Scoundrels and Hypocrites

Hate is what drives them.  Always has been, always will be.

vacuumslayer at LGM:

Trump won because Russia and Comey interfered in our election, yes. But the fact is that there were just enough supporters of Trump to give him that plausible “win.” People saw in Trump a chance to exact revenge on all the people they dislike–feminists, liberals, and people of color.

For Trump voters the chance to punish women for being sexual is dream come true; it’s their raison d’être. It’s why they get “teary-eyed” when they talk about abortion. They’re so excited about having a chance to exert control over women they dislike.

 

The evangelicals, meanwhile, are in a death cult. They would genuinely rather the world end than have to share the it with people who aren’t exactly like them.

The Trump coalition is  fine group of scoundrels and hypocrites.

Novermber 6: VOTE, goddammit!  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

Your First Kentucky 2018 Candidate for Donations: Sam Gaskin

He's a gun owner who wants background checks, closing the gun show loophole and "red-flagging" people with more than one assault rifle.

No word yet on reproductive rights, but for the moment he looks good.

From the Hopkinsville New Era:

Sam Gaskins is official in his bid to be a U.S. congressman, having filed to run for 1st District representative Wednesday in Frankfort.

If no one else files as a Democrat for the seat, Gaskins is expected to face a familiar foe in 2018 in incumbent Rep. James Comer. Comer won that election in a landslide, but Gaskins did garner 27 percent of the vote.

This time, he believes he has what it takes to win and is better prepared for the long campaign ahead.

SNIP

“Our president needs to shut up,” Gaskins said in references to Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea, including comments about fire and fury.

As a veteran, Gaskins doesn’t believe there should be troops on the ground, saying they are stretched thin as it is; however, he said if Kim Jong Un continues on his path, and the growing rhetoric between him and Trump continue, he’s afraid troops on the grown will be a reality.

SNIP

 Gaskins has said many times he believes a single-payer system, like in other countries, is the only way to solve the country’s problem with rising health care costs. As long as competing health care companies are involved, he believes the prices will keep rising. But, whether it’s what is currently happening to health care under the Trump administration or the Affordable Care Act under President Obama, the system needs a full overhaul.

Hopkinsville, by the way, is by far the most diverse community in the far-western First District. If Gaskin can mobilize the African-American community there, he's got a real shot at this.

His website is still under construction - Sam!  Get that thing up and running!  Money won't wait! - but here is his facebook page.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article185780063.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article185780063.html#storylink=cpy

Comey's Treasonous Sabotage

Yeah, he's under investigation. For seven days until AG Jeff Sessions cancels the investigation and promotes Comey to Deputy AG.

Kevin Drum has the proof, and it's overwhelming:

If it weren't for Comey, Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by about 6 points and the Electoral College by 70 or more. And that might have turned into control of the Senate as well, though that's a little more speculative.

Democrats clearly need to focus attention on state and local races, where they have done steadily worse throughout the Obama years. But at the national level, they should resolutely avoid the circular firing squad. They didn't lose because their message was unpopular or because they're out of touch or because they're insufficiently centrist or insufficiently leftist. That just wasn't the problem. The Democratic message was fine; Democrats are perfectly well in touch with their constituencies; and they weren't perceived as too unwilling to shake things up. Even with eight years of Democratic rule acting as a headwind, Hillary Clinton's default performance was a substantial win.

The only reason it didn't happen is because James Comey basically decided to call her a liar and a crook—based on absolutely no new evidence and with everyone in the world advising him not to—with 12 days left in the election. That was something she couldn't overcome, and it has nothing to do with the basic Democratic message.

And it gets worse:

From Digby:

All we can say for sure right now is that this is a perfect illustration of the way Comey improperly inserted himself into the election. These scandalous rumors connecting Trump to the Russian government information are unproven and unverified, and the FBI director was right not to reveal this material prior to the election. He completely ignored that principle when it came to Clinton, and there can be no doubt that it made a difference in the outcome. The fact that Comey clearly knew at the time it was at least possible that Trump had been compromised by a foreign government makes his decision even more shameful.

The FBI Committed Treason to Get Trump Close Enough to Steal the Election

Hillary won, by three million votes.  The Electoral College is an inexcusable remnant of the Slave Power, which 150 years after being outlawed is still undermining Democracy.

A rogue FBI is the consequence of Democrats letting repugs get away with treason for the past 42 years: pardoning Nixon, letting Ronnie Raygun and Bush Sr. skate on Iran-Contra, Pelosi and Obama refusing to prosecute Smirky-Darth for war crimes.  All in the name of "moving forward."

The result is we are sprinting backward toward the feudal brutality the Kochs and Exxon-Mobil have finally achieved.

Kevin Drum:

Here's a quick review:

• Goaded by rabid congressional Republicans, the FBI spent prodigious resources on Hillary Clinton's email server, even though there was never a shred of evidence that national security had been compromised in any way.
   
• In July, Comey broke precedent by calling a press conference and delivering a self-righteous speech about Clinton's "carelessness." Why did he do this, when FBI protocol is to decline comment on cases after investigations are finished? The answer is almost certainly that he wanted to insulate himself from Republican criticism for not recommending charges against Clinton.
   
• Weeks later, Comey finally released the investigation's interview notes. Only the most devoted reader of bureaucratic prose was likely to suss out their real meaning: there had never been much of a case in the first place, and contrary to Comey's accusation, Clinton had never been careless with classified material. Like everyone else, she and her staff worked hard to exchange only unclassified material on unclassified networks (state.gov, gmail, private servers, etc.). There was a difference of opinion between State and CIA about what counted as classified, but this squabbling had been going on forever, and had driven previous Secretaries of State nuts too.
   
• As Podesta notes, the FBI took a preposterously lackadaisical attitude toward Russia's hacking of the DNC server. Outside of a badly-written novel, it's hard to believe that any law enforcement organization would do as little as the FBI did against a major assault from a hostile foreign power aimed at one of America's main political parties.
   
• Even when plenty of evidence was amassed about Russia's actions, Comey downplayed it in private briefings. This gave Republicans the cover they needed to insist that Obama not mention anything about it during the campaign.
   
• Two weeks before Election Day, Comey authorized a search of Anthony Weiner's laptop, even though there was no reason to think any of the emails it contained were new, or that any of them posed a threat to national security. Then he issued a public letter making sure that everyone knew about the new evidence, and carefully phrased the letter in the most damaging possible way.

Any one of these things could be just an accident. Put them all together, and you need to be pretty obtuse not to see the partisan pattern. In every single case, Comey and the FBI did what was best for Republicans and worst for Democrats. In. Every. Single. Case.

If you want to believe this is just a coincidence, go ahead. But nobody with a room temperature IQ credits that. The FBI has spent the entire past year doing everything it could to favor one party over the other in a presidential campaign. Democrats ought to be in a seething fury about this. Instead, they're arguing about a few thousand white rural voters in Wisconsin and whether Hillary Clinton should have visited Michigan a few more times in October.

Why Is Everybody OK With A Torture-Loving FBI Director?

J. Edgar Hoover would fucking love this guy.

Rick Perlstein at The Nation:

Some of us have been shouting from mountaintops, others from molehills: James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was:

(a) in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello;

(b) general counsel for a defense contractor while it was busy hushing up a whistleblower who exposed $24 billion contract that they were building vessels for the Coast Guard, on a $24 billion contract, that buckled and leaked on the high seas;

(c) as of three months ago on the board of a bank, in charge of cleaning up their reputation after it paid a $1.92 billion fine for laundering drug money from Mexico; and

(d) the man who, as former FBI agent Colleen Rowley pointed out this morning in The New York Times, “sign[ed] off on most of the worst of the Bush administration’s legal abuses and questionable interpretations of federal and international law. He ultimately approved the C.I.A.’s list of “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, which experts on international law consider a form of torture.

Lots of shouting going on. But not much listening.

SNIP

Comey, it seems, is not a story even to those who generally give a shit.

It’s not like we’re totally dead to civil liberties, and the FBI’s violation of same; I have reason to know that for a fact. Compare to my piece from last month on Comey, which was tweeted out forty-three times, a piece I wrote last year on the FBI’s abuse of infiltrators and entrapment techniques in “terror” cases, which was tweeted 1,865 times. Now, that’s an important subject, also—one that senators should, but won’t, grill Comey on, too. But it’s not 433 times more important!

I asked a friend why she thought the entrapment piece caught on, and the Comey exposé hasn’t. I noted that the earlier piece focused on the infiltration and arrest of Occupiers. She replied, “I think that’s it. Occupy = nice white kids. Torture/surveillance = scary brown muslims.”

Is that it? Has our dull civic deadness come to that? We’re exhausted, that’s for sure. Notes one of my Facebook friends, “When our civic values are attacked from a few sides, some people are capable of outrage and will fight back. When they are attacked from all sides, over and over again, over a prolonged period of time, people lose the ability to react.”

“Eventually some administration will nominate John Yoo Attorney General and nobody will even deeply sigh.”

“Comatose, Mr. Perlstein, because we have come to accept that what we think no longer matters.”

Read the whole thing.

Comey's One Act of "Heroism" Does Not Erase His Crimes

Before mass swoons over James Comey paralyze the nation, let's remember that President Obama's likely nominee to head the currently-in-very-deep-shit FBI is about as far from a defender of Americans' civil rights as you can get this side of Rand Paul.

Brad Friedman:

Lest you get the idea, after all of this, that we're lauding Comey for anything more than the seemingly heroic behavior he describes on the night in question and concerning the matter discussed in his testimony, here is a cautious reminder about who Comey is, from the ACLU's Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, in response to reports of Comey's nomination to FBI Director:

As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration. Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig. Although Comey, despite tremendous pressure from the Bush White House, deserves credit for courageously stopping the reauthorization of a secret National Security Agency program, he reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.

Nor should we forget to ask - as many people did at the time -  just what kind of program could be horrible and unconstitutional enough to make the guy who thought nothing of OKing torture and indefinite detention of American citizens say "no, uh-unh, not that!"