Oh, then you're going to have a lot of fun.

War and Peace delivers. Recommend having a rough familiarity with the Battle of Austerlitz going into it. First half of C + P is like an amazing detective story. The OG hard-boiled novel and it's Amazing. Then the end is bogged down in Christian moralism and loses all energy. Tolstoy > Dostoyevsky.

I know it's hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list.

Some perspective: The S&P opened down -1.3% on Trump's Greenland saber-rattling. That's $750 billion of wealth destroyed -- roughly equal to estimates of the value of Greenland.

And so ~in dollar terms~ his shenanigans have already cost the US one Greenland, and we've got nothing to show for it.

Can we start referring to it as The I.C.E., which sounds like a Federal bureaucratic agency as opposed to ICE, which makes it sound cool?

Fiona Hill testimony before Congress October 14, 2019 And the Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine.... You know, you have your Monroe doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You're in our backyard in Ukraine....

With alt text:

This should be every headline. That he isn't is incredibly telling as to where we are as a country.

A friendly reminder: If a politician you can vote for does something you don’t like WRITE THEIR OFFICE A LETTER. Not an email. Not a post. Their offices assume if someone actually takes the insane time to write a letter and post it many many many people must strongly agree and take it seriously.

Everything makes sense if you assume Trump entered into a regional powers agreement with Russia and China, where the US "gets" the Western Hemisphere, and they get the rest of the world. If so, it would lead to China's dominance really fast.

If you want a fun conspiracy gummy to chew on, Bay of Pigs used the future president/CIA head George HW Bush's offshore oil operation, for, I believe, refueling. Codename for Bay of Pigs operation: Operation Zapata. The name of Bush's company: Zapata Petroleum. Coincidence? Very likely, but fun.

My take is not fun, but I really doubt that people in the CIA would kill Kennedy over Cuba when he was a Cuba hawk (operation mongoose) and LBJ immediately ended Cuba operations. I think there was a cover up, but I think that was to control narrative/hide CIA screw up, but that’s a whole thing.

Okay so one administration can plan something that gets executed by the next. Like NAFTA was negotiated by H W and singed by Clinton. Bay of pigs was planned under Eisenhower then fell on Kennedy’s desk. He adjusted the plan and told them to go ahead ie he signed off. Where do we disagree?

Or MAYBE I chose to comment on a topic I know something about…

Yeah, it was planned, and as I said Kennedy changed to plan to remove air support. Are you actually under the impression that Kennedy didn’t know about Bay of Pigs? This is a not a point that anyone who knows anything about this debates.

The CIA was largely invented to give the President plausible deniability when it comes to covert action, so you don’t blame him when he orders a coup, but big stuff is all part of presidents overall agenda. Like if they take over a country and the Us president is like “uh no” the coup would fail.

It means he gave them the order to go ahead. He cut the air support from the plan, and his defenders would say he was pressured into. Are you guys under to impression we invaded a country without telling the president? Even after RFK ran point on Operation Mongoose. This isn’t controversial.

I think the best argument against the CIA was that Kennedy was on death's door his entire presidency. He'd had his last rights read to him twice, riddled with Addison's, and needed amphetamines to walk without crutches. His nickname in the Senate was "the cripple". They would have just poisoned him.

Whoever killed him, he was NOT trying to stop the Cold War. In the month before he was shot, he okayed a plot to kill Castro, and killed the leader of South Vietnam, which made the Vietnam War inevitable. RFK was on HUAC. JFK signed off on Bay of Pigs. The myth of JFK was posthumous.

Every member of ICE should take notice.

If you’ve done that: What it Takes (about 1988 election), nothing is true and everything is possible, Wrapped in the flag: A personal History of America’s radical right. Goliath, Democracy In Chains, On Corruption in America.

Already said but the Cato books. Maybe start with Master of the Senate. The early books of the Johnson series can lose readers if they aren’t into Texas history/LBJ, but Master of Senate is a revalation. The best book for understanding the process of the senate and how one seizes power in America.

Turns out pressing Trump about his involvement with Epstein gets you one hell of a sound bite. Maybe everyone should try it.

When the mentally ill don't have access to firearms, mental health crises don't have to end in tragedy; they can be downright wholesome.

The Kremlin disguised a nearly $100 mn payment to Trump in the form of a brokered real estate deal... and both Jeffrey Epstein and William Pulte were involved in the deal. That's very interesting.

Russiagate apology forms now

The article ignores how the meaning of "socialism" has changed dramatically since Eugene Debs. Most of Deb's socialist proposals are modern norms, such as female suffrage, a 40-hour work week, no child labor, public housing, and progressive taxation. Also, Trump nationalizing companies is Debsian.

Why does ICE officers always, and usually falsely, claim they are being threatened or attacked? Because this legally justifies the use of lethal force and firearms.

Looks as if Trump is saying no Democrat will be allowed to win another national election—and he will use the FBI, the DOJ, and the CIA to make sure of that. This is a full-scale attack on American democracy, and every Republican, CEO, and conservative mouthpiece who doesn't object is complicit.