Human Rights, Very Human Wrongs

America under the Trump regime continues the spiral into dangerous rogue nation status as we join countries like North Korea, Libya and Iran in refusing to be a part of the UN Human Rights Council.

The United States announced it is leaving the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission on Tuesday. 

The move comes at time when the U.N. Human Rights Commission (a 47-member body with rotating terms) and refugee agency have both condemned the president’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border before they get the chance to apply for refugee status. On Monday, the U.N. rights chief called the Trump administration of splitting migrant families “unconscionable.” 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced the U.S. departure from the U.N. rights body at the State Department. 

“We have no doubt there was once a noble vision for this council, but we need to be honest, the Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights,” Pompeo said. 

“For too long the human rights council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias. Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded,” Haley said. At last year’s session, she announced that the United States would consider withdrawing from the council unless some changes were made and spoke about a “biased” stance against Israel.

In explaining the decision, both Pompeo and Haley also said that the council repeatedly singled out Israel. 

Haley has had a contentious relationship with many at the U.N., not only within the Human Rights Council (which is investigating U.S. ally Saudi Arabia for its killing civilians in the war in Yemen), but with the General Assembly as well, which Haley has accused of having an anti-Israel bias. 

With the exception of Libya, who was kicked off the U.N. rights council, no country has ever left the body, and the United States would be the first to drop out.

So yes, having the head of the UN HRC call Trump's child interment policy out as a human rights violation on Monday resulted in America leaving the council on Tuesday, this wasn't an accident.

As we continue to careen down the path towards authoritarian state, I wonder...

When will the rest of the world decide to do something about us?

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Not only does the US officially have more firearms than people, but guns outpace people in America by nearly 20% as of 2017.

There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over. 

Those numbers come from the latest edition of the global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. 

The report, which draws on official data, survey data and other measures for 230 countries, finds that global firearm ownership is heavily concentrated in the United States. In 2017, for instance, Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms. 

With an estimated 120.5 guns for every 100 residents, the firearm ownership rate in the United States is twice that of the next-highest nation, Yemen, with just 52.8 guns per 100 residents. In raw number terms, the closest country to the United States is India, with 71.1 million firearms in circulation. These numbers do not include firearms owned by law enforcement agencies or militaries.

On gun ownership, the United States stands out among the world's wealthiest nations, with an ownership rate more than three times higher than the rate in the next-highest country, Canada. The gun ownership rate in the United States is more than six times higher than the average among similar wealthy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I'd say as of right now, we're well over 400 million civilian firearms in this country.  And lets remember the rate of firearm ownership among US adults has actually gone down over the last 30 years, meaning that more and more often we're seeing firearms as massive stockpiles in the hands of a few people.  Some charts:

That's not healthy for anyone, folks.  It's not like Japan or Belgium or the UK are third-world hellholes, guys.  They get by with literally a small fraction of the firearms we have.

No wonder everyone else thinks we're nuts.

StupidiNews!

• For the second time in less than a month, ICE agents have conducted a major raid on an Ohio business that allegedly employed undocumented workers and made over 100 arrests.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says that the state will sue the Trump regime to stop the practice of separating migrant children from their families at the border.
• Pope Francis says that populism is no solution to immigration and is condemning separating children from families at borders, calling the practice "contrary to our Catholic values" and "immoral".
• The White House is declaring China's economic policy as "theft of intellectual property" and a threat to US economic security, and says America will take whatever measures needed to defend itself.
• Internet security experts are warning that the Satori botnet has resurfaced again, this time taking control of DSL routers in Brazil, South Korea, Italy, the US, and Russia.

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

There's a number of developments today to review in the ongoing Trump/Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and it starts with our old friend Erik "of Darkness" Prince and his interview with Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff.

[Woodruff]There’s been a lot of reporting that Mueller’s interested in some of the meetings you had in the lead-up to the campaign and after the election and I was just wondering if you could tell me if you’ve heard from anyone on Mueller’s team? 

[Prince]I certainly understand the intense interest in the investigation and certainly some of the wild-eyed reporting in the media. I have spoken voluntarily to Congress and I also cooperated with the special counsel. I have plenty of opinions about the various investigations but there’s no question some people are taking it seriously and I think it’s best to keep my opinion on that to myself for now. All I will add is that much of the reporting about me in the media is inaccurate, and I am confident that when the investigators have finished their work, we will be able to put these distractions to the side.

[W]You told the House intelligence committee that the Seychelles meeting [with Dmitriev] was unplanned, but ABC reported that George Nader briefed you on it beforehand. What do you make of that ABC reporting? 

[P]All I can say is, there’s been a lot of media reporting about me over the years and most of it is wrong. They get it wrong way more than they ever get it right. 

[W]What do you think the United States’ posture toward Russia should be? Do you support the president’s rhetoric about trying to thaw that relationship? 

[P]Absolutely. As I’ve said before, if Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin to defeat German fascism, Nazi fascism, national socialist fascism, then certainly Donald Trump can work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. And I think good statesmanship could even start to drive a wedge between Russian policy and Iran policy because we can disagree vehemently on their policy in Ukraine but we don’t have to be, certainly, their enemy in the Middle East. And even from a NATO perspective, I mean look, remember, 400,000 Americans died in World War II. Twenty-two million Russians died breaking the Nazi army. And from a Russian perspective, there are more unfriendly nations aligned on their borders now than at any time since May of 1940. So I don’t think we have to be provocative with NATO and I think it’s a good idea for the president to reach out diplomatically. I mean for heaven’s sakes, he’s sitting down and talking to Kim of North Korea. Putin is a much more rational actor and I think it’s totally appropriate for the president to sit down and try to thaw the situation.

Two things here:  Prince happily talked to both Mueller and Congress, and he's still convinced he's untouchable to the point of being fully available to advise the regime on coming military matters.  Nice guy.  Would hate for that notion to be disabused by a couple dozen US Marshals.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani now doing a 180 on calling for Mueller's head from last week.

President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said on Monday that he was actually just bluffing last week when he called for Justice Department leaders to suspend special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation within 24 hours. 

“I didn’t think it would,” Giuliani told POLITICO with a laugh when asked about the Mueller inquiry’s still being very much an active investigation. “But I still think it should be.”

So, apparently somebody had a nice long conversation with Rudy about his antics over the last week or so and is reining him in.  Whether it's Trump himself or somebody on his behalf I don't know, but the lesson to learn here is not to take anything Giuliani says at face value anymore, not that it should have happened in the first place.

That doesn't however mean that all of Trump's mouthpieces are easing off the Mueller probe, far from it as a matter of fact as the WSJ 's Bill McGurn is calling for Rod Rosenstein's head, as well as the head of Trump FBI Director Chris Wray.  It's a bit incongruous I know, but that's the Trump regime for you.  Hell, Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale is calling for Jeff Sessions's head along with Mueller.  These guys still want blood.

However, there's yet another piece of the money laundering/real estate puzzle in the Trump/Russia probe that has come to light this week as McClatchy's Anita Kumar explains.

Aleksandr Burman, a Ukrainian who engaged in a health care scheme that cost the federal government $26 million and was sentenced to a decade in prison, paid $725,000 cash for a condo at a Trump Tower I in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. in 2009. 

Leonid Zeldovich, who has reportedly done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea, bought four Trump units outright at a cost of more than $4.35 million, three of them in New York City between 2007 and 2010. 

And Igor Romashov, who served as chairman of the board of Transoil, a Russian oil transport company subject to U.S. sanctions, paid $620,000 upfront for a unit at a building adorned with the future U.S. president's name in Sunny Isles Beach in 2010. 

Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in south Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.

Once again, buying real estate properties in all-cash sales through shell companies is classic, classic money laundering 101.  Russian buyers purchased more than $100 million in Trump real estate with cash in this way.  This isn't the first time we've heard of this happening with Trump's real estate assets, but the fact that this keeps coming up should be setting off major alarm bells that Trump and his sleazy family have been engaging with criminal activity with Putin and the Russians long before the 2016 election.

Mueller's on it, believe me.

Immigration Nation, Con't

Deanna Paul at the Washington Post buries the lede all the way until the last paragraph, but Trump Regime Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it clear Monday that the regime will continue to take migrant and asylum-seeking families crossing the Mexico border and put their kids in cages until Trump gets what he wants from Congress.

As protesters gathered outside the convention hall where Sessions was addressing the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans, Sessions gave the game away:

According to Sessions, policies of the past eight years led law enforcement to begin arresting people who crossed the border illegally, yet gave effective immunity from prosecution to anyone who also brought a child. “Word got out about this loophole and the results were predictable: The number of aliens illegally crossing with children went from 14,000 to 75,000 in just four years. A fivefold increase,” Sessions said. 

Sessions said that this could not continue, in part, because of the “enormous cost” incurred by the government and the “enormous burden” on law enforcement, schools and hospitals. 

As Sessions defended his “zero-tolerance” policy, the chanting group outside the NOLA convention center grew. Demonstrators filled the sidewalks and blocked the streets. One woman was struck by a vehicle, and five people were arrested, according to WWL-TV, a local CBS affiliate. Protesters demanded that families be kept together and held signs: “Immigration detention centers are concentration camps for kids” and “Cage Jeff Sessions.” Some demonstrators, who came close to fighting local law enforcement, as seen in a video published by WWL, pushed against police and deputies guarding the building, bearing a banner that read, “Criminalizing our community,” according to one video. Other people displayed posters that read: “Imagine your children in a cage” and “Love has no border.” 

Although the federal government, according to Sessions, does not want to separate parents from their children, it does not want adults to bring children into the country unlawfully or place those children at risk, either. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have also crossed the borders, which, according to Sessions, has led to the resurgence of the MS-13 gang. 

President Trump wants to bring down crime and make this country safer, said Sessions, who says that’s what he’s doing. 

“If we build a wall, if we pass a legislation, if we close a loophole, we won’t face these terrible choices,” he said, adding that Trump will not allow this lawlessness to continue.

And there we have it.

You have to admit, this cartoonish level of inchoate evil is pretty effective.  The Trump regime is willing to use kids in cages to attack Democrats, but even Republicans aren't buying it when all parties know full well Trump's executive orders are solely responsible for the forcible separation of children from their families and putting them in internment camps.

Republicans know damn well that this is bad for them too, and that this is direct retaliation for House Republicans working with Democrats to force a vote on several immigration bills that don't meet Trump's standards.  He's not going to allow those bills to move forward, and he's willing to go this far in order to ensure that doesn't happen.

It's possible that Trump's plan if things get too hot for him is to use Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as a disposable lightning rod in order to take the damage, but at this point all the living former first ladies from both parties are scorching Trump over this, including Laura Bush.  I don't see how this doesn't become the issue the Democrats need to win and win big in November, especially since the Trump regime is promising to make things even worse.

Top aides to President Donald Trump are planning additional crackdowns on immigration before the November midterms, despite a growing backlash over the administration’s move to separate migrant children from parents at the border. 

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the departments of Justice, Labor, Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.

The goal for Miller and his team is to arm Trump with enough data and statistics by early September to show voters that he fulfilled his immigration promises — even without a border wall or any other congressional measure, said one Republican close to the White House. 

Among the fresh ideas being circulated: tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; making it harder for legal immigrants who have applied for welfare programs to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from certain countries. 

Details of the ideas are still being worked out, one White House official said. 

In one of the most closely watched plans under discussion, DHS has proposed a new rule that former Obama administration officials and immigration advocates worry could be used as an end run around a 1997 court settlement that limits the time migrant children can be kept in government custody. Putting a formal government rule in place, lawyers and advocates say, could in effect supersede the settlement, allowing the administration to get rid of it altogether by dropping the rule a year or two later. 

“Once you rescind that regulation, then you go back to being able to do whatever you want and the detention becomes the complete discretion of ICE,” said Leon Fresco, former deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Department of Justice. “That is where people think this is headed.”

To recap, Stephen Miller and his merry band of white supremacist dudebros are happily planning indefinite detention camps for kids crossing the border as a deterrent to both people inside and outside the US.  This is of course on top of Jeff Sessions and the Trump regime's plans to effectively end legal immigration as well as plans to target naturalized citizens for deportation.  This has been planned out from the beginning, guys.

The partnership between Mr. Sessions and Mr. Miller began in 2009, when Mr. Miller, a conservative rabble rouser and contrarian who emerged from the left-leaning Santa Monica, became a spokesman for the senator. He sported sideburns and skinny ties as he often delivered long and passionate lectures to reporters, and anyone else who would listen, about the dangers of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. 

Mr. Sessions, 71, had strong views shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama, where he saw immigrants take jobs at a poultry plant away from poor, unskilled Americans. 

During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and 20 years in the Senate, Mr. Sessions came to believe that immigrants, whether here legally or illegally, posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes and competing for welfare benefits. He was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy. 

Mr. Miller, 32, had gone from California to Duke University. While a student, he met David Horowitz, a right-wing provocateur and the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, which opposed progressive thought on college campuses. After Mr. Miller graduated, Mr. Horowitz helped him get a job with Michele Bachmann, then a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, and recommended him highly to Mr. Sessions. 

Together Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions often drew on the work of anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — some of which are derided as hate groups by immigration activists and civil rights organizations. 

The Southern Policy Law Center, which tracks white nationalists and other hate groups, describes FAIR as having “a veneer of legitimacy” that “hides much ugliness.” 

By 2013, Stephen K. Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, invited Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions to a dinner at the Capitol Hill townhouse that served as the headquarters for the conservative news outlet. The three bonded over an article titled “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” foreshadowing the case they would help Mr. Trump build during his presidential campaign.

These guys are absolute evil, and frankly I'm tired of them running this country.  I would think you guys are too.

Shutting Off The Leaks

The Trump regie's relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has taken a decidedly sour turn now that our old buddy Vlad is using them to keep Trump in line, and Trump has decided that the "deep state" is useful to him after all when it serves his purposes.

Federal prosecutors charged a former CIA employee Monday with violations of the Espionage Act and related crimes in connection with the leak last year of a collection of hacking tools that the agency used for spy operations overseas.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment with illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information and related counts in connection with what is considered to be one of the most significant leaks in CIA history.

The indictment accused Schulte of causing sensitive information to be transmitted to an organization that is not named in the indictment but is thought to be WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks posted the hacking tools online last year in a release it called “Vault 7.” Prosecutors alleged Schulte stole the information in 2016.

Schulte had long been a suspect of investigators exploring the leak, but before Monday, he had been held on separate child pornography charges. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that investigators looking into Schulte found the pornography in his residence. His personal computer, federal prosecutors alleged, held more than 10,000 images and videos of such material, protected under three layers of passwords.

Schulte was arrested on charges stemming from the porn in August 2017.

“As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims,” William F. Sweeney Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement. “As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information. To further endanger those around him, Schulte allegedly received, possessed, and transmitted thousands of child pornographic photos and videos.”

An attorney for Schulte did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday night. In a statement reviewed by The Washington Post previously, Schulte claimed that he reported “incompetent management and bureaucracy” at the CIA to the agency’s inspector general and to a congressional oversight committee. He asserted that cast him as disgruntled and that when he left the CIA, he became a suspect in the leak as “the only one to have recently departed [the CIA engineering group] on poor terms.”

The indictment accuses Schulte, 29, of exceeding his authorized access to CIA computer systems and altering systems to delete records of his activities and deny others access. Added together, the charges against him carry a statutory maximum penalty of 135 years in prison. Some officials have compared the leak of which he is accused to that of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who also revealed details about U.S. capabilities to spy on computers and phones around the world.

I've talked about WikiLeaks extensively on ZVTS as well as Julian Assange and their involvement with Russia as Putin's information clearing house, and how Russia has been yanking the strings of the website since Ed Snowden took his treasure trove to Moscow.

These guys were an integral part of Russia's operation to attack the 2016 US elections and help Donald Trump, and it worked better than anyone in Moscow could have hoped.  Now that WikiLeaks is a potential liability to Trump, or rather, now that Trump realizes that WikiLeaks was always going to be used against him by Putin, Trump is having the CIA go after the leakers.

We'll see where this goes, but my guess is that Schulte has already caused extensive damage to the CIA, meaning that both the NSA and CIA have been fatally compromised in the last several years, and Russia has reaped the benefit.  Like it or not, Putin has been holding all the cards on our counterintelligence services for quite some time now, and he has the Oval Office to boot.

Trump will at least go far enough to try to protect himself from WikiLeaks, but there's no way we can expect the US government to fix the massive Russian damage to the country with Trump at the helm.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is threatening a major escalation in his trade war with China with a promise of new punitive tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, a move Beijing calls "blackmail".
• Former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in Monday against the Trump regime's child-separation policy for immigrants crossing the border, calling it "cruelty".
• British PM Theresa May is expected to reject a plan to give lawmakers more control over Brexit as parliament wants assurances that the UK won't get stuck with a "no deal" situation in the future.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company's recent financial woes are the result of "extensive and damaging sabotage" involving a former employee and proprietary company data.
• Just days after a federal judge gave the green light to AT&T's buyout of Time Warner, the company says it plans a new mobile streaming service that's free for customers and $15 a month for others.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look

As I keep saying, Trump is the metastasized symptom, the cancer is the Republican party.

More Republicans view North Korean leader Kim Jong Un favorably than do House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), according to a poll released Monday. 

The Ipsos survey conducted for The Daily Beast found that among Republicans, 19 percent indicated they hold a favorable opinion of Kim, while 17 percent said they have a favorable opinion of Pelosi. 

Sixty-eight percent of Republicans said they held an unfavorable opinion of Kim, while 72 percent said they had an unfavorable view of Pelosi.

Republicans have long criticized the Democratic leader, using her in campaign ads to rally up their base, while the survey results come just one week after President Trump’s historic summit with Kim in Singapore, where the two leaders discussed reining in Pyongyang's nuclear program.

America First, for certain definitions of "America".  Besides, Republican voters get to decide who's "American" right?

Nearly every day, voters have been confronted with heart wrenching stories about immigrant children being separated from their parents upon crossing the border into the United States.

The president incorrectly blames his administration’s policy on Democrats, but regardless of his attempt to pass the responsibility, self-identified Republicans have his back, according to a new Ipsos poll done exclusively for The Daily Beast. 

The poll of roughly 1,000 adults aged 18 and over, and conducted June 14-15, asked respondents if they agreed with the following statement: “It is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally.” 

Of those surveyed, 27 percent of the overall respondents agreed with it, while 56% disagreed with the statement. Yet, Republicans leaned slightly more in favor, with 46% agreeing with the statement and 32 percent disagreeing. Meanwhile, 14 percent of Democrats surveyed supported it and only 29% of Independents were in favor. 

The sample, according to Ipsos, included 339 Democrats, 335 Republicans and 204 Independents.

Nice people, Republicans.  Hell, Quinnipiac actually has a majority of Republicans approving of this. 

It's not Trump.  It's the people who voted for him.

About That Fox-Watching Uncle Of Yours

Politico's Michael Grunwald lays out the GOP's biggest weapon in the 2018 midterms: Boomer retirees who absolutely have time on their hands to vote, and overwhelmingly they vote Republican. Unless Democrats can get the kind of midterm turnout to counter them, the Blue Wave could crash on the rocks.

The Villages is America’s largest retirement community, a carefully planned, meticulously groomed dreamscape of gated subdivisions, wall-to-wall golf courses, adult-only pools and old-fashioned town squares. It’s advertised as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown,” and it’s supposed to evoke a bygone era of traditional values when Americans knew their neighbors, respected their elders and followed the rules. It has the highest concentration of military veterans of any metropolitan area without a military base. It has strict regulations enforcing the uniformity of homes (no second stories, no bright colors, no modern flourishes) as well as the people living in them (no families with children, except to visit). And it is Trump country, a reliably Republican, vocally patriotic, almost entirely white enclave that gave the president nearly 70 percent of the vote.

Older voters are America’s most reliable voters, which is why baby-boomer boomtowns like The Villages represent the most significant threat to a potential Democratic wave in Florida in 2018—and the most significant source of Republican optimism for many years to come. Because while the Villages may look like the past, with its retro architecture and gray-haired demographics, it sells like the future. This master-planned paradise an hour northwest of Disney World has been the fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States in four of the last five years. And as the baby boom generation continues to retire, The Villages is continuing to expand into nearby cattle pastures, luring more pensioners to this fantasyland in the sunshine, gradually swinging America’s largest swing state to the right.

The Trump supporters who get the most media attention tend to be economically anxious laborers in economically depressed factory towns. But in Florida, economically secure retirement meccas like the Villages are the real reason Trump won in 2016—and why the state’s Republicans, who have controlled Tallahassee for two decades, think they can avoid a blue wave in 2018 and help re-elect Trump in 2020. For all the hype about Puerto Ricans moving to the Sunshine State after Hurricane Maria, or high school students like the Parkland gun control activists turning 18 and registering to vote, any Democratic surge could be offset by the migration of Republican-leaning seniors who like Florida’s balmy weather and lack of income tax. If midterm elections typically play out as judgments on the presidency, then Florida’s upcoming contests will be a race between the usual laws of political gravity and the state’s demographic destiny: Trump remains unpopular with younger voters, and Democrats have already flipped four Florida legislative seats in low-profile special elections this year, but the older voters who are most likely to vote in midterms are increasingly likely to move to Florida and support the president.

It makes sense that they’re coming to The Villages, because this leisure-class Sun Belt oasis is a lot more pleasant than the dying working-class Rust Belt towns that journalists usually visit on Trump-voter safaris. It feels like a 40-square-mile cruise ship, or a college campus without required classes. It has enough golf courses to play a different one every week of the year, and more than 100 miles of golf cart trails that keep traffic congestion to a minimum. It’s the pickleball capital of America, appropriate considering that badminton-meets-tennis-ish paddle game has become America’s fastest-growing sport. It has 3,000 clubs that keep 125,000 Villagers busy doing everything from belly dancing to astrology, water aerobics to water skiing, karaoke to quilting. It isn’t exactly luxurious, but it’s comfortable, with a median home price above $250,000; though a new POLITICO/AARP poll finds plenty of concern elsewhere in Florida , the only real economic anxiety for most Villagers is the state of their investment portfolios, which are thriving in the Trump era. At a meeting of the Financial Markets and Investment Club in early June, a speaker announced: “NASDAQ just closed at a record high!”

That meant more wealth for club members like 80-year-old Larry Harman, a former Chicago-area stockbroker who watches the markets so closely he founded a separate club devoted to options trading. But while Harman voted for Trump, and gladly would again, his investment gains are not the reason: “I keep telling people: Come on, Trump has nothing to do with your portfolio.” Harman, a former Marine, is much more excited about Trump’s crusade against the National Football League. “Players taking a knee, that’s bullshit!” Harman told me. “I’m with the president 100 percent: Throw your hand over your heart and respect our flag.”

It’s not a coincidence that The Villages supports the nation’s largest American Legion post—or that signs in its bar declare: “NO NFL GAMES ON POST TELEVISIONS.” Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2:1 here, and in interviews, they generally expressed support for Trump’s tax cuts, as well as his hands-off approach to Medicare and Social Security. That has helped blunt the perennial Democratic pitch to seniors: Choose us, because Republicans are coming for your checks. But what really attracted them to Trump were issues that had little to do with their pocketbooks or their daily lives—like his opposition to sanctuary cities, or his insistent rhetoric about strength, or his attacks on Muslims, MS-13 and defiant black athletes. They feel like Trump is on their side in a cultural war against cop-haters, scheming foreigners, global warming alarmists, and other politically correct avatars of disorder and decline; they thought President Barack Obama was on the other side, standing with transgender activists, welfare freeloaders and Islamic terrorists. And when Trump vows to make America great again, they sense that he means more like The Villages.

“They want an America that’s a little more like it was when they were growing up, and that’s what Trump is offering,” says Daniel Webster, the area’s conservative Republican congressman. Dennis Baxley, the area’s equally conservative Republican state senator, points out that The Villages offers that, too, with safe streets, light traffic, artificial lakes that provide a real sense of serenity, and hundreds of support groups for every imaginable malady or hardship. It’s a throwback to when they were children in 1950s America, without actual children.

“It really is like living in a village, where there’s law and order, and people take care of each other,” says Baxley, who owns three funeral homes in The Villages. “Trump tapped into that sense that the rest of America isn’t like that anymore, that some people don’t have to follow the rules.”

Trump is definitely one of them. They love him for it, and they'll vote GOP for the rest of their lives.  More importantly, they show up to register and vote where Gen X and especially Millennials don't bother, so these are the voters that control our politics and our country.  They'll continue to control elections, especially midterms, for the next couple of decades, the living embodiment of the "I'm spending my kids' inheritance" bumper-sticker Boomer assholes who figure they earned it, and that they can't take it with them.

They elected the GOP, they elected Trump, and they'll damn sure be at the polls in November 2018.

Will the rest of us be ready to stop them?

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Realizing that yet another Trump campaign contact with Russia has been revealed by witnesses cooperating with the Mueller probe, Roger Simon is now trying to claim that the revelations of yet another meeting between Trump's camp and Russians trying to sell political dirt on Hillary Clinton was an FBI setup, yeah, that's the ticket.

One day in late May 2016, Roger Stone — the political dark sorcerer and longtime confidant of Donald Trump — slipped into his Jaguar and headed out to meet a man with a Make America Great Again hat and a viscous Russian accent.

The man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent in the upcoming presidential election, according to Stone who spoke about the previously unreported incident in interviews with The Washington Post. Greenberg, who did not reveal the information he claimed to possess, wanted Trump to pay $2 million for the political dirt, Stone said.

“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone recalled saying before rejecting the offer at a restaurant in the Russian-expat magnet of Sunny Isles, Fla. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”

Later, Stone got a text message from Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign communications official who’d arranged the meeting after Greenberg had approached Caputo’s Russian-immigrant business partner.

“How crazy is the Russian?” Caputo wrote according to a text message reviewed by The Post. Noting that Greenberg wanted “big” money, Stone replied: “waste of time.”

Two years later, the brief sit-down in Florida has resurfaced as part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s sprawling investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to Caputo. Caputo said he was asked about the meeting by prosecutors during a sometimes-heated questioning session last month.

Stone and Caputo, who did not previously disclose the meeting to congressional investigators, now say they believe they were the targets of a setup by U.S. law enforcement officials hostile to Trump.

They cite records — independently examined by The Post — showing that the man who approached Stone is actually a Russian national who has claimed to work as an FBI informant.

Interviews and additional documents show that Greenberg has at times used the name Henry Oknyansky. Under that name, he claimed in a 2015 court filing related to his immigration status that he had provided information to the FBI for 17 years. He attached records showing that the government had granted him special permission to enter the United States because his presence represented a “significant public benefit.”

There is no evidence that Greenberg was working with the FBI in his interactions with Stone, and in his court filing, Greenberg said that he had stopped his FBI cooperation sometime after 2013. 

So we can add Roger Stone to the list of Trump campaign folks actively seeking meetings with Russians for dmaging dirt on Hillary Clinton, and who didn't tell the FBI about it.

There are an awful lot of Trump campaign people in that particular boat: Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Erik Prince, and quite possibly Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump himself.  There was an awful lot of meetings between Russians and Trump campaign people before the 2016 election, too:  in Trump Tower, in DC restaurants, in the Seychelles, at the 2016 NRA convention in Louisville.

Believe me when I say Mueller knows about all of them.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump Regime continues to insist that children will be separated from families illegally crossing the border unless Democrats agree to hardline immigration reform by the GOP.
• The US and South Korea are expected to announce the end of joint military exercises dependent on North Korea keeping its promise to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
• China says it will target US oil imports as part of retaliation for Trump's $50 billion in punitive tariffs as the global trade war heats up, and Beijing could even turn to Iran in order to buy cheaper crude.
• Audi CEO Rupert Stadler has been taken into custody by German investigators to prevent possible evidence tampering involving the automaker's role in the 2015 Volkswagen diesel scandal.
• Disgraced former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former company president Ramesh Balwani are facing multiple wire fraud and conspiracy charges over the defunct medical startup.

Sunday Long Read: Breaking Up An Outbreak Breakdown

In this week's Sunday Long Read, The Atlantic's Ed Yong discusses where the world is in the Trump era as far as being ready for the next global pandemic, and while there are a number of factors that make a response potentially better than even a few years ago, there's a lot to worry about as global supply-chain economics has trimmed all fat from the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and that makes maintaining public health stockpiles far more expensive and daunting.

One hundred years ago, in 1918, a strain of H1N1 flu swept the world. It might have originated in Haskell County, Kansas, or in France or China—but soon it was everywhere. In two years, it killed as many as 100 million people—5 percent of the world’s population, and far more than the number who died in World War I. It killed not just the very young, old, and sick, but also the strong and fit, bringing them down through their own violent immune responses. It killed so quickly that hospitals ran out of beds, cities ran out of coffins, and coroners could not meet the demand for death certificates. It lowered Americans’ life expectancy by more than a decade. “The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death,” Laura Spinney wrote in Pale Rider, her 2017 book about the pandemic. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history—a potent reminder of the threat posed by disease.

Humanity seems to need such reminders often. In 1948, shortly after the first flu vaccine was created and penicillin became the first mass-produced antibiotic, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall reportedly claimed that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent. In 1962, after the second polio vaccine was formulated, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet asserted, “To write about infectious diseases is almost to write of something that has passed into history.”

Hindsight has not been kind to these proclamations. Despite advances in antibiotics and vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo sapiens is still locked in the same epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we’ve been fighting since the beginning of our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict. Down through the centuries, diseases have always excelled at exploiting flux.

Humanity is now in the midst of its fastest-ever period of change. There were almost 2 billion people alive in 1918; there are now 7.6 billion, and they have migrated rapidly into cities, which since 2008 have been home to more than half of all human beings. In these dense throngs, pathogens can more easily spread and more quickly evolve resistance to drugs. Not coincidentally, the total number of outbreaks per decade has more than tripled since the 1980s.

Globalization compounds the risk: Airplanes now carry almost 10 times as many passengers around the world as they did four decades ago. In the ’80s, HIV showed how potent new diseases can be, by launching a slow-moving pandemic that has since claimed about 35 million lives. In 2003, another newly discovered virus, sars, spread decidedly more quickly. A Chinese seafood seller hospitalized in Guangzhou passed it to dozens of doctors and nurses, one of whom traveled to Hong Kong for a wedding. In a single night, he infected at least 16 others, who then carried the virus to Canada, Singapore, and Vietnam. Within six months, sars had reached 29 countries and infected more than 8,000 people. This is a new epoch of disease, when geographic barriers disappear and threats that once would have been local go global.

Last year, with the centennial of the 1918 flu looming, I started looking into whether America is prepared for the next pandemic. I fully expected that the answer would be no. What I found, after talking with dozens of experts, was more complicated—reassuring in some ways, but even more worrying than I’d imagined in others. Certainly, medicine has advanced considerably during the past century. The United States has nationwide vaccination programs, advanced hospitals, the latest diagnostic tests. In the National Institutes of Health, it has the world’s largest biomedical research establishment, and in the CDC, arguably the world’s strongest public-health agency. America is as ready to face down new diseases as any country in the world.

Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. Most of the intravenous bags used in the country are manufactured in Puerto Rico, so when Hurricane Maria devastated the island last September, the bags fell in short supply. Some hospitals were forced to inject saline with syringes—and so syringe supplies started running low too. The most common lifesaving drugs all depend on long supply chains that include India and China—chains that would likely break in a severe pandemic. “Each year, the system gets leaner and leaner,” says Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It doesn’t take much of a hiccup anymore to challenge it.”

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years. Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed. And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

When Ebola flared in 2014, the science-minded President Barack Obama calmly and quickly took the reins. The White House is now home to a president who is neither calm nor science-minded. We should not underestimate what that may mean if risk becomes reality.

Again, global pandemics keep happening and are happening.  So far, we've been able to hold the line.  But there are a lot of things that have to go right for that streak to continue, and should a particularly bad virus appear, a global death toll in the tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, wouldn't be out of the picture.

It's a question of when, not if.  Should "if" be "during the Trump era" then we're in real trouble.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

There are signs that the one-two punch of Donald Trump's tax cuts for the rich and igniting a global trade war is starting to hurt the US economy.  Unemployment is down, but so are hourly wages.  Fed chair Jerome Powell raised core interest rates last week to head off inflationary pressures as gas price hikes have eaten up wage gains for Americans since Trump took office, with oil prices jumping substantially after Trump wrecked the Iran nuclear deal.  And in the heartland, a new round of tariffs on China announced last week will only make things worse for US farmers.

Perhaps Iowa farmers' biggest fear is becoming a harsh reality: The escalating U.S.-China trade dispute erupted Friday, with each country vowing to levy 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in goods.

U.S. and Iowa agriculture is caught in the crossfire, with farmers selling $14 billion in soybeans to China last year, its top export market.

Soybeans are among hundreds of U.S. products China has singled out for tariffs. The U.S. has an equally long list that includes taxing X-ray machines and other Chinese goods.

Iowa farmers could lose up to $624 million, depending on how long the tariffs are in place and the speed producers can find new markets for their soybeans, said Chad Hart, an Iowa State University economist.

U.S. soybean prices have fallen about 12 percent since March, when the U.S.-China trade dispute began.

"Any tariff or tax put in place will have a significant impact, not only to the U.S. soybean market but to Iowa's, because we're such a large producer," Hart said Friday.

Iowa is the nation's second-largest soybean grower, producing 562 million bushels last year worth $5.2 billion.

Iowa is number two.  The number one soybean producer is Ohio.   Farmers around here have noticed, too.  They're worried.  And Iowa has bigger problems too.

China already has smacked farmers with an additional 25 percent tariff on pork, and Mexico plans a 20 percent tariff on ham and pork shoulders.

Those moves could cost Iowa pork producers $360 million over the year, an ISU economist estimates, less than initially calculated, thanks to some pork price recovery.

Mexico is weighing tariffs on $4 billion of U.S. corn and soybeans, Reuters reported Friday, while the European Union and Canada are considering tariffs on a range of U.S. products.

Iowa stands to lose a billion dollars a year from tariffs on soybeans and pork.  If tariffs extend into corn too, Iowa's farm economy will be badly damaged.  That's just one state, too.

Then we have to talk about how food is going to get a lot more expensive in the US as a result of these tariffs, so even if you're not a farmer, you'll notice at the grocery store for sure.  It's going to get worse before it gets better, too.

It's About Suppression, Con't

In the wake of last week's 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowing Ohio Republicans to purge voter rolls solely on the basis of not voting, I predicted that the decision would serve as a green light for other red states to begin massive voter suppression efforts:

Republicans want as few people eligible to vote as possible for a reason, and this is just one more weapon to use against voter registration drives.  Don't be surprised if red states in fact take up even more aggressive voter purges too, apparently it's open season now on "use it or lose it" as a "right" to vote.

What this means is voting is no longer a protected right, but something that can be taken from you by the states for the reason of choosing not using it.  Alito and the conservative majority on the court aren't concerned with voting rights, they are concerned with Republicans winning, period.

North Carolina Republicans are wasting no time now that they know how the court stands on restricting who can vote and are going for broke to stop groups that vote Democratic from being allowed to cast ballots ahead of midterms.

The last time Republicans in the North Carolina Legislature enacted a law making it harder for some of the state’s residents to vote, a federal court said the statute targeted African-American voters “with almost surgical precision,” and threw it out.

That was last year. Now the legislators are back with a new set of election proposals, and an unconventional plan to make them stick.

Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, Republican senators unveiled legislation that would eliminate the final Saturday of early voting in state elections, a day that typically draws a large share of black voters to the polls. That followed a Republican proposal last week to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would require all voters to display a photo ID before casting votes.

In addition, party leaders say they are preparing a constitutional amendment that would curb the power of the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, over the state board that controls election procedures.

Since Republicans swept to control of the North Carolina Legislature and the governorship in 2010 and 2012, the state has become ground zero for struggles over election rules and voting rights. But Democrats have recently made gains in the state, most notably with Mr. Cooper’s win in 2016.

Voting rights advocates say Republicans are trying to lock in as much of a political advantage as possible in advance of a November election that could weaken or break their hold on the Legislature.

It's a pretty ballsy plan, I have to hand it to them.

Their plan faces risks. Both voter ID and restrictions on early voting were keystone features of the last Republican elections bill, in 2013, that federal judges struck down as racially discriminatory in 2017.

This time, however, the party’s tactics have changed. The voter ID amendment would require approval by citizens as well as legislators. The final Saturday of voting has been popular — nearly 200,000 citizens voted on that day in 2016 — and African-Americans turned out at a rate 40 percent greater than their share of the electorate. But the bill to eliminate that Saturday would apportion those lost hours among other early voting days, so the total hours of polling would not change.

Opponents call that a smoke screen, and say the legislation is crafted to curtail early voting by requiring local election officials to staff every polling place 12 hours a day for all 17 days of the early voting period. Many election offices will struggle to find enough volunteers to meet that schedule, they say, and will be forced to close early voting sites to comply.

And of course the counties that would be most likely to have to close early voting would be places with large urban black populations like Durham and Mecklenburg, and Sandhills counties in the east with a large percentage of black voters and not a lot of resources like Wilson, Wayne, and Sampson.

Like I said, pretty ballsy, especially bringing in a Voter ID amendment to the state Constitution, assuring that only SCOTUS could stop it, and won't.

Look for more states to put voter suppression efforts into state constitutions the way Republicans did with gay marriage 15 years ago.  Millions of Americans were denied the right to marry until SCOTUS stepped in, but this time that train is headed for the opposite direction.

Immiration Nation, Con't

House Republicans, realizing that they are going to get crushed in November, are scrambling to come up with some sort of cover as Trump's hideous policy of separating kids from their families at the border not only continues unabated, but is actually accelerating.

Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their families at the U.S. border over a six-week period during a crackdown on illegal entries, according to Department of Homeland Security figures obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The figures show that 1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31. The separations were not broken down by age, and included separations for illegal entry, immigration violations or possible criminal conduct by the adult.

Under a “zero tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Department of Homeland Security officials are now referring all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are.

Sessions announced the effort April 6, and Homeland Security began stepping up referrals in early May, effectively putting the policy into action.

Since then, stories of weeping children torn from the arms of their frightened parents have flooded the media and the policy has been widely criticized by church groups, politicians and children’s advocates who say it is inhumane. A battle in Congress is brewing in part over the issue.

Some immigrant advocates have said women were being separated from their infants — a charge Homeland Security and Justice officials flatly denied. They also said the children were being well cared for and disputed reports of disorder and mistreatment at the border.

On Thursday, Sessions cited the Bible in defending the policy, arguing the recent criticisms were not “fair or logical and some are contrary to law.”

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said.

The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group, released a statement Friday saying, “A policy of willing cruelty to those people, and using young sons and daughters as pawns, shatters America’s strong foundation of humanitarian sensibility and family values.”

The Trump regime policy has resulted in internment tent camps for migrant children filling America's TV screens during an election year, and Trump is lying and claiming Democrats in Congress are forcing this with Obama-era laws.  It's complete nonsense, and House Republicans want to pass something so they can tell voters they tried to stop it, but of course the bill in front of the House GOP doesn't actually stop Trump from doing this.

The reality is that Trump, congressional Republicans, and most Trump voters all want this policy.

President Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.

On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.

Trump’s public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.

“The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda,” he tweeted. After listing his demands in any immigration bill, he added, “Go for it! WIN!”

The attempt to gain advantage from a practice the American Academy of Pediatrics describes as causing children “irreparable harm” sets up a high-stakes gambit for Trump, whose political career has long benefited from harsh rhetoric on immigration.

Democrats have latched onto the issue and vowed to fight in the court of public opinion, with leaders planning trips to the border to highlight the stories of separated families, already the focus of news media attention. Democratic candidates running for vulnerable Republican seats also have begun to make the harsh treatment of children a centerpiece of their campaigns.

But there are those religious groups that see this as the abomination that it is.

The policy has cracked Trump’s usually united conservative base, with a wide array of religious leaders and groups denouncing it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention issued statements critical of the practice.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at Trump’s inauguration, signed a letter calling the practice “horrible.” Pastor Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse, a vocal supporter of the president’s who has brushed aside past Trump controversies, called it “terrible” and “disgraceful.”

We'll see what happens, but my guess is that Trump will continue to blame Democrats, and that his own voters will buy the lie, as they have everything else.  As for the rest of America, we'll see if this motivates us to actually do anything about one-party Trump control.