(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

"Footprints."



"A man's or a woman's?"

Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Closer and closer and closer, still. From The New York Times:

The indictment represents the first charges by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for meddling in the 2016 presidential election — the fundamental crime that he was assigned to investigate. In a 37-page indictment filed in United States District Court, Mr. Mueller said that the 13 individuals have conspired since 2014 to violate laws that prohibit foreigners from spending money to The indictment charges that the foreigners falsely posed as American citizens, stole identities and otherwise engaged in fraud and deceit in an effort to influence the U.S. political process, including the 2016 presidential race. “The nature of the scheme was the defendants took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists,” Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, said in a brief news conference on Friday afternoon at the Justice Department.

Oh, they’re smart fellers, they are. The indictments were rolled out perfectly. It is now absolutely impossible for the president* to fire either Rosenstein or Mueller without the worst possible political consequences. By basing the indictments on federal election law, Mueller has framed the case so as also to include anyone who accepted this criminal help.

And the material in the indictment—which you can read for yourself here—outlines a thoroughly complete campaign of ratfcking aimed exclusively at electing Donald Trump to be president of the United States. This was Donald Segretti on steroids, with the power of a huge apparatus behind them. A few excerpts:

On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the Instagram account “Woke Blacks” to post the following message: “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”

b. On or about November 3, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased an advertisement to promote a post on the Instagram account “Blacktivist” that read in part: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

c. By in or around early November 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the “United Muslims of America” social media accounts to post anti-vote messages such as: “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”

They pushed the “voter fraud” fantasy as well. Kris Kobach must be so proud.

Getty Images

b. On or about August 11, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators posted that allegations of voter fraud were being investigated in North Carolina on the Twitter account @TEN_GOP.

c. On or about November 2, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the same account to post allegations of “#VoterFraud by counting tens of thousands of ineligible mail in Hillary votes being reported in Broward County, Florida.”

And, as we saw above, they did what they could to suppress the minority vote.

46. In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 US. presidential election or to vote for a third-party US. presidential candidate.

It’s important to remember that every one of the tactics mentioned above—especially the voter-fraud canard—have been electioneering tactics used by the former Republican Party for at least two decades. All these Russians are alleged to have done is to weaponized further what already was in place and direct it toward the benefit of the Trump campaign.

The Trumpites (and now the president*, himself) already have mustered a response—namely, that there is no evidence presented here that directly proves any “collusion,” which remains their magic conjuring word that makes all the monsters go away. That may get them through the night, but they have to know that Mueller has the goods now, and that none of us know what other goods Mueller may have.

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Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong - no collusion! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018

I can recall a scene from the late Jimmy Breslin’s Watergate book, , in which a lawyer working in the office of House Judiciary Council John Doar put together a series of index cards that created a timeline of Richard Nixon’s first day in the White House after the Watergate break-in. From the cards, you could see how Nixon and his men were concocting a strategy to bury the story and insulate the president from how they were doing it. At this point, Nixon was still saying he didn’t learn anything about the break-in until months later. Breslin talked about what the cards were saying,

“Oh, come on.”

We are still supposed to believe that the Russians concocted this amazing scheme to influence the election and the person on whose behalf they were operating the scheme didn’t know what they were doing?

Nor did the people running his campaign?

Oh, come on.

Really, come the fck on.

I really don’t have anything more to say about what happened in Florida because, frankly, I’ve been doing this for almost seven years now and I’m goddamn sick and tired of arguing with people over the nuances of mass murder.



Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Rise Devil Rise” (Mercy Brothers). Yeah, I still pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: In celebration of the Winter Olympics, here, from 1938, are some icebreakers in Estonia. “In the Baltics, the ice cream is free.” The Brits are just a riot.

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Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Spokesman-Review? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

For instance, ankles told Eastern Washington University paleontologist Judd Case that the dinosaur he discovered in Antarctica in 2004 is more primitive than its relatives, such as the velociraptors made famous by “Jurassic Park.” Case and his former student, Ricardo Ely, have submitted a paper for publication outlining the discovery and explaining for the first time how it fits in with other known species of dinosaurs.The discovery was far from a full skeleton: just part of a left foot and leg. But there’s a lot paleontologists can learn from a few bones. Case’s find is a deinonychosaur, the group of dinosaurs most closely related to birds without being birds themselves. Based on where it was found, it’s thought to be about 71 million years old, putting its time frame toward the end of the Late Cretaceous period.

When his dinosaur walked the Earth, Antarctica was green year-round and connected to Australia and South America. Because it was the last part of the world to get flowering plants, its animal species often appear more primitive than their contemporaries in other parts of the world, which can help scientists trace when various characteristics spread. “Antarctica is the last outpost for many of these primitive dinosaurs,” he said. It’s an area rich for new discoveries, he said. “Most of these dinosaurs have literally been found in the last 15 years,” Case said. “It’s opened probably the bigger vistas of what’s going on down there.”

Even in Antarctica, dinosaurs lived then so penguins can be happy now.

We’re all Top Commenters this week.

I’ll be back on Monday. I have confidence that nothing will happen about this country’s insane attachment to its firearms in the interim. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and try not to lose hope. Those kids speaking out in Florida need everyone to have their backs.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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