Emptywheel,

I would like to thank you for your professional journalism, long time reader, I fully appreciate what you do. So will the end result, in your opinion, expose how pervasive the Russian influence has threaded itself through the republican house and senate? I feel that many of them are compicit in violation of the law by conspiring with a forgien entity to influence an American election.

 

When did we enter The Outer Limits?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCcdr4O-3gE

The Twilight Zone is too EZ.  You have to be really old, like me, to remember The Outer Limits.

How the Grand Illusion works, Manafort Trial #1 Coverage:
Last night some nitwit at that right-light mess Mediaite posted a ‘report’ detailing a supposed blow up by Judge Ellis at the government over a supposed attempt by the prosecution to promote a non-expert witness into giving the jury an expert opinion, complete with Ellis standing up beside his chair growling ‘That’s enough’ at the first attempt, then yelling ‘I SAID THAT’S ENOUGH!’ in a furious and threatening tone, as if the government had forfeited all further judicial cooperation in the exercise.

Drudge of course right this up & linked to it from his front page.

Never happened. The witness was an accountant who provided services for Manafort. The government was moving into a new area, and the judge wanted to close for the day. Which is NORMAL – especially for judges like Ellis.

A more courteous judge would have engaged trial counsel briefly by pointing out the late hour, asking after their plans for the rest of the day, and suggesting the jury might like to call it a day. But Ellis has his way, in the end not so pleasant but it works the same.

But all the Trumpalos and QAnons who believe they’re doing their best to ‘stay informed’ won’t know any of that.
Not a single beat reporter in regular msm even bothered mentioning the supposed blow-up incidence, because it’s something they see every. freaking. day. as normal. as. can. be.
And now I have no doubt at all that the supposed Ellis blow-up at the prosecution is burning up the wingosphere – whereas, in Reality World, the government just closed a terrific day of evidence in favor of their case, and left the jury to contemplate all the fraud and fakery and double-switcheroos Manafort – MANAFORT, not Gates, said the witnesses – pulled with his foreign money transfers, supposed loans, supposed loan foregiveness, fraudulent loan applications and phonied up income & loss statements in the tax returns.

So when Manafort goes down it’ll be treated as a shock, a phony verdict, the Deep State pulling off another dastardly plot.

I’ve never thought much of Mediaite, but it never actually hit me before this incident how low young Danny Abrams sits in the tank.

I can forgive a lot of things. I’m sort of a liberal after all and was raised a Christian, back in the day when forgiveness was divine, but one thing I cannot forgive is Styx.

If only JD were a Zevon fan he could wail, “how was I to know she was with the Russians, too.”

If the Charles Koch/Donald tRUmp war is real, Pence will be president after the Nov elections.

This article by Naomi Klein deserves a wide readership:

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

She corrects a glaring lapse in the NYT Magazine’s celebrated long read: Losing the Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.  The NYT, fittingly for the great manufacturer of consent, does not blame American or global capitalism or its radical neoliberal variant.  It blames mother “human nature”. 

That’s a variation on blame everybody, which means nobody, which gives the NYT’s corporate sponsors a free ride. The implication is that we lay back and enjoy the inevitable.

Ms. Klein’s thesis, and that of the Times’s Nathaniel Rich, is that the scientific community, by the end of the 1980s, had the data to say unequivocally that human activity was dangerously increasing global temperatures, with predictably bad results.

The problem, according to Ms. Klein, is that 1989 was also the peak of neoliberalism’s global effort to free the wealthy, business, and finance capital from purportedly stifling government interventions designed to protect people and their environment.  Neoliberals, having rolled their great snowball uphill, then let it roll down.  And here we are today.

Ms. Klein points out that it is not too late.  We are at a moment when neoliberalism’s many faults have become obvious to many.  We are in a position to reverse some of its cultural, political, and economic gains.  Ms. Klein:

We aren’t losing earth — but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.