Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is back, as America's favorite mercenary warlord is once again pushing his plan to privatize the Forever War with Afghanistan, something guaranteed to made Prince and his family tens of billions of dollars but I'm betting nothing will come of it.

President Donald Trump is increasingly venting frustration to his national security team about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and showing renewed interest in a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to privatize the war, current and former senior administration officials said.

Prince's idea, which first surfaced last year during the president's Afghanistan strategy review, envisions replacing troops with private military contractors who would work for a special U.S. envoy for the war who would report directly to the president.

It has raised ethical and security concerns among senior military officials, key lawmakers and members of Trump's national security team. A year after Trump's strategy announcement, his advisers are worried his impatience with the Afghanistan conflict will cause him to seriously consider proposals like Prince's or abruptly order a complete U.S. withdrawal, officials said.

In an interview with NBC News, Prince said he believes Trump advisers who oppose his plan are painting "as rosy a picture as they can" of the situation on the ground, including that "peace is around the corner" with recent U.S. efforts for peace talks with the Taliban. He said he believes Trump's advisers "over-emphasize the fluff and flare of these so-called peace talks."

Prince, a staunch Trump supporter whose sister is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, argues that after 17 years of war in Afghanistan, it's time for the U.S. to try something new.

"I know he's frustrated," Prince said of the president. "He gave the Pentagon what they wanted. ...And they haven't delivered."

Prince said he hasn't spoken directly to Trump about the plan, but told NBC News he plans to launch an aggressive media "air campaign" in coming days to try to get the president to embrace it.

His effort coincides with Tuesday's one-year anniversary of Trump announcing a strategy that increased the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. Trump approved the Pentagon recommendations reluctantly.

Prince wants to sell Trump a big win ahead of the midterms, and as I mentioned before, Prince has been pushing Trump down this path for some time now.  Of course, one of the major problems is that Prince is neck deep in Trump's foreign campaign money laundering and that Robert Mueller has cooperating witnesses that put Prince as Trump's point man at meetings in Seychelles in 2016. As a result, Prince himself is now cooperating with Mueller.

Somehow I don't think Donald Trump is going to look kindly upon that and want to work with Prince.  Just sayin.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The hammer is about to fall on former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, big time, as the criminal investigation gets one major step closer to Trump himself.

Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.

Any criminal charges against Mr. Cohen would deal a significant blow to the president. Mr. Cohen, 52, worked for the president’s company, the Trump Organization, for more than a decade. He was one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal and visible aides and called himself the president’s personal lawyer after Mr. Trump took office.

The bank loans under scrutiny, the total of which has not been previously reported, came from two financial institutions in the New York region that have catered to the taxi industry, Sterling National Bank and the Melrose Credit Union, according to business records and people with knowledge of the matter, including a banker who reviewed the transactions.

Federal investigators in New York are seeking to determine whether Mr. Cohen misrepresented the value of his assets to obtain the loans, which exceed $20 million.

They are also examining how he handled the income from his taxi medallions and whether he failed to report it to the Internal Revenue Service.

Cohen is about to have supreme motivation to cooperate with Robert Mueller.

At this late stage of the inquiry, it is still possible that Mr. Cohen may plead guilty rather than face an indictment. He has hinted publicly and has stated explicitly in private that he is eager to tell prosecutors what he knows in exchange for leniency.

A cooperation agreement would likely include a provision that Mr. Cohen also provide information to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating possible involvement by the Trump campaign in Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

It is unclear whether the prosecutors and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers have had detailed discussions about a potential cooperation deal, but it is unlikely that the government would bring charges without having done so.

But if a plea deal is not reached, either because Mr. Cohen and prosecutors cannot agree on the terms or because prosecutors determine he does not have valuable information or is not credible, the government would likely seek to bring charges well before the midterm elections.

If the matter is not finalized by the end of August, prosecutors probably will wait until after the election, one of the people familiar with the inquiry said in recent weeks. That schedule would conform with the Justice Department’s informal policy of avoiding bringing politically sensitive cases that could influence voters close to an election.

In other words, the plea deal door closes for Cohen in two weeks.  The fact that Cohen has basically been off the radar over the month of August makes me think "the matter" is "being finalized" as we speak.  The article makes it clear there's two scenarios: Cohen gets charged before Labor Day, or he cooperates (and the Mueller team has bonus "we can't comment on this" plausible deniability due to the Justice Department guidelines on political cases before an election.)

We'll see which one Cohen chooses.  It's possible at this point in the game, he doesn't have anything novel to offer Mueller, and he gets crushed before the month is out, too.

My gut says he cooperates.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime has rejected an offer from Turkey to release an American pastor being held under house arrest in exchange for forgiveness of US fines on Turkey's largest bank.
• The Pentagon says US troops will remain in  Iraq "as long as needed" to help stabilize formerly ISIS-held regions of the country.
• Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull could be facing revolt as his popularity has collapsed, leaving the opposition Labor party a heavy favorite in May's scheduled elections.
• International cargo shipping giant Maersk says US tariffs will hurt America far more than other countries, according to the company's trade flow data.
• After putting the first woman in space 55 years ago, Russia's space program is down to its last female cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, and she may be grounded on a semi-permanent basis.

Last Call For The Coaled Hard Truth For Kentucky

Kentucky coal jobs are never coming back, and when Donald Trump promised the people of this state that he would bring them back, he lied to us, plain and simple, in order to get our votes.

Personal income has gone down in several Eastern Kentucky counties where coal employment has been decimated in recent years, according to a report from the Appalachian Regional Commission.

In Harlan County, for instance, per capita market income fell from $13,053 in 2015 to $12,579 in 2016, while in Perry County it dropped from $19,726 in 2015 to $19,043 in 2016, the most recent year covered in the ARC’s calculations.

Pike, Knott, Bell, Breathitt, Leslie, Letcher and Johnson also were among the Eastern Kentucky coal counties that saw a drop in per capita market income.

The declines were a factor in income in Appalachian Kentucky losing ground in comparison to the U.S. level.

Per capita market income in Appalachian Kentucky equaled 48.3 percent of the national level in 2015, but that fell to 46.8 in 2016, according to the ARC report.

Nationally, the income figure went up in 2016 to $40,679, but in Kentucky’s Appalachian counties, it edged down from $19,204 in 2015 to $19,022 in 2016.

That was the lowest level of any area in Appalachia, which the federal government defines as covering all of West Virginia, about half of Kentucky and parts of 11 other states.

Per capita market income is a measure of an area’s total personal income not counting transfer payments such as public assistance, according to the ARC report.

Coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky have plummeted from 14,619 in 2011 to 3,909 in the second quarter of this year, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.

Studies have cited competition from cheap natural gas for electricity generation as the biggest factor in coal’s decline, though other factors have played a role, including efforts to beef up environmental rules in the Obama administration and the rise of renewable energy such as wind power.

There has been no significant increase in coal jobs in Kentucky under President Donald Trump.

And there never will be, Kentucky.  Coal jobs are never, ever, ever coming back. Stop voting for the party that wants to give our money to billionaires.

You Never Go The Full Orwell, Rudy

We've finally reached the point where Donald Trump's lawyer is on TV telling the world literally that "truth isn't truth" anymore.

President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign officials and a Russian government ally could not be evidence of collusion even though the intention of the meeting was to get damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Giuliani brushed aside the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller could rely on the meeting for any possible charges against the president.

"It turned out to be a meeting about another subject and it was not pursued at all. Any meeting in regards to getting information about your opponent is something any candidate's staff would take," Giuliani said on "Meet the Press."

"The president of the United States wasn't at that meeting, he didn't know about that meeting, he found out about it after. By the time he found out about it, it was nothing. If this is their case for collusion, good luck Mueller."

It's not, any everyone knows there's far more evidence against Trump, but we play the kayfabe game anyway.  It's all professional wrestling.

Giuliani also threw more cold water on the prospect of the president testifying in the special counsel's investigation, arguing he wants to avoid Trump getting "trapped into perjury."

"When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth," he said.

"Truth isn't truth," Giuliani added, pointing to the accusations that Trump discussed the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in a meeting with then-FBI director James Comey, who Trump later fired.

"Donald Trump says: I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says: You did talk about it. So tell me, what the truth is?"

Up is down, black is white, and the truth is what Dear Leader Trump says it is, citizen.  Anything else is Fake News.

Sunday Long Read: Anything But Vanilla

The BBC has put together this week's Sunday Long Read on one of the oldest flavorings in the world, vanilla. In remote Madagascar villages, vanilla beans are more precious than gold - or lives sometimes -- and thieves and criminals know it.  The demand for natural vanilla in products has skyrocketed in the last few years, and that's put a major commodity squeeze on the beans and their producers.

A barefoot farmer is making his way through a forest.

Quiet drops of rain tumble steadily through the night, picked out in the light from his torch.

The rusty machete he holds isn’t for cutting down vines or chopping away stubborn branches - it is a defence against thieves.

Lots of other men - farmers like him - are out in the rain, patrolling the forest. For the past three months, they have left their homes every night and made the long journey into the plantations to protect their crop.

But this is not an illegal coca plantation, or anything like it. In fact, these farmers are growing a crop whose name is a byword for something boring.

The men need weapons to guard against robbers who roam the countryside looking for one thing - Madagascan vanilla.

It’s easy to see the raised pattern of dots on the smooth green skin of the pods.

They show that these vanilla vines belong to Leon Charles.

"That’s my name. My nickname - people here call me Baba.”

Leon is with his wife, Oristin, in their garden, where they grow coffee and vanilla in the village of Ambanizana, at the edge of the Masoala National Park, in the north-east corner of Madagascar.

It’s a hard place to get to - there are no roads to speak of. From the island’s capital, Antananarivo, it takes two flights, two hours on a speedboat and another 30 minutes in a canoe to reach Ambanizana.

The village is full of music. Upbeat dance melodies blare through the sheer, pink curtain covering the doorway of Leon’s home - a rectangular, wooden structure with a peaked roof.

Here, the forest meets the sea and the high humidity, shade, and moderate temperatures make it perfect for growing vanilla.

Each vine that Leon prunes holds pods - also known as beans - that will eventually retail for more than $150 (£120), once they are dried.

To deter theft, all the farmers in the surrounding area are stamping their names, or sometimes serial numbers, on to individual pods while they’re still on the vine. Even when the pods are dried, the markings can be made out.

Leon was robbed before last year’s harvest - and it was devastating for his family. “I was working in my [nearby] rice field when they quickly took advantage in order to steal,” he says. “I was so sad, I even cried, because we lost everything. I didn’t have money to send the children to school. Our household has been experiencing hardship for a whole year.”

But it could have been even worse.

 It's a good story, and one of the oldest in history: the 21st century spice trade is still all about scarcity, quality, and exploitation.  And it's the poor subsistence farmers who always lose in the end.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

I do remember saying back last September that White House counsel Don McGahn should cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller regarding his investigation:

And given Trump's long, long history of screwing his employees whenever it becomes slightly inconvenient for him personally, if I were Don McGahn I'd strongly consider rolling over on Trump before I ended up with a very long federal prison sentence.

Guess what we just found out over the weekend?

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which investigators might not have discovered without him.

For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual. Lawyers are rarely so open with investigators, not only because they are advocating on behalf of their clients but also because their conversations with clients are potentially shielded by attorney-client privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.

“A prosecutor would kill for that,” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, which did not have the same level of cooperation from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers. “Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom.”

Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.

Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.

It is not clear that Mr. Trump appreciates the extent to which Mr. McGahn has cooperated with the special counsel. The president wrongly believed that Mr. McGahn would act as a personal lawyer would for clients and solely defend his interests to investigators, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking.

In fact, Mr. McGahn laid out how Mr. Trump tried to ensure control of the investigation, giving investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president. Mr. McGahn cautioned to investigators that he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities, though the limits of executive power are murky.

I'm not sure who leaked this, but it's pellucid clear that McGahn has been in the process of saving his own ass for the last nine months. The phrases "including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise" and "investigators might not have discovered without him" should be giving Trump a heart attack right now, because it seems to me this is the biggest rollover yet on Trump himself.

Remember, McGahn threatening to quit as WH counsel was the reason why Trump was stopped from firing Mueller 14 months ago. Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien said as much eight months ago that McGahn not only leaked the NY Times story in January about Trump attempting to fire Mueller, but that McGahn's cooperation with Mueller was a distinct possibility.

If McGahn is now in Mueller's crosshairs, he might have decided that the simplest solution is to cooperate with the probe and turn over information in exchange for gentler treatment. In that scenario, McGahn becomes the source, directly or indirectly, of all kinds of interesting stuff for investigators and the media to ponder.

The timeframe of the NY Times story this weekend matches up with McGahn being the leaker then.  It makes a lot of sense that he would also be the leaker now, especially if McGahn felt Mueller was in trouble again.

Of course, there's the very real possibility that McGahn is cooperating to not only protect himself from the obstruction investigation, but to insulate himself from the Russia conspiracy investigation as well. As Marcy Wheeler reminds us, McGahn's days prior to being WH counsel at the FEC meant McGahn was the deciding vote to kill a 2011 investigation into Trump's 2012 campaign PAC run by Michael Cohen, with help from Roger Stone.

There's a reason why McGahn is Trump's White House counsel, in other words.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Hard Seven Going On Eight in China

The Ten Stages of Genocide tells us that the Chinese roundup and persecution of Uighur Muslims is well into stages seven and eight.

China has sharply expanded an internment program that initially targeted ethnic Uighur extremists but is now confining vast numbers of the largely Muslim minority group, including the secular, old and infirm, in camps across the country’s northwest.

Up to one million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang region, have now been incarcerated in an expanding network of “political re-education” camps, according to U.S. officials and United Nations experts.

As the camps have swelled in size, some Uighurs living outside China say that relatives—mainly, but not all, older people—have died in detention or shortly after their release.

Satellite images reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a specialist in photo analysis show that camps have been growing. Construction work has been carried out on some within the past two weeks, including at one near the western city of Kashgar that has doubled in size since Journal reporters visited in November.

The full extent of the internment program was long obscured because many Uighurs feared speaking out. Now more are recounting experiences, including six former inmates interviewed by the Journal who described how they or other detainees had been bound to chairs and deprived of adequate food.

“They would also tell us about religion, saying there is no such thing as religion, why do you believe in religion, there is no God,” said Ablikim, a 22-year-old Uighur former inmate who asked to be identified only by his first name.

Stage seven, Preparation, is where Beijing is now: we're in the middle of the "Final Solution" of ridding China of Uighurs in the name of "re-education" in detainment camps.  Stage eight, Persecution, means that the detained will never leave the camps alive.

Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. In state sponsored genocide, members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often expropriated. Sometimes they are even segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. They are deliberately deprived of resources such as water or food in order to slowly destroy them. Programs are implemented to prevent procreation through forced sterilization or abortions. Children are forcibly taken from their parents. The victim group’s basic human rights become systematically abused through extrajudicial killings, torture and forced displacement. Genocidal massacres begin. They are acts of genocide because they intentionally destroy part of a group. The perpetrators watch for whether such massacres meet any international reaction. If not, they realize that that the international community will again be bystanders and permit another genocide.

At this stage, a Genocide Emergency must be declared. If the political will of the great powers, regional alliances, or U.N. Security Council or the U.N. General Assembly can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance provided to the victim group to prepare for its self-defense. Humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees to come.

No such UN Security Council action will come, because China will veto it.  No such military action will come, because China has the troops and weapons to make any such action Pyrrhic. No such financial or economic action will come, because China is too important a trading partner to the world.

The Uighurs will be massacred, and we will soon proceed to stage nine, Extermination, and stage ten, Denial, afterwards.

Billions will be rightfully horrified by this.  But others will see a blueprint for future action.

The Late Women Of Late Night

In the #MeToo era where white guys still run everything, Hollywood still has a massive problem with women hosting late night shows.

Well, that was fast. On Friday, Netflix quietly pulled the plug on The Break with Michelle Wolf, one of the only “late-night” shows on “television” hosted by a female comedian, just three months after it premiered.

The streaming service also ended the short-lived Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale, but it was the news about Wolf’s show that came as a much bigger shock. That’s because, when The Break premiered in May, Wolf was riding higher than pretty much any other comedian in the country after her breakthrough performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. As recently as last week White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was still talking about how much her jokes stung.

At the time, the general consensus was that she was suddenly a hot commodity and Netflix was lucky to have her after she decided to leave first Late Night with Seth Meyers and then The Daily Show. Now, after just 10 episodes, Netflix has decided not to order any more.

“None of us can believe how classlessly Netflix has handled this,” a source connected to the show told The Daily Beast after the news broke, noting that the entire writing staff and even the showrunners found out they had been fired on Twitter.

The move comes just a couple of weeks after BET announced it was cancelling The Rundown with Robin Thede after its first season. That cuts the number of late-night-style shows hosted by women in half, with only TBS’ Samantha Bee and Hulu’s Sarah Silverman left standing.

The utter opacity of Netflix’s model makes it impossible to know how many people were watching The Break on a weekly basis, but the show’s cultural impact could be felt on a near-weekly basis. Wolf is an expert at outraging conservatives—perhaps something Netflix was less-than-thrilled about—from her “God bless abortions” segment over the 4th of July to her commercial parody that equated ICE to ISIS a couple of weeks later.

The later segment made heads explode on Fox News, including comedy aficionado Mike Huckabee, who declared, “You know, comedians are supposed to be funny, they’re supposed to make us laugh. I love satire, it’s one of my favorite forms of comedy, but her form of comedy is not satire, it’s angry, bitter hate.”

Wolf and Thede are gone, let's not forget that the right has also called for Silverman's head and Trump himself demanded that Samantha Bee lose her show.  If Hulu and TBS had folded their cards earlier this year as the right wanted, there would be no women hosting late night.  That still may happen now that the number of women late night hosts has been halved in August and the right now will focus again on Bee and Silverman, emboldened by their obvious wins.

That's exactly how they right wants it.  They want subservient, meek, obedient women, not biting, funny, smart ones.

The Dark Road From Eighty Years Prior

History tells us that the bad old days of European white nationalism are definitely back.  Austria's Freedom Party, Greece's Golden Dawn, Italy's Lega, France's National Front, Hungary's Jobbik and Fidesz, all are virulently anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-black, and very much pro-white. Poland has already fallen to these forces of proto-fascism, where critics of Polish President Andrzej Duda are being deported and banned from the EU.

The right-wing Polish government is continuously breaking new ground in its attacks on democracy and the rule of law. But now it has set a truly astonishing precedent. Warsaw has just used its European Union powers to deport a government critic and banned her from entering any country within the European free movement zone. The implications are ominous – and not only for Poland.

Lyudmyla Kozlovska, a young Ukrainian human rights defender, is a fervent promoter of democratic Poland. Since she left her home country for Poland a decade ago, she has put considerable effort into promoting the model of Polish democracy to emerging countries through the Open Dialog Foundation, her Warsaw-based think tank. She has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Polish politicians and officials for the cause.

This week, the Polish government deported Kozlovska. The authorities have not provided any explanation, but the likely reason is clear enough. She and her Polish husband, Bartosz Kramek, had criticized the government for what they see as its efforts to undermine the country’s democracy.

“It’s evil irony I ended up in the same situation that I helped many people to avoid,” Kozlovska told me. Now back in Ukraine, she is completely cut off from her life on the other side of the border, including her family and husband. But it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Kozlovska says she has lived through more than a year of government harassment after her husband posted a statement on Facebook criticizing the democratic rollback in Poland and calling for peaceful civil disobedience. The post went viral.

Sweden too is on the edge of disaster as the openly neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats are rapidly gaining power.

Around 4,000 far-right supporters gathered on the grounds of a ruined castle last weekend to plot the downfall of the socialist ideas that have come to define their progressive country.

Their views — anti-immigration, anti-establishment and often anti-Muslim — are not new amid the populist tsunami that's crashed into much of the West.

But this is Sweden, where socialists have dominated every election for the past 101 years, making the Nordic nation something of a lodestar for leftists around the world.

Some polls predict that the supporters' favored party, the Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazism and white nationalism, will win as much as 25 percent of the vote in an election scheduled for Sept. 9. Such a result would likely earn the Sweden Democrats more seats in Parliament than any other single party.

At the party's annual summer festival here, speeches were interspersed with heavy metal music as supporters gathered at Sölvesborg Castle for the headline act: an address by Jimmie Åkesson, the 39-year-old leader of the Sweden Democrats.

"He's the only politician I can trust," a retiree named Jan shouted above the din. "We need him for our country. I don't have so many years left, but for my children and for my grandchildren."

This is where the Trump regime wants to go, and if they maintain control of Congress in January, we're all headed down this path to the end of the republic.  The same forces that gave rise to Trump are loose in Europe.  The results will be far nastier I expect.

We've been here before, 80 years ago.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The Trump regime is corrupt through and through, and that means the Republican party is corrupt through and through as well.

The Justice Department is investigating whether longtime Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy sought to sell his influence with the Trump administration by offering to deliver U.S. government actions for foreign officials in exchange for tens of millions of dollars, according to three people familiar with the probe.

As part of the investigation, prosecutors are scrutinizing a plan that Broidy allegedly developed to try to persuade the Trump government to extradite a Chinese dissident back to his home country, a move sought by Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to two of the people.

They also are investigating claims that Broidy sought $75 million from a Malaysian business official if the Justice Department ended its investigation of a development fund run by the Malaysian government. The Malaysian probe has examined the role of the former prime minister in the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the fund.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Christopher Clark, an attorney for Broidy, declined to comment.

Broidy’s alleged activities were detailed in news reports earlier this year that cited hacked emails. The Los Angeles-based venture capitalist, who served as top fundraiser for the Republican Party and President Trump, has said that allegations against him are an effort by his enemies to smear him.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, said he had no knowledge of any request for records related to Broidy. The White House referred a request for comment to the Republican National Committee, which declined to comment.

If you thought the kleptocracy was limited to only Trump and his family, well, the reason why all those Republicans enabled him was so that they could benefit as well with their own scams.  Broidy's tens of millions laundered through the RNC was no different.  Our government is 100% for sale.

Meanwhile the retaliation against intelligence community Trump critics continue, and they're not even trying to hide that it's political targeting of critics anymore.

The White House has drafted documents revoking the security clearances of current and former officials whom President Trump has demanded be punished for criticizing him or playing a role in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to senior administration officials.

Trump wants to sign “most, if not all” of them, said one senior White House official, who indicated that communications aides, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Bill Shine, the newly named deputy chief of staff, have discussed the optimum times to release them as a distraction during unfavorable news cycles.

Some presidential aides echoed concerns raised by outside critics that the threatened revocations smack of a Nixonian enemies list, with little or no substantive national security justification. Particular worry has been expressed inside the White House about Trump’s statement Friday that he intends “very quickly” to strip the clearance of current Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

It is absolutely Nixonian, and it is being done to win the news cycle.

While he has frequently called Mueller’s inquiry a “rigged witch hunt,” and did so again Friday, Trump’s move against Brennan, and threats to move against others, has brought the controversy to a new level. Sanders announced the Brennan decision Wednesday, citing what she called his “erratic conduct” and “wild outbursts” on television, as well as allegedly erroneous statements he had made.

The senior White House official acknowledged that the step against Brennan had been prepared in late July, when Sanders first said Trump was considering it. But the decision to take that step was made this week to divert attention from nonstop coverage of a critical book released by fired Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.

Consideration is being given to holding other prepared documents in reserve for similar opportunities in the future, the official said.

Expect more naked retaliation to be made in order to move the press off the coming bad news for Trump and the GOP.  When Trump runs out of security clearances to revoke, will he start directing the Justice Department to prosecute his critics?

Be assured that Robert Mueller is aware of all of this.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

There's very little doubt now that both Republican US senators in my state are deeply involved in the Trump regime's Russia malfeasance, Mitch McConnell because of his role of protecting Trump as GOP Senate majority leader, and Rand Paul as proxy for Russia's powerful oligrarchs in the Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says he will ask President Trump this weekend to lift sanctions against top Russian officials so they can visit the United States later this year.

Paul said members of both bodies of Russia's legislature had agreed to come to the United States to continue talks after the GOP senator visited Moscow earlier this month.

"They have both agreed to come to Washington in the fall for further meetings. That's a good thing. The downside is the chairman of each of the committees is banned from coming to the United States because of sanctions," Paul told Fox News's Laura Ingraham. 

He added that to overcome the blockade he will ask the president, when they talk this weekend, to "take people off the list who are in the legislature."

Paul didn't specify who specifically he would ask be removed from U.S. sanctions lists.

But Paul met with Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Russian Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, during his trip to Moscow. Kosachev was targeted during a new wave of sanctions announced earlier this year.

Paul's trip to Moscow raised eyebrows in Washington, where many of his colleagues have been skeptical of Trump's warmer stance toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Spokesmen for both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told The Hill last week that they had not invited, and we're not discussing inviting, their Russian counterparts to visit the Capitol.

Kosachev indicated earlier this month that Moscow would be interested in organizing a meeting between members of the Russian legislature and their U.S. counterparts.

Paul and his Ron father have been deep into Russian "useful idiot" damage to the US for years, unlike Trump's overweening greed, for Paul it's ideology.  Even McConnell thinks this is a bad idea, removing sanctions on Russia's legislative leaders, all installed by or members of Putin's circle of oligarchs, is foiling exactly the "hit them in the wallet" damage that Congress insisted on Trump doing.

Rand Paul doing this under the cover of "diplomacy" is atrocious.  Both of my Senators need to go, but neither one is up for reelection this year unfortunately, and KY Dems have all kinds of problems putting together any sort of real challenge anyway (see Conway, Jack, and Grimes, Alison).

Russia has both my senators in their grip.  That terrifies me as an American and as a Kentuckian.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The prospect of states becoming purple has caused Republicans to go insane and push massive Jim Crow-style laws, voter identification scams, intimidation tactics, and disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of black voters over the last four years. It's happened in Ohio, it's happened in Alabama, it's happened in Wisconsin, it's happened in North Carolina, it's happened in Mississippi, and it's happened in multiple other GOP-controlled states. 

When President Obama reminded Democrats that this was going on and that the way to fight this was registration and exercising that right to vote, we ignored him and had the lowest midterm turnout in generations in 2014, and one of the lowest turnouts for a presidential election in 2016.

Now Jim Crow has returned to Georgia in the Trump era just in time to prevent the nation's first black woman as Governor.

Civil rights advocates are objecting to a proposal to close about 75 percent of polling locations in a predominantly black south Georgia county.

The Randolph County elections board is scheduled to meet Thursday to discuss a proposal that would eliminate seven of nine polling locations in the county, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. Included in the proposed closures is Cuthbert Middle School where nearly 97 percent of voters are black.

"There is strong evidence that this was done with intent to make it harder for African Americans," ACLU of Georgia attorney Sean Young said. The ACLU has sent a letter to the elections board demanding that the polling places remain open and has filed open records requests for information about the proposal to close the polling places.

County elections board members did not immediately respond Wednesday to a phone message seeking comment on the proposal.

Young and others from the ACLU plan to attend the elections board meeting Thursday.

According to the latest census figures, Randolph County's population is more than 61 percent of black, double the statewide percentage.

The median household income for the county was $30,358 in 2016, compared to $51,037 in the rest of the state. Nearly one-third of the county's residents live below the poverty line, compared to about 16 percent statewide, according to U.S. Census figures.

It is Republicans who say we have to cut polling precincts, but always in blue counties with large numbers of black and brown voters.  It is Republicans who say we must have strict voter ID laws to stop non-existent voter fraud that happens to disenfranchise black and brown voters. It's Republicans who say we have to end early voting in order to "save local governments money" after cutting state voting budgets and preventing black and brown working-class voters from casting votes on days other than Tuesday.

This is voter suppression.  It's working better than the GOP could have ever hoped.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues to remove as much judicial oversight and due process as he can from deportation proceedings in order to speed up the Trump regime's inevitable mass deportation scenario.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday sought to speed up the deportation of illegal immigrants, telling immigration judges they should only postpone cases in removal proceedings “for good cause shown.”

Sessions, in an interim order that was criticized by some lawyers, said the “good-cause” standard “limits the discretion of immigration judges and prohibits them from granting continuances for any reason or no reason at all.”

Unlike the federal judiciary system, U.S. immigration courts fall under the Department of Justice and the attorney general can intervene. Sessions, a Republican former U.S. Senator appointed by President Donald Trump, has been unusually active in this practice compared to his predecessors.

Sessions has led efforts by the Trump administration to crack down on illegal immigration, including a “zero tolerance” policy that separated immigrant parents from their children while they were in U.S. detention. Trump abandoned the separation policy in June under political pressure.

Critical in showing “good cause” is whether a person is likely to succeed in efforts to remain in the United States, either by appealing for asylum or receiving some form of visa or work permit, Sessions said on Thursday.

Stephen Kang, an attorney with the ACLU immigrants rights project, described Sessions’ order as “troubling” and one of a series that “has moved in the direction of restricting due process rights for individuals who are in removal proceedings.”

Kang said Sessions seemed to portray immigrants seeking more time to prepare their cases as trying to “game the system and avoid deportation.”

Kang said removal proceedings were complex and people needed time “both to get lawyers to ensure that their due process rights are protected and time just to make sure their cases get a fair hearing.”

Sessions doesn't want fair hearings or due process or any of that.  He wants deportations of people deemed undesirable by the Trump regime.  And if you think for a second that this will be limited to just "illegal immigrants" you haven't been paying attention to the regime's stated plans this year to remove due process, end legal immigration, denaturalize immigrant citizens and revoke their citizenship, discharging immigrants who served this country to earn citizenship, turn ICE and the Border Patrol into intelligence agencies, sue states and cities over sanctuary laws, turn the 2020 Census into a tool to hunt the undocumented and harm blue states with large immigrant populations, separate immigrant children from their parents and keeping them in detention camps, all but end refugee settlement programs, and revoke green cards for those who get on social safety programs.

It will not be long before the regime starts applying these tactics to citizens of the US who are critics. We cheerfully call them "dissidents" in other countries, people locked up by autocratic regimes for "crimes against the government".  We're not that far away from having our own dissidents rounded up here in America.  As I said two months ago, we're at a hard six, heading for seven in the ten statges of genocide.

StupidiNews!

• Pentagon officials have postponed Donald Trump's proposed Washington DC Veterans' Day military parade until at least 2019, citing logistical issues.
• In a unanimous voice vote, the US Senate has adopted a resolution affirming support for a free press and that the "press is not the enemy of the people".
• A Xiamen Air passenger jet overshot a runway at Manila's airport early Friday, the plane slid off the rain-soaked tarmac into a perimeter fence but no casualties were reported.
• Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin is warning that Turkey will face more US economic sanctions if Ankara does not release an American pastor Andrew Brunson, held on house arrest.
• New polling shows most Americans overwhelmingly disagree that the US needs a new "Space Force" branch of the US military separate from current US Air Force space operations.