Last Call For Thirty-Eight, Twenty, And Zero

Don't look now kids, but Republicans are getting closer to their goal of a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the laws of the land and institute a balanced budget requirement that would cripple the country's economy for good.  Wisconsin now makes the 28th state to do this, and should the GOP get to 38, the game ends...and so does America.

Wisconsin became the 28th state to call for a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution, with a 19-14 vote Tuesday in the Republican-led state Senate.

Lawmakers also approved measures to limit the scope of the convention to the passage of an amendment requiring a balanced federal budget and to determine who would represent the state at such a convention. The first two resolutions do not require Gov. Scott Walker's signature to take effect; the third does.

Walker tweeted Tuesday morning that he supports the measures, which were approved by the Assembly in June.

Senate President Roger Roth, R-Appleton, joined Democrats in opposing the proposals. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, had previously voiced hesitations about the effort, but said the members of his caucus ultimately lined up to support it.

Supporters say they would use the opportunity only to get the federal government's finances in order — in particular, the country's $20 trillion national debt.

"The founders put this in place specifically for times when the federal government was not taking action when there is severe risk," said Sen. Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, the bill's Senate author.

Ahh, but of course those restrictions to limit the proceedings to "just a balanced budget" amendment would be unenforceable hogwash.

Critics of the effort fear a convention would open the door to major constitutional revisions in a "runaway convention," since delegates would not be required to abide by proposed limitations.

"To turn around and open that document up to a convention of people, I think, is extremely risky and dangerous," said Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison.

Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, cited the current political climate, rife with disagreements between political parties and within them, as he argued the time is not right to open the Constitution.

"Do you want to leave the fate of our country in the hands of people on both sides right now who are more full of rage than they are of acceptance?" Erpenbach asked.

Asked later whether he believes restrictions on the scope of the convention can be enforced, Fitzgerald said "it should be a concern."

"It always should be a concern when you have something that could be wide open," Fitzgerald said. "It's just hard to really forecast that right now."

So Republicans need just six more states to agree in order to rewrite the Constitution as they see fit.  Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell all aside, the very, very real threat to America at this point remains Republicans at the state level.  Republicans now have more than a majority of states on record calling for the Constitution to be rewritten.  Should they get to that three-fourths super-majority, all bets are off on America's continued existence.

This is why we need to take states back in 2018.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

With all indications that Robert Mueller is closing in on former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and his son Michael Jr. and that either indictments could be handed down very soon or that Flynn is already cooperating with Mueller in his investigation, the guesswork goes to where Mueller may be headed next by looking at what his all-star team of prosecutors is doing.

His most experienced attorneys have discrete targets, such as former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and current White House aides. Mueller’s longtime chief of staff is coordinating all the lawyers, including some who cover multiple topics. Select FBI special agents have been tapped to question witnesses. 

Spearheading the criminal case against Manafort and his longtime deputy Rick Gates are three prosecutors schooled in money laundering, fraud, foreign bribery and organized crime: Andrew Weissmann, Greg Andres and Kyle Freeny. 

And at the center of the investigation into Flynn is Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama-era deputy assistant attorney general who most recently worked with Mueller at the WilmerHale law firm — and whose name has so far appeared only on publicly available court documents relating to the guilty plea of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Assisting Rhee on the Flynn case is Zainab Ahmad, an assistant U.S. attorney from New York with a specialty in prosecuting and collecting evidence in international criminal and terrorism cases — and whose name hasn’t yet appeared in Russia-related court filings at all. 

Mueller’s org chart pulls back the curtain on how the special counsel’s relatively small team is handling an array of investigative targets ranging from campaign contacts with Russian operatives to possibly Trump himself. 

“Division of labor is essential here,” said Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney who worked with Weissmann in the prosecution of Enron executives in the early 2000s. “There’s got to be some carving up of this thing into nests of facts.” 

Mueller’s investigation began with a focus on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, but he’s free to pursue any crimes he finds. Former Justice officials said the special counsel’s team needs to be flexible as it scrutinizes Trump aides’ contacts with Russians, Manafort’s overseas lobbying, Flynn’s firing due to his failure to disclose conversations with Russian officials, and the president’s decision to oust FBI Director James Comey. They could cast a still wider net; Trump and his lawyers have warned Mueller to stay away from the president’s real estate deals. 

One lawyer in Mueller’s office has indicated publicly that the different parts of the special counsel’s work are interconnected. During Papadopoulos’ plea agreement hearing in October, Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky urged the federal judge to restrict Freedom of Information Act access to the court files because “there’s a large-scale ongoing investigation of which this case is a small part.”

Flynn is a keystone to this whole mess, as was made clear over the weekend as reports that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica sought out stolen DNC emails from WikiLeaks after joining the Trump campaign as data analysts in 2016.

During that same time period, Republican operative Peter W. Smith tried to obtain the Clinton State Department emails. In his search for the emails, he said he was working on behalf of Michael Flynn, a Trump campaign adviser. One of the cyberexperts Smith met, a man named Matt Tait, told Smith that his mission would entail trafficking in stolen emails obtained by Russia. Smith made clear this didn’t bother him. “Smith and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States,” recounted Tait. Despite impressing upon them the ethical and legal dangers of cooperating with a probable Russian intelligence plot, “Smith, however, didn’t seem to care.” 

The Journal also reported last summer that American investigators “have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary.” 

Flynn also worked as a consultant to Cambridge Analytica — a fact he failed to disclose until this last August. We don’t have proof that all these figures were acting together. But it certainly appears that Cambridge Analytica was heavily involved with trying to get Clinton’s stolen emails, and was aware that Russia had engineered their theft, and played an important role facilitating cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The road to Mueller recommending charges against Donald Trump will continue to be a long one, but Mueller has the right people for the job, and that road leads through Michael Flynn.  The issue has always been whether or not the GOP-led House would impeach, or that the Senate would conduct a trial and actually remove a chief executive, or if things would take a Nixonian path and Trump would resign before it got that far.

I'm sure Mueller will have those recommended charges at some point ready to go. I'm far, far less sanguine about believing that Trump or the GOP will actually give a damn, and that's where we get into the truly ugly scenarios.

Part of that remains whether or not the investigation is completed before the 2018 midterm elections come around.  I would suspect that we'll find out the answer to that next summer or sooner.  A GOP facing charges against Trump saying "we refuse to hold an impeachment vote" may run into some issue with the voters next November, just saying.

We'll see.

The Tale Of A Lesser More, Con't

One one hand, accused pedophile and GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is suddenly starting to fall behind in the polls to Democrat Doug Jones for next month's special election.

Democrat Doug Jones is leading Republican Roy Moore in Alabama's Senate race in the wake of explosive accusations of sexual misconduct against Moore, according to a new poll released Sunday.

Forty-six percent of likely voters polled said they would vote for Jones, while 42 percent said they would vote for Moore, according to the Louisiana-based JMC Analytics and Polling.

The survey was conducted on Nov. 9 and Nov. 11, after The Washington Post reported that a woman said Moore had initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was 14 years old and he was 32.

In RealClearPolitics's average of polls, Moore was leading by 6 points prior to the Post report. A Friday poll, the first following the scandal, found Moore and Jones tied.

On the other hand, enthusiasm for the special election among Moore supporters is on the rise.

On Friday, Moore called the allegations "false, false, [and] misleading" and at a Veterans' Day event on Saturday, the Republican candidate said, "Everybody on this room, every person watching on these cameras, should ask theirselves, 'Isn't it strange that after 40 years of constant investigation people have waited until four weeks prior to the general election to bring their complaints?'"

Moore finds his defenders back home while the climate is less hospitable in Washington, where GOP senators, as well as the White House, have called on the conservative firebrand to drop out of the race if the report is true.

Of more than 15 Republican voters in Alabama interviewed by NBC News, none said their support for Moore would change.
Most said they didn't believe the allegations and some said even if they are true, that wouldn't sway their vote for him next month because they think Moore is a good man, should be forgiven and they could never bring themselves to vote for a Democrat anyway. Several attacked the media.

On the gripping hand, as Jerry Pournelle used to write, Steve Bannon's odious crew is now doing everything they can to victimize the women who came forward to denounce Moore a second time. Jon Swan at Politico 2.0:

Steve Bannon has sent two of Breitbart News' top reporters, Matt Boyle and Aaron Klein, to Alabama. Their mission: to discredit the Washington Post's reporting on Roy Moore's alleged sexual misconduct with teenagers.

Bottom line: This story is about to get even uglier, if that's imaginable. I expect more counter-attacks will play out in Breitbart News and other outlets over the coming days.

A story that popped today — splashed over the Breitbart homepage — contains what the website claims is a major hole in the account of Leigh Corfman, who says Alabama Senate candidate, Moore, made sexual advances on her when she was 14 years old.

Klein reports from Birmingham, Alabama: "Speaking by phone to Breitbart News on Saturday, Corfman's mother, Nancy Wells, 71, says that her daughter did not have a phone in her bedroom during the period that Moore is reported to have allegedly called Corfman – purportedly on Corfman's bedroom phone – to arrange at least one encounter."

Why this matters: It's quite a head-scratcher as to why Breitbart thinks this bedroom phone detail matters. As Corfman's mother told Breitbart "the phone in the house could get through to her easily." Wells stands by her daughter's allegations. But the fact Breitbart is running stories like this shows the extremes to which it may go to discredit Moore's accusers.
Another hard truth: Many Alabama voters hold the mainstream media in such low regard that they've dismissed the Washington Post's reporting entirely.

I still remained convinced that Bannon will be able to rally enough anger and hatred to put Moore in office.  Moore may not win by double digits, but he'll win.  It doesn't matter what you and I think, it matter what Alabama voters think.  "All politics is local" is hoary old saw for a good reason, and Alabama Republicans will elect Moore just to piss off the rest of the country.

Watch.

StupidiNews!

• Iranian state TV is reporting some 300 dead and 4,000 injured as a magnitude 7.3 quake shook the Iran-Iraq border late Sunday, nearly all of the casualties are on the Iranian side.
• Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte met with Donald Trump in Manila on the last leg of Trump's Asia trip, protesters were broken up by police with water cannons and batons.
• A majority of Spaniards want early national elections as a chance to weigh in or Catalan's failed independence bid as the region has been ordered to hold new elections on December 21.
• Rumors that Saudi King Salman will abdicate the throne in favor of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are completely untrue according to Saudi officials.
• SpaceX competitor Sierra Nevada has successfully tested its Dream Chaser space plane, on track for a 2019 launch as a NASA cargo transport for the International Space Station.

Last Call For Doing The Electric Slide

Turns out that Whitefish Energy was all set to bilk Puerto Rico out of tens of millions for getting the lights back on, and they couldn't even do that right.

The small energy outfit from Montana that won a $300 million contract to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s tattered power grid had few employees of its own, so it did what the Puerto Rican authorities could have done: It turned to Florida for workers.

For their trouble, the six electrical workers from Kissimmee are earning $42 an hour, plus overtime. The senior power linemen from Lakeland are earning $63 an hour working in Puerto Rico, the Florida utility said. Their 40 co-workers from Jacksonville, also linemen, are making up to $100 earning double time, public records show.

But the Montana company that hired the workers, Whitefish Energy Holdings, had a contract that allowed it to bill the Puerto Rican public power company, known as Prepa, $319 an hour for linemen, a rate that industry experts said was far above the norm even for emergency work — and almost 17 times the average salary of their counterparts in Puerto Rico.

A spokesman for Whitefish, Chris Chiames, defended the costs, saying that “simply looking at the rate differential does not take into account Whitefish’s overhead costs,” which were built into the rate.

“We have to pay a premium to entice the labor to come to Puerto Rico to work,” Mr. Chiames said. Many workers are paid overtime for all the time they work. Overtime pay varies by type of worker, union membership, mainland utility company and many other factors.

The markup is among the reasons that federal officials are scrutinizing all other contracts involving Puerto Rico. The control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances is seeking more authority over the billions headed the island’s way, including the power to review big contracts and randomly inspect smaller ones.

Two weeks after Prepa abruptly withdrew the contract from Whitefish following strong criticism by federal and congressional officials of the company’s expected ability to perform the work needed, more questions are being raised about the deal, including how much it will actually cost. Whitefish will keep repairing power lines until Nov. 30.

As the Trump administration prepares to spend billions of dollars on rebuilding Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, the Whitefish deal — hatched in a dim powerless room six days after a storm packing winds of nearly 150 miles an hour knocked down thousands of power poles and lines — has served as a cautionary note about the potential for soaring costs that are common in the wake of disasters.

The Whitefish Energy contract is not serving as a "cautionary note" at all. As Naomi Klein warned us about some ten years ago with Dubya, it's serving as an instruction manual for the Trump regime.  The entire year of 2017 has been the GOP's brutal application of Klein's "Shock Doctrine" theory in action.

It will only get worse. They're not hiding it anymore because they don't have to.

The Return Of The 50-State Strategy

DNC Chair Tom Perez makes the strong argument that in the Trump Era, all GOP seats should be considered "in-play" and that Democrats should leave no federal or state seat uncontested.

"Democrats can compete and win everywhere," Perez told "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatzin an interview Sunday. "That's what we showed last week not just in New Jersey and Virginia, but in mayor's races and state senate races."

Democrats won governorships in Virginia, with the victory of Ralph Northam, and New Jersey, where Phil Murphy came out on top.

Perez said it is the first time since 2005 that Democrats won the governor's office in both states.

It's about time, too. Dems can and should fight on the issues, and if they do, they win.

Raddatz asked the DNC chair about a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll showing that 61 percent of Americans say Democratic leaders are mainly criticizing Trump, not presenting alternatives.

Perez countered that the party's candidates led with "our values" in the 2017 elections.

"We were leading with our values in Virginia and elsewhere. We talked about health care a lot because health care is a right for all, not a privilege," he said. "The number one issue for voters in Virginia was health care. They understand that the Republicans are trying to take their health care away.”

We already know what the Democratic alternative to Trump is, we saw eight years of it and Trump is doing his dead-level best to eliminate it.   For Democrats to take back the House and Senate, that means candidates who can win in redder districts, and that means backing military veterans.

"There's no doubt that veterans have unique qualifications and experiences that give them important credibility with Democrats, independents and Republican voters alike," Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Tyler Law told ABC News.

Party officials acknowledge that when they were looking for strong recruits to replenish the Democratic party bench this year, their teams often sought candidates with military experience. But, they argue, veterans have also stepped up in droves and decided to run on their own since the presidential election last year.

The DCCC expects 30 or 40 of its candidates next year will be veterans, a major uptick from recent cycles.

VoteVets, an organization that supports Democratic candidates, told ABC News they recently hired additional staff to handle the increased number of calls from veterans who are thinking about running for office. The group’s co-founder, Jon Soltz, said the DCCC reached out to his group early on, despite the fact that the two organizations have not always seen eye to eye. In 2014, VoteVets backed Rep. Seth Moulton’s, D-Mass., campaign against a sitting Democratic incumbent. This year, though, the two teams are meeting monthly to review the status of veteran candidates’ campaigns.

“This was an equation that worked for Democrats in 2006,” Soltz told ABC News, referring to the last time the Democrats won back the majority in the House. “People trust a veteran as a messenger. They are running because they want to continue to serve their country. They can talk to working class Americans where the Democratic party is struggling.”

You have only to see how Donald Trump treats the US military -- as his personal plaything -- to see why veterans are stepping up to run against the GOP.  Here in Kentucky that means folks like Lt. Col. Amy McGrath.

McGrath offers a pretty standard Democratic response to GOP tax cuts (“fiscally irresponsible and in my opinion just morally wrong”) and attacks on the Affordable Care Act (from which Kentucky has benefitedimmensely). But she packs some surprises, too.

The most important may be McGrath’s unusually positive message on American government. As a Marine, she toured the world (“except for the nice places”), living in tents in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan. After looking around, she thinks American democracy isn’t as swampy, dysfunctional and broken as it's advertised to be.

“The concern I have is this constant bashing of our institutions, of our principles, bashing the government itself,” she said. “Trust me, I’ve been to countries where there’s no government. And our government’s pretty damned good.”

We can make American governing institutions better, she said, "but we can’t make them better if nobody wants to go into them because we’re bashing them.”

She’s similarly concerned that core American principles are being undermined by attacks and indifference. “Our constitutional principles, which you can say, ‘Well, they’re on a paper and they’ll never be taken away.’ Folks, we have to fight for those every day. Freedom of the press -- you think that can’t go away? OK. Maybe.”

McGrath is mounting her first campaign systematically, pragmatically, balancing fundraising against other concerns. She has kept her distance from Emily's List, the financial engine that powers the campaigns of many Democratic pro-choice women. I thought that might suggest unorthodox Democratic views on abortion; I was wrong.

“I’m one-hundred percent pro-choice. I align with everything Emily's List aligns with,” she told me.

Then why isn’t she raking in the pro-choice dough?

“I don’t want to be tied to a litmus test,” McGrath said. “I don’t want to be tied to any national interest like that, where people can say, you’re just a puppet.”

I wish she was running here in KY-4 against Thomas Massie, but I'll take her winning KY-6 back. Like it or not, being the Emily's List candidate in Kentucky isn't a good thing.  We have to have Dems that can win so we can get the majority in order to make policy if we're going to have any hope of redeeming the government after Trump.

We need more of this.  A lot more.  And I'm glad we're getting it.

Sunday Long Read: You Can Lead White Voters To Water...

...but you can't make them think.

Pam Schilling is the reason Donald Trump is the president. 

Schilling’s personal story is in poignant miniature the story of this area of western Pennsylvania as a whole—one of the long-forgotten, woebegone spots in the middle of the country that gave Trump his unexpected victory last fall. She grew up in nearby Nanty Glo, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners. She once had a union job packing meat at a grocery store, and then had to settle for less money at Walmart. Now she’s 60 and retired, and last year, in April, as Trump’s shocking political ascent became impossible to ignore, Schilling’s 32-year-old son died of a heroin overdose. She found needles in the pockets of the clothes he wore to work in the mines before he got laid off.

Desperate for change, Schilling, like so many other once reliable Democrats in these parts, responded enthusiastically to what Trump was saying—building a wall on the Mexican border, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, bringing back jobs in steel and coal. That’s what Trump told them. At a raucous rally in late October, right downtown in their minor-league hockey arena, he vowed to restore the mines and the mills that had been the lifeblood of the region until they started closing some 40 years ago, triggering the “American carnage” Trump would talk about in his inaugural address: massive population loss, shrinking tax rolls, communal hopelessness and ultimately a raging opioid epidemic. When Trump won, people here were ecstatic. But they’d heard generations of politicians make big promises before, and they were also impatient for him to deliver. 

“Six months to a year,” catering company owner Joey Del Signore told me when we met days after the election. “A couple months,” retired nurse Maggie Frear said, before saying it might take a couple years. “He’s just got to follow through with what he said he was going to do,” Schilling said last November. Back then, there was an all-but-audible “or else.” 

A year later, the local unemployment rate has ticked down, and activity in a few coal mines has ticked up. Beyond that, though, not much has changed—at least not for the better. Johnstown and the surrounding region are struggling in the same ways and for the same reasons. The drug problem is just as bad. “There’s nothing good in the area,” Schilling said the other day in her living room. “I don’t have anything good to say about anything in this area. It’s sad.” Even so, her backing for Trump is utterly undiminished: “I’m a supporter of him, 100 percent.” 

What I heard from Schilling is overwhelmingly what I heard in my follow-up conversations with people here that I talked to last year as well. Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most. 

“I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”

It never mattered what Trump actually did otherwise, as long as he followed through on his promise to make those people miserable again after 2008.

When I asked Del Signore about the past year here, he said he “didn’t see any change because we got a new president.” He nonetheless remains an ardent proponent. “He’s our answer.” 

I asked Schilling what would happen if the next three years go the way the last one has.
“I’m not going to blame him,” Schilling said. “Absolutely not.” 

Is there anything that could change her mind about Trump? 

“Nope,” she said.

White Trump voters are proudly and unrepentantly racist, until the end.  Trump made that acceptable, and they will love him forever for it.

Period.

Stop chasing them, Dems.  They are lost to you.  The rest of us will have to carry on in spite of them.

They will turn out to re-elect Trump in 2020.  Better make sure there's a lot more of us than them, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

Here endeth the lesson.

Last Call For The Void Of History

Everything old is new again in Europe.

About 60,000 anti-Islam, anti-immigrant nationalists and fascists trooped through Warsaw on Saturday, marking Poland’s Independence Day in a striking display of right-wing strength.

For the event, the marchers chose the slogan “We Want God,” a phrase from a Polish religious song that was uttered by President Trump during his visit to Poland in July.

The march, organized by a Polish youth movement, drew extremists from around Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that banners displayed slogans such as “White Europe,” Europe Will be White,” and “Clean Blood.” Al Jazeera reports that some of the marchers’ chants “directed expletives at refugees, leftists, liberal media outlets, and the U.S.”

As Poland’s government has veered hard to the right in recent years, the march has become the premier event every Independence Day, supplanting official commemorations in visibility. Poland’s government appears to be supportive of that development.

“It was a beautiful sight,” Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said. “We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”

November 2017 is starting to feel like November 1937, and that's not a good thing.

Not a good thing at all. 

The Tale Of A Lesser Moore, Con't

Alabama Republicans are scrambling to do something about accused pedophile Roy Moore being their state's next senator, with several (mostly male) state lawmakers weighing in to say Moore is fine and that he should run and win next month, no problem.  One Alabama Republican went as far to say that the women who brought up these allegations should be prosecuted and jailed.

Prominent Republicans are calling on Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama Senate race after multiple women have come forward to accuse him of propositioning them when they were teens. But at least one conservative is in Moore’s corner: Alabama State Rep. Ed Henry.

Henry, who represents Hartselle in Cullen County, claims that if the allegations are true, his accusers deserve to be prosecuted for not reporting his actions sooner.

“If they believe this man is predatory, they are guilty of allowing him to exist for 40 years,” he told The Cullman Times on Thursday. “I think someone should prosecute and go after them. You can’t be a victim 40 years later, in my opinion.”

Republicans know this is another Todd Akin situation developing and they are willing to try anything in order to save themselves, and that means finding a way for current placeholder Sen. Luther Strange to win.

Some Senate Republicans have encouraged Mr. Strange — who lost to Mr. Moore in a bitterly contested Republican runoff election in September — to run as a write-in candidate, an option Mr. Strange is considering, according to Republicans who have spoken with him. But some Republicans believe he would do little more than play spoiler, ensuring either that Mr. Moore is elected by taking votes Mr. Jones would otherwise get or that the Democrat wins by siphoning support from Mr. Moore among Republicans seeking a palatable third option.

Mr. McConnell and Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, spoke with Mr. Strange about the prospect immediately after the Moore news broke on Thursday, according to Republicans familiar with the conversation. And Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who won re-election in 2010 as a write-in candidate, was planning to discuss logistics with Mr. Strange this weekend.

Asked Friday if he thought Mr. Strange should run as a write-in candidate, Mr. McConnell said only that “you’d have to ask Luther what his intentions are, given this development.”

Republicans in Washington and Alabama have also approached other potential candidates about a write-in effort, including Representative Robert B. Aderholt, a mainstream conservative from northern Alabama. But it is unclear that any prominent Republican will be willing to mount a wild-card campaign for the Senate unless Mr. Moore stands down first.

Absent Mr. Moore’s cooperation, Republicans in Washington have conferred with election lawyers to explore other long-shot options for replacing or marginalizing him, several of which would probably lead to a clash in court with Mr. Moore and his supporters.

But the manuevering is getting Byzantine for a reason.

One approach that Republicans are considering, according to people briefed on the deliberations, would involve asking Gov. Kay Ivey to order a new date for the election — sometime early next year — and giving the party time to ease Mr. Moore from the race.

Alabama election law requires candidates to withdraw at least 76 days before an election in order to be replaced on the ballot, a deadline Mr. Moore has already missed.

State law gives the governor broad authority to set the date of special elections, and Ms. Ivey, who is a Republican, already rescheduled the Senate election once, after inheriting the governor’s office in April when her predecessor, Robert Bentley, resigned in a sex and corruption scandal. Ms. Ivey’s advisers have not ruled out exercising that power again, according to Republicans in touch with her camp, but she has signaled that she would like reassurances of support from the White House before taking such an aggressive step.

Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist close to Mr. McConnell, said presidential intervention was needed to bring any order to the situation in Alabama. He suggested that President Trump could personally nudge Mr. Moore out of the race and back a write-in campaign by Mr. Strange, or perhaps Mr. Sessions, a popular figure with Alabama Republicans.

You catch that last part?

The part where Jeff Sessions runs a write-in campaign to get his old Senate seat back?

Now how many problems would THAT solve for Trump?  Sessions would no longer be Attorney General. Trump would have to appoint a new one.

One who would end the Mueller investigation and go after Clinton and the Democrats instead.

Stay tuned.  I think there's going to be some serious movement on this.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

On Friday the White House remarked that Donald Trump would not be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam because of "scheduling conflicts". Then all reporters were kicked out except for FOX News US state media.

Nearly all U.S. journalists covering U.S. President Donald Trump’s appearance at a major economic summit in Vietnam were barred from attending key events Friday and Saturday, including photo-ops featuring interactions between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The small group of U.S.-based reporters who track Trump’s movements abroad, known as the travel pool, was largely relegated to a holding room on Saturday while nearly two dozen world leaders posed for photographs and mingled at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Danang.

A Fox News video crew and an official White House photographer were granted access to the meetings. Fox was the news organization that was tasked with providing pool video to other news outlets. But the rest of the pool reporters, including independent photographers from U.S. news organizations, were blocked from covering the event.

A similar situation unfolded Friday night, when planned coverage of an APEC dinner with Trump and other leaders was scrapped, leaving print reporters, photographers and other members of the pool without the ability to cover the event.

New York Times Photographer Doug Mills, who is traveling with the president as part of the pool, tweeted his frustration at the lack of access, with an image of a black square attached. “This what our APEC Summit photo coverage looks today (sic) in Da Nang Vietnam. Blank. No coverage by the White House Travel Pool photographers traveling with @realDonaldTrump.”

The White House said it asked for more access for pool reporters, but was denied.

“We have been negotiating since the pre-advance and have made progress on almost every event for this swing,” Michelle Meadows, a White House official helping to organize the trip, told reporters in an email Friday when asked why they were not given access to the event. “We ALWAYS ask for the full Pool to have access but we do not always get what we want.”

Which naturally meant Trump met with Putin and didn't want the world to know.  Afterwards we got some very strong and very curious statements from both men.  First, US and Russia joint military cooperation in Syria will continue pretty much forever.

President Vladimir Putin and U.S. leader Donald Trump agreed to support a political reconciliation in Syria with the participation of Bashar el-Assad while maintaining the existing two-nation communication channels used to fight Islamic State.

The leaders are satisfied with the “successful U.S.-Russia” military efforts that have “dramatically accelerated” the group’s battlefield losses, according to a joint statement issued after the leaders met briefly on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam.

“These efforts will continue until the final defeat of Islamic State,” according to the statement. A U.S. official who requested anonymity said the joint statement shows both leaders back a political solution and peace process.

We're currently giving Moscow an effectively permanent military foothold in the Middle East and helping them do it, giving Putin military ground access to Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and of course Lebanon, the current Saudi-Iran flashpoint.  Oh, and Moscow's money laundering capital of Cyprus is just 150 miles off the coast of Syria.  Vlad couldn't ask for a better base of operations.

He's got us cold, so he's feeling pretty confident, enough to publicly accuse the Democrats of making up the entire Mueller investigation.

An alleged link between U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russia is being fabricated by Trump’s opponents as a weapon against Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday.

Reports that Putin’s relatives were involved in contacts with Trump administration were untrue, Putin told a briefing at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam. 

And here's the kicker - Trump not only copped to meeting with Putin, Trump of course believes him 100%.

While agreeing to renew peace efforts in Syria, President Trump said Saturday that Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin denied interfering in the 2016 election.

President Trump confirmed the agreement, telling reporters that he and Putin had "two or three very short conversations," in which they largely discussed Syria — though he said Putin also denied Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

“He said he didn't meddle,” Trump said. “He said he didn't meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did." 

In fact on the way home from Vietnam Trump attacked his own intelligence agencies. Again.

President Trump on Saturday lashed out at U.S. intelligence leaders for their conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, calling them “political hacks” and slamming the investigations into Russian interference as a “Democratic hit job.”

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump blasted former U.S. intelligence officials by name, including former CIA director John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey."I mean, give me a break, they are political hacks," Trump said, according to CNN. 

"So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”

“So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with them," he continued, referring to the Russian president.

Trump said that the investigation into Russian interference in the election was a “Democratic-inspired thing” and a “pure hit job."

If there's somehow any doubt that Moscow has metric craptons of compromising information on Trump, well understand that Putin is now in charge of our Syria policy and the Justice Department for starters.

Meanwhile here stateside, as many people suspected, the "senior policy adviser" in Robert Mueller's announcement of George Papadapoulos's guilty plea is Trump's Nazi buddy Stephen Miller.

At midday on March 24, 2016, an improbable group gathered in a London cafe to discuss setting up a meeting between Donald J. Trump, then a candidate, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

There was George Papadopoulos, a 28-year-old from Chicago with an inflated résumé who just days earlier had been publicly named as a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. There was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic in his mid-50s with a faltering career who boasted of having high-level contacts in the Russian government.

And, perhaps most mysteriously, there was Olga Polonskaya, a 30-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg and the former manager of a wine distribution company. Mr. Mifsud introduced her to Mr. Papadopoulos as Mr. Putin’s niece, according to court papers. Mr. Putin has no niece.

The interactions between the three players and a fourth man with contacts inside Russia’s Foreign Ministry have become a central part of the inquiry by the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, into the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election. Recently released court documents suggest that the F.B.I. suspected that some of the people who showed interest in Mr. Papadopoulos were participants in a Russian intelligence operation.

The March 2016 meeting was followed by a breakfast the next month at a London hotel during which Mr. Mifsud revealed to Mr. Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” That was months before the theft of a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee by Russian-sponsored hackers became public.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are seeking to determine who — if anyone — in the Trump campaign Mr. Papadopoulos told about the stolen emails. Although there is no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos emailed that information to the campaign, Mr. Papadopoulos was in regular contact that spring with top campaign officials, including Stephen Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, according to interviews and campaign documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The revelations about Mr. Papadopoulos’s activities are part of a series of disclosures in the past two weeks about communications between Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials or self-described intermediaries for the Russian government. Taken together, they show not only that the contacts were more extensive than previously known, but also that senior campaign officials were aware of them.

Miller is still in the White House.  I don't think that will be the case much longer.

Have a nice day.

Meanwhile, In Minnesota...

Our old friends the Three Percenters are back in the news, and they're ready for The Second Civil War (which they are totally not trying to cause, you guys.)

Joshua Raider is a commanding officer in the United Patriots of Minnesota 3% and one of the few willing to talk about the movement publicly. He said people told him not to do an interview. His brother video-taped the conversation between Raider and the Fox 9 Investigators.

When asked what the group stands for he replied: “Protecting community, gun rights, the 2nd amendment, that kind of stuff. Pretty straight up stuff.” 

The name, 3 Percenters, comes from the American Revolution, a belief, long-disputed, that only three percent of the colonists took up arms against England.

The 3 Percenters share ideological DNA with other right wing extremist groups, like the Posse Comitatus, The Oath Keepers, and Sovereign Citizens, and especially the militia and patriot movements.

The group, about 400 members strong, has become social media savvy, spreading their message and sharing pictures on Facebook.

3 Percenters have regular training exercises around the country, like this one in Colorado. They say they’re preparing for natural disasters, a terror attack or if everything goes to hell. One of the participants said there were people from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Colorado taking part in the training. 

“I think our country is possibly heading toward civil war,” said Raider. 

When asked if the groups are racists he said: “I disagree with the white supremacist movement. I disagree with the black supremacist movement.” 

“We do not accept hate mongering in our group,” he added. 

According to Raider, their members in Minnesota come from all walks of life, including law enforcement, but he also admits they’ve had a few bad apples.

“I run into nuts here and there who try to join our group. You have to weed them out right off the bat,” he said. “Obviously no one thought to check out Jason Thomas.” 

Jason Thomas was the leader of the 3 Percenters in Minnesota, until his home in Red Wing was raided by the FBI earlier this year.

“Simply just to protect civilian population from man-made and natural threats,” he told the Fox 9 Investigators. 

When asked if the government is a man-made threat he replied, “Yes, governments have historically killed more of their people than anyone else.” 

According to a previously sealed search warrant, the FBI considers the Minnesota 3 Percenters a “militia group which believes in the violent resistance to or intended overthrow of the U.S. Government.” 

“I don’t know why they’re targeting us, just the ideology we have,” said Thomas. 

The FBI said it was also what Thomas wrote on Facebook: “I can guaranty (sic) you that I’ll be one of the first to start killing feds…. And am actually trying to build up our capacity to challenge them” (March 12, 2016). 

When asked if he meant federal agents he replied, “can’t comment on that”.

Just because Obama is no longer president doesn't mean that militia groups have gone away.  It just means the FBI and the media isn't watching them as closely.

I guarantee you though that as soon as removing Trump from office becomes a real option, these guys are going to be the first to say that if Trump goes, so do the safeties on their weapons.

Watch.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Time to check in with the Mueller team again, and we've got news that the investigation is expanding into new areas.  First, Mueller's interviews with Trump regime aides in the White House continue, this week moving closer to Trump himself by focusing on Trump speechwriter and white supremacist cheerleader Stephen Miller and his role in Trump's firing of FBI director James Comey.

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has been interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, according to sources familiar with the investigation. 

The interview brings the special counsel investigation into President Donald Trump's inner circle in the White House. Miller is the highest-level aide still working at the White House known to have talked to investigators. 

Miller's role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey was among the topics discussed during the interview as part of the probe into possible obstruction of justice, according to one of the sources. 

Special counsel investigators have also shown interest in talking to attendees of a March 2016 meeting where foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos said that he could arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin through his connections. Miller was also at the meeting, according to a source familiar with the meeting. 

Papadopoulos was recently charged with lying to the FBI about Russian contacts he had during the campaign. 

Earlier this year, Miller assisted Trump in writing a memo that explained why Trump planned to fire Comey, according to sources familiar with the matter. Eventually that memo was scrapped because of opposition by White House counsel Don McGahn, who said its contents were problematic, according to The New York Times. The Comey dismissal letter -- drafted during a May weekend at Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey -- has also drawn interest from the Mueller team. Sources tell CNN that White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, who was also in New Jersey that weekend, did not oppose the decision to fire Comey. CNN has reported the special counsel's team is asking questions in interviews with witnesses about Kushner's role in Comey's firing. 

The Times reported in September that the Justice Department had turned over a copy of the letter, which was never sent, to special counsel Robert Mueller. That memo, according to a source, was very similar to a letter written by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that was cited as the reason for firing Comey. Rosenstein's letter criticized Comey's handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server. 

But just days after the firing, Trump said he considered the Russia probe in his decision to fire Comey.

We know Miller was involved in Trump's now infamous May memo outlining his reasons to fire Comey, and now we know Mueller is definitely interested in that memo and Miller's role in it.  If Trump fired Comey in order to protect himself from the Russia investigation, that's obstruction of justice.  Comey interviewing Miller over this specifically is further evidence that possible obstruction charges are coming.

And speaking of coming charges, that brings us to story two this week:  Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn's lobbying for Turkey and President Erdogan may have turned into a channel to order the US to round up and extradite Erdogan's political foes in the states to Turkey.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's alleged plan to forcibly extradite a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania is now a part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. 

Why it matters: Flynn had previously done consulting work on behalf of the Turkish government, which he failed to disclose before joining the Trump administration. This meeting would have taken place during the transition and after he had accepted his position as Trump's national security advisor, which occurred on November 18.

The details: Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn, Jr., reportedly met with Turkish representatives in New York in December to discuss delivering cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is living legally in the United States in exile, to Turkey in exchange for as much as $15 million. The plan would have involved transporting Gulen to a Turkish island prison via a private jet. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Gulen of fomenting 2016's failed coup attempt against him. 

And it's not the first time this plan came up as Flynn held a similar meeting with high-level Turks, including Turkey's foreign minister and Erdogan's son-in-law last September. Former CIA Director James Woolsey attended that meeting, telling the WSJ that the plan then involved "a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away." Woolsey later turned down his consulting fee for the meeting and alerted then-Vice President Joe Biden about its content.

Remember, Erdogan has been blaming last year's coup attempt on Gulen and his followers since it happened, and he kind of needs Gulen in order to crush the very real rumors that Erdogan planned the whole thing himself so he could crack heads.

The Flynn "kidnap and rendition" story we've known about since March and again, we now know that Mueller is looking into this as well.

But Flynn is in trouble on more than one front.  It's not just Erdogan, but his contact with other suspected Russian-influenced politicians like GOP Rep. Dana Rorhabacher.

Investigators for Special Counsel Robert Mueller are questioning witnesses about an alleged September 2016 meeting between Mike Flynn, who later briefly served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a staunch advocate of policies that would help Russia, two sources with knowledge of the investigation told NBC News.

The meeting allegedly took place in Washington the evening of Sept. 20, while Flynn was working as an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign. It was arranged by his lobbying firm, the Flynn Intel Group. Also in attendance were Flynn’s business partners, Bijan Kian and Brian McCauley, and Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, who worked closely with his father, the sources said.

Mueller is reviewing emails sent from Flynn Intel Group to Rohrabacher’s congressional staff thanking them for the meeting, according to one of the sources, as part of his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Rohrabacher, a California Republican, has pushed for better relations with Russia, traveled to Moscow to meet with officials and advocated to overturn the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 bill that froze assets of Russian investigators and prosecutors. The sources could not confirm whether Rohrabacher and Flynn discussed U.S. policy towards Russia in the alleged meeting.

The Washington Post reported in May that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, also a California Republican, was secretly recorded telling other party members, in what seemed to be a joke, "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump."

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rohrabacher offered Trump a deal that to protect Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks, which released emails damaging to Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election, from legal peril. In return for not prosecuting him for his group's 2010 leak of State Department emails, Assange would allegedly provide proof that Russia was not the source of the hacked Democratic emails. The intelligence community has pointed to Russia as the secret provider of the email trove to WikiLeaks.

Rohrabacher's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As I keep saying, expect more charges as the dominoes fall and things get closer to Donald Trump.  We're coming up on the one year in office mark and there's already talk of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic again.

The White House is bracing for another staff shakeup upon President Donald Trump’s return from Asia, with senior-level staff moves that could further consolidate chief of staff John Kelly’s power in the West Wing. 

Deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn — a former top aide to Jeff Sessions in the Senate who played a central role during the presidential transition — is expected to be reassigned to the Commerce Department or another federal agency, according to multiple administration officials and outside advisers familiar with plans for the staff change.

Dearborn’s portfolio over the past year has covered high-level assignments, including helping to organize the president’s schedule. But that job has since been passed to another deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin, while Dearborn has become increasingly marginalized internally since Kelly’s arrival in late July. 

Dearborn’s departure would make him the latest in a growing conga line of West Wing aides who started on Inauguration Day but failed to last a full year. It would help Kelly clear the ranks of staffers he inherited from his predecessor Reince Priebus, whose tenure was marked by infighting and competition between loyalists brought in from the Republican National Committee and alumni of Trump’s renegade campaign.

Keep in mind Mueller is talking to many of these departed aides.  Don't be surprised if Dearborn's name comes up in Mueller's hunt either.  He's a direct link between Trump and Sessions during the 2016 campaign, and he would have had access to both during the March-June 2016 timeframe that Mueller is concentrating on.

Stay tuned.

The Lessons Of Tuesday Night, Con't

Ron Brownstein at the Atlantic makes the argument that for Dems to win, they definitely need black voters and high turnout.  But to win the House back through gerrymandering, dog whistles, and voter suppression, Dems need college-educated white voters, and in Virginia and New Jersey this week, they did that.

The soaring wave of discontent translated into solid turnout and crushing margins for Democrats in their key voter groups, all of which have expressed intense resistance to Trump in polls. Although they declined in number from last year’s presidential race, Millennials slightly increased their share of the vote in both states compared with the 2013 gubernatorial races there. Sixty-nine percent of those young people gave their votes to Northam, and 75 percent gave their votes to Murphy. That’s a chilling trend for Republicans, given that more Millennials will be eligible to vote than baby boomers in 2018 and 2020. Turnout among African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities was also solid. In both states, Democrats carried roughly four out of five non-white voters.

But the principal engine of the Democratic sweep was a suburban tsunami in white-collar communities in Northern Virginia, Northern New Jersey, and even the suburbs of Seattle, where Democrats convincingly captured a state Senate seat that flipped control of that chamber to them. Those results will surely unnerve every U.S. House Republican holding a well-educated suburban seat.

“Tonight, college-educated white voters … collectively stood up and said, ‘Enough,’” said Jesse Ferguson, a former communications director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “If I was a Republican representing a suburb, I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight because there’s a storm brewing.”

Four years after Republican Chris Christie carried almost two-thirds of whites in New Jersey with at least a four-year college education, Murphy won 52 percent of them. In Virginia, Democrats had won between 42 percent and 45 percent of college-educated whites in each of their recent victories there, including Barack Obama’s in 2012, Governor Terry McAuliffe’s in 2013, Senator Mark Warner’s in 2014, and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. But Northam blew past them to capture 51 percent of college-educated whites against Republican Ed Gillespie.

That emphatic shift undoubtedly reflected a backlash against Gillespie’s turn toward Trump-like themes of cultural confrontation on so-called “sanctuary cities” and Confederate monuments. But it also quantified how much of a potential burden Trump poses for the GOP among those well-educated voters: Fully 58 percent of Virginia’s college-educated whites said they disapproved of his job performance in the exit poll.

Not only did white-collar voters shift toward the Democrats, but they also registered their discontent in astonishing numbers. Northam won populous and affluent Fairfax County by about twice as many votes as McAuliffe in 2013 and Warner in 2014—and, incredibly, by even more than Obama in 2012. Northam bested the McAuliffe and Warner margins by 50 percent or more in Arlington and Alexandria counties just outside of D.C. Just as important, the stampede toward the Democrats extended to suburban Richmond counties, including Henrico and Chesterfield, where the GOP had remained much stronger than in Northern Virginia. It also extended down the ballot to the state House of Delegates. Democrats not only captured several open seats, but they also defeated enough Republican incumbents holding suburban seats to create a dead-even split in the chamber, pending recounts.

“In these urban areas, Trump has taken over the Republican brand, like it or not,” said former Republican Representative Tom Davis, whose district was in Northern Virginia. “The immigrant [policy], his language, his rhetoric—everything is tailored here to that white, non-college[-educated] base in everything he does. He just has no appeal to those suburban people, either personally or politically.”

It's a fair argument, as much as it makes me grumble trying to rely on "college-educated" voters who somehow thought Donald Trump was a good idea for the country.  But the Obama coalition does include younger white voters who turned out for him in 2008 and 2012.  Maybe 2016 was an error on their part and we need them in 2018 to expand the base.

I'm willing to entertain that to an extent, and that extent is "college-educated white women did give Northam a 16-point lead."  But these were also the exact voters who were supposed to materialize for Hillary Clinton in swing states in the Midwest.  Overall, Trump won college-educated white voters 48-45% last year.

They failed us a year ago on their judgment of Trump.  Let's try for them, but we cannot depend too much on them going forward and must continue to prioritize efforts to expand the number of voters of color instead.

Meanwhile, Tuesday's ass-kicking in Virginia means the number of GOP congressional retirements ahead of 2018 is now up to 30.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Thursday that he will not seek reelection, becoming the latest in a string of GOP lawmaker retirements. 

Goodlatte, 65, is the third term-limited House committee chairman to announce his plans to leave the chamber within the past week. 

"With my time as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee ending in December 2018, this is a natural stepping-off point and an opportunity to begin a new chapter of my career and spend more time with my family, particularly my granddaughters," Goodlatte said in a letter to supporters.

Goodlatte's district is pretty safely in GOP hands, but not as safely as it was on Monday.   We'll see.

The Tale Of A Lesser Moore

Alabama's special election for Jeff Sessions's old seat is next month, and the candidates are two lawyers: Democrat Doug Jones, who successfully prosecuted the two remaining KKK members who committed the infamous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, and Roy Moore, a man removed from the Alabama Supreme Court not once but twice over failure to follow the law and who now faces allegations of sexual contact with 3 teenage girls in 1979.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

The Post's story on Moore's odious conduct is extremely well-sourced.  Moore denies the allegations and literally calls the story "fake news", hoping to fundraise off the outrage factor of being attacked by the evil Democrats, but other Alabama Republicans are shrugging and saying that even if he did it, it shouldn't and doesn't actually matter and that the women are all liars anyway.

“I think it’s just a bunch of bull,” Perry Hooper Jr., President Trump’s Alabama state chairman, told TPM. “Mitch McConnell should know better to make a statement like he made unless he gets all the answers. We’re right in the political zone right now, the election’s December 12th. This is the same campaign issue the left ran against Donald Trump on, they’re doing the same thing against Roy Moore.”

Hooper, who’d backed Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) over Moore in the primary, called the allegations “ludicrous” and “gutter politics” unless they could be proven.

“The same thing went on when President Trump ran for office, there was about 15 ladies who ran to the press and said the same thing,” he said.

When asked how the claims could be proven, he suggested the woman take a polygraph.

“Maybe she just needs to take a polygraph test. And the people who are pushing her, they need to take the same test too to see if they’re telling the truth,” he said.

Alabama State Rep. Ed Henry (R), Trump’s other Alabama campaign co-chairman, was even harsher.

“I believe it is very opportunistic and they are just looking for their chance to get on some liberal talk show. I’m sure they’ve probably been offered money by entities that surround the Clintons and that side of the world. We know they will pay to dirty anyone’s name that’s in their way. If you believe for a second that any of these are true then shame on these women for not coming forward in the last 30 years, it’s not like this guy hasn’t been in the limelight for decades. I call B.S. myself. I think it’s all lies and fabrication,” Henry told TPM.

When asked about McConnell’s comments, he erupted.

“Mitch McConnell, and you can quote me on this, is a dumbass, a coward, a liar himself and exactly what’s wrong with Washington, D.C. He would love for Roy Moore not to be in Washington, he’d much rather have a Democrat. Mitch McConnell is scum,” he said, putting the chances at “zero” that the state party would un-endorse Moore.

And he said he’d need photographic evidence to believe the women.

“They got some pictures? That’ll do,” he said. “You can’t sit on something like this for thirty-something years with a man as in the spotlight as Roy Moore and all of a sudden three weeks before a senatorial primary all of a sudden these three or four women are going to talk about something in 1979? I call bull. It’s as fabricated as the day is long.”

Indeed, Donald Trump has been accused by over a dozen women of sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault, and the official position of the White House and the Republican Party is that every single one of the claims is fabricated by lying women.

But at this point, the election is 32 days away and there's no chance Moore will drop out or be removed, so as with Trump, we're about to see if Republican voters believe allegations of sex crimes are a dealbreaker or not.  We know racism isn't, and we've got plenty of evidence that sex crimes aren't either, so my prediction that Moore wins easily next month remains.

We're dealing with voters in a state like this.

While dozens of Republicans in Washington are calling on Moore to step aside if the allegations are true, Republicans in Alabama don’t think the story will resonate the same way for voters. Instead, they focused on the timing of the allegations, which come just four weeks before the election.

Paul Reynolds, the Republican National Committeeman from Alabama, told The Hill that something about the timing of the accusation and the Post’s role breaking the story “doesn’t smell right.”

“My gosh, it's The Washington Post. If I’ve got a choice of putting my welfare into the hands of Putin or The Washington Post, Putin wins every time,” he said.

“This is going to make Roy Moore supporters step up to the plate and give more, work more and pray more."

They believe this is a good thing for Roy Moore.

Chuck Todd (yes, that Chuck Todd) argues that Doug Jones can win this race.

Now you might say that there’s no way (or little way) that a Republican could lose in Alabama, a state Trump won by a whopping 28 points in 2016. But consider:

• Before yesterday, Moore’s lead was just in the high single digits or low double digits, according to the polls. That isn’t a bulletproof lead;
• Moore has been a controversial figure in Alabama for more than a decade;
• Democratic opponent Doug Jones has owned the TV airwaves for an entire month, with ads like this: “I can work with Republicans better than Roy Moore can work with anyone”;
• And the race is a one-on-one special election that takes place two weeks before Christmas, so it will be a low-turnout affair. There is no other race on the ballot.

This isn’t to say that it’s a slam dunk that Moore loses after yesterday. But we’re not sure enough people realize how dangerous the political situation is for the GOP. 

Yes, Jones isn't facing a 28 point blowout.  But if loses by 5 points instead of 12, he still loses.  That's where I see things going.  The situation can change and I hope that I'm wrong and Jones wins.

I don't see that happening unless there's a major collapse of Moore's support and that collapse hasn't come yet.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• At speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Danang, Vietnam, Donald Trump promised to "put America first" just like other leaders intend to put their counties first.
• With the success of the recent Star Wars films, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a new movie trilogy in development for the franchise in 2020 and beyond.
• Senate Republican released their own version of the GOP tax bill with significant differences from the House GOP, Republicans still plan to try to pass the measure by the end of 2017.
• The White House is now saying Donald Trump will not meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the APEC summit in Vietnam this week, citing scheduling conflicts.
• AT&T says it will take the Trump regime to court if regulators attempt to make Time Warner sell off CNN as part of its planned merger with the phone giant.