Sexing Up The New York Times

The New York Times announced this week that its paid subscription revenue had passed the record $1 billion mark, thanks in large part to its reinventing itself as the go-to source for #Resistance fighters of the liberal class, hungry to share their hatred of everything the Trump regime stands for.

During an earnings call on Thursday, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The Times, said the company was pleased with the “continued strong retention” among the users who subscribed to The Times amid the 2016 presidential election.

“We’ve continued to make encouraging progress and are seeing far lower monthly churn than a few years ago,” he said.

Digital advertising revenue increased 14 percent last year, to $238 million. In the last three months of the year, digital advertising revenue rose 9 percent, to $84 million; it now represents 46 percent of the company’s total advertising revenue.

And to complement the never-ending appetite for Donald Trump, the newspaper has honed its own edginess to razor-sharp intensity by dishing ever more salacious dirt on the lives of Trump, his detestable inner circle of unworthies, and all manner of Trump-like predators and schmucks. Unfiltered quotes from the potty mouth of the Mooch, details of the crimes of Harvey Weinstein so graphic that it would have been unthinkable for the Times to print them even a year ago, lurid gossip from previously discredited opposition research dossiers - it's all fit to print now. 

And given its own long history of prudish standards and practices, the Times certainly has a lot of catching up to do. Just witness how many times its staid op-ed writers have been inserting "shithole" into as many columns as they can, just because they suddenly can. Trump, who rose to power in New York City through regular sleazy publicity in the tabloids, has succeeded in turning the Paper of Record into a tabloid practically all by himself.

Still, when the Times decided to publish its latest weekend book review section as a click-worthy treatise on sex lit, both ancient and modern, it just can't help displaying its historical squeamishness. Even when unabashedly selling sex, the editors find it necessary to paint their project with the gloss of virtue and clinical intellectualism.

It fell to a 20-something book review staffer named Lauren Christensen to write the Times Insider "explainer" piece about the project, because "everybody knows" that 20-somethings are shallow creatures who are mainly interested in reading about Kim Kardashian, cute pets, "The Bachelor," teen pregnancies, and sex.

 In the interests of her target audience, Christensen had already recently reviewed a book about the history of sex toys. Then she claims to have been surprised when a male colleague dropped by her desk to recommend other books in the genre, such as "Buzz" and "Vibrator Nation."

Since these books were written from a feminist point of view, the referrals were construed by Christensen to be a matter of professional collegiality and not an instance of sexual harassment in the workplace. Thus, like any minion at the bottom of the heap, she "dutifully" posted some blurbs to Instagram, to many ensuing clicks and eyeballs.

"Thus the seeds of what has now resulted in the Sex Issue — brilliantly christened 'Pleasure Reading' by our editor, Pamela Paul — were sown," enthuses Christensen, in a cute and suck-uppy attempt at double entendre humor.

And now we get the birth product resulting from the great unsheathing.

First the disclaimer: For all her heavy reading, Christensen for some reason finds it necessary to defend her own virtue, skating right on the regressive edge of learned female helplessless. She can't seem to stop insisting in her "explainer" piece how truly naive she is at heart, and how embarrassed she initially felt about doing the project. I guess she hasn't been reading her own newspaper's articles on Trump and Weinstein and their ilk. And she really should start, because whenever women feel forced into doing uncomfortable things at work, the psychological damage can last a lifetime. Then again, maybe she's just acting the part of the arch Times critic:

Inevitably, oversight of the issue fell by consensus to me, the lone 20-something. I have ever since been trying to pretend that, when it comes to sex, I have the slightest clue what I’m talking about. I started by pooling my resources, aggregating 50 covers of the most erotic books throughout literary history for the week’s visual back page, “Under the Covers.” (Please appreciate the word “seminal” on that page; it is one of my proudest career achievements to date.) The day that email went out revealed my impossibly erudite colleagues in a new light, instantly transformed as they were into giddy schoolchildren trading naughty jokes behind the teacher’s back. One by one the previewers revealed the steamy, guilty pleasures of their literary pasts. We’ve collectively done some pretty dirty reading.

As edgy as it pretends to be, the Times still very much dwells in the Victorian Age, when people also merely pretended to be squeamish about sex as they lustfully went about reading about it, writing about it, and doing it.  How does one even censor a Sex Issue, anyway? Christensen daintily explains:

The real fun began once these pieces started rolling in — turns out it’s not so easy to compile a Sex Issue while maintaining The Times’s elevated house style. Some edits were obvious: As much as I admired Ms. Marnell’s rough-around-the-edges, colloquial and honest writing style, I simply couldn’t run either of the two “b” verbs she used as synonyms for intercourse. Less obvious was that I’d need to remove a detailed, explicit quote from the memoir she reviewed, “Getting Off: One Woman’s Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction.” I had to paraphrase it at the expense, I felt, of the full force of both the book’s and Ms. Marnell’s prose. Mercifully, Philip B. Corbett, the paper’s standards and ethics arbiter, did allow me to keep the quote, “I came so hard I thought my heart would explode.”

The Times recently got rid of its copy-editing desk, but thankfully, Corbett's job is still apparently safe.  He's the guy who pretends to carefully weigh what is and what is not acceptable to print, so as to give the repressed writers the pleasure of exploding with joy whenever they're allowed to keep in the naughty bits, like "seminal." After all, seduction wouldn't be sexy if it didn't maintain the aphrodisiac of coquettish modesty.

But back to how good Trump has been for the Times Narrative brand. The president being a self-described non-reader, I wonder if the "Sex Issue" might even inspire him to add some of its titillating recommendations to his lonely bedside table copy of Mein Kampf. The volumes would certainly enhance the pleasure of eating cheeseburgers in bed, and might even inspire him to turn off Fox News for a few minutes every day as he laboriously mouths all the words between bites. Perhaps he can start with the YA (youthful audience) section before finally working himself up to Ovid (for poetry in Tweets) and Joyce (for improving his stream-of-consciousness skills.)

I think I'm being arch.

Wall Street Might Run For President Directly

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who made the term "too big to jail" infamous, says he is pondering another revolving-door spin from his gig defending white collar criminals - this time all the way to the Oval Office. 

We’ll see,” he said during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC.

 

He was asked if he’s mulling a run for the White House because he’s learning how to raise funds and giving political speeches.
“I think I’ll make a decision by the end of the year about whether or not there is another chapter in my government service,” he replied.

This is known as the political trial balloon. We'll see whether enough voters swoon when he again explains his deferred prosecution agreements with Wall Street criminal banks and how he agonized over giving presidents, including most recently the demented Donald Trump, the right to drone people to death at will anywhere on the planet.

Admittedly, the bar has been set conveniently low for Democrats, even a heavily damaged Democrat like Holder. In his first "major rare interview," he did after all schmooze to Rachel Maddow that even one of his kids would be a better president than Trump. Unlike the Normless Wonder, Holder would protect and respect the FBI and other members of the Intelligence Community who have all but ignored "the malefactors of great wealth" in order to set up sting operations against Muslim terrorists. Unlike Trump, Holder never called their countries of origin "shitholes" as he respectfully wrote his often-secret legal opinions on how to quietly tail them if not therapeutically drone them to death by means of unnaccountable surgical strikes.

Ditto for immigration. Holder never used racist dog-whistles as he gave the Obama administration legal cover for its record mass deportations, many of whom were unaccompanied minors who were condemned to almost certain deaths from gang and political violence when they were forcibly returned to their Central American home countries.

Somehow, the issue of Trump's horrific pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio never came up during the "rare" sit-down with his good pal Rachel, because that might have led to the awkward question of his own notorious pardon recommendation for Clinton donor and fugitive Wall Street crook Marc Rich, issued on the eve of Holder's first revolving door-spin from ignoring wealthy criminals in public to vigorously defending them, for big bucks, in private.

His kid-glove treatment of the money-laundering, drug-dealing kingpin HSBC alone should disqualify Holder from a presidential run.But no matter. The luxury corner office of Covington and Burling will always stay open for him, as would another revolving door spin the next time a corporate Democrat wins.

The Gravitas of the Chin-Stroker

The Trouble With the Latest Hacking Story

A Homeland Security official has told NBC News that Russian hackers "successfully penetrated" the voter registration rolls of an "exceptionally small" number of states prior to the 2016 elections. There is no evidence that the data were actually tampered with, as in purging the names of registered voters. It simply means that the lists were read, copied and collected.

What virtually none of the alarmist news coverage bothers to explain is that US voter registration rolls are already legally accessible public records. If Russia wanted to access voter data in Washington, D.C., for example, all its spies had to do was click on the District's Board of Elections official website. Every registered voter's information was already there for the taking: name, home address, party affiliation, precinct ward and whether or not they voted in each election since 2012.

Elsewhere in the United States, it's often harder. Those wishing to penetrate the voter registration rolls might have to submit a formal request, either in person or by mail.  This is exactly how you end up on the junk mail lists of every politician running for office. It's annoying and intrusive at times, but as far as I know, political hacks have never been accused of hacking the rolls during campaign season.

Alexander Howard of the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency advocacy group, has called for tighter restrictions on voter roll access for all entities: for example, requiring submission of a formal Freedom of Information Act request in order to obtain voter information. As it stands now, three states - Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado - impose absolutely no restrictions on who can access the data. Other states impose wait times or charge hefty fees in order to give the voting public a semblance of privacy and protection from bad actors, such as corporate marketers. California prohibits all access to voter information from outside the US, and specifies the information can only be used for political purposes. 

Interestingly enough, Colorado is among the handful of states now complaining that its public rolls were "targeted" by Russia, while California denies outright the Homeland Security claim that its database was infiltrated by Russian spies.

Since a massive breach of national electoral data already occurred in 2015, exposing the personal information of 191 million American voters for anyone in the world to see online, pointing fingers at Russia at this point is a little like complaining about the barn door being left open. If you've ever voted, says Howard, then somewhere out there in cyberspace your name, your address, your gender, your voter ID number, your voting frequency (but not who you voted for) and whether or not you voted in any primary since 2000, is possibly still available free for the taking, by anybody with the tools to search for it. (I purposely did not search for it myself.)

But whatever amplifies and advances the required Narrative which blames Russia and only Russia for abusing voter information and endangering our democracy is A-O.K. by our famously independent mainstream media.

Here's a suggestion from Ludditeville: let's bring back paper registration and paper records and paper ballots, all of which will require actual physical burglaries and physical tampering to complete any espionage and other dirty tricks, just like in the good old Watergate days.

Crayfish Girl Power

"This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It's Taking Over Europe" reads the New York Times headline about a rapidly evolving arthropod.

Talk about burying the lede. It's not until several paragraphs later that we learn that the prolific marbled crayfish - also known as the Texas Crayfish - are all females whose enormous batches of eggs contain only immaculately conceived females, or replicas of both Mom and each other. Take that, everybody who is so worried about the alleged #Backlash against the #MeToo movement. I am woman, hear me roar. Or more accurately, I am woman cloned crayfish, so hear me emit a high-pitched chirp out of my scaphognathite.

Not only is it high time we rid the lexicon of the sexist term "crawdaddy," it also might be a good idea to ban men from all future crayfish mating call competitions, especially since the new variety no longer has any need for a mating call.

From the Times article:

For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko.

Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.

It could always be worse. At least it's not the invasive pet pythons dumped in the Everglades which have developed the ability to clone themselves. Yet. 

Plus, crayfish are both edible and easy to catch with one's bare hands. Go to a pond and they will literally swarm around your feet just waiting to be picked up. True, they might pinch your fingers. But what's a little pain compared to the torture of having to constantly pinch pennies at the overpriced supermarket?

Food snobbery may well become a thing of the past once everybody, men and women alike, no matter their income level, can prepare and consume Crayfish Thermidor or Crayfish Newburg.

Still, gather your crayfish while ye may. It's inevitable that, smelling one more good thing to exploit, venture capitalists and private equity vultures will quickly swoop in to create factory farms out of all the ponds where the crayfish clones have gone forth and multiplied. The thought of an unlimited and free source of self-serve food for the world's hungry people is probably too much for finance capitalists to bear. And since the unlimited future of Marmorkrebs seems pretty much guaranteed, betting on crayfish futures the way a certain former first lady bet and won on cattle futures is already dead in the water.

Capitalism itself never dies. It simply mutates into newer forms, money begetting money out of nothing except itself, and then has the nerve to call itself the Mother of Innovation. 

So to paraphrase Star Trek's Mr. Spock, may the new crayfish species live long and nurture and prosper and remain impervious to the predatory Klingons of Wall Street.

Disinformation, Neocon-Style

It's deja vu all over again. When you look closely at the pushback against the Nunes memo exposing the alleged misuse of the secret FISA Court for political gain or revenge, you begin to see a pattern and a formula.

The propagation of anti-Russian fever is weirdly reminiscent of the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq.  That Vladimir Putin is "hacking" our crumbling democracy is as much an article of faith as Saddam Hussein's cache of weapons of mass destruction. The methods by which this faith is being propagated to the American public become especially obvious when you notice that some of the same Iraq War cheerleaders are involved in this latest neocon effort.

The initial public acceptance of the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "belief" of the majority of polled subjects in Russian meddling in the presidential election stays alive thanks largely to the process of amplification.

The first part of the conflict-creation recipe involves bellicose think tanks and defense industry-beholden politicians planting scary stories in the mainstream media, whose stenographers graciously grant the planters anonymity due to the "sensitivity" of the situation and fears that national security will be threatened if the public gets too much information. The second step is for the warmongers to then point to these planted stories as proof positive that they are full of facts, the actual details of which must unfortunately be withheld to protect the interests of the planters. These two steps are like yeast. They make the disinformation cake rise and rise.

This is what former Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2002.  His office fed New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon the "scoop" that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium from Africa and using it to build nuclear weapons. Then Cheney went on Meet the Press and pointed to the New York Times as his proof that Saddam did indeed plan to attack the US.  To give the disinformation an added dose of verisimilitude, "investigative" reporter Miller even went to jail for a time to protect the powerful sources of the false information. Rather than out herself as a stenographer, she made herself a martyr - until the whole scam fell apart, and she lost her job at the Times.

Where one neocon bit the dust, however, there are plenty more to take her place. Take, for example, one Molly K. McKew, a self-described "information warfare expert" who got her start in propaganda at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, and went on to lobby Congress on behalf of some of the former Soviet satellite countries whose billionaire leaders she also personally advised, before reinventing herself as a Russophobic pundit on cable TV shows and penning articles for such mainstream organs as Politico and the Washington Post.

At least McKew, unlike Judith Miller, is honest enough not to pose as an actual investigative journalist. Instead, she modestly gives herself the Orwellian title "narrative architect."

How does an architect construct a narrative? To get the recipe, just read her latest lengthy, convoluted and alarmist Politico effort, entitled "How Twitter Bots and Trump Fans made #ReleasetheMemo Go Viral." The main secret ingredient of McKew's concoction is, paradoxically, the exact same process of amplification that she accuses the TrumPutin trolls of employing on Twitter. It takes one to know one, I guess. She liberally links to articles and data that she either dreamed up herself, or that come from like-minded Neocon think tanks, or that are anonymously-sourced articles in the establishment press planted by these same think tanks and revolving-door politicians.

The proof is in the pudding if not in the cake, McKew gloats. You see, Trump decided to release the Nunes memo before he even read it, thanks to the thousands and thousands of #ReleasetheMemo tweets arriving at his desk and those of the "Trumpiest of congressmen" in the past few weeks. It is such a terrible thing when mere trolls have the power to influence such powerful Establishment Influencers.

McKew further amplifies her Politico message by pointing out that since the mighty Washington Post also agrees that Trump and the GOP have been unduly influenced by Russian trolls, it has got to be true. Another term for this propaganda technique is affinity bias, which supplements the endless repetition of boilerplate talking points through the use of an echo chamber.

Since Molly McKew can't blame the twitter campaign directly on Russian trolls, she points to Russian bots who retweeted the messages of actual human Americans, thereby infecting the minds of many other Americans. If this sounds confusing, it is meant to be confusing. She therefore blames the nefarious use of computational propaganda, which she defines as

“the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”—has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials. The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. It is critical that we understand how this was done and what it means for the future of American democracy.

Molly McKew then refers to a number of computational charts of Twitter feeds which derive directly from computerized analyses allegedly conducted both by herself and by former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff's new neocon think tank, Alliance for Securing Democracy. (I previously wrote about this war consortium's bogus Hamilton68 Dashboard, which purports to have the Big Brother ability to figure out who is tweeting, what they're tweeting, when they're tweeting, and where they're tweeting it from. Naturally, McKew seizes upon the Dashboard propaganda to further amplify her own argument. Chertoff's organization itself amplified the #ReleasetheMemo amplification frenzy when it planted an article in HuffPo complaining that the hashtag had lost a bit of its oomph during the manufactured government shutdown scare. This piece was where I myself first learned about #ReleasetheMemo.)

McKew ultimately undermines her own analysis of "Russian interference" when she is forced to admit that her research revealed that real American human tweeters actually started the memo campaign. What difference does the truth really make at this point? So she is nobly respecting the privacy of the US humans involved. For now, anyway. The implicit message is that you American humans best be careful what you write, lest Putin appropriate your words and you become fair game for eventual unwanted exposure by the Molly McKews of this enterprise.

 It is computational propaganda—meaning artificially amplified and targeted for a specific purpose—and it dominated political discussions in the United States for days. The #releasethememo campaign came out of nowhere. Its movement from social media to fringe/far-right media to mainstream media so swift that both the speed and the story itself became impossible to ignore. The frenzy of activity spurred lawmakers and the White House to release the Nunes memo, which critics say is a purposeful misrepresentation of classified intelligence meant to discredit the Russia probe and protect the president.

McKew further amplifies her own neocon message when she links to the warmongering paranoia of the Atlantic Council, another pro-war think tank at the forefront of fomenting Cold War 2.0 for greatly amplified profits to the weapons manufacturers who own it and operate it.

We ordinary people are not supposed to know all this, though, because otherwise how could the neocons manufacture our mindless consent for perpetual war and help us to overcome our "sickly inhibitions" against death and destruction on the epic scale that a hot war with Russia would entail?  What matters is that we allow the "right" people to manipulate us and make us believe that our leaders really, really care about us. The "Russians," McKew and her fellow disinformation specialists warn us, would have us believe we're all on our own, without a hope and without a prayer.

"And yes," she concludes, "that also reinforces the narrative the Russians have been pushing since 2015: You’re on your own; be angry, and burn things down. Would that a leader would step into this breech, and challenge the advancing victory of the bots and the cynical people behind them."

It takes a professional Narrative Architect like McKew to construct a Potemkin Village made out of Mom and apple pie, with the American flag being the only drapery you'll ever need to protect your privacy and your lives.

A prolific tweeter herself, McKew amplified her message even more today by plugging her own appearances on both NPR and MSNBC to further warn Americans about the dangers of unsanctioned amplification. For super-duper amplification, the New York Times' David Leonhardt graciously plugged her piece in his column. She'll even be appearing at SXSW in Austin next month to amplify her paranoid brand to music fans. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans' cynical can of worms which I wrote about in my previous post is already on its way to being pried open thanks to Donald Trump's "unprecedented" attack on the surveillance state. The Times has filed suit, demanding that the entire transcript of the FISA matter regarding Carter Page be opened to public scrutiny. In ordering the cherry-picked Nunes memo declassified, Trump probably unwittingly opened a legal door toward more transparency. This is likely the real reason that the Neocon alliance was gnashing its teeth over a nonexistent threat to national security.

***

Further reading on Molly McKew and her Manichean mindset and possible grift:

Meet Molly McKew, War Lobbyist and Hero of #TheResistance, Washington Babylon. 

A New Cold War Against Russia is a Terrible Idea, New Republic.

American Says She Was Hounded Out of Moldova by Pro-Russian Politician, Buzzfeed

***

I've been reading Robert Coover's brilliant but underappreciated, maligned, and even repressed account (The Public Burning) of Cold War 1.0 and the Rosenberg executions. One passage in particular struck me, because it so perfectly captures the "zeitgeist" of RussiaGate, and why so many otherwise intelligent people are falling for the "narrative architecture" being amplified by Molly McKew and her compatriots in government and media.

Speaking as an imaginary Richard Nixon, Coover writes that there was

"... an almost Wagnerian scope to the prosecution's presentation, incorporating many of the major issues of our times, whether or not relevant to the crime charged; the sense throughout that this was clearly a struggle between the forces of good and evil... and a lot of pretty fair spy stories to the bargain, if the prosecution was to be believed: secret codenames, recognition signals, covert drop sites, escape plans, cover stories, payoffs, cat-and-mouse games with FBI surveillance teams, border intrigues. But there was more to it than that. Not only was everybody on this case from the Judge on down - indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government myself included - behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise. Even the Rosenbergs seemed to be swept up in this sense of an embracing and compelling drama."

And further,

"And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? Certainly most of them had a gift for inventing themselves - or as they'd say in the CIA and KGB, for elaborating their covers - maybe, helplessly, they just dreamed it all up. Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along, eager to be admired and their heroism and their loyalty to the cause of their friends, some of whom, they were certain (the FBI said there was a spy ring, there had to be one) were members of the alleged conspiracy"

RussiaGate hysteria will live on until war breaks out, or until a Democratic-Neocon majority again takes over Congress and the White House and things can can get back to a semblance of normal: in other words, respectful bipartisanship and fairness and collegiality in love and secret war and tons of money. Nobody wants to give up his place on the stage at this point, because doing so would be both heresy and an admission of fraud, not to mention a career-buster. It's all a show. We are either complicit actors, unwilling spectators, or outright traitors to the Narrative Cause if we refuse to become properly cowed and afraid. We are simply not allowed to despise Donald Trump if we don't also firmly believe that he is a Putin puppet. We must pledge allegiance to the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, if only because Trump is treating them so nastily. His insulting Tweets are deemed by the Miss Manners crowd to be so much worse than his real crimes, such as extrajudicial drone assassinations of civilians, which have now already overtaken those of his predecessor.

The one weapon we do still have is to relentlessly expose "consultants" like Molly McKew for exactly who they are: war profiteers. As ever, simply follow the money.

Happy Groundhog Day

It's official. There will be six more weeks of winter because this is a science and reality-based community, and when The Groundhog sees his shadow, we gotta believe his predictions. Otherwise we would not be patriotic Americans.

The X-Files is back on TV, as you may have heard. Before they came out of hibernation last year in the wake of the Trump election, our intrepid FBI agents were last seen on the tube in 2002, chasing their ghosts and aliens. George W. Bush had just taken office, and the creepy Deep State at the center of the series was still just a paranoid dream. The tinfoil hat ethos of the show now seems kind of quaint and cozy, what with the Snowden revelations and the Patriot Act and the anti-democratically secret FISA court and Trump's ravings about aliens hiding under every bed and scaling every imaginary wall.

And how the tables have turned. The ultra-right wing of the Uniparty has suddenly has gone all renegade ACLU and demanded that our civil rights to due process and privacy be protected. Sure, the GOP just cares about the rights of Boss Trump, and not even remotely about ours. But once they open their cynical can of worms via the so-called Nunes Memo, who knows what unintended good consequences might ensue?

House Republicans will apparently use the so-called Rule X to release their doctored version of the X-Files, whereupon the "apolitical" FBI will be forced to defend itself, and so on, and ad infinitum, while the Democrats flail and wail and as much as admit that they are powerless hacks in thrall to the Military-Industrial Complex.

As Jonathan Turley writes about the obscure Rule X,

Indeed, the rule has come to mean the very opposite of its language. Subsection 11(g) has never been used in countless conflicts with intelligence agencies which simply refused to declassify information. That lack of use of has reaffirmed the widely held view of congressional committees being “captured” by the agencies they are supposed to oversee. The intelligence committees have a steady revolving door of staff between Congress and the agencies. Moreover, members often use closed sessions to remove embarrassing conflicts or scandals from the public view.
This is why the vote on Jan. 18 to activate Subsection 11(g) was accompanied by a virtual “Wilhelm scream” heard from Capitol Hill to Langley to Quantico. The “Man From Rule X” may be a somewhat flawed character, as to his motivations in taking this step. However, regardless of the content of the memo, the act of defiance under this rule has been too long in coming.

 Bring it on. Just because The Groundhog retreated back to hibernation doesn't mean that we have to. If he saw his shadow, at least that means that there is still some sunlight out there. It's high time that Rule X was used for the purpose for which it was intended and not as a convenient P.R. fig leaf to disguise the fact that our government's boastful version of "transparency" has long meant its exact opposite.

So who knows? As much as the gospel of trickle-down prosperity sold by the right wing Uniparty is a complete sham, the idea of trickle-down transparency is yet to be tested. The truth is out there, somewhere.

Wake Me When It's Over

*Update: The memo is now officially Out There.

It wasn't read into the Congressional Record via Rule X after all, but simply declassified by the White House for immediate release. Nobody upstages Trump. But at least the truth that there is a Rule X, and that the congressional intelligence flacks can release whatever they want as long as it's during an open session is now Out There.

How the memo itself relates to and/or avoids the whole or actual truth is yet to be determined, given that this is still very much an intra-establishment political battle in dire need of some anti-partisan outside analysis and more independent journalism. But that the discredited Steele "Golden Showers" dossier was allegedly presented to the FISA Court by the FBI without disclosing to the judge that it was paid-for private political opposition research does have the ring of truth to it. The Democratic-Surveillance State machine will be questioned and forced to defend itself in public, and these self-described Trump resistance fighters will absolutely hate being put in any kind of corner. It looks as if the phony "national security" excuse for politicians doing horrible things could be about to collapse under its own weight. Stay tuned!

State of the Bunion, With Heel Spurs

Since much of Donald Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint last night consisted of his own hands, Mussolini-like, clapping for himself, and his  frequent pauses to look around and see who was applauding him, the reviews saying this was one of the longest harangues of its type are misleading.

Before I get into the rancid meat of the speech, let's get the fashion sidebar out of the way first. Paul Ryan wore a suitably lighter shade of blue tie than Trump's, although he did botch his own opening line: "I preven-- present the president of the United States!"

First Lady Melania chose the Hillary Clinton nominating convention look: a blinding white pantsuit. There are already plenty of articles on the possible cultural symbolism and hidden meanings of this choice of couture, so I won't bother. As I previously reported, the Democratic ladies borrowed their style from the Golden Globe ladies, and wore funereal black. Nobody shouted "Shut up!" or otherwise disrupted the spectacle - which is, after all, the political equivalent of Hollywood's own multi-part orgy of theatrical self-congratulation. There were one or two nonverbal outbursts that sounded like projectile vomiting, which I swear came from my TV and not from me or my pet goldfish.

Now, to the speech. If I were asked to give it a title, it'd be a toss-up between "It's Always Sunny When You Got Somebody To Hate" or  "It'll Take a Trillion-Dollar Military Industrial Complex To Crush One Little Latino Gang From Long Guyland."

No way, as the New York Times cheerfully posited in its usual insane deference to the "occasion" of the S.O.T.U. if not the man, was this an appeal for "unity,"  unless a more cohesive jelly mold of fear and hatred was what Trump had in mind.  When read rather than listened to, in fact, it sounds like many bullshitting presidential victory laps of hope which came before it.

Here's my interpretation (his actual words are in italicized quotes.)

America is a lot like Dante's trilogy, folks. There's both a heaven and a hell and maybe a purgatory, but I've never really been one for centrism, so I'll keep maniacally spinning from hell to heaven and back again throughout this diatribe. If there is anything I'm a master at, it's keeping people so seriously off-balance they won't know what's really hitting them until it's way too late.

Ordinary people look out for ordinary people. Because America is a bootstrapping nation which hasn't had a safety net for so long there's no need to even talk about it in this speech.

So, thank you, Mr. Helicopter Rescuer in the audience, for being a human prop next to the White Pantsuit Supermodel, so we don't have to talk about how the government has turned its back on the people of Puerto Rico and "the Harvey."

Thank you, too, Mr. Firefighter dude for rescuing 60 people from the Inferno in California. It only goes to prove that just because you're trapped in a raging fire you don't necessary die from it. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Congresscritter Steve Scalise, who proved that just because you get shot along with many other people every single day in America, you can come out of your own trial by fire looking just fantastic, 10 years younger in fact, all because of our great health care system. (Scalise jumps to his feet to prove it and he even blows a two-handed macho Hollywood-style kiss to the president. Because gun ownership for anybody and everybody is what America is truly all about. This happy-ending shooting proved we are one great big happy country-family.

"If there is an opportunity, we seize it." Because predation and greed are what we're all about.

Even though wages are stagnating, I'll do like all my predecessors did and insist they're rising. Plus, since I can't get Jay-Z calling me a germ out of my head, I'll dig in a little deeper and claim that black people have never had it better. Also Wall Street is booming, which is great for the pension accounts it's appropriated until the bubble bursts and somebody who is not a billionaire loses their shirt, their house, and maybe even an eye.

So anyway, here's a shout-out to Steve and Sandy, who own a small factory in Ohio.  Also to their black employee, an all-American welder who is a great welder because his bosses told me he was. You think I personally have the time to look at his welding? So that's another racist dog-whistle completed, sending the message that black people are either uppity Jay-Zs, or not hard-working enough to score a seat next to the White Pantsuit Goddess. How can I be a racist when I highlight a black guy on my special night?

"If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything." This is a subtle dig at the 800,000 Dreamers, in the vein of critics who counter the Black Lives Matter Movement with "all lives matter." Trump hammers down on this "dream" theme several more times during his speech.

"In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is 'in God we trust.'” (At this point the camera pans to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is caught applauding this line as robotically as any spellbound person who has ever been positively conditioned throughout life to loaded buzzwords and thus avoid thinking of how this country has always used the tropes of God and family to inflict a whole lot of Infernos both here and abroad.)

"And we celebrate our police, our military, and our amazing veterans as heroes who deserve our total and unwavering support." If you question endless war for profit, or complain about police brutality, you're not a real (white) American.

On that Orwellian note, here's another shout-out to a human prop. Young 12-year-old Preston up there, sitting right next to the White Pantsuit Goddess, started a movement to plant 40,000 flags on the graves of soldiers. Because unlike flowers, flags never die. "Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans. Preston’s reverence for those who have served our Nation reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem." Naturally, this was a dig at the mainly black athletes who have taken a knee in protest of racism at football games. Nothing like using a nice little kid as your racist cudgel, eh, Trumpolini?

Now it's on to the appointment of conservative judges who will allow people to keeping buying more guns because the Second Amendment rules. A quick pan to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch doesn't elicit any emotion whatsoever.

 "All Americans deserve accountability and respect – and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people."
Naturally, as the Underminer-in-Chief, this new rule would not apply to Donald J. Trump. But it'd be nice to see Congress take him at his word, just for fun.

Now it's on to the manufacture of more gas-guzzling, fuel-inefficient cars to keep the wheels of Capitalism grinding on until the whole planet erupts into one Dante's Inferno after another.

But before that happens, Trump wants terminal cancer patients to stop schlepping from country to country in search of a quack cure when they should easily have "access" to untested therapies right here in the Homeland.

Also, Trump has directed his new HHS secretary, fresh from the profiteering pharma industry, to "fix the injustice of high drug prices."  He might mean the injustice to the drug industry of laws against price-fixing, which prevent them from conspiring to raise and fix prices to even higher levels than they are already.

On to infrastructure improvement, a meaningless suggestion which seems to come up at every S.O.T.U. speech. Private corporations will not sink any money into such a thing, because it's risky and the returns are slower than would be gleaned by simply gambling with customers' money and making more money off of money than off of things. And no president in recent memory has ever suggested that public works projects actually be totally public. Where there is no profit motive, there is just no American way.

"We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work. We want every child to be safe in their home at night. And we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.
We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity."

Notice he doesn't say that he wants every child to have guaranteed health care and a guaranteed public education. He does want every child to be afraid of "foreigners" who make them feel so jittery in their beds at night after they see his inflammatory Tweets. And ominously, he hints at more social safety net cuts to come in some very neoliberal language: "lifting" people from welfare to work and implying that poverty is some sort of cultural problem or individual foible. This is another classic racist and misogynistic dog-whistle employed mainly by the GOP, but also echoed by the Democrats' offerings of "ladders of opportunity."

Now it's on to fulminating the discredited trope of the "trickle-down" prosperity to be unleashed by the massive tax cuts for the rich. Oh, but let's throw in some paid family leave, because that's the pet project of Daughter Ivanka, a registered Democrat until Daddy ran for president.

Finally we get to the real rancid offal of the speech: Keep All Latino Furners Out with our big, beautiful fantastic border wall. To help him make his point, Trump points to a couple more human props whose children were killed by the notorious MS-13 Gang on Long Guyland. And then, using the old divide and conquer propaganda technique, Trump wags an approving digit at a Latino ICE agent who is patriotic enough to go after his own ethnic group.

Now that he got that out of the way, he doubles down on ending the visa lottery and thus barring immigrants from what he infamously called "shithole countries." And he again lies about so-called chain migration allowing any immigrants' distant relatives to get a free ticket into the country.

Next, he tiptoes around the crisis of opioid addiction by telling the heartwarming story of a compassionate Christian cop who adopted the baby of a heroin addict. The implicit message here is that there will always be people to care for the children of addicts, so the government and the oligarchs raking in the dough don't have to worry about it. Because if the children of powerful people become addicted, there are plenty of pricey rehab hospitals to take them in while other addicts either die in the streets, or go through withdrawal in overcrowded prisons, or some stranger comes along to "lift them up."

Would it be a proper S.O.T.U. if Trump didn't also demand unlimited Congressional funding for an already bloated military machine? Naturally, this last symphonic movement elicited the requisite fascistic chorus of USA!USA!USA! as a worthy substitute for fireworks and clashing cymbals. To get the crowd adrenaline flowing, he gushes over two soldiers who helped evacuate a hospital booby-trapped by ISIS explosives, because, as they would have us believe, American soldiers never, ever commit civilian atrocities.

And just in case you still had any doubts that the US military is planning a continuation (it never officially ended) of the Korean War, they should have dissipated with Trump's introduction of his final human prop, a North Korean refugee who lost a leg and whose family was forced to eat dirt helping him to flee to freedom. He further strove to overcome our sickly inhibitions about another war with the evening's most heartless use of human props - the parents of Otto Warmbier, who was apparently tortured by North Koreans before they released him back to the States, where he died of irreparable brain damage - although with the lack of an autopsy, the cause of death was never established.

This country belongs to the police and the military, Trump bellowed.

Is it a coup yet?