Meat The Press, Con't

It's looking more and more like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the disappearance of Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Kashoggi, who is by all accounts, extremely not among the living anymore.

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan.

The intelligence, described by U.S. officials familiar with it, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in Khashoggi’s disappearance last week after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say that a Saudi security team lay in wait for the journalist and killed him.

Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and Mohammed in particular. Several of Khashoggi’s friends said that over the past four months, senior Saudi officials close to the crown prince had called Khashoggi to offer him protection, and even a high-level job working for the government, if he returned to his home country.

Khashoggi, however, was skeptical of the offers. He told one friend that the Saudi government would never make good on its promises not to harm him.

“He said: ‘Are you kidding? I don’t trust them one bit,’ ” said Khaled Saffuri, an Arab American political activist, recounting a conversation he had with Khashoggi in May, moments after Khashoggi had received a call from Saud al-Qahtani, an adviser to the royal court.

The intelligence pointing to a plan to detain Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia has fueled speculation by officials and analysts in multiple countries that what transpired at the consulate was a backup plan to capture Khashoggi that may have gone wrong.

A former U.S. intelligence official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter — noted that the details of the operation, which involved sending two teams totaling 15 men, in two private aircraft arriving and departing Turkey at different times, bore the hallmarks of a “rendition,” in which someone is extra­legally removed from one country and deposited for interrogation in another.

In other words, the Saudis used the US rendition playbook and black-bagged a very vocal critic of the Saudi regime.  The Trump regime is desperately trying to make it look like the Saudi Crown Prince was a "reasonable guy" instead of, you know, ordering and carrying out the assassination of a US citizen, because thanks to the Magnitsky Act, Trump now has to find a way to either clear the Crown Prince's name or impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia, something that would kind of wreck his son-in-law Jared Kushner's arms deal.

A man who spends his time demonizing journalists is tacitly giving the green light to his authoritarian allies to deal with journalists in whatever way they want to, and Trump will absolutely look the other way on this. Regardless of the motive to silence Khashoggi, we now have three oppressive, anti-press regimes responsible for his disappearance and most likely his murder: the Saudis, the Turks, and the Americans.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Heidi Heitkamp is finished.

Not because of her courageous vote against Brett Kavanaugh, but because thousands of Native American voters in North Dakota just became ineligible to vote thanks to...the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a lower-court order requiring voters in North Dakota to present certain forms of identification and proof of their residential address in order to cast a ballot in next month’s elections. A case challenging this requirement on behalf of the state’s sizable Native American populations alleged that the requirement would disenfranchise tribal residents, many of whom lack the proper identification and do not have residential addresses on their identification cards.

The Supreme Court’s order will likely make it harder for Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, considered the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, to retain her seat in November. Heitkamp won her seat by less than 3,000 votes in 2012 with strong backing from Native Americans, and she is the only statewide elected Democrat. North Dakota Republicans began changing voting rules to make it harder to cast a ballot months after Heitkamp’s victory six years ago. Republicans have claimed the changes to voter ID requirements are intended to stop voter fraud, even though in-person fraud is exceedingly rare.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was sworn in on Monday, did not partake in the decision, and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented.

North Dakota’s 2017 voter law ID was challenged by Native residents who alleged that the law disproportionately blocked Native Americans from voting. In April, a federal district court judge blocked large portions of the law as discriminatory against Native voters. “The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses,” Judge Daniel Hovland wrote. “Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote.” According to the website of the Native American Rights Fund, which represents the plaintiffs, many native residents lack residential street addresses because “the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities.”As a result, tribal IDs use P.O. boxes, which are not sufficient under North Dakota’s new law—a specification that seems designed to disenfranchise native voters. Hovland’s ruling was in place during the primaries this spring.

But in September, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the law to go into effect. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling Tuesday. In her dissent, Ginsburg argued that the Supreme Court’s order was at odds with one of the top court’s most frequently invoked doctrines on election law: not to change the rules right before an election. By allowing a different set of ID rules in the general election from in the primary, Ginsburg warned, the court was risking widespread confusion and disenfranchisement.

“The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction,” Ginsburg wrote. “Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election. If the Eighth Circuit’s stay is not vacated, the risk of disfranchisement is large.”

Ginsburg noted that according to the factual record of the case, about 20 percent of voters likely to try to cast a ballot in the midterms will lack the required identification. Another “approximately18,000 North Dakota residents also lack supplemental documentation sufficient to permit them to vote without a qualifying ID,” she noted.

A great many of those voters who will lose their right to vote, one month before the election, will be Native Americans who backed Heitkamp.  She's done.  She will lose by double digits now, because tens of thousands lost their vote in North Dakota.

Meanwhile in Georgia, GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp, running for Governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, is in the middle of stealing that election by also disenfranchising tens of thousands of Democratic voters.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s (R) office is blocking 53,000 people from registering to vote, according to records obtained by the Associated Press, a huge number that could sway his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams.

As TPM laid out this morning, Kemp has used a controversial “exact match” program to approve or block voter registrations that disproportionately impacts minority voters.

Now we know exactly how many people that might affect this election. According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people.

It’s unclear how many of these voters will be able to get on the rolls by Election Day, though if past is prologue Kemp will manage to keep many if not most of them from voting.

The secretary of state has waged a years-long battle against voting rights groups in the state, regularly going after minority voter registration efforts, while purging voting rolls and making it harder for many people to vote.

This figure shows how much impact that could have. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s (R) 8-point reelection margin in 2014 was just 200,000 votes total. Abrams and Kemp have been statistically tied in most public and private polls. Whether or not these voters get on the rolls could determine who wins the election.

Republicans will keep making it harder and harder to vote until only rich, old, retired white people can.  Do we not get this?

StupidiNews!

• The strongest hurricane to hit the US in 14 years, Hurricane Michael leveled Mexico Beach, Florida and the surrounding panhandle and continues to rip through Georgia.
• With 40% of Gulf of Mexico oil production shut down, gas prices are expected to rise sharply in the South and Midwest due to Hurricane Michael.
• US stock markets plunged Wednesday, losing 4% as investors consider the market could be reaching a correction phase as fourth quarter guidance is expected from several major companies.
• At least three are dead after a strong 6.0 earthquake rocked Bali, Indonesia early Thursday, an aftershock from last month's monster quake that killed more than 2,000.
• AT&T plans to launch its own streaming service, combining HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros. TV and movies and channels to compete with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and now Google.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

They're not even pretending anymore that Kavanaugh wasn't put on the bench to serve as Trump's proxy on the Supreme Court, and they don't have to care anymore now that he's there for life.

The Roger Stone aide who is mounting a constitutional challenge to special counsel Robert Mueller wants to take his case to the Supreme Court and feels "great" that Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be on the bench to, hopefully, deal a major blow to the Russia investigation. 

Andrew Miller previously worked as an aide to Stone, a longtime Trump ally who is under scrutiny in the Russia investigation. Miller was subpoenaed earlier this year to testify before the special counsel's grand jury. Instead of complying, he waged a legal battle to invalidate Mueller's authority to act as a prosecutor. A federal judge ruled against him, holding him in contempt of court for failing to testify, and he has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Asked how he feels about Kavanaugh's presence on the court, as someone who might be sympathetic to his case, Miller said, "I feel nothing but great. I'm cool as a cucumber now." 

Miller made the comments on a radio show Tuesday morning, when Kavanaugh heard his first oral arguments as a newly minted justice. The program on WBEN in Buffalo, New York, was hosted by former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo, a staunch Mueller critic who has been questioned as part of the investigation and is partially funding Miller's legal team. 

Earlier in the show, Miller's attorney said he hoped to take the case to the Supreme Court and predicted that a majority of the justices would support his argument against Mueller's authority, if they decided to take the case. The probability that Kavanaugh and his colleagues on the court would get to hear Miller's challenge of Mueller anytime soon is a stretch.

For the case to reach the Supreme Court, Miller would have to lose at the appellate court first. His case is scheduled to be heard by three appellate judges on November 8, and a decision would come later. 

Kavanaugh would be "very good on this issue," Miller's attorney Paul Kamenar said on WBEN. 

"He would be a good ally," Kamenar said of Kavanaugh, "because he has talked about these cases before in terms of presidential power and limiting the power of the government and has written about this very issue of the constitutionality of the independent counsel."

They're publicly doing victory laps.  They know exactly why he was appointed, and they know exactly why Justice Kennedy retired.

The fix is in.  We have to start undoing the damage in November, and while it will take the rest of my lifetime, if we don't start next month with the House and the Senate, we may never get the chance at all.

A Higher AI-er That Hires, Expired

Judging from Amazon's latest experiment in machine learning in removing the bias in HR from hiring for technical positions, AIs are only as intelligent as the data you feed them to learn and grow from.

Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.

The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.

Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges, but the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.

The irony here is that when it comes to technical positions, Amazon, like most American corporations, wants cheap H1-B labor from overseas, and the massive majority of H1-B workers are male.  The bias in STEM has been towards men for decades, so when Amazon put in ten years of hiring 75-80% men for technical positions into the hopper, the program "learned" that bias too and spat out the same results.

The problem with AI, like any computer program, isn't the program.  It's the people who program it.

You don't have to be a genius super-coder to pick that up.

Tramp Trades Blows, Con't

Trump tariffs are now starting to bite on automakers and the first of many to announce major layoffs is Ford, announcing that some 24,000 American auto jobs are going away.

Ford will be making cuts to its 70,000-strong white-collar workforce in a move it calls a "redesign" of its staff to be leaner, have fewer layers, and offer more decision-making power to employees, the company announced.

The number of jobs that will be axed is unknown at this point.

“A lot of the (reorganization) is about making different choices about strategy,” Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told NBC News, adding that the goal isn’t just to slash spending but to improve the “fitness” of the company.

However, a recent report by Morgan Stanley estimates "a global headcount reduction of approximately 12 percent,” or 24,000 of Ford's 202,000 workers worldwide. "Such a magnitude of reduction is not without precedent in the auto industry,” analysts wrote in the investment note.

The decision is part of Ford's $25.5 billion reorganization plan, which includes slashing $6 billion in improved capital efficiencies. Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who cut more than 12,000 jobs as head of office furniture maker Steelcase, had been expected to make cutbacks even sooner, according to some observers. Hackett took over from Ford veteran Mark Fields when he was ousted from the company in May 2017.

Ford is lagging behind the competition, selling an anemic 32.8 vehicles per employee. Long-time rival GM puts out 52.7 vehicles per employee. But it's unclear exactly how improved efficiencies will impact potential job cuts.

Ford has already warned that President Donald Trump's auto tariffs have impacted the company to the tune of $1 billion, and the president’s trade policies threaten to play havoc with Ford’s ongoing reorganization, Shanks told NBC News.

Trump and Ford have been squaring off since well before the 2016 election, when then-presidential candidate originally threatened to impose hefty tariffs on vehicles Ford intended to start importing from a factory in Mexico. The carmaker eventually scrubbed that plan, but rather than return production to the U.S. it decided to move it to China.

Earlier this year, Ford said it would all but pull out of the U.S. passenger car market, citing the rapid shift in demand from sedans, coupes, and wagons to SUVs, CUVs and pickups. It was going to eliminate the conventional Focus models in favor of a crossover version, the Active. Now, with that model dropped, the still-popular Mustang will be the only remaining passenger car model in its line-up, with Ford relying in the future almost entirely on light trucks — such as the F-Series pickups that last year generated nearly all of its profits.

Ironically, Ford actually may have to cut production of the Mustang and some other models — in the process, potentially reducing U.S. jobs — as a result of the tariffs China has enacted on American-made vehicles in a tit-for-tat trade war. The Mustang had been one of the most popular U.S. vehicles sold in that country. 

Expect more "reorganizations" from automakers in the months ahead.  The way the housing and financial markets are right now, it won't take much to push them over the edge into another 2008-style collapse and another deep recession.

And this time we won't be getting out of it nearly as well.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Michael is now a Category 4 storm heading for the Florida panhandle, with heavy rain and storm surge already affecting the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Miami.
• Outgoing UN Ambassador Nikki Haley may have owed more than a million dollars according to federal ethics disclosures at the time of her resignation on Monday.
• A federal judge has blocked parts of Missouri's photo ID requirement law for voting, ruling that the state failed to tell voters what other forms of ID are acceptable at the polls.
• A major US telecom firm discovered hacked hardware from a Chinese supplier and removed it after a report last week that China inserted chips into servers to hack into US businesses.
• A major class-action suit against Google has been filed in California after Monday's news that the tech giant exposed the private details of a half-million users.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The "Kavanaugh Crush" that Republicans have been crowing about for the last week isn't materializing and if anything, Republicans have lost serious ground in the last several weeks with women according to the latest CNN poll.

Four weeks out from Election Day, Democrats remain well ahead of Republicans in a generic ballot matchup, with 54% of likely voters saying they support the Democrat in their district and 41% backing a Republican, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. 

This is the widest margin of support for Democrats in a midterm cycle since 2006, when at this point, the party held a whopping 21-point lead over Republicans among likely voters. That's also when Democrats seized control of the House from Republicans, making Nancy Pelosi speaker until 2011. 

This year, Democrats' enthusiasm about their congressional vote has increased and 62% now say they're extremely or very enthusiastic to vote, up seven points since September among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Among Republicans and Republican leaning independents, enthusiasm has remained relatively steady, going from 50% in September to 52% in the most recent poll. 

Democratic enthusiasm this year is more intense than it has been in previous midterm cycles, which typically engage voters less than presidential years. The 40% who call themselves "extremely enthusiastic" is the highest share to say so in a midterm election cycle since CNN first asked the question in 2009. 

In fact, Democrats' enthusiasm today more closely resembles the 2008 presidential election. Just before President Barack Obama was elected, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners said they were extremely enthusiastic about voting that November. In 2008, Democrats won eight seats in the Senate and 21 in the House, as well as a victory in the presidency. 

The real issue though is now the gender gap is a gender chasm.

Women's support for Democratic candidates remains extremely strong; 63% of women say they'll vote for the Democrat and only a third say they'll vote for the Republican. Men are more closely divided, but tilt in the opposite direction, with half backing the Republican and 45% behind the Democrat.

Republicans up five points with men.  Democrats up thirty points with women.

Tell me again how Kavanaugh helped?

A Haley Bail-y Tale-y

The latest departure from the Trump regime is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who apparently blindsided everyone in the White House when she submitted her resignation last week, effective at the end of the year.

Haley discussed her resignation with Trump last week when she visited him at the White House, these sources said. Her news shocked a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration.

Background: Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was easily confirmed four days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017.

She has overseen Trump's shift in dealing with the UN, including the U.S. exit from the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley called the organization's "greatest failure."

Worth noting: Haley wrote a public op-ed in September challenging the N.Y. Times' anonymous op-ed:

• "I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person."
• "Like my colleagues in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council, I have very open access to the president. He does not shut out his advisers, and he does not demand that everyone agree with him. I can talk to him most any time, and I frequently do."
• "If I disagree with something and believe it is important enough to raise with the president, I do it. And he listens."

Not anymore, he does.   And why would Haley up and leave?  Like most Trump regime officials, if you're not actually Trump, being openly corrupt still gets you busted.

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley should be investigated to determine if she complied with ethics regulations when she accepted seven free flights for herself and her husband on luxury private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen, according to a request filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) with the State Department’s Inspector General.

Ambassador Haley’s 2017 public financial disclosure report listed her acceptance of gifts of seven free flights on private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen for herself and her husband. Those flights were between New York, Washington, DC, and three cities in her home state of South Carolina, and appear to have been worth tens of thousands of dollars to her. In her financial disclosure report, Ambassador Haley asserted that each gifted flight qualified for an exception based on a personal relationship with the giver. The report, however, does not provide enough information to demonstrate that this exception was applicable to the flights. Whether the exception applies depends partly on whether the three businessmen were the only sources of the gifts; if business entities were sources of the gifts, the exception was inapplicable.

Federal ethics regulations prohibit employees from soliciting or accepting gifts given because of the employee’s official position. They also direct employees to consider declining otherwise permissible gifts if they believe a reasonable person would question their integrity or impartiality as a result of accepting the gifts. At a minimum, Ambassador Haley should have been conscious of the appearance concerns surrounding her acceptance of gifts of private luxury air travel at a time when her colleagues in the administration were making news with their own lavish air travel.

“By accepting gifts of luxury private flights, Ambassador Haley seems to be falling in line with other Trump administration officials who are reaping personal benefits from their public positions,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “Our ethics laws are clearly written to prevent even the appearance of corruption and improper influence. We’re calling on the State Department’s inspector general to further investigate the nature of these gifts, determine whether they are in line with ethics rules, and ensure that employees like Ambassador Haley are fully trained on the application and importance of ethical standards.”

This CREW legal request came today, the same day Haley's resignation was announced, so there's about a 99% chance that we actually found the one person in the regime who still is capable of shame when it comes to ethics violations.

And if you believe that, well...

Haley joins a long list of corrupt Trump regime officials who overstayed their welcome by grifting on the public dime, of course the biggest violator is Trump himself, and he could not care less about that.

Here's my gut feeling:  Jeff Sessions is done as AG as soon as the midterms are over.  Trump will need a new AG.  My money is on Lindsey Graham.  Which means Graham's Senate seat will be open.  Both Haley and Graham are from SC.

It's not hard to be this cynical, but that's what is coming.  Graham becomes Trump's hatchet man, the Saturday Night Massacre happens, and Haley gets appointed to fill out Graham's term.

I hope I'm wrong, but to me, Haley's sudden resignation screams that this is in the works.

We'll know soon enough.

It's Mueller TIme, Con't

The Trump regime has installed its Potemkin court and believes they have won, and will coast to an easy victory in November followed by the end of the Mueller probe and with it, American democracy.  Unfortunately for them, reality is a harsh mistress.

A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome,” used code names to identify the players — Mr. Trump was “Lion” and Mrs. Clinton was “Forest.” Mr. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear.”

There is no evidence that the Trump campaign acted on the proposals, and Mr. Gates ultimately was uninterested in Psy-Group’s work, a person with knowledge of the discussions said, in part because other campaign aides were developing a social media strategy. Psy-Group’s owner, Joel Zamel, did meet in August 2016 with Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s eldest son.

Investigators working for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired, have obtained copies of the proposals and questioned Psy-Group employees, according to people familiar with those interviews.

The scope of the social media campaigns, essentially a broad effort to sow disinformation among Republican delegates and general election voters, was more extensive than the work typically done by campaign operatives to spread the candidate’s message on digital platforms. The proposal to gather information about Mrs. Clinton and her aides has elements of traditional opposition research, but it also contains cryptic language that suggests using clandestine means to build “intelligence dossiers.”

We know now that ultimately instead of going with Psy-Group that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon went with Cambridge Analytica for their social media manipulation tactics to be used on American voters in 2016.  But the real story here is that this ties Rick Gates to Zamel, and Zamel to Donald Trump Jr. as linked in the article above, and we know Zamel's Psy-Group and Bannon's Cambridge Analytica announced a partnership just after Election Day 2016.

This was the May 2018 NYT article that found Zamel met with Trump, Jr. and Erik Prince in the Seychelles, along with Saudi, Emirati, and Russian nationals to discuss a larger plan involving the 2016 election.  As I said in May:

So this brings up an excellent point.  It wasn't just Putin who wanted to see Trump win.  The Trump campaign was open for business, and Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Russia, and possibly more foreign influences knew that Trump was open to the highest bidder.  And they took them up on the offer.

So now we have the timeline more clearly:  Kushner turned Zamel down officially, but then Trump's son met with Zamel after, off the books, with Erik Prince facilitating.  Kushner couldn't be caught with this meeting on record, so Junior did the dirty work.

Zamel gets a fat partnership contract with CA.  Erik Prince's sister Betsy DeVos becomes Education Secretary, while Erik Prince himself gets to pitch privatizing Trump's war in Afghanistan (and still is.)  The Saudis, Emiratis, and Russians get the access they want to the White House.

And Mueller knows it all.

Clock's ticking...

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Michael is expected to strengthen to a Category 3 storm as it heads through the Gulf for the Florida panhandle and is expected to make landfall Wednesday afternoon.
• Convicted felon Bill Cosby is seeking a new trial or a reduction in sentence citing new evidence of prosecutorial misconduct after his conviction of sexual assault last month.
• Two Americans have won this year's Nobel Prize in Economics for work on long-term sustainable prosperity models in the age of climate change.
• The IMF is cutting global economic growth forecasts for the first time in two years as Trump's trade war is causing downward revisions in GDP growth for 2019.
• Hot on the heels of last week's Google Stream gaming service announcement and testing, Microsoft is introducing its own Project Xcloud game streaming service for mobile phones and tablets.

Last Call For Paying The Piper

Alaska Republicans are furious with Lisa Murkowski's failure to vote yes on confirming Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and now she will be made to pay the price.

Alaska Republican party leaders plan to consider whether to reprimand U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski for opposing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The party has asked Murkowski to provide any information she might want its state central committee to consider.

Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock says the committee could decide to issue a statement. Or he says it could withdraw support of Murkowski, encourage party officials to look for a replacement and ask that she not seek re-election as a Republican.

He says the party took that more extreme step previously with state legislators who caucused with Democrats.

He says all this follows outrage from Alaska Republicans.

Murkowski told reporters that if she worried about political repercussions she wouldn’t be able to do the job Alaskans expect her to do.

Meanwhile, on the Dem side, West Virginia's Joe Manchin is in his own mess of his own making as both parties are taking their shots.

Danielle Walker cried on Joe Manchin's shoulder after she shared her story of sexual assault in the senator's office. She thought he listened. The 42-year-old Morgantown woman said she was both devastated and furious when Manchin became the only Democrat in the U.S. Senate to support President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

"I feel raped all over again," Walker told The Associated Press.

A day after Manchin broke with his party on what may be the most consequential vote of the Trump era, the vulnerable Democrat is facing a political firestorm back home. While Republicans — including one of the president's sons — are on the attack, the most passionate criticism is coming from Manchin's very own Democratic base, a small but significant portion of the electorate he needs to turn out in force to win re-election next month. A Manchin loss would put his party's hopes of regaining control of the Senate virtually out of reach.

Walker, a first-time Democratic candidate for the state legislature, said she may not vote at all in the state's high-stakes Senate election. Julia Hamilton, a 30-year-old educator who serves on the executive committee of the Monongalia County Democratic Party, vowed to sit out the Senate race as well.

"At some point you have to draw a line," Hamilton said. "I have heard from many, many people — especially women. They won't be voting for Manchin either."

Here's the difference: at the end of all this, Lisa Murkowski will still be in the Senate.  It's increasingly clear that Joe Manchin and North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, who bravely voted no on Kavanaugh, will most likely not be.

Now tell me, who comes out ahead in January if the lesson is Red State Dems are screwed no matter what they vote for in the Senate?

Hint: it won't be the Dems. 

Deportation Nation, Con't

The first major case that will include Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice may very well be Nielsen v. Preap, a class-action suit against Homeland Security to determine if the Trump regime can simply deny bond hearings to those who ICE have detained for deportation because of crimes they committed years, and sometimes decades ago.

Nielsen is a class action brought by a group of immigrants in the Ninth Circuit who have been or are being detained under 8 U.S.C. § 1226, a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That section authorizes federal authorities to detain any alien who may be subject to “removal”—the technical term for deportation. That term covers a lot of immigrants—border-crossers arrested after entering the U.S. illegally, tourists or students who have overstayed their visas, and lawful permanent residents who have committed certain crimes.

The statute creates two classes of “removable” aliens—first, ordinary detainees who haven’t committed crimes but are facing removal on other grounds and, second, “criminal aliens” facing removal because of criminal convictions.

Once ordinary aliens are detained for removal, they face three different legal tests: First will be a “bond hearing,” at which they can try to convince an immigration judge that they can be safely released, and will show up for their deportation hearing. They can put on evidence of their community, and family members can attend to give their support. If they get bond, they can go back to their lives until their next hearing. Next, whether they get bond or not, they receive a “removal hearing” at which they can try to show that they are not “removable” after all. If they win there, they are free to go. But even if they fail in that effort, they can still to try to show that they are eligible for what is called “cancellation of removal”—for example, because they have been lawfully present in the U.S. for years and have family ties here, or because deportation would subject them to danger in their country of origin. If the immigrant can prove that claim, immigration authorities have the discretion to allow him or her to remain and “adjust” to legal status.

But go back to the beginning—the bond hearing. Some “criminal aliens” have been convicted of certain specified statutory crimes (such as drug or firearms offenses, sex offenses, terrorism or espionage, or crimes of “moral turpitude”). For this “criminal alien” group, the statute says that “when the alien is released” from imprisonment, the government “shall take [him or her] into custody.” These immigrants get no bond hearing; they must be held in detention until their cases are resolved. They can still challenge removal; they can still ask for cancellation; but they must remain behind bars for the months or even years those proceedings can take.

This is the issue in Nielsen v. Preap: It is not whether authorities can detain these aliens—they can. But does the statute really deny bond hearings to all of them—longtime residents of the U.S. who were convicted of minor offenses 5, 10, 15 or more years ago? What if a person has long ago been released and has returned to a community, established a family and put down roots, and lived a blameless life since that brush with the law? In other words, what if the immigrant would otherwise be a prime candidate for bond?

These aliens can be detained and deported. There is no question that ICE agents can show up at their homes, arrest them, and hold them for removal proceedings. But does the “when” language mean they don’t get a bond hearing? If a non-citizen has left prison and established a new life, did Congress in writing the statute really mean to deny that person the chance to show an immigration court that he or she will show up for a removal hearing, the way other “noncriminal” aliens can?

And that’s where the meaning of the word “when” comes in.

This is a class action case on behalf of immigrants, many of whom served or are serving sentences, or even probation, for minor offenses. One of the lead plaintiffs, Mony Preap, was born to Cambodian parents in a refugee camp; he has lived lawfully in the U.S. since 1981. In 2006, he was convicted on two misdemeanor counts of possessing marijuana—an offense that would have subjected him to mandatory detention. However, immigration authorities did not arrest him then. Instead, he returned to his community and was convicted of battery—which does not trigger the mandatory detention statute. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at that point took him to a detention center, and he was denied a bond hearing. He was eventually able to show an immigration judge that he was eligible for “cancellation,” and so he has been released.

Another plaintiff, Eduardo Vega Padilla, arrived as a toddler and has been a lawful resident for 52 years; his six grandchildren are all U.S. citizens. He was convicted of controlled-substance offenses in 1997 and 1999 and placed on probation; while he was serving that sentence, he was convicted of possessing an unloaded pistol, then released in 2002. In 2013, ice agents arrested him at his home. Because of the drug offense, ice denied him a bond hearing until a district court ordered them to provide one—at which point he won release.

Representing all immigrants arrested under similar circumstances, the plaintiffs argue that, if ICE wants to detain an immigrant without hope of bail, it must detain him or her at the moment of release; any other reading of the “when” in the statute, they say, allows authorities to wait years, and then detain immigrants long after they have successfully returned to their lives. Congress cannot have intended that.
That reading is something like “when” in this sentence: “When you have completed the quiz, turn in your paper and pencil and exit quietly.” The government’s reading might seem more like this chestnut: “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Effectively, the Trump regime wants the power of indefinite detainment for deportable aliens, even the ones who have been in the country for decades, living peaceful lives.  It's a necessary step to mass roundups of undocumented immigrants that are surely coming just as soon as SCOTUS gives the green light.

Brett Kavanaugh will get to hear such a case next week where he would most certainly be the fifth vote to allow ICE such broad powers.

No rest for the wicked, it seems.

Gaia, You Look Like Death Warmed Over

Catastrophic events from climate change are not a "by 2100" thing that only Generation Z's future grandkids will have to deal with, it's so bad now that it's a "by 2040" thing that my generation will have to deal with.

The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.

With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found.

“There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

At the same time, however, the report is being received with hope in some quarters because it affirms that 1.5 degrees Celsius is still possible — if emissions stopped today, for instance, the planet would not reach that temperature. It is also likely to galvanize even stronger climate action by focusing on 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees, as a target that the world cannot afford to miss.

“Frankly, we’ve delivered a message to the governments,” said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the IPCC panel and professor at Imperial College London, at a press event following the document’s release. “It’s now their responsibility … to decide whether they can act on it.” He added, “What we’ve done is said what the world needs to do.”

The transformation described in the document is breathtaking, and the speed of change required raises inevitable questions about its feasibility.

I expect the Trump regime will dismiss the report as "fundamentally flawed" before the end of the day, after all they fully admit that temperatures are going to rise a whopping 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, causing mass catastrophe, and there's no way to stop it, so why bother?

The IPCC report tells us that we're going to see some of those effects within 20 years, not 80.

Specifically, the document finds that instabilities in Antarctica and Greenland, which could usher in sea-level rise measured in feet rather than inches, “could be triggered around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming.” Moreover, the total loss of tropical coral reefs is at stake because 70 to 90 are expected to vanish at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report finds. At 2 degrees, that number grows to more than 99 percent.

The report found that holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could save an Alaska-size area of the Arctic from permafrost thaw, muting a feedback loop that could lead to still more global emissions. The occurrence of entirely ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean goes from one per century to one per decade between 1.5 and 2 degrees, it found — one of many ways in which the mere half a degree has large real-world consequences.

Risks of extreme heat and weather events just rise and rise as temperatures do, meaning these would be worse worldwide the more it warms.

To avoid that, in barely more than 10 years, the world’s percentage of electricity from renewables such as solar and wind power would have to jump from the current 24 percent to something more like 50 or 60 percent. Coal and gas plants that remain in operation would need to be equipped with technologies, collectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS), that prevent them from emitting carbon dioxide into the air and instead funnel it to be buried underground. By 2050, most coal plants would shut down.

Cars and other forms of transportation, meanwhile, would need to be shifting strongly toward being electrified, powered by these same renewable energy sources. At present, transportation is far behind the power sector in the shift to low-carbon fuel sources. Right now, according to the International Energy Agency, only 4 percent of road transportation is powered by renewable fuels, and the agency has projected only a 1 percent increase by 2022.

Meanwhile the Trump regime is currently in the process of scrapping all of these Obama-era programs, and is actually looking to greatly increase coal plant usage and emissions.  Odds are we're going to reach the 1.5C mark before 2040.

By then, it will be far too late.  We'll go down as global villains in the history books for centuries.

And we will deserve it.

StupidiNews!

• A limousine carrying several people to a birthday party in upstate New York struck a parked vehicle and killed 20, including all aboard the limo, the driver and two bystanders.
• Singer Taylor Swift has weighed in on politics in her home state of Tennessee, saying that Republican Marsha Blackburn "appalls and terrifies" her as she endorsed Democrat Phil Breseden for the Senate.
• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says he is following the story of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi after reports the Washington Post writer was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
• Right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro has the lead in the first round of voting, making him the prohibitive favorite to win a run-off in late October.
• The Trump regime is giving the green light for funding Ohio's first offshore wind power project in Lake Erie, eight miles off the coast, the first freshwater offshore wind project in the US.