Sunday Funnies

Michael Flynn, Trump's new NSA

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was fired from his last job in the military, sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin after giving a paid speech in Moscow, called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, and said President Obama was a “liar” with no plan for defeating ISIS.

As of Thursday, there’s something new to say about him: Flynn will be moving into the West Wing as President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

This fellow's ethics aren't situational; they're non-existent.

(Flynn) began receiving classified national security briefings last summer while he was also running a private consulting firm that offered “all-source intelligence support” to international clients.

Flynn’s relationship with his overseas clients is coming in for new scrutiny amid recent disclosures that two months ago, during the height of the presidential campaign, his consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, registered to lobby for a Dutch company owned by a wealthy Turkish businessman close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

More from the link embedded in the graf above:

... Kamil Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with real estate, aerospace, and consulting interests, told The Intercept on Thursday that one of his companies, Inovo BV, paid Flynn’s company “tens of thousands of dollars” for analysis on world affairs. On election day, Flynn published an opinion piece for The Hill urging U.S. support for Turkey’s controversial strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and pushing for the extradition of Erdogan’s political rival, Fethullah Gülen, who now resides in Pennsylvania. “From Turkey’s point of view, Washington is harboring Turkey’s Osama bin Laden,” Flynn wrote, on Nov. 8.

This is what draining the swamp looks like.  At least we might not get into a war with Russia (beyond our current proxy one in Syria, that is), but the drone bombing and assassinations will continue until morale improves, despite Flynn's stated opposition.  He has said in the past that the they create more terrorists than they eliminate (shockingly, Flynn is correct about that).

So Trump’s almost inevitable string of drone murders will be conducted under the guidance of a man who knows they produce terrorism rather than reducing it, that they endanger the United States rather than protecting it. In that assessment, he agrees with the vast majority of Americans who believe that the wars of the past 15 years have made the United States less safe, which is the view of numerous other experts as well.

Flynn also advocates for torture and indefinite detention but is conflicted about its 'productivity'.  There are certain inconvenient truths about what Flynn gets right -- in blind hog/acorn fashion -- and what he gets wildly wrong.  Colin Powell did not mince words about Flynn in a leaked DNC email (aren't we glad now we have those?).

“I spoke at DIA last month,” the former secretary of state wrote in a hacked email released this summer. “Flynn got fired as head of DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”

Flynn could have been vice-president, you may recall, but he's in a position to do much greater damage now.  The only thing he seems to lack is a family connection, like Jared Kushner.  There's a reason why James Clapper pulled the chain yesterday.

In 2014, two years into what was supposed to be a three-year term, Flynn was summoned to the Pentagon by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers and told that he was being removed from his post.

Vickers was a central character in the book and film Charlie Wilson's War, you might remember.

According to the Washington Post, Flynn tried to salvage his job by sidestepping his superior officers and making a direct appeal to the vice chief of the Army. When Clapper found out, he warned Flynn that he would fire him on the spot if Flynn made another attempt to do an end-run around his bosses, according to the newspaper.

Clapper, arguably Flynn’s biggest bureaucratic adversary, announced his resignation Thursday, just hours before Flynn’s appointment.

Your seat backs and tray tables need to be locked in the upright position.

Scattershooting the Greens, the US Senate, and the TXGOP

-- Both DBC and Gadfly have analyzed the 'what went right/wrong' for the US Greens and the Texas Greens, which beats the hell out of Kuff's theory of numbers or whatever he's deep into a spreadsheet about this week.

This isn't brain surgery: the Greens will take a quantum leap of sorts if/when a number of prominent Democrats give up on a Revolution from within, bolt that party, and take over the GP, bringing professional infrastructure with them.  I wished hard for it to be Bernie Sanders almost two years ago, but as you may recall it was Tad Devine that convinced him, against his inclination, to run for president as a Democrat.

So there must be some collective and public exodus of elected officials and their operatives, not just a few political scientists like Dr. Cornel West.  A prominent name at the top of the ticket, like Ralph Nader was in 2000, is critical.  As we blog today, there simply aren't enough Donkeys who believe that it's anything but a pipe dream to build something viable outside the two-party box, and that's because the media exposure won't be there for them, and because the presidential debates are run by a cabal of duopolists.  Those two things have to change before the GP can take the next step.  Media exposure will come if the name is big enough; the CPD must be made obsolete by replacing it with something else first.

Update: As a reminder for those such as Dan Savage who don't really get what the Green Party represents beyond Jill Stein, Politics of Courage supplies a list of all Greens who ran for Congress, state, and local offices in 2016 and the vote percentages they earned.  It's also worth noting that Laredo city council member George Altgelt, first elected with Green Party support and just re-elected in that city's non-partisan municipal contests, endorsed Gary Johnson for president.

-- For those Democrats still transitioning from denial and anger toward acceptance ... this isn't going to make you feel better.  Charles Schumer was the wrong guy at the wrong time to lead this charge, but you're stuck with him now.

Senate Democrats are the last line of defense against Trump's agenda because of the chamber's supermajority hurdle. They're expected to oppose any attempt to repeal Obamacare and slash tax rates, among other policies. At the same time, they want to work with him to pass a massive infrastructure package and crack down on Chinese currency manipulation.

On top of that, Democrats must defend 25 Senate seats in 2018, including five in deeply conservative states and another five in traditional battlegrounds that Trump won.

It's going to get worse in 2018 before it gets better in 2020.  Hopefully.

Update: Twenty-twenty is the big enchilada, with an imperative to turn Trump out of office and electing a slew of Democrats in the statehouses, as the census is performed and redistricting moves to the top of the priorities list.

Speaking of going from bad to worse...

-- The Texas Legislature is readying for next year's session with a conservative agenda that makes Trump's look liberal.  Dan Patrick is going in for the kill.

Patrick's top two priorities are passing a balanced budget — which is required by state law — and reforming the state's property tax system, which he said is "taxing people out of their homes and hampering business growth." The rest of the list is filled with ideas that will be stringently opposed by Democrats and, in some cases, moderate Republicans, including limiting which bathrooms transgender people could use; imposing more restrictions on abortion; strengthening the state's voter ID law, and allowing parents more choice in the schools that their children attend.

[...]

The rest of his list included plans to ban local governments from refusing to cooperate with immigration agents or enforce immigration laws; prevent student-teacher relationships; cap increases in state spending, and rein in insurance lawsuits after hailstorms. 

No mention of addressing, much less fixing, the state's funding for its public school system.  Nothing about improving the healthcare of Texans.  And as in Washington, there's nothing on the horizon that suggests 2018 will be anything but another red wave at the statehouse again.  The Castro brothers aren't stupid enough to run for anything in two years.  (They were not the attack dogs that Wendy Davis could have benefited from in 2014 and they won't be of much use to anybody who dares to run in 2018.  Their precious political capital is invested in non-liquid assets.)

Texas Republicans may be the absolute shittiest in the country, but it's Texas Democrats who keep losing to them.  Who will be the sacrificial lambs Democrats proffer for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and so on down the list of statewide executive offices?  Could they at least find someone to challenge Sid "C-word" Miller, for crine out loud?  Or will it be another assembly of no-name stooges that can manage 38% or so on the basis of straight-ticket voting, like Jim Hogan or Grady Yarbrough or Betsy "Combat Boots" Johnson?

Who wants to run against Ted Cruz?  Besides Michael McCaul, I mean.

Sad!

-- Rick Perry for Department of Oops.  Only Donald Trump would consider our illustrious, longest-serving governor in history to run a Washington bureau that was on his list to eliminate, but which he could not remember the name of.