Multiple news agencies have reported that Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, will retire in March after twenty years with the agency, and is going on leave immediately. The Washington Post first reported last week that Don the Con, our 45th President, had asked Mr. McCabe last summer how he had voted in the presidential election, during a conversation in which he claimed to be considering McCabe as Acting Director shortly after abruptly firing Director James Comey.
Mr. McCabe’s wife had run for the Virginia State Senate as a Democrat in 2015, and had received $200,000 from the Democratic National Committee plus half a million dollars from the PAC run by Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary Clinton (a political campaign in which Mr. McCabe played no role whatsoever)– so there was in reality no chance of Don’s allowing Mr. McCabe any real authority. Mr. McCabe was able to finesse Don’s question by telling him he didn’t vote, and was able to warn the Don not to make an appearance at FBI Headquarters “to boost morale” after firing its popular Director (because it would not go over well with the rank and file.)
Axios had just reported on January 23 that FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign rather than fire Mr. McCabe under pressure from Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. Axios also quoted a statement from the White House Press Principal Deputy Secretary that described former FBI Director Comey as “politically motivated” (in what way a registered Republican could be “politically motivated” rather than just apolitically disgusted by a corrupt President was not explained by the Principal Deputy.)
Mr. McCabe’s neutrality, much less integrity, is suspect in Don’s eyes even though he was appointed by President GW Bush and worked under two registered Republicans, James Comey and Robert Mueller. There is a clear element of paranoia in Don the Con’s thinking here, not just defensiveness. Don is a fan of conspiracy theories, and he has probably already signed on to the one about a “secret society” within the FBI dedicated to taking him down because they are jealous of his charisma.
If Don is not already aware of the extent to which his campaign shared data with the Russian government (the actual assistance the Russians gave to Cambridge Analytica was hacked emails and access to Russia’s army of bots for targeted ads and content) then Mueller’s investigation will soon clarify it for him. There was a dedicated computer link between Trump Tower and the Kremlin and a secret operation that linked swing voters and supplied content meant to increase their insecurity.
White voters were found to pick Trump over Clinton if they were insecure and suspicious of established politics and the democratic system. Black voters could not be induced to support Trump by any feasible means. People who had suffered at the hands of the system, such as laid-off factory workers and people who had lost their houses to foreclosure, had become vulnerable to propaganda that linked their insecurity to immigration or “politics as usual.” Targeting insecure voters with propaganda that increased their anxiety only made them more likely to vote for an anti-establishment candidate, which is precisely what Trump pretended to be.
In reality, Don the Con is the ultimate establishment figure, having a vested interest in keeping the status quo intact, including racial and sexual discrimination, oil consumption, pharmaceutical company profits, and the rich getting richer.
Don’s reputation at the FBI is “in tatters” but there may be a hard core of Trump supporters in the depths of certain FBI offices, such as that in New York. In fact, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, who hired the notorious spy and Russia expert Christopher Steele, stated before Congress that Steele feared the FBI had been “co-opted” by Trump supporters– and cut off all contact with them– after FBI agents were cited in the New York Times on October 31, 20016 claiming that they had investigated Trump and found “little” connection to Russia.
In fact, there were already strong grounds for suspicion and the NSA and CIA had become involved in the widening investigation. On October 12, 2016, the NYT reported: “Hillary Clinton’s top adviser said the FBI is investigating Russia’s possible role in hacking thousands of his personal emails, an intrusion he said Donald Trump’s campaign may have been aware of in advance.”
It was only after the first Tuesday in November that the combined intelligence agencies put together and presented to both Obama and Trump a document which described Russia’s role in hacking the election. It appears to many that our intelligence community, including the FBI (and ultimately President Obama) failed to warn us that Russia was hacking our election when there was still time for the American people to do something about it (like not voting for Don the Con.) The claims in the NYT on October 31, 2016 about FBI agents not finding any Trump-Russia connections seems especially inappropriate, particularly when combined with their announcement about the re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation.
“Although prices are often justified by the high cost of drug development, there is no evidence of an association between research and development costs and prices; rather, prescription drugs are priced in the United States primarily on the basis of what the market will bear.”
From the abstract of the 2016 study in the JAMA, “The High Cost of Prescription Drugs in the United States”
The NYT article referencing this study uses Humira as an example of this phenomenon:
“The price of Humira, an anti-inflammatory drug dispensed in an injectable pen, has risen from about $19,000 a year in 2012, to more than $38,000 today, per patient, after rebates, according to SSR Health, a research firm. That’s an increase of 100 percent… A prefilled carton with two syringes costs $2,669 in the United States, compared with $1,362 in Britain, $822 in Switzerland and $552 in South Africa, according to a 2015 report from the International Federation of Health Plans.”
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Don’s number one reason for claiming that Mueller was prejudiced against him and trying to fire him, last June, was that, after Mueller had resigned from his golf club (possibly because he moved away), the club had failed to refund his membership fees as Mueller had requested by letter:
The dispute was hardly a dispute at all. According to a person familiar [with the] matter, Mueller had sent a letter requesting a dues refund in accordance with normal club practice and never heard back.
(Stolen from the Washington Post via Slate, courtesy of Slate chief news blogger
(photo courtesy of pexels at pixabay.com)
Dr. Lukasz Niec, working in a Michigan hospital during a flu epidemic that is still ongoing, holds a valid green card (he’s still a citizen of Poland) and has been in the US for forty years since his father brought him legally into the country as a child. He was convicted of a misdemeanor as a teenager that involved “moral turpitude” (whatever that is) but has been practicing medicine for the last ten years without a hitch. He was abruptly detained, incommunicado, by ICE agents on his first day off after a week of double shifts. His crime, according to ICE? He was convicted of two offenses 26 years ago as a teenager: receiving stolen goods and destruction of property worth less than $100; one crime was “erased” from his record– but these crimes involve “moral turpitude” and are reason enough to deport him. The real reason for his arrest? He has had 18 contacts with the police over the past few years, all involving traffic violations such as not having proof of insurance, not changing the address on his license, and parking near a fire hydrant. His worst offense? Driving drunk (“under the influence” in 2008, for which he served probation for a year, and for which the court “set aside” his conviction. ICE officers claimed that he “came under scrutiny” because of these mostly trivial violations of traffic laws. His employer, Bronson Healthcare, has appealed for his release, noted his service to the community as a physician, and argued that they need him back at work.
It appears that this man is a target for law enforcement officers who apparently have a vendetta against him; perhaps it is related to his ex-fiancee, who has a child with him and is trying to prevent him seeing her. She charged him with child abuse last summer because of a bruise which she claimed was a bite mark; the case was dismissed because the bruise didn’t look like a bite mark and it was unknown who caused it or when it was suffered.
In addition to these complications, the judgement of “moral turpitude” seems arbitrary. If something is against the law, doesn’t that automatically imply “moral turpitude”? Or is it only for “moral” crimes?
PS The fact that this man came to the attention of ICE because of numerous contacts with the law, none of which have resulted in convictions in the past ten years, highlights the trick that law-enforcement personnel play on people who are arrested, then found not guilty: they keep a record of the arrests and act as if the arrest alone is enough to taint a person with law-breaking. After all, if he was arrested, he must have been guilty of something– right? It’s always guilty until proven innocent.
People who have been detained, even when they are released following a hearing, have their DACA status removed even though they were actually detained by mistake: this happened to Daniel Ramirez, who was picked up at the same time when ICE agents came to arrest his father (their original target.) Agents claimed that the fact that he had a tattoo on his arm showed he was a gang member. Even though his lawyer, Luis Cortes, disproved this to the satisfaction of an immigration judge and Ramirez was released after a month in custody, he was left without DACA protection and lost his job. (This information comes from an article in “The New Yorker.”)
(The reports about Niec came from an article , one of several on the case in “Michigan Live” by unknown authors since Dr. Niec was taken away on January 16; national newspapers have picked up the story. Interestingly, numerous comments on the Michigan Live story were submitted by people who seem to have a vendetta against him, inflated the child abuse allegations from dismissed to convicted, and consider his traffic offenses to be sufficient reason to deport him.)
(The picture, by Mohamed Hassan, comes courtesy of pixabay.com)
More than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned on Election Day, officials say, resulting in ballot discrepancies in 59% of precincts that raise questions about the reliability of future election results in a city dominated by Democratic and minority voters.
“This is not the first time,” adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. “We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.” Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines “hit up against each other and malfunction” as they’re being transported to the precincts.
(This comes from Time magazine in a news piece by CHARLOTTE ALTER on December 14, 2016)
(Illustration courtesy of pixabay.com)
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, hardly a member of the Clinton-left, activist liberal media, described the whole thing as “obviously a PR stunt.” He added: “I wouldn’t have predicted that it would work this well. After all, Republicans insinuating that a memo written by a Republican committee chairman in a Republican-controlled Congress during a Republican presidency is being hidden from the public by some force or entity other than the Republicans strikes me as kind of hilarious.”
(This comes from an opinion piece by Robert Schlesinger in the U.S. News & World Report – hardly a “liberal” news organization – on Wednesday, January 24, 2018)
(Once again, the photo comes courtesy of pixabay.com)
It’s 2 Minutes to Midnite– Goodbye
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has updated their doomsday clock and it now shows 2 minutes to midnight, the closest to disaster we have been since 1953, when both the US and the USSR tested hydrogen bombs. This update reflects the breakdown of efforts to reduce reliance on nuclear deterrence, posturing by the American President, planned development of smaller, more usable nuclear weapons, and not least: the uncontrolled and unaddressed effects of climate change (global warming.)
You can read about it at Live Science in this article posted today.
(photo courtesy of AlexAndropov86 on pixabay.com)
“Help Me, Obi-Wan, You’re My Only Hope”
A “Nature” article published today describes a new technology capable of producing “Princess Leia” (so-called from the scene in the movie “Star Wars”) images in thin air. Here is the abstract for the Optical Trap Display, which uses floating cellulose particles trapped by laser light and illuminated by multicolor lasers:
Free-space volumetric displays, or displays that create luminous image points in space, are the technology that most closely resembles the three-dimensional displays of popular fiction1. Such displays are capable of producing images in ‘thin air’ that are visible from almost any direction and are not subject to clipping. Clipping restricts the utility of all three-dimensional displays that modulate light at a two-dimensional surface with an edge boundary; these include holographic displays, nanophotonic arrays, plasmonic displays, lenticular or lenslet displays and all technologies in which the light scattering surface and the image point are physically separate. Here we present a free-space volumetric display based on photophoretic optical trapping2 that produces full-colour graphics in free space with ten-micrometre image points using persistence of vision. This display works by first isolating a cellulose particle in a photophoretic trap created by spherical and astigmatic aberrations. The trap and particle are then scanned through a display volume while being illuminated with red, green and blue light. The result is a three-dimensional image in free space with a large colour gamut, fine detail and low apparent speckle. This platform, named the Optical Trap Display, is capable of producing image geometries that are currently unobtainable with holographic and light-field technologies, such as long-throw projections, tall sandtables and ‘wrap-around’ displays1.
(This news was written up by SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer for the Associated Press and I received it through a built-in news service from Microsoft that appears to be standard with the latest iteration of Windows 10.)
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Hunter Shot by His Own Dog
In the Krasnokutsk district of the Saratov region, a man was shot by his own dogs when they leaped on him as he let them out of the back of his car to go hunting. He was holding a double-barreled shotgun pointed at his abdomen, and apparently the dogs triggered it when they jumped on him. He died on the way to the hospital. This was reported on Monday by the Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Saratov region. Here is the post, in Russian, on the incident, which occurred on the morning of January 21, 2018: http://saratov.sledcom.ru/news/item/1197106/
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
A Modest Proposal: Tell Democratic Politicians to Focus On People’s Problems Rather Than the Con
Don’s real con is that he has such an outrageous personality that everybody focuses on that instead of his really horrible policies (or lack of any rational policies at all.)
My proposal is that we focus on policy: for example, a national jobs agency that gives retraining to people who need it, and finds jobs for people who are trained already. Despite our low unemployment rate, we have people working in jobs that don’t use their real skills, jobs that don’t pay well enough to get ahead, and menial work that sucks out the soul.
A national employment agency would help some of the most alienated people in society– those who have been laid off by companies that now show trillions in profit (an estimated $2.5 trillion in cash is held by companies) and people who have been unemployed because technological advances have made their jobs obsolete (like coal miners.)
The second policy area that would be politically popular is a transportation initiative that would allow people who can’t reach their work to commute– by whatever means necessary, including car-pooling. Some of this work could be done quite cheaply. It doesn’t require building a bullet train or buying busses.
There is considerable precedent for the idea that focusing on Don the Con’s personality is not the most effective way to build long-term support. If Don leaves, do we focus on Moral Mike’s personality? That won’t work. We need to go back to first principles and talk about the policies that could improve our economy and everyone’s well-being– policies that the Republicans have ignored despite their propaganda about “Make America Great Again.”
