CNN reported today that US investigators have corroborated some of the communications detailed in Christopher Steele’s 35-page dossier on Donald Trump. No, not the hooker pee-pee stuff, but “intercepted conversations” have proven that “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials [who spoke to CNN].” As portions of Steele’s information have been confirmed as rock solid, this suggests that where there’s smoke, there might be hooker pee-pee.
“Some of the claims in a controversial dossier linking Donald Trump to the Russian government appear to have been verified by U.S. media outlets,” The Independent‘s Lucy Pasha-Robinson reported on 2.7. On top of which former MI6 guy Christopher Steele (aka author of Trump pee-pee dossier) has come out of hiding and is back at work in central London. “One of the allegations set out in [Steele’s] document claimed a senior Russian diplomat, Mikhail Kalugin, was withdrawn from Washington to avoid exposing his involvement in U.S. presidential election operations,” Pasha-Robinson writes. “McClatchy has reported [that] two sources with knowledge of ‘multi-agency investigations’ into Kremlin influence on the US elections have confirmed that Kalugin was under scrutiny when he departed.”
A 1.12 Guardian story by Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding reports that the reputation of the author of the Trump dossier, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, is sterling among high-level people in the intelligence community.
“In the rush [by the Trump camp] to trample all over the dossier and its contents, one key question remained. Why had America’s intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself? The answer lies in the credibility of its apparent author, the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him. In all these respects, the 53-year-old is in credit.”
The first step in Donald Trump’s plan to deball and dilute Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice happened this morning when the House Intelligence Committee released its cherry-picked memo. Trump-approved and Devin Nunes-finessed, the memo alleges anti-Trump bias on the part of the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation.
The plan, of course, is to use this memo to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and thereafter replace him with some Trump flunky who will presumably block or get in the way of Mueller’s investigation in every imaginable way.
This is a strong-arm Mussolini move — fascistic bully-boy behavior. Obviously part of an established pattern of Trump getting rid of his perceived Justice Department enemies — Deputy director Andrew McCabe, former FBI director James Comey, United States Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
The gist of the memo is that the allegedly biased (i.e., critical of Trump) Christopher Steele report “formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page,” per a Washington Examiner summary.
Last week it was announced that HBO will team with director Jay Roach and producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman for an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann‘s Game Change, a forthcoming book about the Trump vs. Hillary battle. Halperin and Heilemann have already made similar hay with The Circus, a Showtime series that ran all through ’16, as well as the currently streaming Trumped: Inside The Greatest Political Upset of All Time.
The forthcoming HBO docudrama, which could hit as soon as ’18 but more likely the following year, is now in conflict with a nearly identical-sounding miniseries (announced on 2.14) that Zero Dark Thirty‘s Mark Boal will produce with Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, and which Boal will write the screenplay for. If HBO’s project follows the mold of the 2012 Game Change about the ’08 election, it’ll run 120 minutes while the Boal-Eillson will run “eight to ten hours.” But they’ll both still be telling the same story.
HE to Boal: “Mark — You’re now in a race with Mark Halperin, John Heilemann and the Game Change guys. You have to have a different angle in mind, right? Something that will exceed or expand upon what they’re almost sure to do? It wouldn’t hurt to be first either. My guess is that besides going more in-depth with your eight-to-ten-hour running time, you’re going to play the Russia card (i.e., the Christopher Steele dossier) and maybe even allude to the pee-pee tape just to keep things interesting.
“What else will distinctively separate your miniseries from whatever Halperin-Heilemann may have in mind? Can you give me some kind of vague hint about your plan of attack? Or do you care about any of this stuff?”
A day or two ago Russian publisher Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian intel officer Sergei Mikhailov was arrested, dragged out of a meeting with a bag over his head, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported or passed along that Mikhailov was charged with treason.
It’s also come out that Ruslan Stoyanov, a cybersecurity official with a private firm, was recently arrested on “suspicion of treason.”
Yesterday I tweeted and Facebook-posted a Telegraph story, written by Robert Medick and Robert Verkaik, that said a British asset who may have leaked to Christopher Steele the existence of Donald Trump’s alleged pee-pee blackmail video is now dead, apparently murdered.
Why would Christopher Steele, a respected investigator and former MI6 agent, a guy with a family and a mortgage and bills to pay, work for weeks without salary? Probably because he was convinced that the project he’d been working on (and which not enough people had paid sufficient attention to) was bigger than himself, bigger than just a job.
This Independent article by Kim Sengupta adds that “it is believed that a colleague of Mr. Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid.”
In a 6.12 piece called “The American Press Is Destroying Itself“, Matt Taibbi has nailed the current p.c. zeitgeist, and his observations are downright frightening.
“The American left has lost its mind, [having] become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline [while] torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
“The leaders of this new movement” — the BLM absolutists, Millennial wokester “safeties” and their terrified chickenshit allies — “are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
“They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud to a data scientist fired from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones! And now this madness is coming for journalism.
“Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who’d made politically ‘problematic’ editorial or social media decisions. The New York Times, the Intercept, Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety, and others saw challenges to management.”
Please read the whole thing, but the bottom line (and just because Mark Harris might disagree with this notion doesn’t mean it’s not true) is that the progressive left HAS lost its mind, and you don’t have to be a conservative or (God forbid) a Republican to acknowledge this. I began as a good Democrat in my tweener and teen years, and I’ve regarded myself as left-leaning iconoclast since I was 20 or thereabouts. But over the last two or three years calling myself a staunch leftie has become untenable. Because the left has gone lunatic.
The wokester “safeties”, POC feminist blame-shriekers, cancel culture advocates, #MeToo tunnel-visionists (Taibbi doesn’t even mention the nonsensical conviction, in defiance of established facts, that Woody Allen is guilty of molesting Dylan Farrow in August 1992), progressive guilt-trippers and fanatical Khmer Rouge purists are running the journalist asylum.
These people are beyond scary, and yet the idea that come November voters will have to choose between allowing these progressive banshees free reign and giving another term to the salivating, sociopathic racism and curdled delusion of Donald Trump is a false scenario.
The thing to cling to in this surreal hurricane is sensible, skeptical, carefully measured liberalism — the kind that isn’t so terrified of being accused or white privilege and/or racism that a semblance of reality actually penetrates the cerebellum. I’m talking about the Bill Maher, Joe Rogan (except for his hateful dismissals of Doddering Joe), Matt Taibbi, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Brett Stephens, Bari Weiss, Sasha Stone, Richard Rushfield, Jordan Ruimy and Katie Herzog cabal.
Boiling it down to eight words, I really can’t be a leftie any more. Because the 21st Century “woke” terror (named in honor of Maximilien Robespierre and the “French reign of terror” of the 1790s) has become too manic, too smothering, too horrifying.
I’ll never be a rightie (I took too many acid and mescaline trips in my 20s for that to ever happen) and the idea of being a comme ci comme ca centrist sounds boring as hell. I just know that the shrieking, accusatory, career-cancelling, sensitive-to-a-fault left has gone around the bend and over the waterfall. They’re just as unhinged and foam-at-the-mouth frightening as the bumblefuck Trump supporters who will attend the Tulsa rally on Juneteenth (i.e., Friday the 19th).
And while I still trust the N.Y. Times‘ reporting on foreign matters, COVID and climate as well as book, film and theatre criticism, I don’t trust them at all in terms of reporting about our domestic racial turbulence and certainly not on the opinion pages — they’ve totally gone over to the regimented BLM-filtered side and are now representing the activist journalism fraternity in this respect.
To bring it all back home, Taibbi has written that “people depend on [journalists] to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?”
I’m told that 46% of the directors of the forthcoming 2020 Sundance Film Festival are women…cool. The highest percentage ever. And I’m sure the annual ten-day event (1.23 through 2.2) will be…I don’t what. Snowy? Wokey-wokey? Inspiring? A lot of whoo-whooing before each premiere screening? A sense of zeitgeist fatigue? A feeling of “here we go again”?
A Taylor Swift doc (Taylor Swift: Miss Americana). Julie Taymor‘s Gloria Steinem biopic, titled The Glorias. Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted. Sean Durkin‘s The Nest. Viggo Mortensen‘s Falling. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Four Good Days. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill. Brenda Chapman‘s Come Away.
But Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods, the Last Flag Flying-ish Vietnam gold-hunt film, won’t be there.
You know why? Because Sundance is a secular woke-spiritual get-together that has kinda sorta stopped mattering, and Spike knows Cannes is a better deal. He knows and I know that Sundance of 2020 is about itself — movies for the woke devotional — whereas the Sundance festivals of 2015 or ’10, ’05, ’00 or ’95 were about movies looking to ignite and connect and bust out and generate currents of serious consequence, and perhaps even some award-season action down the road. No more. That era has past.
Now the filmmaker deal is “come to Sundance to introduce your film to the Sundance friendlies, and maybe they’ll tell their Instagram friends about it when it starts streaming four or six or ten months hence…whenever. But you’re almost certainly not breaking out. You and your film are members of Sundance Village, and you’ll never, ever step out of that realm. Unless you’re Kenneth Lonergan or someone in that fraternity.”
If you believe in Sundance Village movies and the values that they stand for and/or are endorsing and seeking to bring about, then Sundance Village is for you. Buy your ticket packages, lay out the dough for the condo, buy your snow gear and your Southwest Airlines discount tickets.
But I know some people who aren’t going this year. Because they know that the high-voltage Sundance necessity of years past is ebbing, and that it won’t be a total tragedy if they don’t attend. Because they’ll see the hotties (there are always four or five) in good time. Maybe some will be streamable while the festival is underway.
10 or 15 years ago the slogan was “Sundance spelled backwards spells depressing.” Now it’s “Sundance spelled backwards means ‘does anyone give that much of a shit?'”
My honest attitude after attending for 25 or 26 years? I think I’ve conveyed that.
The big BAFTA news this morning, if you want to call it that, is that the Big Short momentum we’ve all been sensing (insect antennae vibrations, tingling neck hair) is looking real, and as a result the Spotlight guys might have reason to start biting their nails. Maybe. Or maybe not. Adam McKay‘s wonky housing-mortgage dramedy landed five BAFTA nominations, including Best Film and Best Director, while Tom McCarthy‘s journalism drama snagged just three — Best Film, Best Original Screenplay and a Best Supporting Actor nom for Mark Ruffalo. Then again N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick tweeted this morning that The Big Short “is the new Wolf of Wall Street — lots of noms but won’t close the deal.”
The Spotlight and The Big Short teams are also competing with a pair of pre-Golden Globe parties this weekend only a night apart — a Spotlight dinner this evening in Beverly Hills vs. The Big Short‘s Saturday night soiree at the Chateau Marmont. And you know who will be at these parties? The same journos and Academy members who’ve been attending all the award-season events over the last couple of months. Journo: “What…you again? I just saw you at that Bryan Cranston party.” Academy member: “My thoughts exactly, pal. No offense but have you ever considered doing something with your evenings besides schmoozing at parties and jostling for celebrity face-time?” Journo: “Same to ya, fella….oh, wait…ooh! ooh! There’s Steve Carell!”
Carol landed nine nominations, as did Bridge of Spies — a completely decent, middle-ground espionage drama that no one will be watching or talking about six months or a year from now, much less five or ten years hence. The Revenant landed eight noms. The Martian‘s Ridley Scott — “Sir Ridders” — got his gold-watch nomination for Best Director, and Matt Damon was nominated for Best Actor along with The Revenant‘s Leonardo DiCaprio (pretty much locked to win), Steve Jobs‘ Michael Fassbender, The Danish Girl‘s Eddie Redmayne (anybody with a smidgen of taste hates this movie but the none-too-brights are impressed with Redmayne’s open-hearted transgendering) and Trumbo‘s Bryan Cranston.
Mad Max: Fury Road and director George Miller got the shaft — no major noms, just tech stuff.
The BAFTAs blew off Charlotte Rampling! The 45 Years star is much more in the conversation than Lady In The Van‘s Maggie Smith but they nominated Smith and not Rampling? This is bullshit.
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