Corrupt enough yet?

A key aide to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been granted permission to make extra money moonlighting for private clients whose identities are being kept secret.

A letter approving outside employment contracts for John Konkus — signed by an EPA ethics lawyer in August — was released Monday by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The ethics official noted that Konkus’ outside contracts presented a “financial conflict of interest” and barred him from participating in matters at EPA that would have a “direct and predictable” financial benefit for his clients.

Norm Eisen said on Twitter that he didn’t even let people do outside work for non-profits when he was Obama’s ethics honcho.

The Washington Post reported in September that Konkus had been scrutinizing grant applications for mentions of climate change, which he reportedly referred to as “the double C-word.”

That’s in line with statements by Pruitt, who as the administration’s top environmental official has embraced a pro-fossil-fuel agenda while questioning climate science showing that global warming is primarily caused by man-made carbon emissions.

House Democrats decried what they called the politicization of the EPA’s grants-making process in a letter sent to Pruitt on Monday.

“A political appointee cutting millions of dollars in funding to EPA grant recipients on what appears to be a politically motivated basis, while at the same time being authorized to serve as a paid media consultant to unnamed outside clients, raises serious concerns of potential conflicts of interest,” said the letter. Signatories included Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

I guess Republicans have an edge in ignoring conflicts of interest, since they think profit is sacred and thus holy and thus incapable of involving corruption.

Environmentalists said Monday that the agency’s lack of transparency about the private payments to EPA staff on the public’s payroll raises concerns about whom they are really working for.

“The American people already know that Scott Pruitt is working for corporate polluters and not for them, but the revelation that his staff is moonlighting for private clients while working at the EPA full-time brings suspicions of pay-to-play to a whole new level,” said Melinda Pierce, the legislative director of the Sierra Club. “And if Konkus is not working for polluters directly, the public is forced to ask whether he is running a partisan political operation from within the agency instead.”

#swamp

Classic.

https://twitter.com/GMconservative/status/970724036559880192

I thought feminism was supposed to mean equality for all, if that’s the case why does “feminism” need to mentioned if equality was mentioned? Because clearly feminism is women’s advancement only.

Just classic. Feminism means equality for all, therefore, there’s no need to mention “feminism,” because the goal is equality for all, so that just makes this pesky scare-quoted “feminism” thing superfluous AND totally creepy because it’s women’s advancement only. WHY CAN’T WOMEN JUST FOCUS ON EVERYBODY GOD DAMN IT and by everybody I mean men, especially with men who wave the Murikan flag not once but TWICE.

A confusing story. A former Trump aide has been subpoenaed by Mueller but says he’s not going, Mueller will have to arrest him, so neener neener. Also, Trump is awful and this is all his fault.

Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg publicly defied the Justice Department special counsel on Monday, announcing in an extraordinary series of media interviews that he had been subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election but that he will refuse to go.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg told The Washington Post in his first stop on a media blitz, saying he does not plan to comply with a subpoena from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to hand over emails and other documents related to President Trump and nine other current and former Trump advisers.

But that’s apparently not because he’s keen to defend Mr Golf.

Nunberg seized the national media spotlight for much of Monday afternoon to denounce Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt” and to detail what he said he had learned about the probe from his private interview last month with Mueller’s team.

…

Nunberg said repeatedly that he believes Mueller is trying to build a case that Trump was “the Manchurian candidate.” He said that he suspects Mueller has concluded that Trump “may have done something” based on the questions he was asked by the special counsel’s team.

The line of questioning, Nunberg told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur, “insinuated to me that [Trump] may have done something, and he may very well have.” He added, “Trump may have very well done something during the election. I don’t know what it is. I could be wrong, by the way.”

Hey, he may have done it, but to hell with the subpoena anyway, let the prosecutor arrest me!

Sounds like a manic episode.

Nunberg — who advised Trump in the run-up to the campaign but was fired shortly after Trump declared his candidacy — was unsparing in his criticism of the White House staff and even of the president himself.

He complained to The Post that Trump had treated him, as well as Stone and others, terribly and would eventually regret it.

In one of his CNN interviews, he said Trump sometimes acted like “an idiot,” noting that he met last year with Russian leaders inside the Oval Office, where he shared classified intelligence.

“Granted, Donald Trump caused this because he’s an idiot,” Nunberg told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “Who the hell advised him to allow those Russians in the Oval Office?”

But all the same he won’t comply with the subpoena.

Refusing to comply with a subpoena from the special counsel could have real consequences. Susan McDougal, a former business partner of Bill Clinton, spent 18 months behind bars for civil contempt after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating the Whitewater real estate controversy during Clinton’s presidency.

McDougal said in an interview Monday that she would not do anything differently — though Nunberg should know that being incarcerated is no joke. She said she was moved from facility to facility and spent a good deal of time in isolation.

“It is not an easy thing to do,” McDougal said. “You don’t just go sit and work out in the afternoons.”

McDougal questioned why Nunberg was appearing on television suggesting he knew things that might be of interest to Mueller. “Why would he do that and then not cooperate?” she asked. “The difference is, I didn’t know anything.”

Right? That’s what I’m wondering. Why be all defiant while also telling the national media what the investigation is up to?

Aides in the West Wing watched Nunberg’s television interviews closely, voicing frustration that he had thrust Russia back into the headlines and laughing over what they considered Nunberg’s lack of discipline.

Ah, it must be so refreshing to have someone else to laugh at for lack of discipline.

Nunberg told The Post that he was planning to go on Bloomberg TV and tear up the subpoena.

But he soon changed his plans. Later Monday afternoon, Nunberg called into MSNBC for a lengthy, live interview with Tur. Minutes later, he called into CNN, where Gloria Borger interviewed him. And the next hour, Nunberg was on CNN again, this time with anchor Jake Tapper.

Relative to the restrained comments or flat-out silence of other witnesses in Mueller’s investigation, Nunberg’s interviews were provocative. Nunberg told Tur that his lawyer is “probably going to dump me,” prompting Tur to ask, “Are you ready to go to jail?”

And as he wrapped up the MSNBC interview, he asked Tur, “What do you think Mueller is going to do to me?”

Nunberg sounded similarly skittish on the phone with Tapper and appeared to have second thoughts about his decision to defy Mueller.

“Should I spent 80 hours going over my emails, Jake?” he asked.

“If it were me,” Tapper replied, “I would . . . It sounds like a pain, but he is the special counsel.”

Yep. Sounds manic.

Editing to add video of Nunberg squealing (literally squealing) in outrage at being told to hand over all his emails with Bannon and other fish while Katy Tur keeps asking him questions like an adult. Half hilarious half outrageous. H/t Dave Ricks

I generally find E. J. Dionne too bland and middleground, but he’s good today on how contempt for expertise has led us to this runway to hell.

For the past week or so, an avalanche of commentary about the chaos of the Trump regime has pointed to how key appointees are rushing toward the exits; how Trump springs new policies with little preparation and changes his views news cycle to news cycle; how ill-prepared Trump and many of his aides were for the rigors of the White House; and how recklessly they cast aside norms and rules aimed at preventing conflicts of interest and sleaze.

How did we get a government of this sort? For decades, our country has been witness to a war on public life. Legitimate dissatisfaction with government has turned into contempt for government itself and a denial of the indispensability of politics.

We value expertise from our doctors, nurses, engineers and scientists. But when it comes to government, there is a popular assumption that those who spend their lives mastering the arts of administration, politics and policymaking must be up to no good. This inclination, by the way, is prevalent in other democracies, too.

Well we do and we don’t value expertise from our doctors, nurses, engineers and scientists. There’s plenty of anti-intellectualism and down with expertisism aimed at them too. Anti-vaxxers? Goop? Detox? Homeopathy? Jade eggs? Naturopathic everything, chatter about the spirit as opposed to science, yadda yadda. People aren’t knitting their own freeway bridges yet, but it could happen.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we did the opposite? If we taught it as a cardinal principle that we should respect knowledge, and be aware of what we don’t know, and try to learn more instead of trying to diminish the value of knowing?

It is an attitude that leads voters to mistake inexperience for purity and outsider status (often, as in Trump’s case, a feigned outsiderism) for an exceptional understanding of the people’s wishes.

It has turned the word “politician” into an epithet, even though most of our best presidents (Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt especially) have been politicians through and through. The cliched and supposedly high-minded distinction between “a politician” and “a statesman” was always wrong. It’s coming back to haunt us.

Add LBJ to that list. If he’d been less of a “politician” he wouldn’t have been able to nudge and bully Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Yes, democracy can be frustrating. Our leaders have made big mistakes. Power and wealth are concentrated into too few hands. But repairing our problems requires citizens willing to engage in public life, not shun it, and people in government who respect the work they are asked to undertake.

Clueless narcissistic real-estate developers are not among those people.

The NRA decided it would be a good time to threaten us all.

“To every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents…Your Time is running out. The clock starts now."
–@DLoesch #Oscars90 pic.twitter.com/SDVjeTxyfB

— NRATV (@NRATV) March 4, 2018

We’re supposed to report people who make threats, right? So that the system will work the way it’s supposed to, and people who make threats will be instantly and magically prevented from shooting up a school, and there will be no need to ban the sale of assault weapons.

“To every lying member of the media, to every Hollywood phony, to the role model athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents, to the politicians who would rather watch America burn than lose one ounce of their own personal power, to the late-night hosts who think their opinions are the only opinions that matter…,” Loesch says against a backing track of ominous music. “…your time is running out.”

Before she opens fire.

Golly, this is stark:

https://twitter.com/jojomoyes/status/970412950434582528

Only American Beauty is even close to parity.

Child marriage in Somalia Pakistan Yemen Kentucky.

A bill to make 18 the legal age for marriage in Kentucky has stalled in a Senate committee amid concerns about the rights of parents to allow children to wed at a younger age, according to several lawmakers.

Known as the “child bride” bill, Senate Bill 48 was pulled off the agenda just hours before a scheduled vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the second time in two weeks.

What about the rights of parents to spank children with spiked clubs? What about the rights of parents to lock their children out of the house on freezing nights? What about the rights of parents to hold their children’s hands in a flame to teach them about fire?

Parents don’t have “rights” to abuse their children. Children have rights not to be abused by their parents.

The bill’s supporters have said underage marriages most often involve a teenage girl marrying an older man and may have involved sexual exploitation of the girl.

An older man “marrying” a high school age (or younger) girl is itself sexual exploitation of the girl. He doesn’t do it because she’s a whiz at doing laundry.

Donna Pollard, a Louisville woman who said she was married at 16 to an older man who began sexually abusing her when she was 14, has advocated for the bill. She told Courier Journal that opponents include the Kentucky Family Foundation, a Lexington-based conservative group that lobbies lawmakers on social issues. Family Foundation Executive Director Kent Ostrander did not respond to requests for comment.

Ah those reactionary groups that name themselves after the word “family,” by which they actually mean male ownership and dominance over girls and women.

Pollard testified in support of the bill along with a representative of the Arlington, Virginia-based Tahirih Justice Center, a women’s advocacy organization seeking to end child marriages in the United States.

Pollard said the man she now calls her “perpetrator” became violent and abusive after they married in 2000, a wedding she said was encouraged by her mother, who married at 13.

“I felt just completely and totally trapped,” said Pollard, now divorced.

Not all of them are lucky enough to get divorced.

Russian hacking of our elections? What’s that? What could that possibly mean?

As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.

In other words Trump has sent them a signal: Russia, if you’re listening, hack our elections in my favor, spasibo.

James K. Glassman, the under secretary for public diplomacy during the George W. Bush administration, said the center’s uncertain funding and temporary leadership reflected the administration’s lack of interest in countering either jihadist or Russian propaganda.

“They’ve got the vehicle to do this work in the center,” Mr. Glassman said. “What they don’t have is a secretary of state or a president who’s interested in doing this work.”

Mr. Tillerson is focusing his energies instead on drastically shrinking the department, leaving a significant part of its budget unused and hundreds of important decisions unmade.

And Russian trolling unhindered.

Andrew Gilligan has a big story in the Times today – big as in both important and information-rich (aka long).

A charity dealing with abuse survivors and promoting gay sexual health faces claims of sexual misconduct in the first recent charity sex scandal where the alleged victims are in the UK.

Leeds city council said it has referred two complaints about the Yorkshire-based organisation Men who Enjoy Sex With Men — Action in the Community (Yorkshire Mesmac) to police.

The Charity Commission also said it was in “ongoing engagement” with Mesmac, which has received more than £5m from councils, government and the police. The commission said it had “serious concern” after one of Mesmac’s former trustees was jailed for child sex offences committed during his time in post, including paying a boy, 15, for sex.

Brian Mynott, a Yorkshire-based therapist who works with abused young men, said he had spoken to a further three people, all victims of child abuse, who claimed to have been sexually harassed or asked for sex by Mesmac staff when they went to the charity for help. “They told me it was a pick-up joint and they did not want anything to do with it,” he said.

The kicker? This isn’t just employees breaking the rules – this is Mesmac policy.

The Sunday Times revealed in October that Mesmac explicitly allowed its staff to have sex with people they met through work, many of them young and vulnerable. In its official policy the charity stated that “sexual relationships are acceptable with service users initially met during work time”, although it added that intercourse “would be inappropriate if the service user has entered into a 1-2-1 or ongoing support relationship with the worker” and that sex with children was not allowed.

Mesmac dropped the policy after it was exposed but insisted that it had “never been made aware” of any case where a staff member had had sex with a client. However, The Sunday Times has established that in 2009 Mesmac’s then chairman, Brendon Fletcher, its treasurer, Paul Tidd, and another trustee, Richard Watts, had resigned in protest at the sex-with-clients policy and Mesmac managers’ refusal to change it.

The priests at least pretended it wasn’t policy.

Trump threw a fundraiser in the party room at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. There he whined and complained about the fact that Hillary Clinton hasn’t been “investigated” since the election while for some mysterious and baffling reason he has.

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

Haha, hoho, funny joke. He should take over all the comedy work.

He’s been in a bad mood lately.

Morale at the White House has dropped to new lows, and Trump himself has seethed at the negative headlines.

On Saturday, among donors gathered in the grand ballroom named for himself at Mar-a-Lago, Trump pondered the happiness of his former rival, wondering aloud whether she was enjoying life after the campaign.

“Is Hillary a happy person? Do you think she’s happy?” he said. “When she goes home at night, does she say, ‘What a great life?’ I don’t think so. You never know. I hope she’s happy.”

That’s not much to build his life on – hoping Hillary Clinton is as miserable as he is. Do we think she is? Nope.

Farrakhan gave another anti-Semitic speech last weekend.

Minister Louis Farrakhan engaged in a series of anti-Semitic remarks on Sunday.

Farrakhan has led the black nationalist group Nation of Islam since 1977 and is known for hyperbolic hate speech aimed at the Jewish community.

During the speech in Chicago, Farrakhan made several anti-Semitic comments, including, “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” he later said.

Yeah that’s no good. Whatever you think of Israel, that’s no good.

Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory was in attendance, CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out on Twitter after she shared an image from the event on Instagram.

Mallory has posted on social media about Farrakhan in the past — on February 21, 2016, she posted an image of him from a stage at the Joe Louis Arena with the caption: “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan just stepped to the mic for #SD16DET… I’m super ready for this message! #JUSTICEORELSE #ForTheLoveOfFlint.”

No good.

Katha Pollitt comments:

So Tamika Mallory, one of the four Women’s March leaders, goes to Farrakhan’s rally the other day, where he rambles on about how the Jews run the world and invented trans people and also pot that feminizes black men. She posts happy photos of the event, which Carmen Perez gives a thumbs up to. Questioned about this on twitter, she doubles down with some weird words about leaders who have the same enemies as Jesus.

Why is it so hard to say, yes, Farrakhan is a bigot and I dissociate myself from him? Obama did it. Instead, she doubled down. You can’t represent a mass movement if you’re going to be so divisive.

No good, no good, double-plus ungood.

Of Liberal Intent on Facebook:

Starting Thursday, March 1, 2018, Of Liberal Intent will host a new feature called Women’s Writes. For the duration of Women’s History Month, there will be a new post every day related to women and feminism. The author, Robin Buckallew, has declared the intent to write something every day for Women’s History Month every year until women everywhere have the same rights, opportunities, pay, and respect as men all over the world are able to command. The management of this site hope she lives a very long time…

Works posted there will be works of short fiction, essays, or excerpts from longer works. Please check in regularly to see any and all of the updates in this dynamic new area. This new section will continue to host the works of this author throughout the year, and will host the once a day posts every March until…well, unfortunately, the way it looks, probably until the end of the author’s life, even though she is still young(ish).

Posts will be uploaded at Women’s-Writes and shared on this page.

-The Management™

March 1

First post of new feature, Women’s Writes. A new post will appear every day of Women’s History Month.
Today, March 1, is the first day of Women’s History Month 2018, and I am posting my first piece. It was a singularly crazy day, following a singularly crazy week, and so I had to keep it a bit short, but if you start off the first day by breaking your vow, I have learned you will not succeed. So I opted for a haiku.
#WomensHistoryMonth

https://ofliberalintent.com/womens-writes/works/

Read, and cheer her on!