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CNN reports tonight that the man who served as a go-between between Roger Stone and Julian Assange is named Randy Credico.

I had never heard his name before. He has a radio show, which had both Stone and Assange on as guests. Credico is a comedian, radio host, left-wing activist, satirist and perennial candidate who runs as a Democrat but seems not infrequently to end up backing far right Republicans.

Credico ran a primary challenge against Chuck Schumer in 2010 and then threatened to back far-right Republican Carl Paladino if he didn’t get on the ballot. He also ran for New York City Mayor in 2013. Notably, Stone was a key campaign strategist for Paladino at the time, effectively running his campaign through surrogates and proteges while officially running the campaign of third party candidate Kristin Davis, a retired Madam.

Credico now says he supported Jill Stein. But in May 2016 Stone told another radio audience that Credico was starting a group called Sanders Supporters for Trump. He’s a colorful character. Here’s his congressional subpoena that he tweeted out yesterday,

I don't support it as good or honorable behavior, but I do see a distinction between that sort of questionable contact and the outright predation and power-leveraging that we're seeing people get in trouble for.

I put it up there with the time I stole a stop sign. Not really defensible but not exactly a crime either

Cycloptichorn

The failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story about Senate candidate Roy Moore in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York, according to interviews, text messages and social media posts that have since been deleted.

Starting in July, Jaime Phillips, an operative with the organization Project Veritas, which purports to expose media bias, joined two dozen networking groups related to either journalism or left-leaning politics. She signed up to attend 15 related events, often accompanied by a male companion, and appeared at least twice at gatherings for departing Post staffers.

Phillips, 41, presented herself to journalists variously as the owner of a start-up looking to recruit writers, a graduate student studying national security or a contractor new to the area. This summer, she tweeted posts in support of gun control and critical of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants — a departure from the spring when, on accounts that have since been deleted, she used the #MAGA hashtag and mocked the Women’s March on Washington that followed Trump’s inauguration as the “Midol March.”

along with propensities towards aggression (there's a reason that armies and riots and bar fights etc are overwhelmingly the domain of males). I didn't feel bad or angry or frightened or assaulted any time a girl touched my bum. I found it funny or flirty or both. And perhaps that's a big part of the problem - we project ourselves onto the desires and wishes of women.

Great nations and proud democracies fall when their systems become so corrupted that the decay is not even noticed — or the rot is written off as a normal part of politics.

President Trump has created exactly such a crisis. He has not done it alone. The corrosion of norms and values began long before he propelled the nation past the edge, and his own party is broadly complicit in enabling his attacks on truth, decency and democratic values.

Later on Wednesday, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis published an email from Mr. Keillor in response to a reporter’s questions, giving his version of an encounter with an unidentified woman.

“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he wrote. “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it.”

Mr. Keillor claimed that they continued to be friends “right up until her lawyer called.”

He insisted his discomfort with physical affection was common knowledge, adding, “If I had a dollar for every woman who asked to take a selfie with me and who slipped an arm around me and let it drift down below the beltline, I’d have at least a hundred dollars.”
(...)
“It’s some sort of poetic irony to be knocked off the air by a story, having told so many of them myself, but I’m 75 and don’t have any interest in arguing about this,” he said. “And I cannot in conscience bring danger to a great organization I’ve worked hard for since 1969.”

He also apologized to “all the poets whose work I won’t be reading on the radio and sorry for the people who will lose work on account of this.”

In the right-wing campaign to discredit the truth, every day brings a new low.

I don’t mean Roy Moore’s campaign for U.S. Senate, though that certainly has been at the center, lately, of the broader crusade.

No, I mean the insidious drive — led, sadly, by President Trump — to undermine the reality-based press in America and in so doing to eat away at the underpinnings of our democracy: a shared basis in credible, verifiable facts.

I'm no longer even going to accept a proffered handshake from a woman — or even look at her.

In total, since Trump was inaugurated, the Secret Service has spent at least $144,975 on golf cart rentals alone.

Quote:

It's War, and the Washington Post Knows it
...That the editors of the Post waived their off-the-record rules to make clear what happened — and explained to their readers why they had to take this extraordinary step — suggests they have concluded that these are not normal times, and that sticking to normal practices won't do. Marty Baron likes to say about this, "We're not at war, we're at work." But clearly he understands that there is a war against the press, against the principle of verification itself, and that it will take everything the Post has to prevail.

Journalism is the art of verification. But there are forces on the march behind verification-in-reverse. That's when you take facts that have been nailed down and introduce doubt about them. That releases energy — controversy, furor, culture war, backlash – that you use to power a political movement.

Enemies of liberal democracy invariably attempt to use the values of liberal institutions against those institutions. Fox News founder Roger Ailes wasn’t just cracking a devilish inside joke when he made “Fair and Balanced” the Fox motto. He was undermining the foundation of every journalistic institution that sincerely strived for fairness and balance. Trump turned his campaign rallies into attacks on the journalists covering them, exposing reporters, who are trained to observe, not fight, into passive targets of the mob, incapable of defending themselves.

Trump Is Commander-in-Chief of the War on Mainstream Media

What’s going on with him lately? Is he just colicky? Is he bummed that he missed this year’s return of the McRib?

Nobody knows, but media figures are beginning to notice his increasingly erratic behavior. New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman appeared on CNN and said that Trump seems “unleashed” these past few days.

“Something is unleashed with him lately,” she told hosts Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota. “I don’t know what is causing it. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“I think the last couple of day’s tweets have been markedly accelerated in terms of seeming a little unmoored.”

Shaun King‏Verified account
@ShaunKing
Nov 29
Just moments ago the woman Donald Trump retweeted was CONVICTED in the UK for anti-Muslim harassment of a young mother in front of her children.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has developed a plan to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, within weeks, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing senior officials.