Shamrocked At The Ballot Box

Ireland's Sinn Fein took the plurality of votes in weekend national elections and the current government of PM Leo Faradkar and his Fianna Fail party now have a new junior partner, whether they like it or not.

Irish nationalists Sinn Fein demanded on Sunday to be part of the next Irish government after early results indicated the left-wing party secured the most votes in an election that leader Mary Lou McDonald described as a ballot box “revolution”.

The former political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which has recast itself as the main left-wing party, secured 24% of first-preference votes, almost doubling its share from the last election in 2016, early results showed.

That put it narrowly ahead of the party of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and fellow center-right rival Fianna Fail in an election analysts described as a seismic shift away from Ireland’s century-old, center-right duopoly.

But Sinn Fein is likely to fall behind at least one of its rivals in terms of seat numbers because it stood far fewer candidates and is unlikely to be more than a junior partner in a government.

“This is certainly an election that is historic... this is changing the shape and the mold of Irish politics. This is just the beginning,” McDonald told reporters after arriving at her election count to a huge ovation from party supporters.

She said Sinn Fein would talk to all parties about forming a government and that others should accept their responsibility to do the same.

“I do not accept the exclusion or talk of excluding our party, a party that represents now a quarter of the electorate and I think that is fundamentally undemocratic,” she said.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, who have between them led every government since the foundation of the state, ruled out a coalition with Sinn Fein before the election.

But although Varadkar reiterated his rejection due to “principle and policy”, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin declined to repeat earlier refusals to consider a coalition with Sinn Fein, saying only that there were significant incompatibilities on policy.

“Our policies and our principles have not changed overnight,” he said. “But what is important is that the country comes first.”

We'll see what kind of government gets formed in the wake of this, but for Sinn Fein to come in first is watching the earth move in Ireland, especially in a post-Brexit era.  I'm nowhere near versed enough in Irish politics to know if McDonald can become PM or not, but whoever does lead Ireland's government from here on will have to contend with her party being part of it.

StupidiNews!

• The death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus is now over 900 as the first American casualty has been confirmed by Chinese health officials, a US citizen died in Wuhan over the weekend from the illness.
• Voting results in Switzerland show overwhelming referendum win for laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ citizens, despite adamant opposition from the right-wing Swiss People's Party.
• A bankruptcy deal between US officials and Puerto Rico would cut the island's debt by $24 billion, but faces opposition from Gov. Wanda Vazquez over making pension cuts permanent.
• The Iowa Democratic party officially has South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg winning the most state delegates in last week's caucus as candidates head to New Hampshire for Tuesday's vote.
• New lithium-ion battery technology could be in consumer products in the next year or so, with 20% better charge performance in electronics and the potential for much more in electric vehicles.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham did the rounds on the Sunday shows today making it very clear what's going to happen to Trump's enemies list.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Justice Department has created a process through which Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, can submit information he collected in Ukraine to be vetted.

"The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy," Graham, of South Carolina, said on "Face the Nation." "[Attorney General Bill Barr] told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified."
Graham, a key ally of the president's, said he spoke with Barr on Sunday morning, as well as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. He said they urged him to "take very cautiously" information from Ukraine against Republicans and Democrats.

"If Rudy Giuliani has any information coming out of the Ukraine, he needs to turn it over to the Department of Justice because it could be Russian propaganda," Graham said, making a stern plea for Giuliani and all U.S. politicians to be wary of that information because it "may be backed by Russian misinformation."

When pressed on whether Giuliani is being "played" by the Russians, the South Carolina senator said he didn't know.

"I'm telling Rudy, you think you've got the goods? Don't give it to me, because what do we know? We know the Russian disinformation campaign was used against President Trump. They hacked into the DNC system, not the Ukrainians, and they're on the ground all over the world trying to affect democracy," Graham said.

The Biden hearings are going to happen, and soon.  Right in the middle of the primary campaign. That's a major problem, of course.

But Graham made it much clearer last night what will happen to those involved in Trump's impeachment.

Lindsey Graham: Half the people behind the Russia investigation are going to go to jail pic.twitter.com/Xi9LQV6J9M

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) February 9, 2020

This is the part where Trump starts having people arrested.  And why not?  Who will stop him at this point?

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Meanwhile, in Trump's America, white nationalist groups are freely marching down the streets of Washington DC with police escorts.

A march by the white nationalist group Patriot Front was done near Union Station in Washington around 4 p.m. on Saturday.

The members of Patriot Front that were marching shouted, "Reclaim America" as they moved down the streets of D.C. The group would later end their march at a Walmart in the Union Station area, as some onlookers called them cowards, said WUSA9's Mike Valerio.

Those marching wore similar long-sleeve clothing, wit hats, masks, sunglasses and American flags. They were trailed and surrounded by police officers who were there to de-escalate any issues that arose.

The group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism.

The SPLC added that Patriot Front focuses on "theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country."

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front formed as a white nationalist hate group following the "Unite the Right" in August 2017 that left one woman dead in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This is not the first time the group has protested in Washington. According to the group's website, it was in D.C. June 2019 for remembrance of the USS Liberty on the 52nd anniversary of its attack by the State of Israel.

It's happening in our nation's capital.  Something that would have been worldwide news and universally condemned during the Obama era and unthinkable before that.  It's now a ho-hum occurrence in the Trump regime.

White nationalists, Patriot Front, marched through DC yesterday. Many had their faces covered in white masks while chanting “reclaim America.”

Their parade of racism and extremism cost taxpayers at least 2.6M.
pic.twitter.com/c9j7op8ekh

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) February 9, 2020

White masks.  Guarded by cops.  The police are used to protect the white nationalists.

This is America.  The quiet white nationalism part of this country is once again being said out loud in marches and rallies, and brown and black bodies always suffer badly in the eras where that happens.

Spoilers: the eras where that happens comprise the vast majority of this country's history.  This isn't new. This is America reverting to the historical mean.

Sunday Long Read: Follow The Funny Money, Honey

This week's Sunday Long read comes to us from the NY Times Magazine, where Dave Enrich  gives us an excerpt from his new book on the subject, Dark Towers, and the story of Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank, and a man named Mike Offit.

The roughly $425 million that Offit helped arrange for Trump back in 1998 was the start of a very long, very complicated relationship between ­Deutsche Bank and the future president. Over the course of two decades, the bank lent him more than $2 billion — so much that by the time he was elected, ­Deutsche Bank was by far his biggest creditor. Against all odds, Trump paid back most of what he owed the bank. But the relationship cemented ­Deutsche Bank’s reputation as a reckless institution willing to do business with clients nobody else would touch. And it has made the company a magnet for prosecutors, regulators and lawmakers hoping to penetrate the president’s opaque financial affairs.

Last April, congressional Democrats subpoenaed ­Deutsche Bank for its records on Trump, his family members and his businesses. The Trump family sued to block the bank from complying; after two federal courts ruled against the Trumps, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, with oral arguments expected in the spring. State prosecutors, meanwhile, are investigating the bank’s ties with Trump, too. The F.B.I. has been conducting its own wide-­ranging investigation of ­Deutsche Bank, and people connected to the bank told me they have been interviewed by special agents about aspects of the Trump relationship.

If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.

One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. ­Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know.

Until the 1990s, ­Deutsche Bank was a provincial German company with a limited presence outside Europe. Today it is a $1.5 trillion colossus, one of the world’s largest banks, with offices in 59 countries — and, thanks to its well-­documented pattern of violating laws, an international symbol of greed, recklessness and hubris. Its rap sheet includes manipulating international currency markets; playing a central role in rigging a crucial benchmark interest rate known as Libor; whisking billions of dollars in and out of Iran, Syria, Myanmar and other countries in violation of sanctions; laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Russian oligarchs, among many others; and misleading customers, investors and American, German and British regulators.

­Deutsche Bank’s envelope-­pushing helped it become the global power player it is today, but it also left the company dangerously frail. Its books remain stuffed with trillions of dollars of risky derivatives — the sort of instruments that many other banks have disposed of since the 2008 financial crisis but that persist as a kind of unexploded ordnance in ­Deutsche Bank’s accounts, threatening to inflict severe damage on the bank and the broader financial system if something were to cause them to detonate. Its financial cushions to absorb future shocks are threadbare. Its core businesses are not performing well; the bank lost $5.8 billion last year. Because of Deutsche Bank’s size and its connections with hundreds of other major banks around the world, serious problems could spread, virus­like, to other financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund a few years ago branded ­Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” in the global banking system.
­Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump, rather than being an odd outlier, is a kind of object lesson in how the bank lost its way. The company was hungry for growth, especially in the United States, and it was happy to cozy up to clients that better-­established players viewed as too damaged or dangerous. Along the way, it missed one opportunity after another to extricate itself from the Trump relationship or at least slow its expansion. With hindsight, the procession of miscues and bad decisions appears almost comical.

I have spent the past two years interviewing dozens of ­Deutsche Bank executives about the Trump relationship, among other subjects. Quite a few look back at the relationship with a mixture of anger and regret. They blame a small group of bad bankers for blundering into a trap that would further damage ­Deutsche Bank’s name and guarantee years of political and prosecutorial scrutiny. But that isn’t quite right; in fact, the Trump relationship was repeatedly blessed by executives up and down the bank’s organizational ladder. The cumulative effect of those decisions is that a German company — one that most Americans have probably never heard of — played a large role in positioning a strapped businessman to become president of the United States.

Without Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump would have been a failed real estate tycoon who ended up bankrupt and broke.  He would have been a cautionary tale of greed.

Instead he is in the White House.

That alone makes them the Holy Grail of Trump's dark secrets.

Retribution Execution, Con't

When the sexual predator mob boss in the White House behaves badly and gets away with it through cover-up, his sexual predator underlings behave badly and cover up their crimes too.

The Veterans Affairs Department’s inspector general is reviewing a request from a top House leader to investigate allegations that VA Secretary Robert Wilkie sought to dig up dirt on one of the congressman’s aides after she said she was sexually assaulted at VA’s Washington hospital.

The appeal late Friday from House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano (D-Calif.) came after he received information from a senior VA official, confirmed by The Washington Post, that Wilkie worked to discredit the credibility of the aide, senior policy adviser Andrea Goldstein.

Wilkie, who led the Pentagon’s vast personnel and readiness operation before his VA appointment, quietly began inquiring with military officials last fall about Goldstein’s past, according to three people with knowledge of his efforts. That is when Goldstein said a man groped and propositioned her in the main lobby of VA Medical Center in Washington.

Authorities closed the case in January without bringing charges.

Over several months, Wilkie shared his findings with his senior staff at morning meetings on at least six occasions, three current or former senior VA officials confirmed. Wilkie said his inquiry found that the Navy veteran, who currently serves as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, had filed multiple complaints while in the service, according to three people with knowledge of what Wilkie said. Wilkie also served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

The information shared with Takano’s committee and with The Post said Wilkie was concerned with Goldstein’s “credibility and military record.” The VA official who shared it said Wilkie described Goldstein to his staff as a “serial sexual assault/harassment complainant in the Navy who made baseless allegations, for example, when she was not satisfied with a fitness evaluation.”

“The strong inference was made that all were false allegations,” the VA official wrote. A fitness evaluation in the military is the equivalent of a civilian performance review.

In an interview with The Post, Goldstein disputed she had made numerous complaints. She said she filed a formal complaint with the Navy just once, before her experience at the VA hospital. The Post typically does not name people who report a sexual assault but Goldstein has spoken publicly about her experiences.

The information given to Takano’s committee was done anonymously, but The Post has determined it was sent by a senior VA official. The allegations were first reported by ProPublica.

Wilkie suggested to several people on his staff, including his public affairs chief, that they use the information he collected to discredit Goldstein, a current and former senior official said. They declined.

So to recap, Andrea Goldstein, policy director to the chair of the committee that oversees the VA, was allegedly sexually assaulted in the lobby of DC's VA hospital. The investigation into the assault was closed while the VA Secretary then personally tried to discredit the aide multiple times by digging up her former Navy record and tried to use it against her. There are several witnesses to the Secretary's multiple suggestions to use information to discredit Goldstein.

In any other administration, Wilkie would have resigned within hours of this story being printed.

But this is the Trump regime.  Retribution is a way of life, and it comes from the sexual criminal at the top.

And of course, the people who were supposed to stop Trump are shocked to now discover that he doesn't give a damn about what they think anymore as they no longer have anything to offer him.

A handful of Republican senators tried to stop President Trump from firing Gordon D. Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union who testified in the House impeachment hearings, but the president relieved the diplomat of his post anyway, according to people briefed on the discussions.
The senators were concerned that it would look bad for Mr. Trump to dismiss Mr. Sondland and argued that it was unnecessary, since the ambassador was already talking with senior officials about leaving after the Senate trial, the people said. The senators told White House officials that Mr. Sondland should be allowed to depart on his own terms, which would have reduced any political backlash.

But Mr. Trump evidently was not interested in a quiet departure, choosing instead to make a point by forcing Mr. Sondland out before the ambassador was ready to go. When State Department officials called Mr. Sondland on Friday to tell him that he had to resign that day, he resisted, saying that he did not want to be included in what seemed like a larger purge of impeachment witnesses, according to the people informed about the matter.

Mr. Sondland conveyed to the State Department officials that if they wanted him gone that day, they would have to fire him. And so the president did, ordering the ambassador recalled from his post effective immediately. Mr. Sondland’s dismissal was announced just hours after another impeachment witness, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, were marched out of the White House by security officers and told their services were no longer needed.

The ousters came two days after the Republican-led Senate acquitted Mr. Trump on two articles of impeachment stemming from his effort to pressure Ukraine to incriminate Democratic rivals. Outraged Democrats called the firings a “Friday night massacre” aimed at taking revenge against government officials who had no choice but to testify under subpoena about what they knew.

Among the Republicans who warned the White House was Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who after voting to acquit Mr. Trump said she thought he had learned a lesson. Others included Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Martha McSally of Arizona and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday but a senior administration official confirmed the senators’ outreach.

And every one of these senators voted to make sure Trump they would never hold him responsible.

Hell, I don't believe these spineless clods told Trump a damn thing, because they cower in fear whenever he's around.

Last Call For Sunny Side Up

This weekend is the scheduled launch of the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar Orbiter project to take a look at the sun and in particular, the sun's magnetic poles.

The mission, which is a joint collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, is currently expected to launch shortly after 11 p.m. ET Sunday. This is the first mission that will provide images of the sun's north and south poles using a suite of six instruments on board that will capture the spacecraft's view. Having a visual understanding of the sun's poles is important because it can provide more insight about the sun's powerful magnetic field and how it affects Earth. 

It will take Solar Orbiter about two years to reach its highly elliptical orbit around the sun. Gravity assists from Earth and Venus will help swing the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane, or the space that aligns with the sun's equator, so it can study the sun's poles from above and below. 

This follows the Ulysses spacecraft, another collaboration between ESA and NASA that launched in 1990 and also flew over the sun's poles. Ulysses completed three passes of the sun before its mission ended in 2009, but its view was limited to what it could see from the sun's equator. 

"Up until Solar Orbiter, all solar imaging instruments have been within the ecliptic plane or very close to it," said Russell Howard, space scientist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. and principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter's ten instruments. "Now, we'll be able to look down on the sun from above."

"It will be terra incognita," said Daniel Müller, ESA project scientist for the mission at the Agency's European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. "This is really exploratory science." 

Solar Orbiter is equipped with ten instruments that can capture observations of the sun's corona (which is its atmosphere), the poles and the solar disk. It can also use its variety of instruments to measure the sun's magnetic fields and solar wind, or the energized stream of particles emitted by the sun that reach across our solar system. 

Understanding the sun's magnetic field and solar wind are key because they contribute to space weather, which impacts Earth by interfering with networked systems like GPS, communications and even astronauts on the International Space Station. The sun's magnetic field is so massive that it stretches beyond Pluto, providing a pathway for solar wind to travel directly across the solar system. 

The mission will work in tandem with NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which is currently orbiting the sun on a seven-year mission and just completed its fourth close approach of the star. It launched in August 2018 and will eventually come within four million miles of the sun -- the closest a spacecraft has ever flown by our star.

Here's hoping the project has a safe launch and a fruitful mission.  Lord knows we need all the additional science knowledge we can get right about now.

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Retribution Execution, Con't

Expect much more retribution by Trump against anyone involved in the House impeachment proceedings as his enemies list grows by the day.

Several other officials who testified during the House impeachment inquiry have left the government, including former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch; William B. Taylor Jr., her replacement; vice presidential aide Jennifer Williams; State Department official Michael McKinley; special envoy for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker; and NSC official Tim Morrison. 

More firings are possible. 

The president and his advisers have also discussed removing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, though no final decision has been made, officials said. Trump has expressed frustration that Atkinson allowed a whistleblower report documenting Trump’s alleged misconduct toward Ukraine to be transmitted to Congress. 

Some advisers have also counseled the president to remove Victoria Coates, the deputy national security adviser, who has told others in the White House that she fears her job is in jeopardy. 

Trump has regularly asked aides to continue slashing the size of the NSC, and national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has said he plans to do so, telling NPR in an interview last month that the policy staff, which he put at about 180 people when he took over in September, was bloated. 

By the end of February, O’Brien said, he hoped to have cut it by a third. A senior administration official said there will be widespread departures at the NSC in the next week.

Intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson in particular has multiple bullseyes on him, at least according to Trump State TV.

According to an exclusive report from Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is threatening to take action against Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson over his handling of the whistleblower’s complaint, giving him until February 14 to comply with congressional requests for documents.

“I will be referring this matter for investigation by the Department of Justice if you once again refuse to comply,” Nunes wrote in a letter. 

“The investigation is particularly focused on the guidelines that appeared on a whistleblower complaint submission form that was changed — after the submission of the whistleblower complaint — to eliminate language excluding hearsay information,” Nunes added. 

According to Fox News, House Intelligence Committee Republicans are investigating Atkinson’s “unusual handling” of the complaint, which was the key component of the Democrats’ impeachment effort against President Trump.

Going after Atkinson with not only possible termination but with threatened prosecution represents a dangerous next step in Trump collecting heads.   It's not just witnesses he's trying to destroy, but the people whose job it is to watchdog the intelligence community to make sure it's held responsible.  If Trump is allowed to hang Atkinson out to dry, he will move on to the next step.

If there are any protections and defenses for civil servants left in our government, they will be tested to the breaking point this month.

That's important because the next step after Atkinson could be going after the people who actually impeached Trump.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

How long before FBI Director Chris Wray is told to drop this white supremacist terrorism assessment or lose his job?

The FBI has elevated its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a "national threat priority" for fiscal year 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray said Wednesday. He said the FBI is placing the risk of violence from such groups "on the same footing" as threats posed to the country by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and its sympathizers.
"Not only is the terror threat diverse — it's unrelenting," Wray said at an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, or domestic terrorists motivated by racial or religious hatred, make up a "huge chunk" of the FBI's domestic terrorism investigations, Wray said in statements before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last November. The majority of those attacks are "fueled by some type of white supremacy," he said.

Wednesday, Wray said combating domestic terrorism and its "close cousin," hate crimes, are at the "top of the priority list" for the FBI.

His statements indicate the FBI is just as concerned about racially-motivated violent extremists, including white supremacists, as it is about the threat posed by homegrown violent extremists inspired by foreign terrorist organizations. Wray said both pose a grave threat because the perpetrators are often "lone actors," self-radicalized online, who often look to attack "soft targets" such as public gatherings, retail locations or houses of worship.

In many cases, perpetrators can move quickly from rhetoric to violence, Wray said.

"They choose easily accessible weapons — a car, a knife, a gun, maybe an IED they can build crudely off the internet — and they choose soft targets," Wray said. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now."

Racially-motivated violent extremists were the primary source of ideologically-motivated violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001, Wray said in a statement Wednesday.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have evolved on the issue of threats posed by domestic extremists over the last year or so, reports CBS News' Jeff Pegues, and federal law enforcement officials have faced criticism that they've been sluggish in their response to the increased risk posed by white supremacists and other racially-motivated violent extremists. The public message from federal law enforcement has changed as the threats have intensified.

In March of 2019, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted Islamist militants such as al-Qaida and ISIS, and those inspired by them in the U.S., remained the country's "primary terrorist threat," but said the department was focused on all kinds of violent extremism.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump mentioned the fight against "radical Islamic terrorism" but not the terror threat fueled by other forms of hate.

I can't imagine Wray will still be FBI Director for too much longer.   House Republicans are already gunning for him, which means Senate Republicans will be too.

The head of the FBI on Wednesday batted back criticism from House Republicans that he hadn't done enough to reform the law enforcement agency after the release of a report that detailed the bureau's failures in the Russia investigation. 

In his first public testimony on Capitol Hill since the release of the Justice Department's inspector general report late last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray was critical of the officials accused of wrongdoing in the report, and outlined a number of steps he was making to change protocol at the agency as a result. 

But his response before the House Judiciary Committee was too tepid for a number of conservative lawmakers, who demanded a "thorough and complete public house cleaning" and a "clear, unambiguous expression of moral outrage." 

President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress have seized on the findings in the inspector general report about a series of errors made by the FBI as it sought a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has said that he did not have enough evidence to conclude the motivation behind those errors, and the attorney general has suggested they could have been made in "bad faith." 

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, drew audible protests from lawmakers after declaring he'd lost trust in the agency after the findings of the Horowitz report. 

"I don't trust your agency anymore. And that's a profound thing for me to say, because I was raised to revere the FBI," McClintock said.

The FISA "mismanagement" will be the official reason Wray is fired, but the reality will be that Trump will want an FBI director completely loyal to him not the FBI rank and file or to law enforcement.  He needs somebody as crooked as Bill Barr, and Wray still has slivers of his soul.

No, Trump will dump Wray going forward.  He won't stop at retaliation against impeachment witnesses.  He'll need an FBI Director willing to send people to kick down doors of more powerful people on his enemies list.  Friday night was only the beginning.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

As Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart opines, Trump's State of the Union speech was coded gaslighting to his white supremacist base, ignoring the Native, black, Hispanic, and Asian people that already made America great, and what non-white Americans suffered for in the ongoing struggle for equality.

Under any other president, the end of that annual speech before a joint session of Congress is a clarion call to unity, a moment of national reassurance. That’s certainly what Trump was going for during his 78-minute oration. I’m certain that’s the way it came off to his supporters. Yet, despite its visual and rhetorical messaging to African Americans, I heard something more sinister. What I heard was a white supremacist vision of America that alternately erased and whitewashed its history.

“This is the home of Thomas Edison and Teddy Roosevelt, of many great generals including Washington, Pershing, Patton and MacArthur. This is the home of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong and so many more,” Trump said, tossing in Douglass and Tubman like a couple of Skittles in a bucket of milk. 

“The American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest and most determined men and women ever to walk on the face of the Earth,” Trump said, as though such conquest wasn’t financed by slavery and didn’t involve the horrific annihilation of the indigenous people here long before whites fled their own persecution and poverty in Europe.

“Our ancestors braved the unknown; tamed the wilderness; settled the Wild West; lifted millions from poverty, disease and hunger; vanquished tyranny and fascism; ushered the world to new heights of science and medicine; laid down the railroads, dug out the canals, raised up the skyscrapers,” Trump said. “And, ladies and gentlemen, our ancestors built the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history, and we are making it greater than ever before.”

When the words “we” and “our ancestors” tumble out of Trump’s mouth, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. For his “we” and “our” come off as a clarion call to whiteness. Trump’s “canvas” and “masterpiece,” as he depicted our nation, are devoid of the actual color and complexity that make art and America great. Instead, the president painted a Potemkin paradise where the rest of us deal with the consequences of his lies, white nationalism and vindictiveness. Given Trump and the people around him, I can only believe this was intentional.

After all, Trump put white nationalists on staff. Stephen K. Bannon was his chief White House strategist, and Stephen Miller remains in the West Wing driving the president’s hard-right anti-immigration stance. And need I remind you that Trump said that the neo-Nazis and other assorted white nationalists who unleashed racial and anti-Semitic terror on Charlottesville in 2017 included some “very fine people”? During an Oval Office meeting the following year, he referred to a group of nonwhite nations as “shithole countries.” Last summer, on Twitter, Trump demanded that the four congresswomen of color who make up “the Squad” “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Never mind that all four are U.S. citizens, and three of them were born in this country.

Post contributing columnist Danielle Allen also focused on the last part of Trump’s speech. She, too, noticed how his peroration erased America of its gorgeous mosaic and complicated history. “Can we sing America together so that we are all in the song?” she asked. “We all love a version of this country, but who has a heart big enough to sing the whole thing?” “The whole thing” being a majestic anthem filled with high notes that exalt in our historic accomplishments and low notes that recall the pain and injustice that made many of them possible.

Trump cannot sing that song, nor does he want to be a part of composing it. The song he’s singing is for whites only. He’s incapable of singing anything else.

On top of his corruption, self-dealing, misogyny and racism, Trump is a power-hungry autocrat.  Never forget that he's willing to sacrifice every single one of us for himself.

Last Call For The Ivanka Job

The gaslighting propaganda deluge of garbage that Ivanka Trump is somehow responsible for "millions of jobs being created" is one of the most laughable lies of the Trump regime, and yet industry groups are absolutely pretending she's singlehandedly powers the economy by herself.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is giving Ivanka Trump, the president's elder daughter and a White House adviser, an award for supporting manufacturing.

Trump will be the inaugural recipient of the association’s Alexander Hamilton Award. The new accolade marks the 125th anniversary of NAM and comes as the group launches its Creators Wanted workforce campaign to recognize leaders in manufacturing.

“Ivanka Trump embodies the collaborative spirit and relentless drive needed to solve manufacturers’ most pressing challenge — the workforce crisis. Like no one in government has ever done, she has provided singular leadership and shown an unwavering commitment to modern manufacturing in America,” NAM President Jay Timmons said in a statement.

She will receive her award on Wednesday in Washington at NAM’s Creators Wanted kick off.

“America is home to the best workforce in the world, but the skills of today do not mirror those of tomorrow. I am committed to ensuring our workforce is equipped with the skills they need to seize the vast opportunities that lie ahead,” Trump said in a statement.

She joined NAM's Manufacturing Institute in September to announce a major expansion of a skills training and apprenticeship program created by Toyota Motor North America.

This is ludicrous. Ivanka Trump has done absolutely nothing other than multiple failed lines of clothing and shoes trading off her father's name, and yet she's somehow the smartest businesswoman on Earth now?

Do people believe this nonsense?

From Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration through the end of November 2019, the American economy added a total of about 6.2 million jobs. But during a speech at a White House event on paid family leave on Thursday, the president credited his daughter, Ivanka Trump, with personally creating more than twice as many jobs over the same timespan.

“14 million people she’s gotten jobs for,” Trump said, referring to Ivanka. “Her goal when she started it two years ago was 500,000 jobs. She’s done over 14 million, so that’s really something.”

FOURTEEN MILLION JOBS?!? 

Have we gone insane?  What kind of North Korean reality warping is going on here?

The Klep-Trump-Cracy, Con't

House Democrats had their particular emoluments lawsuit dismissed outright at the DC Circuit over lack of standing.

A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit from Congressional Democrats who accused President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution by receiving profits from foreign governments' spending at his luxury Washington hotel and other businesses.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision did not address the legality of Trump's business dealings, but held that the more than 200 Democratic senators and House members who banded together in 2017 to bring the suit against the president lacked legal standing to do so.

The unanimous ruling from an ideologically diverse three-judge panel suggested that if the House or Senate had formally authorized the suit, it may have been allowed to proceed, but the lawmakers acting as plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to pursue it on their own.

"Only an institution can assert an institutional injury," the court wrote in its brief, 12-page decision.

Trump quickly lauded the decision.

"We just won the big emoluments case," the president told reporters on the south lawn of the White House as he departed for a trip to North Carolina. "It was a total win... It was another phony case and we won it, three to nothing."

"Another win just in. Nervous Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress sued me, thrown out. This one unanimous, in the D.C. Circuit," he added later in a post to his Twitter account.

The lawmakers could seek review by the full bench of the D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court, but it seems more likely that the battle over Trump's private businesses' receipts from foreign sources will continue through other cases currently pending at two other federal appeals courts. Lawyers for the Congressional Democrats signaled they may continue the fight beyond Friday's ruling.

“We're disappointed in the panel's decision and are considering next steps," said Elizabeth Wydra, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center and a member of the legal team that helped represent Democrats in the case. "It is important to recognize that today’s ruling is not a decision on the merits. The Court of Appeals did not in any way approve of President Trump’s repeated and flagrant violations of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.

This was always the longest of the shots against Trump's self-dealing, the latest of which is news that the Secret Service is regularly paying Trump's hotels $650 a night.

President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts.

Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government. When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J., the service needs space to post guards and store equipment.

Trump’s company says it charges only minimal fees. But Secret Service records do not show that.

At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, dozens more times in 2018, according to documents from Trump’s visits.

And at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property, an unusually high rent for homes in that area, according to receipts from 2017. Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there.

These payments appear to contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year.

Trump scams US taxpayers, and he takes foreign money for pay-for-play schemes.  That's never been in doubt, but the legal struggle is designed to make sure it never is settled.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Trump continues to collect heads for his wall now that he's been crowned by the Senate GOP, and the next name on the list is Alexander Vindman, who testified in the House impeachment proceedings.

President Trump is preparing to push out a national security official who testified against him during the impeachment inquiry after he expressed deep anger on Thursday over the attempt to remove him from office because of his actions toward Ukraine.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — a National Security Council aide who testified during House Democrats’ impeachment hearings — will be informed in the coming days, likely on Friday, by administration officials that he is being reassigned to a position at the Defense Department, taking a key figure from the investigation out of the White House, according to two people familiar with the move who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel decisions.
Vindman had already informed senior officials at the NSC that he intended to take an early exit from his assignment and leave his post by the end of the month, according to people familiar with his decision, but Trump is eager to make a symbol of the Army officer soon after the Senate acquitted him of the impeachment charges approved by House Democrats.

Trump made clear on Thursday that he is ready to make his impeachment a key part of his reelection strategy and highlight his anger at Democratic leaders who led the charge to remove him from office, as well as Republicans who did not embrace the defense of his actions even though he was acquitted by the Senate on Wednesday.

Vindman being "reassigned" is the least of the things Trump plans to do.

At an event in the East Room of the White House, he called Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) a “horrible person” and derided Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a flip-flopping Republican with “no sign of principles” whose vote to convict Trump on abuse of power charges was born not out of principle but bitterness over his failed 2012 presidential bid.

And he kicked off the day at the National Prayer Breakfast by questioning the two lawmakers’ claims about the role religion plays in their public lives.

“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you,’ when they know that that’s not so,” he told a room full of religious leaders.

Trump and his allies are considering doing more than just launching verbal fusillades at his perceived enemies over impeachment as the decision regarding Vindman shows. Some of the president’s aides are discussing whether to remove or reassign several administration officials who testified during the impeachment inquiry, according to aides and advisers who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans. Meanwhile, Senate committee chairmen are ramping up their investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine while his father, Joe, was vice president.

“Lieutenant Colonel Col. Vindman and his twin brother — right? — we had some people that — really amazing,” Trump said during an event at the White House, mocking the national security counsel aide who testified during hearings investigating the White House’s actions toward Ukraine.

Expect much more of this in the coming weeks and months ahead.  Yes, Trump's targets have protection and resources for now, but then again, those only remain as long as Trump doesn't go for the jugular right away.  He;s already targeting Joe Biden with a nonsense "investigation".  You have to think that plenty of folks could be next.

StupidiNews!

• With 100% of Iowa caucus precincts reporting in Pete Buttigieg has a one-tenth percentage point lead over Bernie Sanders as question remain about a possible recanvass.
• After a record-breaking 328 days in space, NASA astronaut Christina Koch is back on Earth after she and two others landed safely in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan.
• A Chinese doctor who tried to warn the planet about the Wuhan coronavirus has died from the disease as the death toll in China is now over 630.
• The Pentagon says US forces have killed a top terrorist leader in Yemen as a drone strike is believed to have killed Al-Qaeda affiliate head Qasim al-Rimi. 
• The first clinical trial results of using CRISPR gene editing technology to fight cancer are promising, but the cancers also evolved defenses to combat and slip past the changes made by the treatment.

Last Call For State Of The Hawkeye State

Some 72 hours later, we still don't know who won Iowa for sure, and that's because the process has been a clown show from beginning to end.  If Democrats survive all this, the first thing that needs to go is the caucus process, period.

Results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses were delayed by “quality control checks” on Monday night. Days later, quality control issues have not been resolved.

The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.

In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.

Some of these inconsistencies may prove to be innocuous, and they do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result. There is no apparent bias in favor of the leaders Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, meaning the overall effect on the winner’s margin may be small.

But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1 percentage points with 97 percent of 1,765 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.

The errors suggest that many Iowa caucus leaders struggled to follow the rules of their party’s caucuses, or to adopt the additional reporting requirements introduced since 2016. They show that the Iowa Democratic Party, despite the long delays, failed to validate all of the results fully before releasing them to the public.

Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Democratic Party (I.D.P.), said the party reported the data as provided to it by the precinct caucuses.

“The caucus math work sheet is the official report on caucus night to the I.D.P., and the I.D.P. reports the results as delivered by the precinct chair,” she said. “This form must be signed by the caucus chair, the caucus secretary and representatives from each campaign in the room who attest to its accuracy. Under the rules of the delegate selection process, delegates are awarded based off the record of results as provided by each precinct caucus chair.”

Just about every election night includes reporting errors. They can be difficult to identify, but can often be corrected during a recount or a postelection canvass. This year’s Iowa caucuses are the reverse: Errors are now easy to identify, and hard to correct.

The errors are detectable because of changes to the way the Iowa Democratic Party reports its results, put in place after the Sanders campaign criticized the caucus results in 2016. This cycle, and for the first time, the party released three sets of results corresponding to different steps in the caucus process. The rules are complex and thorough, and they create conditions in which the results can be obviously inaccurate or inconsistent within a precinct.
First, caucusgoers express their preference for a candidate upon arrival, and these votes are recorded in a “first alignment.” Then, candidates with limited support at a precinct, usually less than 15 percent, are deemed not viable; their supporters get a chance to realign to support a viable candidate. The preference at this point is recorded as well, and it’s called the final alignment.

Viable candidates can’t lose support on realignment, but there were more than 10 cases where a viable candidate lost vote share in the final alignment, even though that is precluded by the caucus rules.

This was a mess, plain and simple.  DNC Chair Tom Perez is demanding a recanvass and at this point doing so might make the situation worse for the reasons mentioned above.

What's not in any doubt though is that Joe Biden needs to hit the ground running in NH, NV, and especially in SC or Bernie Sanders will be the nominee.

Neither the disaster of the Iowa Democrats’ caucus app nor the reporting delays change the reality: The former vice president of the United States and the front-runner in nearly all the national and Iowa polls came in a distant fourth, behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Now he must struggle to reassert himself and hope for a magical underdog story (hey, Bill Clinton turned himself into the Comeback Kid after placing second in the 1992 New Hampshire primary). But forget about advertising and campaign staff: It’s now an open question whether Biden will have the cash to pay for his charter plane to fly him around the 14 Super Tuesday states that vote on March 3.

Running short on money is a big part of why he ended up here at all.

After a disastrous summer of fundraising, plans from the team in Iowa and other states would linger with national headquarters for weeks, then come back without approval for the spending being requested. Other candidates were quickly hiring staff—particularly Buttigieg, who in June had all of four staffers in the state but went into the caucuses with 170—while Biden’s team was under an almost complete hiring freeze. The campaign yanked its TV ads, leaving Biden dark for weeks and exponentially outspent in online advertising by Warren and Buttigieg, who soon had the rising poll numbers to show for it. At one point, aides realized, Biden was on track to spend less on TV in Iowa in this race than in his 2008 run, when he finished as an asterisk, with 1 percent of the vote.

Biden aides who were being honest with themselves knew for months that they were in trouble. Some didn’t want to believe it; some couldn’t. Others felt like they’d gotten into a taxi with a driver who was swerving all over the road, and they were just holding on and hoping they made it to the end.

They hoped that Democrats’ obsession with beating Donald Trump and voters’ sense of personal connection to Biden would pull them over the edge. Trump had blundered into his own impeachment out of fear that Biden was strong. Now they were hoping the impeachment trial would help make up for his weakness. “We might win this,” one person who worked on the campaign told me the week before the caucuses, “and it might come down to nothing we’ve done.”

When Biden held his final pre-caucus rally at a middle school in Des Moines on Sunday afternoon, 1,100 people came—his biggest crowd in Iowa of the whole campaign. Eight people introduced him; four retired senators were in the crowd. But by the time he began speaking, the Super Bowl had started, and people were dribbling out of the room. An hour earlier, a few miles away in a high-school gym, Buttigieg had drawn twice as many people.

Biden will make it through Super Tuesday, all the candidates will.  Most will stay in through Big Tuesday at the halfway point of March. But after that?  After that this might be a done deal for somebody other than Joe.

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