Late Night Track -- Kingston Boogie

I can't get over this album... it's incredible.

Something I've Been Muellering...

It's funny; a lot of people have said "Oh, we *told* you Robert Mueller was no superhero and the only way you're going to get Trump out of office is voting in 2020." Strangely, while I actually thought, and still do think, that there's a chance that Mueller could be the reason Trump leaves office (or even that his work still could indict Trump), just because we are in *such* uncharted waters -- as I've said for more than two years now, I think anything can happen on the spectrum of possibilities from a removal of the whole regime and a revote/installation of HRC or Pelosi to Trump just declaring martial law, I've never thought of Mueller as a superhero.

And I didn't, at the beginning, expect him to do that great a job. But I want to say this about him: Having lived through the "investigations" of 9/11 and Iraq, Mueller's investigation has felt *nothing* like that kind of a whitewash. Dude's turned over rocks that I thought only the most conspiratorial of us would've even thought of. He's been incredibly thorough. We know what we've seen. We know Trump worked with Russia. We know he obstructed justice. We also know what both Trump and Russia's M.O.s are, and of course they worked together. Russia's been doing this sort of thing all over the world for a decade. Mueller knows all of this and probably a whole lot of things we probably don't.

We're not blind, and neither are Mueller and his team. If they're not telling us they think Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election (and, remember this -- lesser men in his field recognize it)... they're probably somehow being gagged.

I'm going to stand by that. We may not find that out now or anytime soon (hell, it took half a decade to unearth Nixon's Vietnam shenanigans from 1968), but I think I will see proof of it in my lifetime.

Late Night Track -- Midnight in Richmond

(h/t Bob Cesca)

Reading It So You Don't Have To -- The Mueller Report

I need a nap.

Apparently, Trump is taking one too:

Seriously, Fuck Donna Brazile

Back in late 2017 when Donna Brazile accused the DNC of rigging the 2016 elections in favor of Hillary Clinton, I wrote a trio of posts that remain among the most read posts I've ever written:

Fuck Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile Backs Down

OK, That's Enough, Donna


From the first post:

...I have never been impressed with Brazile. She ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign, which chose Joe-friggin'-Lieberman as a VP candidate and which ran away from Bill Clinton, who had a 60%+ approval rating. She's since held a number of different positions in the party, but also was one of the first Democratic talking heads I became familiar with when I began watching cable news in the early 2000s. She was never very strong on TV, and as I started to identify with the Democratic Party more and more, I always cringed to see her represent the Democratic point of view... So, I'm establishing here that I'm not a fan of hers. At all. And now she's gone from being disappointing to me to being infuriating. Perhaps the reason she's lost pretty much every election she's been involved with is that she doesn't understand how American politics works.

Well, this week, Brazile decided to take her talents to the south side of West 46th Street and join Fox News. She still doesn't understand how American politics works -- and that's being generous. From Booman:

Donna Brazile should know that if you need to write a 900-word essay to rationalize taking your new job, you’re probably not going to convince your critics. If she wants to pay the mortgage with Rupert Murdoch’s money, she can do so without insulting everyone’s intelligence by trying to make the assignment sound high-minded. She will be a commentator at Fox News for the 2020 presidential election cycle, and she has every right to be excited about the challenge or opportunity or whatever you want to call it when a liberal agrees to play Alan Colmes to Sean Hannity on a network that is committed more every day to promoting white nationalism and Islamophobia.

Some of Brazile’s arguments are flat out laughable.

Read the rest. And again, fuck Donna Brazile.

Soundtrack to this post:

RICO-LA!!!!!!!!!!!

Last week I blew through Andrew McCabe's book, Threat. It wasn't that remarkable -- there was nothing as remarkable as this -- but this rang a bell in my head:

Is it telling that McCabe spends half a chapter early in #Threat explaining the genesis and utility of RICO?

— Jason "Mar-a-Lago Delenda Est" Consolidation (@tgconsolidation) February 20, 2019

Back in the first few months after the election -- more than six months before Bob Mueller's investigation was a twinkle in Rod Rosenstein's eye -- there was a lot of talk in some of the not-so-credible corners of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theorizing Twitterverse of the entire Republican Party being taken down by RICO. As much sense as it made as the only solution to the looming metastasis of literal fascism in the United States, I couldn't believe it could happen because it seemed to me like Trump and his cronies were going to be able to prevent any attempts to investigate them and Putin-enabled authoritarianism was going to be the new normal. Those were incredibly dark days for me.

Today, largely due to Trump just being really, really bad at being a dictator (to paraphrase Homer Simpson, "I'M TIRED OF BEING A WANNABE DICTATOR! I WANNA BE A DICTATOR!"), there are at least 17 investigations into Trump and his associates, including several over which he has absolutely no authority. Sure seems like he's fucked. But what about the GOP, who follow him around with their noses in his ass? Could there be large-scale consequences for them? I'm going to say I still doubt it. I do think it's possible that certain Republican elected officials who are so deep into this massive scandal could be indicted -- Lindsey Graham, Dana Rohrabacher, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, and Chuck Grassley come to mind -- however, could there be an effort to pull the entire plant out by the roots? Probably not, but...

About a year ago, in a post aptly titled, "Why I Watch (So Much) CNN," I explained, well, why I watch so much CNN:

Why do I bother? It's not like I'm going to learn anything there I'm not going to lean on the internet. In fact, cable news is, for the most part, months behind. I mean, it's been pretty apparent since late 2016 that Trump's campaign had colluded with Russia to steal the election, and we knew in October 2016 that the New York branch of the FBI was conspiring against Hillary. Most of the news hasn't even gotten that far. But that's why I watch CNN. I learn just how far the press has gotten in their willingness to call a particular spade a spade. In the case of Trump/Russia, the press would barely acknowledge it at all until Buzzfeed published the Steele "dossier." They were skeptical about it for a long time, but hookers and pee make for good TV. The next big milestone was probably the Comey firing, when the talking heads could start musing about obstruction of justice. However, almost no one would actually discuss WHY Trump obstructed justice. As more Russia news came out, such as the Trump Tower meeting, much of it was discussed as more or less as a series of isolated incidents.

Things are changing now. Trump's attacks on Mueller, particularly the revelation that Trump tried to fire him, is starting to elicit talk of Trump actually covering up crimes, and sometimes, the TV personalities will even allude to those crimes being Russia related. Occasionally, they'll discuss whether or not a sitting President can be indicted.

But they haven't gotten to where we were (though that could've changed tonight; I haven't gotten my nightly Lemon fix yet) in December of 2016. We knew that Russia had meddled in the election, with the help of the Trump campaign, and that the election was stolen.

I don't know whether they'll get there, but I'd say the next steps are for the CNN types to acknowledge, on air, that Trump cheated. Then they'll need to discuss what the consequences should be for stealing an election. Finally, and I don't think this'll happen, CNN panelists and perhaps hosts will call for an overturning of the election. That's what I'm watching for.

As we've seen since, things have continued to change. And tonight I saw something I hadn't seen before:

@vermontgmg reminded everyone tonight on @CNN @donlemon that no team is better than the @SDNYnews on the overlapping web of criminal behavior racketeering like by the Trump Organization and these are the RICO tools created under the leadership of @RudyGiuliani while US Attorney.

— James Auld (@solarenvelope) March 1, 2019

That's the first mention I've heard of RICO on CNN in this context. Meanwhile, on MSNBC:

6. As I'm waiting @lastword, @DonnyDeutsch says this is just Cohen's opening act and talks about RICO.@Mimirocah1 picks up on Trump directing criminal enterprise.@TimOBrien focuses on Allen Weisselberg, Rhona Graff, Calamari in Trump Org.

— Jed Shugerman (@jedshug) February 28, 2019

That's three times in ten days. Something's in the air...

Did Andrew McCabe Give Away the Game?

Just a quick hit because I'm very surprised I'm not finding anyone else saying this on Twitter or anywhere else.

This morning, when I first saw this clip on CNN, I did a double take because I thought I heard McCabe about to say something very, very interesting, but he pulled back. Watch this and also read the quote:

“I was speaking to the man who had just … won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia." Former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe, Sunday on 60 Minutes. https://t.co/IVwcM11BGc pic.twitter.com/m6HwHMOqY9

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 14, 2019

There is potentially something very, very heavy in that ellipsis. Here's that quote, with captioning:

OK, so far, nothing strange. But check out the next caption:

Listen to the clip at that moment...

What's missing is what's in the dash between the "and"s. Specifically, a syllable.

Listen again... "and chea -- and won...."

I'm pretty sure what he was about to say was: "I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and CHEATED..."

I heard that when I heard it live, and nothing I'm seeing or hearing is making me hear it any differently.

The FBI leadership from 2016 believes Trump actively stole the election. I think the cat's out of the bag.

Am I wrong?

Earworm of the Afternoon -- Eddie Vedder

Late Night Track -- Careful

Late Night Track -- You Don't Know Me