Like most people, I'm sure, I much dislike "clickbait" headlines.  Raw Story, a news website I particularly like, is a big exponent of such things, its only flaw.  But I was surprised to see the excellent tech site, CNET jump in.

Yesterday, I got the daily CNET newsletter I subscribe to.  It always includes links to a number of stories, with the main story being the email's subject line.  And this one a subject line headline that shouted out -- "The death of cash may finally be coming."  I doubted that, but still I was curious what they had to say about the technology.  And also what the other stories they were covering that day.

Fortunately, I didn't have to click through the clickbait link to the actual article, because the newsletter had a sub-heading underneath those glaring words, "The death of cash may finally be coming."  

The sub-headline was --

"E-commerce and mobile money may in the coming years take a bite out of cash's strength in the payments world. But it won't be easy."

Color me contrarian, but to me -- "may take a bite out of..." and "It won't be easy" seems to mean that, no, the death of cash may finally be coming.

I've liked David Cay Johnston when I only knew of him writing about taxes and winning a Pulitzer Prize. It was remarkable how he made such arcane minutiae and otherwise seemingly-boring material so fascinating and understandable.  I had no idea at the time that he'd been covering Trump for over 30 years. In fact, he now has written two books on Trump.  So, it was notable the in a long interview with him on Salon, conducted by Chauncey DeVega, he commented --

"Let me be very clear and quotable about this. At an absolute minimum, Donald Trump has divided loyalties, and the evidence we already have suggests that Donald Trump is a traitor. In fact, I would say that the evidence we already have, the public materials such as emails for example, strongly indicate that Donald Trump is a traitor. However, I don’t even think he understands what he’s done."

I've been running around the last few days, so Ii haven't had much time to catch up in detail on all the news.  As best I can tell, there is a lot of meltdown and angst around TrumpWorld and in the GOP.  The most galling story, yet one which hasn't received much press attention, is that Trump's Inspector General has sent his findings -- that former acting FBI-director Andrew McCabe was "less than candid" with the FBI -- to the Department of Justice for possible criminal charges.  From what little I've read, it seems unlikely that criminal charges will actually be filed.  But -- 1) they could be, 2) what a chilling effect it must have on the entire department, and 3) what a fascist thing to do, try to undermine other voices of authority.

I also saw that Trump was dancing little jigs about the release of the FBI's Comey memos -- despite the reality that the memos pretty clearly support Comey and show Trump to be a pathetic sleazeball.  All that without even getting into the fact that the memos should never have been released because they were evidence in an ongoing FBI investigation, but several top Republicans in the complicit House put on their fascist hats and were whining and bellowing for the documents.

And more, and more.

But what stood out to me among them all was, in most ways, a lesser story.  But one that is utterly fascinating and especially telling about Trump.  It was a long, detailed and very readable article in the Washington Post by Jonathan Greenberg.  He is a reporter who back in the 1980s worked for Forbes magazine and was involved with putting together the initial "Forbes 400" lists of the wealthiest Americans.  And the title of the article says it all -- "Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400.  Here are the tapes."

What's so notable about the article is that many of the relentless specifics come from off-the-record conversations that Greenberg had, many with Trump himself posing under one of his pseudonyms of "John Barron," as well as conversations with Trump's lawyer and mentor, the disgraced Roy Cohn.  However, Greenberg feels comfortable revealing this conversations because, as he writes -- "Although Trump, posing as Barron, asked Forbes to conduct the conversation off the record, I am publishing it here. I believe an intent to deceive — both with the made-up persona and the content of the call — released me from my good-faith pledge."

But the most notable thing about the article is, as the headline of the piece notes -- the tapes.  Greenberg recorded many of the conversations with both Trump and Cohn, and has embedded them here.  So, you can now hear Trump as "John Barron" clear as day, and lying through every orifice and body part.  And it's blatantly Trump. Even from the distance of time, and him putting on a thicker New York accent, it's Trump.  Clear as a glass window.

Even if you don't read the whole article, at least listen to the tapes.  And in the end, what this article does is demonstrate -- in text and audio -- the beginnings of Trump's public flim-flam to try to con the American public about himself.

If Sean Hannity was smart he'd have taken one for the team.  I'm not saying he should have (honesty indeed is always the best policy, especially in court and on TV news), but just that if the he was really the team player I'm sure he likes to consider himself, then falling on his sword would have saved a lot of headaches for a whole lot of people, including Trump.  That's because the entire point behind the question of who are Michael Cohen's clients is to determine if he actually is functioning as a lawyer, and if not then he can't claim attorney-client privilege for the material seized from his office, home and hotel.  And so, if he wasn't actually an attorney for Sean Hannity, then that leaves him with only two supposed-clients.  One of those is Elliott Broidy, the RNC co-chair for whom Cohen only acted (as far as we know) to facilitate a hush money payoff, hardly a job necessary for a lawyer.  You can get any high or low-level thug to carry that out.  Which leaves only Trump.  That's not much of a law practice.  Mind you, it could be a full-time job for a lawyer, handling all the fraud lawsuits.  Though Cohen didn't handle those.

By the way, to be clear, it's not critical to the government to show that Cohen wasn't acting as a lawyer for the evidence to be seized.  Even an actual lawyer can't hide behind attorney-client privilege if he or she is engaged in criminal activity with the client.  And the federal agents had enough reasonable proof of that to convince a judge to sign off on the raid.

Honestly, I have zero idea of Michael Cohen was acting as a lawyer for Sean Hannity.  I do know that if he wasn't then Cohen's own lawyer is in a mess o' trouble for claiming it in open court.  Judges -- and the legal system -- don't like that.  I also know that even if Cohen wasn't acting as Hannity's attorney there's something in their dealings that someone (whether Hannity or Cohen) doesn't want to see the light of day.  Otherwise, why on earth claim attorney-client privilege and argue in court for 20 minutes for it, except to keep it protected?  The bottom line in all this is that someone is lying.

The thing is, there's one question in all this (well, okay, I'm sure there are a lot more questions than just "one") that I haven't heard asked of Hannity.   And that's, "Are you telling us that you don't have your own attorney that you couldn't have called to ask a very minor question about 'real estate' to???"  Because that's not believable for a second.  And the alternative is that his answer would be, "Oh, sure I have an attorney, but I didn't want to bother him with a really minor 'real estate' question and waste his time, and instead just figured I'd ask the personal lawyer for the president of the United States."

For all this, the most amusing thing has been to see Sean Hannity squealing like a stuck pig and making all manner of claims about the unfair press.  The proper response, of course, is much simpler.  It's "I was not a client of Michael Cohen's and only asked him a simple question about 'real estate,' but I should have disclosed even that to remove even the slightest hint of impropriety, and I'm sorry."

But instead, he's whining about "the press" and fairness, a concept that never seems to have concerned him before.  And again, claiming he wasn't a client -- if true -- hurts Trump, Michael Cohen, and Cohen's lawyer, so this is a no-win situation all around.  Unless Hannity took one for the team.  After all, it's not like his employers would have likely cared.

That's because the funniest response of all has been from "Fox News" whose comment after looking into all this was basically, "Yes, Sean was wrong, but that's okay, we don't mind.  Carry on"  And why should they? Only an actual news organization would care about journalistic ethics...

Before today's Opening Day the game, Bleacher Nation reporter Michael Cerami sent out a tweet that he would jump into Lake Michigan if the Chicago Cubs outfielder Ian Happ lead off the game with a home run. Happ hit the first pitch of the game into the seats.

The water temperature was 41-degrees.

Here's an enjoyable follow-up to the piece I wrote about this morning, Daniel Brown's article on being sportswriting competitors with his wife.  The update was written by Lisa Bonos of the Washington Post, who wisely called up Susan Slusser to get the other side of the story.  You can read that here.

I want to have another Trump-free morning.  And this fits the bill as effectively as anything.  In fact, it's another baseball story -- but please don't run from it.  It's a total joy.  And not what you might otherwise think from that description.

This is an article by Daniel Brown, a sportswriter in Northern California for the Bay Area Mercury News, writing about his biggest competition at another local paper, Susan Slusser, who's the beat sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle.  And she's a formidable competitor at that -- accomplished, driven, tough, and yet so admired that in 2012, in this male-dominated field, she became the first woman to be elected president of the Baseball Writers Association of American.

One other thing:  the two are married.

This is a hilarious, endearing, wonderful, interesting, fun, loving and gracious article.  It's titled, "Help! I married my dreaded baseball rival (a love story)."

He writes openly and happily about being regularly scooped by his wife, and shamelessly using her name to develop a rapport with athletes who he knows adore her for her "fairness, accuracy, accountability, comic timing and ferocious work ethic."  Among several examples, for instance, he writes, "If I drop her name, players bounce up. I once approached Jose Guillen at his locker and told him I was married to Susan Slusser. He sprang out of his chair to hug me."

There's even a very funny story about the one time he lucked out into scooping his wife.  That's a rarity, however, since most of the article is filled with other tales, like the even more amusing story about the rumor of the trade with Stephen Piscotty.

(Personal digression.  I love talking about Stephen Piscotty.  But not for the reason you think.  He used to play for the hated St. Louis Cardinals, the favorite team of the inveterate Chris Dunn.  We'd talk about Piscotty often whenever the Cubs would play their despicable rivals, and I finally explained one day why I always liked bringing Piscotty up.  It's because his name reminds me of a five-year-old kid trying to say, "spaghetti.")

It's just a terrific article.  Do yourself a favor and don't avoid it just because you may not like sports, or baseball.  You can read it here.

As you may recall, six months ago I wrote a series of articles, beginning here, about Trump's connection with a Russian Mafia figure, Felix Sater, who was convicted of a felony in a racketeering case, but never served prison time by being a cooperating witness.  He also has been a business partner of Trump's, with an office in Trump Tower and was one of the forces behind the proposed Trump Moscow plan.

Buzzfeed just published a very long, minutely-detailed article  yesterday on Sater, which you can read in full here.  It's an impressive piece of journalism written by Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold.  It's "The Asset:  How a Player in the Trump-Russia Scandal Led a Double Life as an American Spy."  Not everyone will want to make their way through the whole thing -- I even had to skim -- but I'll provide some notable excerpts below, and also note that the article explains a far-deeper level of trouble he presents for Trump.  All of his criminal activity is there in the article, but what was missing from earlier stories is the lengths he gone to (so he has) "rehabilitate" himself and served as a highly-valuable asset for U.S. national security and investigative forces.  All of which means he's been a wide-open resource as a cooperation witness.

Putting the Buzzfeed article in perspective is a companion piece by Slate.  The headline alone should give you some idea -- "Bonkers Profile of Trump Crony Felix Sater Suggests He is the Kind of Guy Who Wouldn't Mind Working with Robert Mueller."  You can read the article here.  It's substantially shorter -- only six paragraphs -- and summarizes the value of the profile.

Make no mistake, Felix Sater is not only a guy up to his neck in money-laundering and criminal activity on the one end, but also deeply involved with the government as a spy on the other.  And not by his bragging words, but by those of the government.  As Slate notes, "10 current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said [that Sater] supplemented US intelligence by providing location coordinates for al-Qaeda camps that the US military ultimately bombed in Khost, Afghanistan."

That's connected.  With deep inside information.  He passed along five phone number for Osama bin Laden.  This is not someone Trump wants testifying against him.  The problem for Trump is...that Sater already has.

Here are some of those highlights from Buzzfeed.  To start with, a description of the impact when he initially turned state's witness for the government --

"Two federal prosecutors and four FBI agents showed up to vouch for him. A transcript of that hearing is heavily redacted, but it makes clear that Sater was no ordinary cooperating witness.

“'There was nothing he wouldn’t do,' former assistant US attorney Todd Kaminsky, now a New York state senator, told the judge. 'He was really helpful and was the key to open a hundred different doors.'

"[Leo] Taddeo, his main FBI handler, said that Sater’s work damaged the Bonanno crime family and helped the FBI take La Cosa Nostra out of the Wall Street stock business.

“'The length of his cooperation is extraordinary,' said Marshall Miller, another assistant US attorney. 'And I wanted to be here to express from the office’s perspective just how capable a cooperator he was, how important a cooperator he was, and how effective he was.'”


The article later notes that this wasn't a one-time bit of cooperation, which of course is central to his importance in the Mueller investigation --

"To this day, Sater continues to cooperate with the FBI and Justice Department, he said in his statement to the House Intelligence Committee. He wouldn't disclose additional details, except to say that he works on 'international matters.' Two US officials confirmed Sater continues to be a reliable asset.


Additionally, there is this long passage which deals with Sater involving himself with Trump during the course of the election, some of which lies at the center of the criminal charges being investigated --

"When Trump won the presidency, Sater saw an opportunity to do what he does best: make deals. But his ambition backfired, putting Sater in the middle of the Trump-Russia scandal.

"In early 2017, Sater told BuzzFeed News he was trying to close a deal with a Ukrainian politician and others on an energy deal in Eastern Europe. Sater estimated he and his partners could earn billions. But as they closed in, the Ukrainian, Andrey Artemenko, asked Sater for a favor: Could he broker a meeting with Trump’s team to discuss a 'peace plan' for Ukraine and Russia?

"The deal, which Sater said set out a way to lift sanctions on Russia, surely would have pleased the Kremlin, but it would have been a sharp departure from previous US policy. Still, Sater summoned Trump’s personal lawyer, Cohen, to a Midtown Manhattan hotel in February 2017, and Artemenko gave him a letter about the plan. Cohen has denied passing the plan to the White House and told BuzzFeed News he threw it out.

​"Where some see the meeting as foreign interference in US policy, Sater sees opportunity. If he could grease the skids with a potential business partner while bringing peace to a war-torn region, Sater said, who could argue with that? 'No more war,' Sater said. 'People not getting killed. Beautiful situation.'

"But the encounter is now reportedly part of the special counsel’s investigation, and Sater finds himself in the spotlight. Of the Ukrainian plan, Sater said, 'I thought everybody wins. Turns out, I lost.'

"Sater has already been summoned by congressional investigators, and he is expected to speak to the Senate Intelligence Committee in April. He also has been questioned by Mueller’s team, several of whom he knows from his past undercover work. It’s almost certain that Sater has sensitive information about Trump’s business dealings, but he won’t say what he was asked or what information he provided. The special counsel’s office declined to comment for this story."

I will only note that in the initial article I wrote, Sater was reported to have told his family and friend that "I am going to jail."  Whether he does is one matter.  More to the point is that he is in the middle of important parts of Trump business dealings, he believes he has taken actions which are criminal, he has been a government witness in the past, and has continued to be an open cooperating witness for the government in subsequent years, 

Felix Sater is serious trouble for Trump.  We tries nots to steers you wrong...

Yesterday, a friend sent me an article from that day's National Review, the conservative publication started by William F. Buckley, and asked me to read it.  He's not conservative himself, but there was something in it that didn't make sense to him, and he had a question.

No, I said.  I had no intention of reading an article in the National Review.  Just because he had driven himself loopy didn't mean I had to.  I said I would read a page or two, but that was my limit.  Alas, I only got about a page-and-a-half in.  It was awful, made wrong assumptions, and was factually inccorrect.  All in a page-and-a-half. 

The article, "What did Comey tell President Trump about the Steele Dossier?" was intended to be a detailed dissection of former National Security Adviser Susan Rice's emails to herself at the end of the Obama Administration and an explosive expose of what truth they supposedly uncovered.

I first cringed about three paragraphs in.  That's when the author had just noted that Rice's email to herself was written a full 16 days after the meeting it was intended to make an account of, and from that length of time he concluded, "An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done."

Well, gee, that's a pretty darn-emphatic absolutely certainty for something that's not only a presumption, but also isn't true.  Without breaking a sweat, it's easy to figure out other actual reasons someone might take two weeks to write such a note.  For starters, a person could have initially decided that there was no need to write a "contemporaneous" memo to oneself, but two weeks later saw that conditions had changed and so it was best to do so then.  Or someone said, "Did you ever take notes of that meeting?"  And when answering, no, was suggested it might be a good idea to have a record of them. Now, mind you, neither of those may or may not be want happened, but it doesn't take a PhD in human nature to figure out that either are very real possibilities.  Among many others.  And perhaps even far-more likely than "lying to change the record."  I might even offer some pop psychology that one who "lying to change the record" is the sole explanation is is someone who would do so himself.

So, that was the first yellow caution light three paragraphs in.  And then I stopped a page later.  Didn't even make it to my two-page goal.  The stopping point came when the author was setting up what events were going on around that January 5 meeting -- and then began his "Aha, gotcha!" portion of the hypothetical-expose by casting an eye around wider to notice all the other things that were taking place at the same time.  He wrote -- 

"What else was happening? The Justice Department and FBI had gone to the FISA court on October 21, 2016, for a warrant to spy on former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page.  That warrant relied largely on the Steele dossier..."

And that's when I stopped and walked away.  First of all, let's be clear about something:  October 21 is not "what else was happening."  It's a full 2-1/2 months earlier.  Four holidays passed between those days -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.  (And you can throw in Groundhog's Day for fun.)  AND there was a national election in between, as well.  "What else was happening?"  Seriously, dude???  There's nothing even remotely contemporaneous about that.  It's attempting to draw close connections that don't exist.  But I digress, because that's not even the "bad" part.  The bad part is his pointed statement that the FISA warrant relied largely on the Steele Dossier.

It didn't.  We factually know it didn't.  And we factually know it didn't because the Devin Nunes memo actually explained that it didn't.  That memo, written by as biased a Republican for Trump in the House as there may be, to levels that might be literally criminal, and approved by Trump himself, explained in detail how the FISA warrant was obtained, and the Steele Dossier wasn't even among the top reasons.  At best, the parts of the dossier that had already been corroborated were used to support all the other information that had already been gathered which were the basis of the warrant.

So, at that point in the article, one of its foundational points was untrue.  Which makes any conclusions meaningless.  And that didn't even take into consideration all the other things already wrong in it.

But still, I called my friend to find out what was concerning him about the article.

"What I don't understand," he said, "is that the National Review is True Conservative, and True Conservatives have no great love of Donald Trump, so what in the world is the point of this article?  What are they going to great lengths trying to prove?  What is the point here?  It doesn't make sense to me."

I thought a moment and answered --

Two things.  First, there IS NO POINT to it.  Don't try to find out what its "point" is.  You ill drive yourself crazy trying to find a point.  Stop!  This is not a strands of evidence carefully tied together to prove a thoughtfully-drawn conclusion.  It's an idiotic collection of random charges based on faulty presumptions.  There is no point they're trying to prove.

And second, if I had to dive in deep and try to divine some buried reason why this article was written, it's this:  the article isn't about trying to support Trump.  Indeed, True Conservatives don't like Trump at all.  But far more than not liking Trump, they absolutely, gutterly hate Barack Obama with a white-hot passion.  They hated Barack Obama for eight years, and they still hate him with a fury that gnaws away at their soul.  And if Trump goes down in flames it makes Barack Obama look all the better.  So, the article is their True Conservative attempt to do whatever they can to still try somehow to tarnish Barack Obama and try to throw mud at him in any way they possibly can.  Even if they have to twist reality and facts to make up their false case.

Ah, okay, my friend said.  It then made sense to him.  And he could rest more easily.

I see that the Huffington Post has quietly ended its "Contributor Platform" blogs. They've been moving in this direction ham-fistedly for years, and it's a shame since the blogs are how HuffPo came to fame, and with some pretty renowned people writing them. (Barack Obama, Walter Cronkite, Oprah Winfrey, senators, governors, and many, many, many more.)  Despite the "reasons" they publicly gave in an article about something else, saying that there are other outlets, the reality is that the new owners haven't never wanted to deal with having such contributors and began burying them since AOL took over and then subsequently had others come in after.

Though the Huffington Post kept the announcement as low-key as they could, the New York Times recognized this for the significant story it is, and wrote a long, detailed article on it here.  They note that the Contributor Platform blogs encompassed over 100,000 writers and drove 10-15% of traffic on the site.

As readers of these pages have figured out over the years, I've had issues with HuffPo's treatment of their independent contributors for a long time.  Even during the original ownership, I battled with the editors on occasion, though there was always a sense of accommodation.  Their tech editor once called me and had a 30-minute conversation, ultimately addressing some of the problems.  Contrast that with recent days when I haven't heard back from the anonymous "Blog Team" for probably the past two years, even when asking about a glitch on the site.  In fact, if one went to the Huffington Post and even tried to find contributor blogs, it was basically impossible.  The link to them disappeared.  There was no search engine on the site.  In fact, after they changed to their new platform, if they didn't "approve" your article it was explained to me that they coded the piece so that it literally couldn't be found with even an outside search engine (like Google or Bing.)  That's how buried it had become.  Only if you knew specifically who you were looking for or had a direct link could you find anything on the Contributor Platform.  (When I asked why on earth anyone would write an article for free that couldn't be found -- I didn't get a reply and never again heard from the "Blog Team.")

Happily, I recognized this years ago, which is one of the main reasons I began my own site here and have been writing for HuffPo far, far less over the years. In fact, I haven't written an original article them in five years, instead just re-posting pieces from here.  So, it doesn't actually affect me much.  And there is almost a sense of relief and even "good riddance" for what has been so poorly managed in recent years.  But the Contributor Platform began life and remained a good and valuable forum in general. And I know others who still write for the Huffington Post today, for which that's gone. 

And to be clear, the Huffington Post has always taken advantage of getting free writing from its unpaid Contributor Platform.  That was always a question of whether or not to participate.  But speaking only personally, it was to my benefit professionally to keep writing for them.  Too many reasons to go into, but among other things I did get income as a result of writing for HuffPo.  Not directly, mind you, but indirectly, hired for work as a result of it.  And I was published in the anthology, Clued in to Politics, published by CQ Press.  (Standing for Congressional Quarterly.)  So, it was worth my while.  But even that dwindled in recent years, with the change of management, which is largely, again, why I began writing on this pages for the most part.

All things do pass.  This is not an "outrage."  After all, they've been driving in this direction for a long time.  And the news coverage of the Huffington Post, which has become its core, will continue.  But unlike a lot of things that do pass...this one was absolutely unnecessary.  And an act of arrogance.  So be it.  Things move on.