The leader of 'Calexit' just announced he's abandoning the movement and settling permanently in Russia

The leader of California separatist group Yes California announced in a 1,600-word statement on Monday that he "intends to make Russia" his "new home" and is therefore withdrawing his petition for a "Calexit" referendum.

Louis Marinelli, who has spearheaded the Calexit campaign since 2015, set up a makeshift embassy in Moscow in December in partnership with far-right Russian nationalists who enjoy Kremlin support while promoting secessionist movements in Europe.

A Big Shoe Just Dropped
I don't know how much attention it's received. But the appearance of the name of Felix Sater in this new article in the Times is one of the biggest shoes I've seen drop on the Trump story in some time.

The new story explains that a group of Trump operatives, including top lawyer Michael Cohen and fired former campaign manager Paul Manafort, along with a pro-Putin Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andrii V. Artemenko and Mr. Sater are pushing President Trump on a 'peace plan' for Russia and Ukraine.

Cohen recently met with Sater and Artemenko; and Cohen agreed to personally deliver the peace plan (actually a sealed envelope with documents detailing it) to the President when he met with him at the White House. Cohen says he left it with General Flynn days before Flynn was forced to resign.

The backstory to all this is amazingly byzantine and murky. Let me try to cover the key points as simply as I can.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-big-shoe-just-dropped

A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of Trump Associates

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

At a time when Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia, and the people connected to him, are under heightened scrutiny — with investigations by American intelligence agencies, the F.B.I. and Congress — some of his associates remain willing and eager to wade into Russia-related efforts behind the scenes.

Mr. Trump has confounded Democrats and Republicans alike with his repeated praise for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his desire to forge an American-Russian alliance. While there is nothing illegal about such unofficial efforts, a proposal that seems to tip toward Russian interests may set off alarms.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-russia.html

...

With the Trump administration’s mendacity, journalists need to be especially careful about not accidentally elevating lies through the creation of articles intended to debunk them. It may seem helpful to run a story headlined “Murder Rates Not at Historic Levels” or “Voter Fraud Not Widespread.” But those kinds of stories may lead people to think more about murder and voter fraud than they did before, prompting them to worry more about such issues — even though the point of the articles is that they should worry less.

Thorson suggested that journalists should focus more on what politicians are doing than what they’re saying. For instance, instead of writing a story focusing on Trump’s false statements about the murder rate, they ought to describe how Trump is trying to create a police state. Then within the text, they could devote a paragraph to the way the administration uses lies to advance unsavory goals.

Journalism is very quote-centric because journalists are interested in the truth. The glory of obtaining a quote from someone interviewed on the public record is that it is, in most cases, indisputably true and easily verified, especially in an age when digital records exist for almost everything. Statistics, policy analysis, ideology and many other things are easy for politicians and their lackeys to distort and quibble over. But a quote — what someone said — has a life of its own.

Unfortunately, that’s just what Trump and his team are counting on when they spin outrageous falsehoods: The quotes will stand out and a somber debunking of the lies might not register with an audience.

Because of this, journalists may to rethink their reliance on quotes, a heretical notion for many. When a quote is a lie, journalists should think about not using it at all. If the lie needs to be cited, it should be buried deep within the story, under the debunking and not put in the headline or the first paragraph. If we learn not to lead with the lies, maybe they will lose some of their stickiness.

NEW YORK — He was found just before 7 a.m. on Election Day, lying on the floor of the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side.
The man was unconscious and unresponsive, with an unidentified head wound — “blunt force trauma,” in cop parlance. By the time emergency responders reached him, he was dead.

Initial reports said the nameless man had plunged to his death from the roof of the consulate. As journalists rushed to the scene, consular officials quickly changed the narrative. The anonymous man had not fallen dozens of feet from the roof of the consular building, they said, but rather had suffered a heart attack in the security office, and died.

Police officers said the death of Sergei Krivov — his name revealed here publicly for the first time — looked natural, and listed the case as closed.

But who was Krivov? And how did he really die? Three months after he was found dead, as tensions between the US and Russia reach a fever pitch, the New York City medical examiner isn’t sure he had a heart attack after all.

As far as paper trails go, dying is a messy thing, even under normal circumstances. But in the months since Krivov’s death, it’s proven nearly impossible to find out how he died, who he was, and how, if at all, federal authorities were involved in any investigation.
English-language news reports said Krivov, identified then only as a 63-year-old Russian national and Manhattan resident, was a security officer. But a November report from Sputnik, the English-language Russian media outlet, says he was a consular duty commander.

From SPLC:

We just learned that the Senate Committee on Homeland Security is taking calls about Steve Bannon's appointment to the National Security Council (NSC).
We’re told that they’re tallying calls.

You might get a busy signal but try, try, try again all this weekend. Leave a message if you get through to voicemail.

The number: 202-224-4751

Be sure to tell the committee that you believe no individual whose primary responsibility is political in nature should be allowed on the NSC or authorized to attend its meetings. Partisan politics have no place in our national security.