry. It's a set of skills, sure. Like with plumbing. Some are naturals at it, sure. He is, for the limited role he plays of a blowhard boss character with Mussolini personality, constantly beating up his subs.

The real and never deniable Reason #1 remains:

Trump won because he was allowed to unfold his act fully and unmolested during countless hours of free air time given to him by CNN, MSNBC, FOXNEWS and the rest of the corporate media over the full year prior to the first primaries, in a ratio of 2:1 compared to Clinton's, 2:1 compared to all other Republicans combined, and probably 200:1 compared to Sanders.

And the real Reason #2 is listed as #4 above.

Those 2 are what set up "the base" for him, the well-trained Tea Party morons who are angry because they're fucked and need to blame black people or "SJWs" or "liberals" or whatever rather than their actual overlords. Obviously it was very important that he cut whatever deal he cut with the Satans of the Lord leading the Christian evangelicals. But hey, if they think they'll earn, they go for it.

Then it was a matter of getting another 10-15% on top from further patsies. And you are all patsies if you fell for a lesser-evil line favoring Trump, or seriously thought this New York "billionaire" gangster racist landlord who had displayed himself clearly to you for 30 years on the telly was going to be anti-establishment and for the working man.

The rest was a matter of back-and-forth, strategy, happenstance. He didn't win, of course, he came close enough through media equalization to allow the Dead Hand of 1787 to work its basically arbitrary magic.

That is the reality now: this fascist (or whatever you want to call it) beast that is about to privatize health care, round up millions for detention and deportation, make lists based on imputed religious affiliation, build more military, sue reporters for "leaks," seize women's wombs, etc. etc. etc.

And that's the beast you just helped with your total-backfire strategy of accepting a line about "Russian election hack" served up in completely incompetent fashion by elements of the CIA, by the self-exonerating Democratic establishment, and by the corporate media who actually started the Trump ball rolling (return to "real #1" and read it again until it finally sinks in).

This was the narrative when what has to happen is a coalition of those who are about to be battered by this beast to fight back. Not the fucking New Cold War let's send our troops to Latvia and Syria crap!

.

[Iamwhomiam]

[Iamwhomiam]

Don't know how else to link to this video. Annoying as he is, (so many missed opportunities!) imagine being in his shoes during this interview: http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/01/12/kellyanne-conway-donald-trump-russia-intel-briefings-full-interview-cooper-ac.cnn


"Kellyanne Conway and CNN's Anderson Cooper clashed in an interview over CNN's reporting of the classified documents presented to President Obama and President-elect Trump including allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Trump."

[Iamwhomiam]

I'm unable to embed this one either: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38344175

David Remnick: Why Trump’s win is ‘an American tragedy’

Please listen to this rational man.

Edited to add Remnick's article, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-american-tragedy-2

An American Tragedy
By David Remnick November 9, 2016

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.

All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

Trump ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Trump because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Trump, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Trump only seemed to deepen his emotional support.

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

For eight years, the country has lived with Barack Obama as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional, fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial alt-right media. Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to demean and destroy Clinton. The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager.

It is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.

[stefano]

JM Greer, the Archdruid, on snobbery and hatred for Trump voters:

You see, that’s a massive part of the reason a Trump presidency is so unacceptable to so many affluent Americans: his candidacy, unlike those of all his rivals, was primarily backed by “those people.”

It’s probably necessary to clarify just who “those people” are. During the election, and even more so afterwards, the mainstream media here in the United States have seemingly been unable to utter the words “working class” without sticking the labels “white” in front and “men” behind. The resulting rhetoric seems to be claiming that the relatively small fraction of the American voting public that’s white, male, and working class somehow managed to hand the election to Donald Trump all by themselves, despite the united efforts of everyone else.

Of course that’s not what happened. A huge majority of white working class women also voted for Trump, for example. So, according to exit polls, did about a third of Hispanic men and about a quarter of Hispanic women; so did varying fractions of other American minority voting blocs, with African-American voters (the least likely to vote for Trump) still putting something like fourteen per cent in his column. Add it all up, and you’ll find that the majority of people who voted for Trump weren’t white working class men at all—and we don’t even need to talk about the huge number of registered voters of all races and genders who usually turn out for Democratic candidates, but stayed home in disgust this year, and thus deprived Clinton of the turnout that could have given her the victory.

Somehow, though, pundits and activists who fly to their keyboards at a moment’s notice to denounce the erasure of women and people of color in any other context are eagerly cooperating in the erasure of women and people of color in this one case.
...
Behind the media-manufactured facade of white working class men as the cackling villains who gave the country to Donald Trump, in other words, lies a reality far more in keeping with the complexities of American electoral politics: a ramshackle coalition of many different voting blocs and interest groups, each with its own assortment of reasons for voting for a candidate feared and despised by the US political establishment and the mainstream media. That coalition included a very large majority of the US working class in general, and while white working class voters of both genders were disproportionately more likely to have voted for Trump than their nonwhite equivalents, it wasn’t simply a matter of whiteness, or for that matter maleness.

It was, however, to a very great extent a matter of social class. This isn’t just because so large a fraction of working class voters generally backed Trump; it’s also because Trump saw this from the beginning, and aimed his campaign squarely at the working class vote. His signature red ball cap was part of that—can you imagine Hillary Clinton wearing so proletarian a garment without absurdity?—but, as I pointed out a year ago, so was his deliberate strategy of saying (and tweeting) things that would get the liberal punditocracy to denounce him. The tones of sneering contempt and condescension they directed at him were all too familiar to his working class audiences, who have been treated to the same tones unceasingly by their soi-disant betters for decades now.
...
But when you hear people shrieking that Donald Trump is the illegitimate result of a one-night stand between Ming the Merciless and Cruella de Vil, that he cackles in Russian while barbecuing babies on a bonfire, that everyone who voted for him must be a card-carrying Nazi who hates the human race, or whatever other bit of over-the-top hate speech happens to be fashionable among the chattering classes at the moment—why, then, dear reader, you’re hearing a phenomenon as omnipresent and unmentionable in today’s America as sex was in Victorian England. You’re hearing the voice of class bigotry: the hate that dare not speak its name.

Some good stuff also about the co-option of formerly radical groups in the US in the 1960s and 70s.