Dark Brandon Took Down the Bad Balloon

 

Because this was the show you wanted this weekend, the Chinese surveillance balloon made it to the South Carolina coast where it was beyond the debris falling over a populated area, and then it got POPPPPPPPEDDD!  The debris field was seven miles. This is why you don't do this sort of thing over populated areas. That could have been not-great. Also, the US was on it like a bonnet and had been blocking the balloon from surveilling much of anything while trying to study what it was actually here for--so we received some intelligence while it was up there, and China did not receive so much intelligence. 

We might learn more from what we gather from what got downed. 

And anyway it was since Wednesday that Biden said to bring it down and the US military observed when it was safe to do it--and then it got done. You know, while all the critics were suggesting "Do it now!" as if the damn thing was about to cause havoc or whatever.  No havoc got caused, friends. 

Ein "Red" Luftballoon

 

Being a kid of a certain era, of course I thought of the song from Nena when I heard about the Chinese surveillance balloon traversing US airspace. (I also thought of the shooting down by the USSR of Gary Powers' spy plane--a U-2, because this is my brain, this is my Cold War 80's teenager brain, this is my brain on the music of my generation.) Things sure do happen. Sometimes things we know about and sometimes things we don't. The Chinese balloon is supposed to be a weather balloon according to the Chinese, and depending on who you ask, it is both always and never a weather balloon, whether you are talking about spy aircraft or UFOs or anything else. 

I'm a child of the 1980s, but I'm an adult of the 21st century, and I'm like, "how quaint is a fucking balloon"? I'm not talking about how zeppelins are weird since what happened in New Jersey and all, but more like, shit, there are satellites all over the night sky, and I don't know how many dumb MFs got TikTok on their phone. Information gathering has taken some leaps over the decades. What the hell are you all surveilling with a fucking big ass balloon? An obvious large as a couple tractor trailer ass balloon up over the whole continental US?

Could it be our reaction to it? Because that's a fun little test balloon, right there. 

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag Might Be Wired

It was awfully late last night that I took the time to read about the astonishingly poor op-sec choice of some of the Trump-orbiting lawyer-satellites to discuss White House business in the out-of-doors where journos could hear--but wow! There are clearly other things going on besides open-air discussions about who's got info in a vault and who is trying to oust Jared Kushner. Here's the particular gold nugget of interest to the prospector:

Tension between the two comes as life in the White House is shadowed by the investigation. Not only do Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. McGahn all have lawyers, but so do other senior officials. The uncertainty has grown to the point that White House officials privately express fear that colleagues may be wearing a wire to surreptitiously record conversations for Mr. Mueller.

That fear of a "wire"--where did I hear that before? Oh, yeah, from Trump Himself, on the day he decided that he was the victim of an Obama "wiretap".  My own guess about that was that he could not have been wiretapped except if there was a warrant because of suspected wrongdoing, but he could have been picked up because of the type of crowd his campaign preferred to run with.  Not that he was directly targeted--just that he fell into a particular net.

It turns out, that net might have been intended for Paul Manafort, who had a lot to do with Ukraine and maybe Russia and so much more. I'm not sure what Trump knew when he made that March 4 Tweet, but he apparently thought something pertaining to the campaign had been looked into. And since Manafort was suspected of reaching out to the Russians over the Trump campaign...

But that's all so very speculative! Maybe Manafort was a target of the FBI because of things happening even prior to the Trump campaign--but while we're at it, why was Trump still communicating regularly with Manafort (who he alleges he barely knew, despite him having a residence at Trump Tower?) after Manafort left the campaign? Maybe this kind of question should cause Trump to pause before directing his smears (directly or through surrogates) against people who understand the story of his campaign--possibly even better than he does.

TrumpWorld Grab-Bags Never Rest

Sometimes I have enough stories to file a TrumpWorld Grab-Bag post, even if I don't entirely get how all the stories fit together...today. Sometimes I magically have a theme, such as "inconsistency" or "disruption", to go by.  Sometimes I pull them together with the best narrative I can pull together--and today, I think I want to meditate on that busy factor of the folks on the periphery of the TrumpWorld. 

You know who never rested? Gen. Mike Flynn. The more we look, the more we find out about one of Donald Trump's most trusted foreign policy advisers. It turns out, there was yet another foreign connection that he had omitted from his security clearance paperwork, this time regarding nuclear power in the Middle East--not at all a fraught concept, I'm sure. He's also recently refused to testify before the Senate Intelligence committee. 

It might just be that he would like immunity--the problem is, the more you shake this guy, the more weird connections fall out of him. Like, right now, Special Counsel Mueller is looking at Flynn's weird adult son, Mike, Jr. because of his connections to Flynn Intel Group and the Trump Transition.  It's kind of weird to think Jr. even was in a position to be important in Flynn Sr's various lucrative consulting gigs with Turkey and Russia and Saudi Arabia, I guess, and all them, and also in any way involved with the Trump Campaign or transition since Jr. was a big old conspiracy theorist, internet trolling whackadoodle. But who knows--maybe that was the point?

How's Flynn Jr. for peripheral? Well, I also don't want you to forget about Devin Nunes. I know, the last I mentioned Nunes was about his trying to obstruct the Trump/Russia probe by being stupid about the significance of the Steele Dossier. But before that, there was the brilliant late night ride to uncover the vicious, probative, "unmasking" things that the Obama Administration was doing! My stars and garters! What ever happened with that?

Well, for starters, folks in the know never thought it was much. And then the testimony of Susan Rice kind of got interesting--it's really all in a day's work to follow-up on why heads of state or their representatives are visiting the US without a heads-up, and it's interesting that the meeting was with Flynn, Kushner, etc.

This should really have people looking into the whole "Logan Act" thing.

In other news, for some reason, the US government agencies are scrapping Russian-backed Kaspersky software products as if they were obviously full of spying malware or something. Maybe they think they could get hacked--I dunno. But maybe the next election won''t even need to be hacked--I mean, who needs to fuck with the votes when the GOP has ways of fuxxoring with the voters? Outside job, meet inside job. (Aw shit, I'm sounding a little like a conspiracy theorist now, maybe?)

But as for the above graphic? That's to commemorate the moment when an Office of Government Ethics decided why shouldn't people raise donations for their legal fees regardless of whether it's possibly payment for past or future favors!

This Trump Administration has issues that never rest, and it makes me restless. So I share it all with you!

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag is Disruptive

When a member of Duma is so comfortable with the notion of Russia having stolen the US presidential election that he says it aloud, the joke really has gone too far. Whether it's just a kind of boast about Russian capabilities, or a troll about US intelligence lack of capability, it's not actually funny.

It's especially not funny when it's clear that Russia has been very active in trying to influence events here through social media, even using Facebook to arrange anti-refugee and anti-immigration rallies right in the US, that Russian-backed "news" outlets RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik had been part of a propaganda campaign, and that it's possible that UN facilities in New York had been used for some of the operation. 

This is quite a lot of activity going on, with one apparently goal--influence in favor of Trump. There's evidence of Russian meddling in elections in Europe as well, so why not the US as well?

This is why it frustrates me that Rep. Devin Nunes and friends are trying to undercut the Steele Dossier and disrupt the investigation into the Russian hack of the DNC (and really, the election) by trying to discredit it. It just doesn't seem like a good-faith supposition that the real problem with the oppo research dug up in the dossier makes Trump look bad and could have been seeded with disinfo by the Russians for that very effect. The point of oppo is to get factual, damaging information, and this dossier has enough of it. There's not really any reason to believe Trump was not Putin's preference.

After all, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been a continuation of Obama's foreign policy, at best. But with Trump, they could count on a disruption--and possibly even plan a reset of US/Russian relations. Trump, after all, having been able to elide, omit, deny, anything to do with Russia at all publically, however fallaciously, would easily be able to ignore the enormity of the electoral interference on the most obvious of biases--

It benefited him, so it didn't matter. See? Disruption in action.

The problem with disruption though, is sometimes it is not actually...legal. This is a problem for the Trump campaign, because the evidence is piling up that unauthorized people associated were engaging in effecting foreign policy. (Those adoptions? Those sanctions.) And one person who seems particularly in the midst of this dealing was Jared Kushner, who Trump lawyers rather wanted out of the White House, by now.

But he remains, despite several uncomfortable disclosures.  I feel like this is probably something that will end up...disrupted...at some juncture, not without a number of "Please, Daddy"'s on Ivanka's part.

This TrumpWorld Grab-Bag May Have Been Taped

As was hinted, we actually are going to be (probably?) disappointed if we are looking for the "tapes" that Trump suggested might exist of conversations between himself and former FBI Director James Comey, because Trump Himself has Tweeted that what with all the things going on, he's fucked if he knows whether there's tapes.

I truly believe he is fucked if he knows and he's fucked if he doesn't, based on all available information, but that might just be me. (It isn't.)  The reason I say this is, if he did Tweet (OMFG--when was a presidency hinging on shit-Tweets?)that there were possibly tapes to try and warn Comey that whatever he said could be gainsaid by evidence, then that's sort of like a threat, isn't it? And apparently, Comey already anticipated his credibility was at issue, hence the memos. And if the threat to Comey was to keep him honest...um, we should believe his testimony? That seems like the logical thing, right?

Do normal people actually telegraph that they are going to witness-tamper in the most personally damaging way, or is this just a Trump thing?

Anyhow, there is also the possibility that he's hedging on whether there are tapes or not because they exist somewhere maybe and don't back him up, which is a possibility that I find almost as frighteningly amusing as the still-probable pee tape.

But of course, that's not all I'm interested in talking about. One of the phenomenons that currently interest me is The Lawyering.   Pretty much everybody in the White House is going to have to, even if one of Trump's lawyers says they don't have to.  Look, even one of Trump's other lawyers, is lawyering up.  And yet another of Trump's lawyers about this Russia mess is...well, a right-wing hind-titterati shyster. He's usually a religious right whaambulance chaser.  It's kind of weird to see him representing a president, but here we are. But when Trump is down to relying on Jay freaking Sekulow, because other lawyers think he lies and doesn't pay bills, yeah, it's probably grab the wad from the mattress and consult professional counsel time.

But why the lawyering? Because the thing that Trump keeps insisting is a hoax keeps being real. Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson reiterated that in recent testimony to the House Russian hacking investigation. What is critical to know is that there do seem to be crucial failures in our system regarding whether we met transparency with the 2016 election. For one thing, even if there had been suspected fuckery as early as 2015, the FBI notified DNC late and off-handedly, by which point the DNC already knew there was an issue and wanted to do damage control because they were in the middle of an election thanks! There was some Trump-Tweeted mumblefuckery that hinted that the DNC did not present their servers to FBI--absolutely true.  But I believe there were reasons for that. They might not have believed that all FBI agents were going to handle that data responsibly because they were already in the process of being fucked with their own data.  And they really did not want more outlets for fuckery.

Understandable. Frankly--this is a kind of victim-blaming. Is it the DNC's fault that they had no script for an unprecedented breach?

Speaking of breaches--it looks like the Russian hacking efforts, just like Reality Winner leaked about, did impact voting offices.  Maybe votes were thrown out because the legitimate voters got thrown off of the rolls. This is why I've long despised voter ID laws--the idea that legitimate voters and citizens would be denied their franchise on fully bullshit reasons. But if some other country gets to say whose votes are legitimate?

That is deplorable. And if a POTUS was somehow decided based on so much hackery-fuckery?

That's not democracy, and reasonable people who were no supporters of Trump would be justified in wanting his ass out, somehow. Yes, I am one of those people and very biased. But with my own eyes I see where this election was screwed with. And I feel like it was stolen. But now that he's been sworn in, I feel like impeachment is the method, and his emoluments conflicts are more obvious than the Russian "collusion". But for the love of all that's holy, to get there--we gotta flip the House.


(Part of an ongoing series.)

A Good Friday for a Trumpworld Grab-Bag

It's amazing to think that there were signs that the Trump campaign had unusual connections to Russia, as discovered by, well, everybody in the IC, as early as 2015, and yet, the Obama Administration was pretty much politically hamstrung from doing much to point it out--or at least felt they were. I mean, it happened, but it is amazing. It's not that there is one big thing that makes a person go "Hmm, I think there could be a connection here". It's...all the connections.

Speaking of connections--the screenshot of a Tweet from Corey Lewandowski above turned out to be correct--it's been verified that Paul Manafort's company did receive black ledger payments. This makes it about time that he finally got around to registering as a foreign agent--although I feel like everyone already knew that he had worked for the pro-Putin party in Ukraine? It's just weird that it got overlooked, but then again, since Michael Flynn did rather the same sort of thing...maybe it's the sort of tedious paperwork everyone forgets until people find out they got paid? (I'm still mulling over what to make about all the money Manafort's shell company borrowed from Trump-related businesses.) Manafort, like Roger Stone and Flynn, probably has an interesting story in him. Or several.

You know who has interesting stories and doesn't shut up? Carter Page. For a person who either was or wasn't close to the Trump campaign, and almost certainly was close to Russia, he talks a lot. One thing that he's staying mum on, though, is whether talks about sanctions ever came up when he was talking to, oh, anyone. He thinks it might but you'd really have to consult the FISA transcripts, which I think translates to, "Well, if it's on tape, I'm busted, and if it's not, I'm not".  That's an interesting way of looking at it, but he has a very interesting way of looking at things.

Anyway, there has been a bit of a mystery about Page--who brought him onto the Trump campaign as an adviser in the first place? A lot of people thought it was Jeff Sessions, because he was the one who helped Trump put together his list of five(!) foreign policy advisers when it became kind of alarming last spring that he hadn't any. But Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller says, not so. His sources say it was...Corey Lewandowski. The same who approved Page's odd trip to Moscow? The same.

It's just all interesting, is all I'm saying.

Once Again, A Trumpworld Grab-Bag

As has become my wont, when I have too many stories about the Trump Administration to make separate posts out of, I'm just throwing them together in what I'm calling a "grab-bag". It's like a little fistful of politics and intrigue for one's blog-perusing pleasure.

So, I'm not saying there looks like a problem here, but there might be something to idea that the Kushner/Bannon beef or some other irritation might wind up proving fatal to the Trump/Bannon relationship. Possible proof? This non-committal response regarding Trump's confidence in Steve Bannon:

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

That kind of diminishing language is what made Mike Flynn "a volunteer" and depicted Paul Manafort as having a "very limited role" in his campaign. It does rather sound like he's distancing himself from the guy.

In other news, you might recall that it looked like Rep. Devin Nunes had rushed to put his face in front of cameras with some information from White House staffers that he just had to brief the president on, without first sharing it with the rest of the House Intelligence Committee. This lead to Nunes having pretty well addled the credibility of the House Russian probe (or at least, his participation in it) and his decision to step aside from that probe to spend more time with his ethics complaints. Well, funny thing about that classified information--there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun there at all, according to other lawmakers who have now looked at it.

But for those of you who are interested in the Trump campaign "wiretap" story-line, we do have verification that Carter Page was subject to a FISA warrant. Of course, that does mean there was probable cause of wrongdoing--because judges do not seem to just approve those on sheer whim, and, as has been noted before, Page's contacts with Russian agents seems to have been varied and weird.

Make of it all what you will.

Yet Another Trumpworld Grab-Bag

For some reason, I just can't make a blogpost that treats Carter Page having handed off documents to a Russian spy in 2013,  Blackwater founder Erik Prince setting up a Trump/Putin backchannel, and Sebastian Gorka being, well, still one odd duck (in the "If it quacks like a fascist?" mode, perhaps) into separate posts because, well--wow! It's almost as if the campaign of, followed by the administration of, one Donald J. Trump is completely filled with dodgy characters who, you might think, would generate no small amount of attention and concern just by being themselves.

There's something that fails to look entirely coincidental about any of this.

This is why the unmasking thing doesn't really strike me as suspicious--or even really a thing. See, if NSA Susan Rice requested that the name of a US person referenced in a piece of electronic surveillance of another person, it would mean she...didn't know who that person was to start with? So she had to see something else that seemed like a possible national security risk, and asked if that name could be revealed. How would she know in advance if there even was any political use for the name? And then--did that result in any leak?

It's seems like a finger-pointing distraction on the part of team Trump that doesn't really negate that there's a serious inquiry into the Trump/Russia connection. Trump wants to be viewed as the victim of some kind of terrible action on the part of the Obama Administration that has devastated him by...not being used during the election pretty much at all. After, in news that raised even my jaded eyebrows, there was a story that FBI Director James Comey wanted to write an op-ed about the Russian tampering which had been quashed. Although the op-ed would not have mentioned the Trump campaign at all, it would have been clear at the time which campaign was favored by Russian ops. The Obama Administration preferred a joint statement--not that it helped Clinton's campaign in anyway, just that it would show a less-contestable consensus (which Trump and his biggest fans still denies exists, I guess).

The "wiretap" complaint really strikes me as being about whether Trump feels like he's being singled out--but sometimes, when all the dots are connected, even if one wasn't looking for him, the resulting picture starts looking like a very Trump-like thing.

This all feels significant, somehow.

The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws? https://t.co/QIqLgvYLLi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017

We're used to waking up and finding that Donald Trump has poured out some measure of grievance via Twitter--which I think by now he should be a bit wary of after his March 4 Tweet storm basically defined this month. (Only a month?--Yes. I know.) And his grouse about NYT was rewarded later that day with a story that Rep. Nunes' odd intelligence that suggested the wiretapping claims weren't entirely crap (although they still seem to be) came from inside the White House.

Also, former NSA General Flynn is looking to testify under immunity because he has an interesting story to tell. I am sure.

Personal things have kept me from regular blogging this week, but these two items seem significant. The first odd thing is that the "wiretapping" story evolved into a weird couple weeks' clowning of Rep. Nunes, casting doubt on his ability to chair an investigation of the president's connection to the Russian interference in the election (especially when it seems that he considers Trump his "boss") and the second is that Flynn was very vocal about how immunity requests implied certain guilt with respects to people who requested the same regarding the Clinton email investigation. And here he is.

Fascinating.

The News is Real, The Leak Was Fake?

So, I mentioned this a little bit as an aside on Wednesday, but Rep. Devin Nunes gave a presser then that did not do exactly what it looked like he was trying to do. It looked like he had received some kind of information that clarified the "wiretapping by the Obama Administration claim" made by President Trump, by virtue of Trump transition folks after the election apparently being caught up incidentally in lawfully FISA'd wiretaps that were just ordinary old SIGINT on foreign nationals.

This sort of made me wonder just who all were the Trump insiders regularly in contact with that might be under surveillance--but that is still a "no big whoop" kind of speculation. Doubtless, Trump and associates got congratulatory calls post-election. Despite our Logan Act, no small number of representatives of other governments might have wanted reassurances and to start "talking shop". Not every call a Trump associate might have gotten swept up in was as dodgy as the "General Flynn calling Russia all the time" thing. Gosh--we can't already be forgetting how Trump got a call from Taiwan that turned into a tempest in a teacup!

But all the same--there is something kind of weird about why Rep. Nunes went out of his way to make his Wednesday statement when he didn't really seem to be carrying too much in his hands on this one. The Daily Beast kind of suggests he got some kind of shadowy summons and disappeared off this mortal plane for a minute while spooky shenanigans went down. I wouldn't know about that.  What I would say is, if Nunes received some kind of ameliorating intelligence to spin to make the Trump investigation look better, he handled it like a drowning man thrown a life preserver who goes on to try to eat it. It doesn't help that he described what he was doing as being out of a sense of "duty and obligation" to Trump--when that isn't his job. Figuring out if Trump did something grossly wrong, is.

So, he walked back even as much as he had said on Wednesday, on Friday--a thing that might have gotten overshadowed by the health-care bill-fail. The upshot of which is, still spinning, nope, no wiretap,  and maybe we aren't even talking about people from the Trump transition being spoken to, but spoken about.

Can it be that what looked like Rep. Nunes possibly leaking classified information to make Trump look right about the wiretap and to undermine the credibility of the Trump/Russia investigation, turned out to sort of be just a case of him making "fake news"?  As in--not news, just performing for Trump's benefit?

Nunes' leak should be regarded as "fake". Except the bits where he reiterated that Trump Tower was not wiretapped. The reasons why Trump should be investigated remain real.

It Looks Bad Because it is Bad

Based on the Tweets that President Trump was offering up to the Internets a short while before FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director, Adm. Mike Rogers gave their testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, it seems like he already suspected this day would make the Administration look kind of bad.

And it did. FBI Director Comey shot down the case that the Trump campaign had been the subject of wiretapping at President Obama's direction, and acknowledged that there is an ongoing investigation into the Russian interference in the US election via hacking of the DNC and the possibility of the Trump campaign colluding in this effort. Adm. Rogers rejected the possibility floated by the Trump Administration that GCHQ performed the surveillance instead.  The FBI investigation is also looking into how Russian "bots" and "trolls" helped spread stories favorable to Trump (and negative stories about Clinton) on various websites.

I'm sure House GOP Reps who tried to steer attention to "leakers" and the shameful journalists who published leaks as if they were stories were trying to help, but I'm not sure it really does--after all, the Trump campaign "lived by the leak", with Trump going all in on praising WikiLeaks when it was damaging his opponent. Also, there is a limit to how much you can blame the press for bad news when it turns out not to be fake, but true!

It does seem to me that Rep. Devin Nunes was guilty of trying too hard by mournfully bemoaning the "big, gray cloud" that the Trump Administration was now under (of their own doing, I might add) and then, and somewhat bizarrely, saying he did not know who Carter Page or Roger Stone were when asked by Mother Jones' David Corn. That just doesn't even sound likely. Work in DC much, Rep. Nunes? (Actually, he was on the Trump transition team. So there's that.) I think Press Secretary Sean Spicer might have overstrained credulity in claiming Paul Manafort only had a limited role in the Trump Campaign. Oh, really?  (And that Gen. Flynn was a campaign volunteer. You know. The kind who is a top foreign policy adviser during the campaign and then becomes National Security adviser and who sits in on intelligence briefings. Practically just an envelope-stuffer!) I know they are trying to make things look a little better for President Trump, but, it doesn't really. The denials just sound more like covering up to me.

These things look and sound bad because they are bad.  This President had been under investigation since late July. Trump deflects criticism with wild, unfounded claims that are damaging to his credibility. His party has not yet reconciled themselves to the damage he is doing, but it can't really be denied forever--

Can it? When Trump tweets mischaracterizations of testimony so that it can be debunked in real time, can anyone say this is a misunderstanding? Does it not become clear that his credibility--essential to leadership--is perhaps fatally impaired? The state of this presidency is certainly, if not bad, not good. At some point, following the "lead" of a Tweet to suppose, perhaps, that "leaks" are the real issue (and not the damaging information they reveal) or setting up a straw man of Russian hacking of electoral votes, not seriously claimed by anyone, also looks, if not bad, certainly not good.

Pravderp 2: The Tappening

WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer outdid himself today in serving up some astonishing "pravderp" on behalf of President Trump's early Saturday-morning Twitter allegation that phones at Trump Tower were wiretapped by the Obama Administration, which somehow has turned into a congressional inquiry, and turned up...

Nada. I know--weird, right? The guy who alleged that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US, that Senator Ted Cruz's father was plotting with Lee Harvey Oswald, that there were five million illegal votes that skewed the popular vote total (somehow, mostly in California, a state where Hillary Clinton was already assured a win), and other peculiar not-proven shit, seems to have pulled this wiretapping thing out of his behind, and yet, for the sake of the credibility of the office, Spicer has to go out there and make the allegation seem not implausible--or even totally true. (Depending on Trump's mood, I guess.)

So, this leaves the beleaguered Press Sec. stating on Tuesday that he was "extremely confident" that evidence would prove the allegation true and disputing whether Trump even meant "wiretapping" of his "phones" since he used "quotation marks" and might have meant some other kind of surveillance. (Although as the above screencap from Trump's Twitter rant shows, he did mean phones, and did not always use quotation marks.)

Which brings us up to today, when, after comments from US AG Jeff Sessions that he didn't give Trump any reason to consider this story, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan saw no evidence to back the wiretap claims, Senate intelligence also rejected the claim but a wee bit before Spicer was about to do a briefing regarding the budget plan.

A scramble seems to have ensued to find stories to bolster the Trump claim, again, to make it seem plausible, and not like the POTUS simply makes things up, particularly not criminal allegations against a former President.  So he read stories from the press to complain that they did not cover stories that might support Trump's claims, and which kind of did not help and sort of made it plausible that if any wiretap did exist, it was probably because legitimate illicit stuff was happening. It was a bit weird, and also right from Melissa McCarthy's SNL impersonation ("Those were your words!")

It gave me a bad feeling for Spicer for a moment, like it might have been better for his credibility if the press conference was cancelled altogether, or if he even resigned because defending this is an awful lot to ask. But somehow, claiming the determinations of both Houses of Congress as "not findings" (yeah, says I, because nothing was "found") snapped me out of it.

I began to think this had nothing to do with wiretapping claims, because by golly, even if Trump did not mean them "literally", we were taking them "seriously". And attention is attention.  In the meantime, we were introduced to Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who explained how cutting programs that fed kids and old people were really doing us all a kindness, if you could even call reducing the funding of something "a cut" at all, at all. And none of the assembled, gob-smacked journos even thought to ask about whether the Administration hired some kind of Hungarian Nazi either.

I truly detest these Trumpist people. I truly do.

The Internet of Made-Up Things

I just don't know about this, you guys...

WikiLeaks Sure Got Weird Recently

Um. I know. I just did a WikiLeaks post, and it's not like the org (By which I basically just mean Julian Assange, because, right now, is there anyone else but him? Inquiring minds and all that) is my regular bugbear. It's just that I've been wrong, haven't I? WikiLeaks had to have moved the needle a little. After all, Trump won. In retrospect, dirty tricks (that is what framing an information release selectively with the intent to distort could be construed as, right?) might have accounted for a little bit a lot.

But what does anyone make of a discussion about creating a database that starts from "verified" Twitter users to uncover a network of influence?  It doesn't seem like a nice social science experiment to determine who is a real macher on Twitter, and seems a bit more like being the thing they really want to disavow:

Yeah. So I'm pretty sure that if such a database is brought to fruition, with information made public about any number of people, their housing, their jobs, there will be a very sternly-worded disclaimer not to do bad things with this information, which is for very noble social science purposes only, and stop laughing, will you?

Snap diagnosis: Assange suffers from a profound lack of Vitamin D and needs to get out more.