Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Today's Russia bombshell story (and we're well into the uncharted territory where we have enough regular bombshell stories for me to use the term today's Russia bombshell story) is from the WSJ's Shane Harris, who tells us the story of a GOP political operative named Peter Smith.  Smith, it turns out, is the cutout man linking Hillary Clinton's stolen emails, taken by Russian hackers, and Mike Flynn and the Trump campaign. 

Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.

In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.

Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.

What role, if any, Mr. Flynn may have played in Mr. Smith’s project is unclear. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith said he knew Mr. Flynn, but he never stated that Mr. Flynn was involved.

Mr. Flynn didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A Trump campaign official said that Mr. Smith didn’t work for the campaign, and that if Mr. Flynn coordinated with him in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual. The White House declined to comment.

So if you wanted to know what the big shoe waiting to drop on Trump was, judging by his screaming Twitter rants all week, this appears to be it.  By the way, Peter Smith is now dead.  Did I mention that?

Mr. Smith died at age 81 on May 14, which was about 10 days after the Journal interviewed him. His account of the email search is believed to be his only public comment on it.

The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections.

Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.

It isn’t clear who that intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers. The reports were compiled during the same period when Mr. Smith’s group was operating, according to the officials.

Mr. Smith said he worked independently and wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.

His project began over Labor Day weekend 2016 when Mr. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics, said he assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state.
Mr. Smith’s focus was some 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Mr. Smith said he believed that the emails might have been obtained by hackers and that they actually concerned official matters Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal—two notions for which he offered no evidence. Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department tens of thousands of emails related to official business.

Ahh, but it gets better.

In the interview with the Journal, Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.

“We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government,” Mr. Smith said.

And better.

Mr. Smith said after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself. “We told all the groups to give them to WikiLeaks,” he said. WikiLeaks has never published those emails or claimed to have them.

No, that would have given the game away.  But Flynn had them.  The Russians had them.  Smith talked to the WSJ.  And now he's dead.

Fun times, huh?

Gunmerica Declares War

The NRA is apparently sick and tired of liberals wanting to not have schools full of kids being shot up and have decided that the real enemy of the United States is people who don't like firearms. If you think I'm exaggerating the "liberals are the enemy" angle of the NRA, this is their newest video.

MoJo's Kevin Drum on what amounts to a right-wing white supremacist recruitment video:

I’m not sure this video is even unusual for the NRA, which, these days, is more a purveyor of wholesale culture war zealotry than it is just a gun rights group. But it’s still a pretty spectacular appeal to the seemingly bottomless resentment of liberal sophisticates that eternally haunts conservatives despite controlling virtually the entire political apparatus of the United States. If there were a secret version of this video that ended with a call to march on Hollywood and raze it to the ground, I wouldn’t be surprised.

This raises a question for “both sides” apostles: Can you think of a recent video anywhere near as vicious as this one from a left-wing group? I don’t mean some dude on Twitter. I mean some significant organization associated with mainstream liberalism. It’s an honest question. I don’t watch a lot of propaganda videos, so I could easily have missed something. Any takers?

That's Dana Loesch in the video, by the way.  If the name sounds familiar, she's one of Glenn Beck's friends at The Blaze and is married to equally awful conservative media jackass Chris Loesch.

Her response to criticism of this video?

“The language of the left is violence and it has been because they think it’s an acceptable form of protest,” she said. “I thought these people were supposed to be open-minded and creative and funny, and I’ve never seen people who are the dullest crayons in the box in my life, and these people who try to overreact — hyper-reaction — and feign outrage about condemnation of violence that they themselves don’t have the balls to condemn.”

When somebody tell you straight out that "the only way to stop their violence of lies is with the clenched fists of truth" as an endorsed, public statement of an advocacy group for the promotion and use of firearms, it is not "rhetoric"or "metaphor" or "hyperbole", it is a statement that the NRA believes and is openly advocating that firearms should be purchased to be used by scared and angry people as a tool of resolution of political disagreement, to be used on Americans, by Americans.

It is a declaration of a belief that the time is coming when firearms must be used not in defense of liberty but as offense to put down enemies of the state.

It is a call for civil war, a clarion call to take up arms and to use those arms.

It's the most irresponsible and hideous thing I think I've seen in a long time, and the racial undertones of it are both indelible and unmistakable.  This goes far beyond the sick lunacy of a single man's attempt to kill a Republican Congressman earlier this month.  It is a call to open fire, during an open season of blood.

No Republican will dare disavow this.  But if I were making a recruitment video for a anti-government militia group, a white supremacist sovereign citizen movement, or I just wanted to inspire someone to start shooting up the next Black Lives Matter demonstration, in sixty seconds I could not have done a better job.

This is terrifying.  And there will be bloody consequences from this, I guarantee it.

The Bible Belt Meets The Bourbon Trail

It's no wonder that here in a state with the twin national embarrassments of the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter theme park, in a state where religious organizations now have the same "equal access" to discriminate against LGBTQ organizations on public university campuses and use tax dollars to do so, that GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is now putting Bible study courses in Kentucky high schools.

Public schools in Kentucky can soon teach reading, writing and the book of Revelation.

At the Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Matt Bevin gave his public “Amen” to a bill allowing Bible courses in public schools.

Normally, a bill signing does not open with prayer, but in this case, it may have been appropriate. At a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Bevin signed House Bill 128, which allows public schools to teach courses on the Bible.

The bill's sponsor says students need to understand the role the Bible played in American history.

“It really did set the foundation that our founding fathers used to develop documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights," said Rep. D.J. Johnson (R-Owensboro). "All of those came from principles from the Bible."

The bill, which easily passed the House and Senate, gives local school boards the option of developing a Bible literacy class as part of their social studies curriculum. The course would be elective, not required.

“The idea that we would not want this to be an option for people in school, that would be crazy. I don't know why every state would not embrace this, why we as a nation would not embrace this,” Bevin told the crowd.

The ACLU of Kentucky said it’s concerned about how the law might be used in schools.

“A Bible literacy bill that, on its face, may not appear to be unconstitutional, could in fact become unconstitutional in its implementation,” said Advocacy Director Kate Miller.

Miller told WDRB News the ACLU will monitor the law closely.

Comparative religion courses are one thing, I took such a class in college and hey, I learned about the Bible, the Qu'ran,  the Torah and Talmud, the Mahabharata, the Tripitaka and more.  But teaching the Bible in high school, even as a social studies elective, is tricky and in this state probably going to get ugly fast next year.

I'd argue that we need more Constitutional literacy, or literacy in general here in Kentucky, but that's why I'm not on any school boards around here. Go figure.

Bonus question:  When do we get the high school elective courses on literacy of the Qu'ran or any non-Christian religious text?

But you already know the answer to that.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime's modified Muslim ban goes into effect today on travelers from six majority Muslim countries into the US after Monday's Supreme Court partial reinstatement ruling.
• Senate Intelligence Committee members will get to see the memos of fired former FBI Director James Comey about his meetings with Donald Trump.
• Qatar's government says the list of demands presented by Saudi Arabia last week will not be met, the Gulf state remains open to discussing "legitimate issues" with its Arab neighbors.
• The Trump regime's push to restart nuclear power plant construction in the US will begin with the commission of a new study of nuclear power's viability and safety. 
• Internet security experts point to this week's global outbreak of ransomware as a cover, the "PetyaWrap" malicious software was really designed to destroy as much data as possible.

Last Call For Rand, True To His Name

Meanwhile here in Kentucky, Sen. Rand Paul is pissed off that the Senate GOP bill to wreck Medicaid and health insurance doesn't go far enough to rid America of a few million undesirable sick poors and that his Senate GOP buds need to be ready to purge the sick from the country in the name of that Tree of Liberty and all.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says some of his "weak-kneed" Republican colleagues need to remember what they stand for regarding the repeal of ObamaCare. 

During a Wednesday interview on Fox News, Paul — an opponent of the Senate GOP's healthcare bill in its current form — said all Democrats hate the legislation, and so do half of Republicans. 

"The half of Republicans that hate it are conservatives like myself who went to rally after rally after rally saying 'We're going to repeal ObamaCare,' and now we're not repealing it, we're keeping it," Paul said.

"These weak-kneed Republicans up here who are saying, 'Oh, we got to spend more money and we got to keep Medicaid forever, the expansion,' they need to get over themselves." 

Paul said Republicans need to remember what they were for: "Repealing ObamaCare."
He added he'd like to support a healthcare bill, but will only vote for one that truly nixes the Affordable Care Act, not just modifies it or scales it back.

Got that, Kentucky voters?  If you got help from the Affordable Care Act over the last few years, well, you just need to "get over yourselves" and be sick and poor again.  Rand doesn't give a good goddamn if you live or die.

Keep in mind that if the Senate bill passes, the biggest loser in federal Medicaid spending cuts by percentage will be...you guessed it, Kentucky.  The Bluegrass State will lose 58.5% of its federal funding for healthcare by 2022 if this bill becomes law, putting us in a worse position than before Obamacare even came along in the first place.

And Rand Paul believes those federal spending cuts to Kentucky aren't steep enough.

Do you finally get it now, fellow Kentuckians?

A Wealth Of Problems

We've seen plenty of charts on America's income being lopsided as Republicans are more than happy to give the richest Americans a trillion-dollar tax cut or three while ravaging social programs, but it turns out America's wealth distribution is even worse.

Research from Berkeley economists has found incomes at the top 0.001% of the income strata surged a whopping 636% between 1980 and 2014, while wages for the bottom half of the population were basically stuck in place.

Critics of that body of work say its use of pre-tax data masks some of the equalizing effects of the tax code, and thus overstates inequality. If that were indeed the case, a look at the distribution of wealth as opposed to just income, while harder to measure, could be a better barometer as to the true state of America’s social divide. 

This chart courtesy of Deutsch Bank economist Torsten Slok shows the picture with regards to wealth is even bleaker. The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. To put that figure in perspective, US GDP totaled $18.5 trillion in 2016.

Please note America's total wealth doubled during Bill Clinton's two terms, from $30T to $60T, and wealth went up among America's bottom 50%, tripling to $3T or so.  It really was a boom time, and them Dubya came along and screwed us.

Still, the problem remains that just 10 percent of the country owns three-quarters of the wealth in America, and most of us have nothing or next to nothing.  Now we're ruled by a cabal that seems to think that the wealthiest ten percent need more trillions at our expense.

Don't count on voters to fix this either.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As long suspected, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort officially admits now that he was taking money from a pro-Russian party in the Ukraine for two years, something he never officially disclosed when working for the Trump campaign.

Paul Manafort, who was forced out as President Trump’s campaign chairman last summer after five months of infighting and criticism about his business dealings with pro-Russian interests, disclosed Tuesday that his consulting firm had received more than $17 million over two years from a Ukrainian political party with links to the Kremlin.

The filing serves as a retroactive admission that Mr. Manafort performed work in the United States on behalf of a foreign power — Ukraine’s Party of Regions — without disclosing it at the time, as required by law. The Party of Regions is the political base of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who fled to Russia during a popular uprising in 2014.

The disclosure hints at the vast fortunes available to top American political consultants plying their trade in other countries.

It was not immediately clear if Mr. Manafort would be required to pay any fines for the late filing. He has maintained that a majority of his work for Mr. Yanukovych was political consulting in Ukraine, where his firm, Davis Manafort International, operated an office at the time.

The Party of Regions employed Mr. Manafort to help rebrand Mr. Yanukovych and his party, which was long known as tilting toward Russia, as modernizers favoring closer ties to the European Union. All the work disclosed by Mr. Manafort on Tuesday predated Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Manafort’s filing indicates that he was retained by the Party of Regions to help elect national and regional candidates in Ukraine and to liaise with American diplomats in Kiev, the capital, who were monitoring elections there.

“Paul’s primary focus was always directed at domestic Ukrainian political campaign work, and that is reflected in today’s filing,” said Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort.

The problem of course is that Manafort's millions in blood money meant he was in the business of helping a government friendly to Russia get elected, something he refused to actually disclose as he should have done under law here.  Then again, he was performing the same job here, wasn't he?  That mean both Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort have both lied about representing foreign powers in campaign capacity, and then both went to work for Trump.

I'm betting Robert Mueller is having a less-than-fun time sifting through this maze of sand, but when he hits pay dirt it's going to be a hell of a thing.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans will regroup and revise their health care bill after GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled the bill from a vote this week after crumbling support.
• Former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday regarding his stolen campaign emails that ended up on WikiLeaks.
• UK officials have charged six police and safety officers in connection with 1989's deadly Hillsborough stadium stampede that killed 96 in a crowded enclosure.
• The ransomware attack that crippled systems across Ukraine has now spread across Europe and Asia, with India's largest port hamstrung and a British online news site knocked offline.
• The Apple iPhone turns ten this week as gaming app makers look for a new generation of smash hits like Angry Birds and Candy Crush.

Last Call For Wage Slaves, Con't

Five Thirty Eight's Ben Casselman and Kathryn Casteel take a look at the relative uncharted economics of Seattle's $13 minimum wage on the way to $15, and reminds us that what may work economically in King County and SeaTac may not work for say, Bracken County, Kentucky.

As cities across the country pushed their minimum wages to untested heights in recent years, some economists began to ask: How high is too high? 

Seattle, with its highest-in-the-country minimum wage,1 may have hit that limit. 

In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline. 

“The goal of this policy was to deliver higher incomes to people who were struggling to make ends meet in the city,” said Jacob Vigdor, a University of Washington economist who was one of the study’s authors. “You’ve got to watch out because at some point you run the risk of harming the people you set out to help.” 

The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. The paper does not, for example, address whether displaced workers might have found jobs in other cities or with companies such as Uber that are not included in their data. 

Still, despite such caveats, the new research is likely to have big political implications at a time when the minimum wage has returned to the center of the economic policy debate. In recent years, cities and states across the country have passed laws and ordinances that will push their minimum wages as high as $15 over the next several years. During last year’s presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called for the federal minimum wage to be raised to $12, and she faced pressure from activists to propose $15 instead. (The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour.) Recently, however, the minimum-wage movement has faced backlash from conservatives, with legislatures in some states moving to block cities from increasing their local minimums.

The reality is while an $11 minimum wage had little to no deleterious effects, going to $13 is beginning to cause issues in at least one study.

Monday’s report looks at the impact of the second wage increase under the law: the January 2016 hike to $13 an hour for large employers. This time, the findings look very different: Compared to a counterfactual in which Seattle didn’t raise its minimum wage, the number of hours worked by low-wage workers (those earning less than $19 an hour) fell by 9.4 percent over the first nine months of 2016, and the number of low-wage jobs fell by 6.8 percent. Cumulatively, those add up to the losses of 5,000 jobs and 3.5 million hours of work. The average low-wage employee, they found, saw his or her monthly paycheck shrink by $125, or 6.6 percent. 

The study is far from the last word on the impact of Seattle’s law, let alone the $15 minimum wage movement more generally. Indeed, just last week another study used similar methods to reach seemingly the opposite conclusion: A report from the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Seattle’s minimum wage, “raises pay without costing jobs,” as a press release on the study announced. 

The Berkeley study, however, looked exclusively at the restaurant industry. That has been a common practice in minimum-wage research, because the industry is one of the largest employers of low-wage workers. But the University of Washington study suggests a possible flaw in that approach: That research, too, found essentially no job losses in the restaurant sector as a result of the city’s minimum wage hike. That suggests that studies that focused on the restaurant industry might have missed larger effects in other sectors. (Michael Reich, one of the authors of the Berkeley study, said he was confident in his findings. Bernstein said focusing on restaurants, especially fast food, was a widely accepted approach that was well grounded in economic theory.) 

The Washington study has one big advantage over most past research: The authors had access to detailed data on the hours and earnings of nearly all employees in Washington state, allowing them to measure the effects of the minimum wage much more directly than is possible with less complete datasets.3 But the study has its own weaknesses. Because the researchers had data only for Washington state, they had only a limited pool of places they could compare Seattle to — a key step for figuring out the effects of the minimum wage policy. (The Berkeley paper, by contrast, compared Seattle to similar communities across the country.4) 

The Washington researchers also had to exclude many multilocation businesses, which means their sample could leave out major low-wage employers such as fast-food chains. Reich, in a letter to Seattle’s mayor responding to the study, called the findings “not credible” in part because they differed so much from those of past research. But Jeffrey Clemens, an economist at the University of California, San Diego who has studied the minimum wage, said it isn’t surprising that Seattle’s minimum wage would have an unusually big impact because it is so much higher than most other minimums. 

Even if the Washington study stands up to scrutiny — and it will get lots more scrutiny — it carries important caveats. Vigdor cautioned that the study makes no claims about individual workers: It is possible, for example, that workers who lost their jobs after the wage hike quickly found other jobs outside of Seattle, or that they made up for lost hours by driving for Uber. Neither shift would show up in the researchers’ data.

It's a cautionary tale, but again the categories of jobs and employers in the studies are not complete. What this really means is that we don't know what Seattle's minimum wage hikes will mean truly without more data and more expansive research.  Meanwhile, several other cities are set to join Seattle soon at that $15 point, and we'll have more data in more locations pretty rapidly over the next several years.

I know that's all pretty clinical when we're talking about a living wage for Americans out there working every day to put food on the table, but the issue has to be dealt with in a country where the federal minimum wage isn't a livable wage in any single county in the US.  That has to increase.  The question is "by how much".  We have one set of data points, but right now we're still largely in the "here be macroeconomic dragons" section of the chart.

However, keep in mind that the answer as long as the GOP is in charge is "it will never increase because we think that's already too high."

World War 3.0

The next evolution of warfare is being carried out in Ukraine today as the country's internet-enabled infrastructure is being systematically crippled by network attacks

Ukraine’s national bank, state power company and largest airport are among the targets of a huge cyber attack on government infrastructure. 

Rozenko Pavlo, the deputy Prime Minister, said he and other members of the Ukrainian government were unable to access their computers. 

“We also have a network 'down',” he wrote. “This image is being displayed by all computers of the government.” 

The photo showed his PC displaying a message claiming a disk “contains errors and needs to be prepared”, urging the user not to turn it off. 

Images from other affected computers and disabled cash points showed what appeared to be ransomware, demanding a payment of $300 (£235) in Bitcoin to re-gain access to encrypted files. 

Analysts said the virus, named Petrwrap or Petya, appeared to work similarly to the WannaCry ransomware that infected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries last month. 

Ukrainian state-run aircraft manufacturer Antonov was among the companies hit, along with power distributorUkrenergo, which said the attack did not affect power supplies. 

The National Bank of Ukraine said an “unknown virus” was to blame, saying several unnamed Ukrainian banks were affected along with financial firms.

“As a result of cyber attacks, these banks have difficulties with customer service and banking operations,” a statement said.

No shots fired, no soldiers parachuting in, no tanks rolling across the roads, but still billions in damage.  And there really shouldn't be any question as to who's behind it.

The secretary of Ukraine's security council said there were signs of Russian involvement in a wave of cyberattacks that hit Ukrainian institutions on Tuesday, including banks and the state power distributor.

"Already on first analysis of the virus it is possible to talk of Russian fingerprints," the National Security and Defense Council quoted Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov as saying.

This is how wars will be fought going forward: critical transportation, corporate, medical, economic, logistic, and electrical infrastructure systems all crashed at once.  Of course, there will be plenty of old fashioned shooting and bombing too, but the era of including a cyber component of warfare in skirmishes between nation-states is upon us.

After all, our good friends the Russians know damn good and well that internet warfare works.

Just ask Donald Trump.

To Heller In A Handbasket

So the theory goes that vulnerable Nevada GOP Senator Dean Heller announced his opposition over the weekend to the Trumpcare Senate bill, and that some behind-the-scenes stuff would happen where Heller would get permission to vote no on it from Mitch McConnell and the bill still passes the Senate with 51 GOP votes instead of 52 when he has to face voters in 2018.  Heller can then say "Well I heard you and I voted no on it" and gets John McCain Maverick Points™, which he can trade in for another term.  That's the theory anyway, and I'm sure that's what Heller was expecting.

That theory just got burned to the ground this week along with possibly Dean Heller's career as the White House has now declared open season on his head.

A new campaign by top White House allies targeting the GOP’s most vulnerable senator over health care sends a loud message to those resistant to the Trump agenda: We’re coming after you. 

America First Policies, a White House-backed outside group led by the president’s top campaign advisers, has launched a $1 million attack against Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, who on Friday announced that he opposed the Senate’s recently unveiled Obamacare repeal plan.

That included a Twitter and digital ad campaign targeting the senator, including a video that accuses him of “standing with” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a reviled figure in conservative circles. 

“Unacceptable,” the video says. “If you’re opposed to this bill, we’re opposed to you.” 

America First Policies is set to expand its campaign early this week with TV ads that will go after the Nevada senator. 

The offensive aims both to punish Heller and to sway his vote, and it is a stunning act of political retaliation against a member of the president’s own party — one who faces a perilous path to reelection in 2018. Senior Republicans, many of whom are deeply worried about Heller’s political standing and increasingly nervous about the midterms, were shocked and spent the weekend measuring the possible fallout.

It's one thing to say "Sorry Dean, nobody's getting a pass on this one, we need a united vote" and quite another thing to spend a million bucks to take out ads going after somebody in your own party. I'm trying to imagine the Obama White House doing this to Joe Manchin or something and I just can't.  It's ludicrous.

But the cold calculus is there: there are a lot more vulnerable Dems in 2018 in red states (ten of them!) then there are blue state Republicans, which currently consists solely of Dean Heller.  Losing Heller at this point is a calculated risk to make sure there are no surprises on this Senate bill vote.  I guess the White House figures there will still be a net gain of Senate Republicans in 2018 even if Heller loses, and frankly they're probably correct.

Also, it's still early enough to primary Heller off the island.  Former Utah GOP Sen. Bob Bennett only realized how awful the Trump GOP was on his deathbed last year after the Tea Party primaried him out of a career in 2010.  Heller's only finding out now that loyalty to Dear Leader or Else is the name of the game.

But that leaves the question of "What about the other GOP senators who are holding out?"  Maine's Susan Collins, Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski have all come out against the bill as too cruel, and Utah's Mike Lee, Texas's Ted Cruz and my local blockhead Rand Paul have come out saying the bill is not cruel enough.  None of those senators face re-election in 2018, so ads aren't going to matter.

But cold hard cash certainly will.  It's time for the "Let's Make A Deal" phase of the Senate GOP healthcare bill!

White House and Capitol Hill officials are exploring potential deals to divvy up billions of dollars to individual senators’ priorities in a wide-ranging bid to secure votes for the imperiled GOP health care bill. 

A Congressional Budget office score that projected 22 million fewer Americans would have insurance under the plan sent some members fleeing Monday and left the bill in jeopardy of failing to have enough votes to even be called to the Senate floor this week.

But Republicans in the White House and in Congress were pleasantly surprised that the bill included more savings than they expected — and are trying to figure out if they can dole it out for votes. 

The Senate has about $188 billion to play with. 

Among the possible changes: More spending for health savings accounts to appease conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee, according to three people familiar with the matter, and some additional Medicaid and opioid spending for moderates. 

"We are still working with leadership to change the base bill," a Lee aide said. 

Lee, Cruz and others on the right have been looking to wipe out as much of Obamacare as possible and replace it with health savings accounts, group plans and selling insurance across state lines, among other ideas. It’s not clear if the Senate parliamentarian would allow all of those proposals through under strict reconciliation rules. And Lee will likely require far more dramatic changes to be won over. 

Meanwhile, senators from Medicaid expansion states huddled after the CBO score revealed the nearly $200 billion in savings to see if they could get GOP leaders to put more money into Medicaid and to thwart drug addiction. Those modifications may take place on the Senate floor, but Republicans are divided on how to use the money.

Let's keep in mind that this "windfall in savings" of nearly $200 billion comes from throwing tens of millions of people off Medicaid coverage.  Mitch McConnell is then going to turn around and take that money and try to bribe GOP senators with it.

That's how Republicans operate.

StupidiNews!

• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 22 million Americans would lose their health insurance by 2026 under the Senate GOP's health care bill.
• A package of sanctions against Russia that passed by near unanimous margins in the Senate remains stalled in the House, which may never take up a vote on the measure.
• A new Pew study finds the standing of the United States abroad has plummeted rapidly since Donald Trump took office, particularly among America's closest allies and neighbors.
• GOP Sen. Bob Corker and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner are pushing a new bipartisan plan to break up mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
• "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli faced his first day in federal court for securities fraud on Monday as jury selection in the trial gets underway this week.

Last Call For Running The Numbers

To recap, this is what President Obama did for white people since the middle of his first term:

White America turned the country over to the GOP anyway.  When Reagan had to deal with a first term recession and was re-elected and brought white unemployment down from over 9% to 4% in his second term, the country gladly elected another Republican to follow him because he was a hero.

Obama did the same thing in a much worse recession but was reviled for it by the very people he helped the most.

But please tell me again it was "economic anxiety".

SCOTUS-Palooza, 2017 Edition

If it's the last Monday in June, it's time for the big Supreme Court rulings for the end of spring term, and as with 2014's awful Alito Hobby Lobby decision, 2015's Scalia EPA decision wrecking President Obama's clean power plant initiative,  and 2016's Breyer strikedown of Texas's TRAP laws regulating abortion clinics out of business , this year's final rulings were big news that will have lasting effects for years.

The big ruling is actually a future one: the Supreme Court will take up Trump's Muslim travel ban in October and for now has issued a messy partial stay, partial enforcement on the ban.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would decide whether President Trump’s revised travel ban was lawful, setting the stage for a major decision on the scope of presidential power. 

Mr. Trump’s revised executive order, issued in March, limited travel from six mostly Muslim countries for 90 days and suspended the nation’s refugee program for 120 days. The time was needed, the order said, to address gaps in the government’s screening and vetting procedures. 

Two federal appeals courts have blocked critical parts of the order. 

The administration had asked that the the lower-court ruling be stayed while the case moves forward. The court granted part of that request in its unsigned opinion. 

“We grant the government’s applications to stay the injunctions, to the extent the injunctions prevent enforcement of” Mr. Trump’s executive order “with respect to foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

Which means family members of US citizens or employees of US companies can't be banned, but that means that it looks like the burden of proof of said "bona fide relationship" would have to be on the person wishing to enter the US.  That's going to be spectacularly messy to enforce.

Worse, the Supreme Court even taking this up is a majorly bad sign.  We'll see in October when SCOTUS hears the case, but my guess is a ruling would come sooner rather than later given the Trump regime argument involving national security import that the Court clearly believes is relevant here.

We'll see where this goes.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As I keep saying, the investigation into the Trump regime by Special Counsel Robert Mueller has three components: possible collusion with Russia on the election, possible money laundering through Russian firms (as possible payoff for the collusion) and possible obstruction of justice in covering up the first two components.

A Washington Post story from Sunday ties Trump son-in-law and campaign  consultant Jared Kushner to involvement in all three when Kushner profited handsomely from a real estate deal made through Germany's Deutsche Bank just before joining the Trump campaign in an official capacity.

The Deutsche Bank deal was one of the last Kushner orchestrated before joining the White House. It is among the dozens of complex transactions that he was involved with during his decade in the real estate business. 

Although Kushner divested some properties in an effort to address potential conflicts, he retains an interest in nearly 90 percent of his real estate properties, including the retail portion of the former New York Times headquarters, and holds personal debts and loan guarantees. 

The deal that led to the Deutsche Bank loan is rooted in a holiday party held in late 2014 at the Bowlmor bowling alley, which is located in the retail portion.

At the party, Kushner decided that the four retail floors of the building, while rundown, could be transformed into a thriving tourist destination, according to his associates.

The building passed through several owners after the newspaper sold the property for $175 million in 2004 to Tishman Speyer. Tishman sold it three years later for $525 million to a company called Africa-Israel Investments. (Those transactions prompted Trump a few months ago to poke fun at the Times, tweeting that the “dopes” at the newspaper “gave it away.”) 

Africa-Israel’s decision to purchase the building was made by its chairman, an Uzbek-born Israeli citizen, Lev Leviev. He is one of the world’s wealthiest men, known as the “King of Diamonds” for his extensive holdings in Africa, Israel and Russia. He was then expanding his real estate holdings in New York City.

Leviev told the New York Times shortly after the building’s purchase that he was a “true friend” of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, largely through his work with an influential Jewish organization in the former Soviet Union. The newspaper wrote that he kept a photo of Putin in his office in Israel. Leviev’s company said in a statement to The Post that Leviev “does not have a personal relationship” with Putin but has met him “on a few occasions.” Leviev’s statement said he was referring to his belief that “Mr. Putin has been a ‘true friend’ to the Jewish people in Russia.” 

In 2008, a year after the building’s purchase, Leviev invited Trump to his Madison Avenue store, an ultra-high-end establishment called Leviev Jewelry, where they were photographed together, according to the Leviev statement. Leviev hoped to work with Trump on Moscow real estate deals, according to an article in Kommersant, a Russian newspaper. The Leviev statement said that the two “never had any business dealings with one another, contrary to speculation.”

Six years later, Kushner saw an opportunity for his own company.

Leviev, whose company was having financial difficulties, according to an Israeli press account, sold the building’s 12-floor office portion for $160 million, a transaction that did not involve the four retail floors.

Leviev’s daughter, Chagit, took charge of her father’s U.S. subsidiary and set out to find a buyer for the retail portion of the building. The company said it would entertain offers no lower than $300 million. 

Kushner’s company offered $265 million, which was rejected. Kushner himself then negotiated with Chagit Leviev and others in 2015 and succeeded with a $296 million offer, according to an official involved in the matter.

“It was a very hard back-and-forth New York negotiating style,” said Kushner’s broker, Lon Rubackin. Leviev’s partner in the deal, Five Mile Capital, did not respond to a request for comment.

Few knew it at the time, but the negotiations were nearly consummated when Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, ran into Chagit Leviev on May 4, 2015, at an after-party for a Metropolitan Museum of Art gala — an encounter that was memorialized in a picture posted on Instagram. 

“Such a pleasure seeing ­@jaredckushner and his stunningly beautiful wife @ivankatrump last night [at] the #metball­afterparty,” Chagit Leviev wrote.

The deal was signed a week later and closed in October 2015. The Leviev company said in a statement to The Post that Kushner simply made the highest offer and “there was no political element to the transaction.”

Kushner took over a property that was only 25 percent leased, according to a company official. His company recruited tenants, offering some a year’s free rent to lock in long-term contracts, according to an SEC filing. As a result, the building was nearly fully leased, with higher rents, including new tenants such as National Geographic. 

The strategy paid off when Kushner’s company went to Deutsche Bank for refinancing. An appraisal cited in SEC filings for the package of mortgage-backed securities placed the value at $470 million, a 59 percent increase in a year. The bank declined to release the appraisal, but a person involved in the deal said that such a rapid increase was unusual when New York real estate was rebounding from recession, and credited Kushner for finding stellar tenants.

So Kushner just happens to end up making a crapton of money through a bank that was fined for not keeping sufficient tabs on Russian money laundering, and did so with the help of a major Russian oligarch friend of Putin's who just happens to be an expert in a relatively easy method of moving large amounts of cash through something like, I don't know, diamonds.

All this happens a month before Trump is elected.

Kushner didn't bother to disclose this deal that by all rights he should have been very proud of, following in his father-in-law's footsteps as a real estate business tycoon.

The cases against Deutsche Bank were then both settled within weeks of Trump taking office.

So much smoke here there's a probably a small volcano under midtown Manhattan.

But remember this is all fake news because Dear Leader Don says so.