Keeping the Trump Franchise Alive

 Something must be off with my aghastitude meter, because for the life of me I just can't get excited about the ongoing saga of the FBI raid on Donald Trump's Florida estate, in search of allegedly stolen top secret classified documents.

Rumor had it that the G-Men were tipped off by an insider that Trump was hoarding the nuclear codes. This is despite numerous mainstream media reports, when he was in the White House within physical reach of the Big Red Phone, that his alarmed minions were keeping all this info out of his reckless hands. He was apparently in the habit of flushing sensitive stuff in the toilet, anyway. And besides, if he'd really wanted to sell the codes to the highest bidder, you'd think he would have struck a deal by now.

 The only thing we should really fear about nuclear war is the recent reckless provocations of the United States against both Russia and China. The manufactured fear that we'd get nuked got so intense, in fact, that New York City had taken to running public service announcements about what to do in the event of Armageddon.

 If you, like me, are of a certain age and vividly remember those useless classroom "duck and cover" drills during the First Cold war, you'll be happy to know that you can now save yourselves the modern way, without having to tax your knees and spine. All you have to do is go indoors and shut all your windows before lowering the blinds so that Russian or Chinese missiles won't see you. Or so that nobody else can see you either, given that you are also instructed to remove all your clothing and place it in a bag to contain radioactive dust. Then you should switch on the TV and await further instructions from experts who are sheltering in place in their network studios or underground bunkers. These instructions assume, of course, that you are not among the growing number of homeless people in the United States.

As it is right now, as I write this, turning on the TV or logging on to your favorite mainstream news site will subject you to one of two images: either a scowling Donald Trump raising his defiant fist, or numerous ground and aerial shots of Mar-a-Lago.

Given that the FBI raid and its wall-to-wall media coverage has boosted Trump ten points ahead of his closest GOP primary rival (Ron De Santis), he might consider renaming his club MAGA Largo and bragging that he is the reincarnation of that other embattled film noir hero hotelier Humphrey Bogart, holed up in his own Florida club, fighting off both the cops and the various sleazy gangsters and stool pigeons lurking about the place.

In actuality, Trump is simply the buffoon he always was. His coup attempt largely failed both because of his stupidity and lack of foresight and those of his inner circle of gangsters and stool pigeons. As historian and author (The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order) Gary Gerstle writes, 

The January 6 committee has now revealed how far Donald Trump was willing to go to prevent the peaceful and lawful transfer of power from his presidency to that of Joe Biden. Yet, his deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy also had a slapdash quality to it, reflecting Trump’s own impulsive nature and his reliance on a group of schemers – Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone and John Eastman among them – of limited ability. It is not entirely surprising that Trump’s coup failed.

Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded – this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying. The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.

So as I see it, there are several "takeaways" from both the raid and the corporate media's overwrought coverage of it. The first is that just because Trump is a doofus doesn't mean that his political rivals in the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration are all that intelligent either. Did they really think that going after him on suspicion of violating the Espionage Act and stealing papers would not boost his poll numbers, his cult of victimhood, and instigate a rightwing backlash against the rightwing FBI? Or, did they stupidly assume that the raid and possible resulting indictments would make him the ideal "pied piper" candidate for the doddering Joe Biden or other weak Wall Street candidate to easily trounce in 2024? Remember how well that cynical ploy worked out for the Dems in 2016, thanks in no small part to Bill Clinton urging Trump to run.

It seems odd that the Feds only got around to getting their search warrant a year and a half after these highly sensitive documents had gone missing. They were hiding in plain sight all along, or at least were in a secure location known to the authorities.

 The whole scenario could have been lifted straight from Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of duplicates and duplicity, The Purloined Letter, plotted around a mysterious document rumored to expose the French queen's indiscretions and thus making her and various VIPS prone to blackmail and extortion. It isn't the content or even the existence of the stolen document that matters in this story. It's the suspicion that it does matter. It's the speculation of what it contains, if it does exist. It's the assigning of any importance or meaning of the recovered (or not) document.

 And we'll probably never learn about the content (or not) of Trump's purloined documents and perhaps compromising emails, photos or other intel. Censorious elites in fear of being embarrassed or compromised can and will always claim that transparency would only endanger "national security" and reward China, Russia, Iran or whatever enemy they can come up with next. Life imitates art in this case: one of the alleged documents sought and/or seized by the FBI involves the French president. Where's C. Auguste Dupin when you need him to untangle this latest mess of intra-oligarchic intrigue? Instead of the raiding FBI goons ruining Trump's day, perhaps an all-American rumpled cigar-chomping Columbo-type detective showing up at MAGA Largo HQ to flatter Trump would probably have gotten much better results than the elite army of J. Edgar Hoover has, so far anyway.

Could Trump himself have avoided all this drama if he had simply converted his palace into his official presidential library with the help of the National Archivist, as Barack Obama and others have done? Not that Obama's presidential library will contain the actual physical documents, but only an assurance that "digital" copies of same will be released, sometime in the vague and distant future. Trump's biggest offense, perhaps, is that he isn't a reader or a frequenter of libraries. He's not even offering the excuse that he is hard at work on his memoirs and thus needs copious official research material to refresh his memory and ensure accuracy, if not correct spelling or the editing out of numerous superfluous exclamation points. 

Donald Trump should be the least of our worries. The Supreme Court, the CIA, McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, the White House - they are only the first villains who come to mind. 

The MAGA Largo saga appears to be the Establishment's second act in the drama leading up to the November midterms, when both sides of the Duopoly would be perfectly fine with a banishment of both Trump fans and what's left of the progressive left. With the centrist liberal class's defense of both the police state, and their actual or attempted censorship of independent media voices, they have chosen to ignore that their FBI heroes also just raided the home of the leader of the African Black Socialists as well as other unnamed targets, accusing them of conspiring with Russia in order to undermine American democracy, interfere with the political process and worst of all offenses against neoliberal decency, "sow division." among citizens with their anti-war rhetoric. As reported by the World Socialist Website,

The APSP’s only activities noted in the indictment consist of holding rallies in various American cities opposing the “Genocide of African People in the United States” and making public statements denouncing US-NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine, while expressing political sympathy for Russia.

The case has all the hallmarks of a political frame-up targeting a political organization for its opposition to the US-NATO war against Russia. It points to an attempt to intimidate and criminalize opposition to the war more broadly.

It's gotten to the ridiculous point that any criticism of war and our leaders' reckless provocations of war, of censorship, and of the police state will get you labeled a Trump sympathizer or a fascist. They're gaslighting us not with expert propaganda, but with the equivalent of nitrous oxide. Their narratives are meant to manufacture fear and submission, but they're full of sound and furious silliness, signifying nothing so much as their own desperation. Their slapstick comedy would make us laugh if it weren't also so damned dangerous.

 

Whaddya Say, Boys - Should We Flush It Or Steal It?

 

Coup-Coup For Democracy

Mere hours after unleashing a series of angry tweets accusing the FBI of plotting a coup to overthrow him, Donald Trump managed to get in a leisurely round of golf at his Florida club before going the Feds one better and showing them who's still the boss.

 You see, the FBI planned their coup in the dark. Trump actually staged a  televised rally in broad daylight on President's Day, no less, to officially announce to the whole world that he and his team of neocons are staging a coup to overthrow the government of Venezuela.

The revelations of two coup attempts in one day must have set a new record in the annals of global political intrigues. And Trump's game of coup d'etat tit-for-tat also gives new meaning to the conventional wisdom that not only is he completely lacking a sense of irony, he is absolutely nuts, a/k/a coup-coup. And since his latest medical exam also now places him in the clinically obese category, for all we know he might even be Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs along with suffering that creepy, kooky obsession with border walls.

Of course, since the US is the world's sole remaining superpower and Venezuela is a lesser country having the gall to balk at US corporate plunder, one of these coups is not like the other. The attempted coup against Trump, revealed by former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, was "illegal," according to the president and his cronies.

The attempted coup against Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, on the other hand, is simply the latest in a long line of "humanitarian interventions" against a small country which persists in disrespecting the inalienable rights of multinational corporations to plunder it of its natural resources. Maduro still hasn't gotten the message that his country, already squeezed to the breaking point by multiple factors, including US economic sanctions and embargoes going back for years, can only recover its stability if he allows Trump to destabilize it with much creative destruction and outright theft, not to mention bloodshed.

That is why the Powers That Be are fully on board with Trump's meddling in Venezuela's affairs while still whining that alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is not only just like Pearl Harbor, but that Trump himself was meddling in the FBI investigation of the meddling.

NBC News explains the planning and the plotting by the federal police to get rid of Trump:

The conversations came in the chaotic days after James Comey was fired as FBI director, McCabe told CBS, as the FBI became increasingly convinced that the president was obstructing into the agency's investigation in Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Rosenstein went as far to offer to wear a wire to the White House to gather information, McCabe said. (Officials have previously told NBC News Rosenstein made the remark sarcastically.)

Trump, calling McCabe "deranged," added in a tweet that "there is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who just elected a president they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more."

One reason that the permanent ruling class of the United State doesn't likewise think that it's "deranged" to try to overthrow the democratically-elected leaders of other countries is because they have self-immunized themselves from international war crimes statutes. Should any US official ever be hauled before the international court of The Hague for an act of mass murder, meddling and destruction, Congress has passed a law that would allow such a defendant to be rescued, by any weaponized means necessary, as though he or she were a hostage and not an alleged coup-instigator, aggressor, mass murderer, or torturer.

Before Trump came along, US leaders were more circumspect while plotting their regime-changing coups, invasions and wars. This secrecy served the purpose of keeping the inherent racist and class war aspects of these depredations hidden from the folks in the Homeland, lest any unabashed racist and classist rhetoric from the ruling class racketeers encourage too much freelance violence and racist rhetoric from within the ranks of the ordinary folks. If US leaders had to talk publicly about their depredations, they did so in the guise of protecting the human rights of the foreign people whom they were about to maim, torture, rape, kill, expel, or if the victims were especially lucky, simply rob.

Trump doesn't do fake-humanitarianism well. When he speaks of Central Americans as rapists, infestations, criminals and invaders, the standard "responsibility to protect" propaganda as he applies it to Venezuelans just doesn't ring as true as it did when previous presidents dished out their rhetoric in more tasteful globs of unctuous rectitude.

When Trump delivers the propaganda, any pretense at high-mindedness about Venezuela falls absolutely flat. His choice of the far right white nationalist Proud Boys chairman to act as his human backdrop at Monday's Miami rally while pledging assistance to brown-skinned Venezuelans probably didn't win many hearts and minds. When the embattled Maduro later went on TV to opine that Trump was acting just like a Nazi, he didn't have to convince his audience.

This, of course, also puts the pretend-opposition Democratic Party in a quandary. They are just as enthused about regime changes and wars of aggression as the Republicans are. Democrats in South Florida, which has a sizable Venezuelan population, also want to get rid of Maduro. But as the New York Times puts it,

To Democrats, all that suggests that the president may be more interested in wooing Venezuelan-Americans and other Latino voters than in promoting bipartisanship on the Maduro issue.
“I’m concerned about the Trump administration politicizing this issue, using Venezuelans’ suffering to score political points here in Florida,” said Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, Democrat of Miami. “We shouldn’t be using this as a political weapon.”

So much for the plight of actual Venezuelans. They apparently have no say in the leadership or direction of their own country. They must be portrayed as incapable of acting in their own best interests. What really matters is which side of the US Uniparty can score the most political points off the backs of suffering, starved-out people. Meddling is fine, just so long as the United States does it, and as long as the purpose of the meddling can be sold to the US public in a palatable series of lies.

As Noam Chomsky has written, FDR's famous Four Freedoms: of speech and worship, and from fear and want, are traditionally vaunted and then wantonly disregarded by leaders as they undertake their myriad invasions, coups and wars. But missing from the propaganda ("we must rescue the oppressed starving victims of X's reign and stop him from abusing his own people!") that they spread for domestic consumption is the all-important Fifth Freedom, the unspoken precept which explains much of what "we" do in the world. From his book Turning the Tide, an examination of US interventions in Central America up to the Reagan years:

(It is) the freedom to rob and exploit. Infringement of the four official freedoms in enemy territory always evokes much agonized concern. Not, however, in our own ample domains. Here, as the historical record demonstrates with great clarity, it is only when the fifth and fundamental freedom is threatened that such a sudden and short-lived concern for other forms of freedom manifests itself, to be sustained for as long as it is needed to justify the righteous use of force and violence to restore the Fifth Freedom, the one that counts.

No matter that Communism collapsed decades ago. US Leaders, most loudly and recently Trump, still use the bugaboo of "socialism" to justify their meddling in other countries. In the latest variation of the "domino" effect or rotten apple theory, Donald Trump vows to defeat socialism in Venezuela lest the "virus" spread beyond any physical wall that he succeeds in building.

 "The rot and infection," added Chomsky, "of course are code words for successful social and economic development that might constrain the Fifth Freedom." 

Trump fails Coup Propaganda 101, his ruling class critics fret, because he makes this alleged virus of socialism too much about politically protecting himself rather than glibly lying about protecting "the country" -- which is code for protecting and enriching corporations and oligarchs. By railing against socialism in so vociferous and ignorant and self-serving a manner, Trump actually makes it look pretty good to everyday Americans - by which I mean citizens of the United States. The people in the rest of the Americas are not fooled by anti-socialist imperialistic cant, and haven't been since Columbus first sailed the Ocean Blue. Trump cannot effectively frighten the folks of the US Homeland about the proper designated strongman and bogeyman to overthrow, because he can't disguise the fact that he himself, in the miscast role of our duly elected president, is the de facto thug and bogeyman.

Oafish Greedy Selfish Trump-Style Imperialism

"Responsibility to Protect" Style-Savvy Liberal Imperialism

The man whom the establishment corporate media righteously lambastes for never reading, and for never getting his facts straight even on the rare occasions when he doesn't deliberately set out to lie, ironically brayed in Miami that "socialism is a sad and discredited ideology rooted in the total ignorance of history and human nature."

But Trump also inadvertently acknowledged the inconvenient truth, which is that in the United States, the only existing and thriving socialism is the kind which benefits the plutocrats at the expense of the rest of us - a system of socialized risk for privatized profit.

"Which is why socialism must always give rise to tyranny...Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class."

It was corporate socialism, or neoliberalism, which gave rise to the tyrannical Trump. And it may well be Trump himself who ironically gives rise to true democratic socialism of, by and for the people.

Now, wouldn't that be a refreshingly crazy coup?

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!

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Something Clicked This Way Comes

Just a few quick thoughts and speculations on the latest thrilling episode of Hillary's Life of Scandal.

--While a hypothetical President-elect Clinton would not have the immediate power to fire FBI Director James Comey for trying to spoil her coronation, she theoretically could grant herself the additional power to abolish the entire agency once she took office. Since dissension within the ranks of the Bureau was reportedly the impetus for Comey's letter to Congress about some newly-discovered emails, Hillary would remain highly vulnerable, with or without the current director's resignation.

 -- Look at the whole murky history of the FBI. Teddy Roosevelt did a sneaky summer end-run around an adjourned Congress in 1908 by unilaterally creating his own executive police force. Congress had refused to go along with the formal creation of such a federal agency, rightly fearing that it would operate in too much secrecy. Ominously, the plutocratic Attorney General directly tasked by Teddy with manning the Bureau just happened to be the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. What one aristocratic Trust-buster and an Emperor's spawn giveth, a once and future mistrusted Empress can (hypothetically of course) easily taketh away.

--When Congress refused to give AG Charles Bonaparte any money for his spy agency, he ignored them, and simply appropriated personnel from the Secret Service. The FBI has been an illegal agency from the outset. But as has been its wont, Congress is loath to overturn an executive order or a secret legal opinion or stealth bombings and invasions once they are "done deals."

--Since the first official task of Roosevelt's quasi-public cop shop was to enforce the Mann Act, and crack down on female sex workers by infiltrating houses of prostitution, wouldn't it be a hoot if one of its very last recorded acts was the attempted destruction of a political campaign by way of cracking down on a male sex addict?

--Of course, the main impetus for the creation of the FBI was the growing popularity of socialism, which spawned widespread paranoia within the ruling class. Roosevelt, remember, only became president when his predecessor was assassinated by an "anarchist." The scary Other back then were not Muslims and Mexicans, but Germans and Italians and other European immigrants. Domestic espionage upon all manner of civil and labor rights activists and pacifists and other critics of the military-industrial complex has long been at the core of the agency's mission. See, for example, COINTELPRO and most recently, the outrageous FBI scanning of Yahoo email under the direction of the talented Mr. Comey. 

 In sum, Hillary, intelligence aficianado that she is, could and likely would simply replace the current FBI with a carefully purged new agency all her own, called the New Improved FBI. 

-- According to its own auto-hagiography, the current Bureau has prided itself from its very inception for selectively rooting out political corruption. In the First Gilded Age, as in our ongoing Second era of inequality, "corruption was rampant nationwide... with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full power." So, who knows, Comey might actually think he's a rare and bold adherent of the noble historic spirit of his spy agency.

-- For those willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, James Comey is simply doing his unpleasant job, creating an unavoidable smallish mess out of the pre-existing humongous mess created by Clinton herself. As noted above, he is probably bowing to pressure from the rank and file, said to be disgruntled by the government's prior kid-glove treatment of Hillary. As a group, law enforcement unions are almost uniformly supporting Law and Order candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This doesn't make a lot of sense, given Hillary's own established hawkishness and pro-police history. Then again, Hell tends to be murky.

-- Democrats who are strutting and fretting at Comey (see, for example, Paul Krugman's Twitter meltdown) for politicizing Clinton's mess should direct some of their wrath at President Obama, who in a fit of pathological bipartisanship nominated the shadow banking/surveillance-friendly Republican FBI Director in the first place. Comey's reputation for honesty was a huge selling point at the time. Fair is foul and foul is fair.

--Just when we thought the duopoly, rampant as it has been with promises of war, and threats and actual outbreaks of violence, and revelations of sexism and fraud in the highest echelons, couldn't go any lower, it just got lower. The direct intervention of an unconstitutional police state into the electoral process is something out of a Banana Republic. The attempted hijacking of the "Neoliberal Death Match" between a publicly loathed multimillionaire and a publicly loathed billionaire is just one end-product of the deeply ingrained corruption which has been integral to the American ruling establishment for a very long time. 

--But the extinction of American representative democracy is nothing compared to the ongoing extinction of two-thirds of the earth's animal species. Since that scenario of dusty death is too frightening to contemplate, you are all hereby urged to turn on CNN in order to get fully briefed on DikiLeaks, as well as to get fully hoodwinked by those insipidly incessant and multicultural "I'm An Energy Voter!" commercials sponsored by the planet-destroying petroleum industry.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

 ***
Nought's had, all's spent/ Where our desire is got without content;/ 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy/ Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy. -- Lady Macbeth.

Declarations of Codependency

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. 

If there's one positive thing you can say about the ruling class, it's that they usually err on the side of taking care of their own. As much as some of their peers smash things up, there's always a ready supply of Elite Miracle Glue to put them together again.

Political appointee James Comey of the FBI performed his own mess-cleaning role on Tuesday by issuing an ass-covering non-indictment indictment of Hillary Clinton. He accused her of "carelessness" in the handling of her correspondence as she acted out her own politically-appointed part as Secretary of State. But because she is a duly recognized member of the Class, there will be no charges, trial or jail time. That kind of justice is reserved for the little people and for government whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning. Comey admitted that the scope of the FBI probe was kept as artificially narrow and piecemeal as her corporate-sponsored presidential platform itself.

He as much as admitted that the FBI "investigation" was political window dressing:

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.
It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

So despite obstruction of justice on the part of Clinton and her minions, no charges of obstruction of justice will be forthcoming. As commenter Scott W observed in a New York Times comment, Richard Nixon must be writhing with jealousy in his grave.

Comey continued,

 We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.

All-righty then. As long as you don't actually intend to kill somebody during your drunk-driving adventure, no charges will be leveled if you're rich enough and powerful enough. Paris Hilton must also be writhing with jealousy, after having had to spend a couple of days in jail for her DUI in which absolutely nobody was ever harmed.

Hillary's only "crime," if we read between Comey's lines, is that she may have endangered the security of other members of the Establishment. Bad actors like Vlad Putin could have gotten hold of some embarrassing stuff, due to Hillary's irresponsible penchant for privacy and paranoia throughout her global travels. Important people may still end up looking bad. But that is certainly no felony if you are a rich and powerful person yourself.

 And like the feckless Daisy Buchanan before her, Hillary was immediately whisked away from her own hit-and-run to both political glory and legal safety.  High above the clouds and then high before the crowds, she had Barack Obama to give her some much-needed cover. (Bill Clinton, the ever-unreliable antihero of this saga, has been temporarily banished from the stage in the wake of his purely social private airplane tryst with Comey's boss, the politically-appointed Justice Doyenne Loretta Lynch.)

Despite (or because of) what should have been the embarrassment of a nationally televised FBI tongue-lashing, Clinton and Obama put up a brave orchestrated front, staying together for the sake of the never-ending Party. To deflect any potential audience disgust at the Clintonian antics, Obama strove mightily to aim the popular wrath toward the most loathsome strawman-in-the flesh rich guy ever to be dreamed up by the Ruling Class:  Donald Trump.

Dredging up that booming, stammering, down-home, G-droppin' style we haven't heard since he last played the populist against private equity vulture Mitt Romney, Obama (who is now reportedly plotting his own career in venture capitalism) was in full lesser-evil mode. As New York Times columnist Frank Bruni  put it, he didn't just ask that we vote for Hillary. He commanded us to vote for Hillary in "a testimonial that was both gushing and epic."

 You see, the media wants you to know that it's Obama's ruling class legacy - not the survival of the working class and the underclass - that's actually on the line here:

Then you look up toward the end of your second term to behold a Republican presidential nominee who is cynically exploiting racism and xenophobia to put the White House within his own reach. He’s not merely your adversary; he’s your antithesis. And his victory would do more than endanger your policies. It would question the very moral of your journey, the very bend of the arc you frequently invoke.

That’s what Barack Obama confronts right now, and that’s why he hit the campaign trail on Tuesday, appearing onstage with Hillary Clinton in North Carolina and proclaiming without reservation that “there has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office” than she. That’s why he’ll say words like those again and again, with the same fire, in the months ahead.

For the nation’s first black president, Clinton isn’t just the better candidate. She’s the better America. She wins and he holds on to his rosiest convictions about what he and his presidency symbolize.

As I responded to an unsigned Times editorial politely requesting more "clarity" from Clinton regarding her carelessness:

 The televised spectacle of the Clinton campaign rally in the immediate aftermath of James Comey's scathing assessment of her competency was downright surreal.

The North Carolina crowds chanting "I'm with her! I'm with her!" and President Obama proclaiming Hillary to be the most qualified and "tested" presidential candidate who ever lived was like something out of a Fellini film.

It's only the continuing atrocity of the Trump candidacy and his Nuremberg rallies that's making Hillary look even remotely morally acceptable to many voters. Because who would ever have thought that a major candidate being lambasted by the head of the FBI for serial venality and recklessness could be tempered and even subsumed in the news cycle by that other major candidate - who, it is obvious, has yet to reach his own outer limits of sociopathy?

It's a sad time in the USA, when the two nominees are competing mainly to see who can win or deflect the most negative media attention. Comey rips Hillary to shreds on character and judgment, while the Speaker of the House rips Trump another new one for yet another sick outburst of racism.

The Clinton-Trump death match could well be the kiss of death to the corrupt, money-driven duopoly. Now might be the optimal time for those third and fourth parties to fill the vacuum.

The only spoilers in the mix are Trump and Clinton themselves.

Forget about whether America is great, greater or greatest. We want our democracy back.

Those Magnificent G-Men in Their Flying Machines

(Optional mood music here.)

No need to worry that the TSA has been shockingly revealed as nothing but security theater, no need to fret over the slight delay in getting the hilariously-named USA Freedom Act passed to make cosmetic changes in the storage facilities used for your phone records and emails. The FBI has got all of you covered. Literally.

The AP reveals that the government, in what can only be described as paranoid overkill, has deployed a veritable domestic air force of low-flying planes to spy on you and your cell phone calls. To give themselves legal cover, the FBI has defined "you" as potential terrorists and enemies of the state.

The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April, orbiting both major cities and rural areas. At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.
For decades, the planes have provided support to FBI surveillance operations on the ground. But now the aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras, and in rare circumstances, technology capable of tracking thousands of cellphones, raising questions about how these surveillance flights affect Americans' privacy.

Privacy? What's that?

The FBI assures us that these manned drones are not in the business of bulk collection or mass surveillance. After all, these are tiny planes, not Air Buses. Weight restrictions do apply, even though Fourth Amendment restrictions do not. As the Freedom Act implies, we are free to give up our privacy just as government and corporate spies are free to take it without the inconvenience of a warrant or other judicial approval.

The FBI confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services.
"The FBI's aviation program is not secret," spokesman Christopher Allen said in a statement. "Specific aircraft and their capabilities are protected for operational security purposes."
The front companies are used to protect the safety of the pilots, the agency said. That setup also shields the identity of the aircraft so that suspects on the ground don't know they're being followed.

Yeah. If a suspect on the ground notices that an aircraft bears a cute corporate logo instead of the scary FBI seal, he will never in a million years suspect that the plane constantly circling and buzzing over his head is following him.

The FBI is not the only federal law enforcement agency to take such measures.

But Ma, everybody else is doing it! The DEA and the US Marshals have been flying spy planes for eons and nobody complained. So why the beef that the Homeland is operating a clandestine military air force against its own citizens? Wahhhhh.

In the FBI's case, one of its fake companies shares a post office box with the Justice Department, creating a link between the companies and the FBI through publicly available Federal Aviation Administration records.
Basic aspects of the FBI's program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department's inspector general, and the FBI also has been careful not to reveal its surveillance flights in court documents. The agency will not say how many planes are currently in its fleet.

Typical bureaucracy. They'll spend billions on designer airplanes but they're too cheap to fork over an extra twenty bucks for a separate post office box rental to keep us safely in the dark. And besides, maybe the reason the DOJ won't say how many planes are in its fleet is because they simply haven't bothered keeping count. Congress can't throw money at ironically-named "defense" agencies fast enough. If our lawmakers can't be bothered with counting, why should mere hirelings?

The planes are equipped with technology that can capture video of unrelated criminal activity on the ground that could be handed over to prosecutions. One of the planes, photographed in flight last week by the AP in northern Virginia, bristled with unusual antennas under its fuselage and a camera on its left side.
Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers and gets phones to reveal basic subscriber information, is used in only limited situations.

They are flying vacuum cleaners. They take off ostensibly to catch Suspect A "aspiring" to join Isis, and then they ever so coincidentally catch Suspect B engaging in a peaceful protest, or Politician C cheating on his wife at the No-tell Motel. All info is safely placed in storage facilities for future reference and use.

"These are not your grandparents' surveillance aircraft," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. Stanley said the flights are significant "if the federal government is maintaining a fleet of aircraft whose purpose is to circle over American cities, especially with the technology we know can be attached to those aircraft."
The Justice Department recently published a privacy policy for its agencies' use of drones and unmanned aircraft systems. But that policy does not apply to piloted aircraft. An FBI spokesman said the FBI's flights comply with agency rules.

Wow. And here I was thinking that my grandma's spy-plane was so buff, so cool. But anyway, as long as the FBI has invented secret rules for spying on me in secret, who am I to complain?

Those rules, which are heavily redacted in publicly available documents, limit the types of equipment the agency can use, as well as the justifications and duration of the surveillance.

The rules devised by public servants are none of your damned business, Terrorist-Citizens!

Evolving technology can record higher-quality video from long distances, even at night, and can capture certain identifying information from cellphones using a device known as a "cell-site simulator" — or Stingray, to use one of the product's brand names. These can trick pinpointed cellphones into revealing identification numbers of subscribers, including those not suspected of a crime.

Leave it to those magnificent G-men to name their weapons of mass surveillance after a member of the shark family. They trust that all of you remember what happened to poor Steve Irwin. When you see that Cessna buzzing over your head you won't even have time to shriek "Crikey" before your private cell phone call is swept up into the fascist maw.

The FBI has recently begun obtaining court orders to use this technology. Previously, the Obama administration had been directing local authorities through secret agreements not to reveal their own use of the devices, even encouraging prosecutors to drop cases rather than disclose the technology's use in open court.

Obama is balancing his future financial security with your privacy. Ninety-nine parts his security to one part your privacy, that is.

 The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover companies to shield the government's involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance missions. The AP declined the FBI's request because the companies' names — as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department — are listed on public documents and in government databases.

(Insert your own hysterical laughter soundtrack here. Or let's help the hapless FBI save the taxpayers some money by sending in our own name suggestions for new fake companies. I nominate Lindsey Graham Tours, LLC. That way, the chickenhawk of the Senate can hawk his fake presidential campaign at the same time the domestic air force fakes keeping us safe from above.)