Last Call For The True Price Of Trumpcare

Trump Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price went on ABC's This Week to defend Trumpcare, and tried to play it off as business as usual.  Price of course forgot that business before the Affordable Care Act meant insurance companies could regularly deny people insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions and could cut off care due to yearly and lifetime caps.  

Even insurance companies flat out said last week that under revised Trumpcare legislation that they would have no choice but to seek significant financial help from the government to keep offering policies, and that millions of policies would be disrupted.

Price's response: let's go back to 2008 when health insurance sucked.

During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Price was asked to respond to a blistering criticism of the Senate Republicans’ health care proposal by two major groups representing the U.S. health insurance industry. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) earlier this week, the groups called the latest version of the bill “simply unworkable in any form” and warned that it would cause “widespread terminations of coverage” to people with serious medical problems.

“It’s really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, because all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare,” Price said, referring to an amendment proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would allow insurers to resume sales of policies that leave out key benefits, such as prescription drugs or mental health treatment.

“A single risk pool, which is what they’re objecting to, is exactly the kind of process that was ― that has been utilized for decades to care for individuals,” he added.

America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association of America, the two groups who wrote the letter, oppose the latest draft of the legislation. They say it would allow insurance companies to discriminate among customers based on medical status ― essentially causing insurance premiums for people with pre-existing conditions to skyrocket.

In discussing their health care plan, Republicans do not usually speak as candidly as Price about returning the nation’s health care system to its pre-Obamacare period, a period marked by egregious insurance company abuses. Protections for pre-existing conditions remain highly popular around the country, and GOP lawmakers are loath to admit their policies would weaken them.

Prior to Obamacare, 79 million — more than one in four Americans — either lacked health insurance or were underinsured. The poor, especially, lacked adequate coverage.

In his appearance on “This Week,” Price countered by arguing that the Trump administration would be taking further administrative actions on health care and that the Senate health care bill is “not the entire plan.”

Price isn't wrong about that last part: Trumpcare would give him phenomenal power over who gets health coverage in America. The bill would mean that Price would get the final decision about which states get Medicaid money and how much under the GOP's block grant scheme, and the decision would be his and his alone.

Remember "death panels"?  Tom Price would be a one man show.

Meanwhile, Trumpcare is going to be so awful that the White House is already attacking the CBO score of the revised Senate GOP bill before it's even out.

Keep calling your senators.

Your 2018 Math Check

I feel very good about the Democrats' chances in 2018 in the House of kicking Paul Ryan to the curb. The latest Cook Political Report check-in on the House finds alarm bells ringing for the GOP and it's still 16 months out.

This is a tricky point in the election cycle to begin making predictions. On one hand, the danger signs are everywhere for the GOP: President Trump's approval is mired in the high 30s, and support for the AHCA's legislation is stuck in the high teens, and Democrats have been significantly over-performing—despite falling short—in a broad array of special elections. They also lead most national generic ballot tests by high single digits.

Race by race, the data isn't much better for Republicans. Multiple public and private polls now show House Republican incumbents who won by wide margins last fall tied with or trailing real and hypothetical opponents. For example, GOP Rep. Martha McSally (AZ-02) cruised by 14 points last fall. After voting for the AHCA, she's running even in two surveys against former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, whose impending bid is the worst-kept secret in Tucson.

Taken as a whole, the evidence would seem to point to a wave election that would justify moving a slew of races into the Toss Up column and threaten GOP control of the House.

Trumpcare is killing them now.  Whether or not that will still be the case in November of next year, we don't yet know.  The Senate however is a different story, as the difficulties of the Dems winning the three seats they need are pretty manifest (enough that even James Carville can see it.)

Democratic operative James Carville is expressing doubt that his party will take back the Senate in 2018, saying Saturday that it would be “very, very difficult," to do so.
“I think right now most Democrats are trying to focus on the 2018 elections and trying to recruit people and keep incumbents, and you know I would say we have a pretty good chance of taking the House back. The Senate is very, very difficult,” Carville told John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York. 

“The problem in the Senate is we have a large number of seats we have to hold in states that Donald Trump carried. Indiana, Missouri, you know, places like that we have to hold seats,” he continued.

“The only places where we have an opportunity for pick up are, you know, Nevada is pretty good. After that Arizona is less good, then you’re down to Texas and Alabama, and for Democrats to win the Senate back, they have to pick up three seats,” Carville said.

Carville is of course talking about Nevada GOP Sen. Dean Heller and Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake, who are both vulnerable, but after that the field turns to flipping either Ted Cruz in Texas or Luther Strange in Alabama, two races that the GOP are probably going to win.

On top of that, as I've said before, the Dems have to defend in ten Trump state races.   That's looking more and more likely now, but the notion of picking off Cruz or Strange is still a massive long-shot. Absolutely everything would have to go the Dems' way next November.  It's not impossible, but I would gladly take a successful defense of all Senate Democrats in 2018 plus flipping Heller's seat and call it spectacular.

It's possible that it completely collapses for the GOP in 2018, the way Trump's going.  We'll see.

Bibi Breaks Ranks With Donny

After the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany two weeks ago, Donald Trump announced that his major diplomatic win was a cease fire agreement in southern Syria with his new buddy Vladimir Putin.  The problem with that is if there's any US ally that isn't going to accept a Syria deal that keeps the Assad regime in Damascus it's Israel, and PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now openly blasting the deal. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters after his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday that Israel opposes the cease-fire agreement in southern Syria that the United States and Russia reached because it perpetuates the Iranian presence in the country. 

The prime minister noted that in his meeting with Macron, he made it clear to the French president that Israel was totally opposed to the cease-fire plan. 

A senior Israeli official who asked not to be named due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the matter said Israel is aware of Iranian intensions to substantially expand its presence in Syria. Iran is not only interested in sending advisers to Syria, the official said, but also in dispatching extensive military forces including the establishment of an airbase for Iranian aircraft and a naval base. 

"This already changes the picture in the region from what it has been up to now," the senior official said. 

Netanyahu discussed the cease-fire deal with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by phone Sunday night.

By openly voicing his opposition to one of the most significant moves the United States and Russia have made in Syria in recent months, Netanyahu made public a major disagreement between Israel and the two great powers that had until now been kept under wraps and expressed only through quiet diplomatic channels. 

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agreed on the cease-fire on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg last week. In a tweet published shortly after the truce came into effect last week, Trump tweeted: "We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!"  

The U.S.-Russian deal included establishing de-escalation zones, otherwise known as safe zones, along Syria’s borders with both Jordan and Israel. Over the past month, Israel had held talks on this agreement with senior American officials, including Brett McGurk, America’s special envoy for the battle against ISIS, and Michael Ratney, the special envoy for Syria, both of whom visited Israel several times. 

During these talks, Israel presented a list of demands and voiced several reservations about the emerging agreement. Inter alia, Israel said that the de-escalation zones must keep Iran, Hezbollah and other Shi’ite militias away from the Israeli and Jordanian borders and must not enable Iran to consolidate its presence in Syria. Israel also told the Americans it objected to having Russian troops policing the cease-fire in the safe zones near its border.

Of course Bibi is pissed.  Here he was finally getting what he wanted with a GOP president, rather than Obama, and Trump is screwing him over worse than Obama ever dared to dream of doing.  Trump giving into Russia and Assad on Syria is not exactly what Israel had in mind when Netanyahu and his party were celebrating Clinton's loss.  They thought they were going to get the keys to the kingdom, but Netanyahu's demands have been completely sidelined in favor of Moscow and Riyadh.

Like most of our allies, Israel is finding out that America first under Trump really means Russia first, and it's coming at the expense of our other long-time allies.

I'm betting they wish they had Hillary Clinton to deal with about right now.

StupidiNews!

• Arizona officials say nine are dead, including six children, as flash flood waters swept through a swimming area along the East Verde River north of Phoenix on Saturday.
• Iran has sentenced a Princeton University doctoral history candidate to ten years in prison on espionage charges, the US State Department says it is aware of the case.
• Iraqi Kurdish security services says ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is alive and near the Syrian city of Raqqa, al-Baghdadi was reported killed last week in a US coalition airstrike.
• The Congressional Budget Office's report on the latest revisions to the Senate GOP Trumpcare bill are expected this week as GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hunts for votes.
• The BBC has announced that Jodie Whittaker will be the first female actor to play Doctor Who as she takes on the role of the 13th Doctor starting with this year's Christmas Special.

Last Call For Qatar In The Act

Time to check in with America's 'allies' in the Middle East, and it turns out the increasingly ugly fight between Qatar and Saudi Arabia may have been taken to a flashpoint by the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials. 

Officials became aware last week that newly analyzed information gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that on May 23, senior members of the UAE government discussed the plan and its implementation. The officials said it remains unclear whether the UAE carried out the hacks itself or contracted to have them done. The false reports said that the emir, among other things, had called Iran an “Islamic power” and praised Hamas. 

The hacks and posting took place on May 24, shortly after President Trump completed a lengthy counterterrorism meeting with Persian Gulf leaders in neighboring Saudi Arabia and declared them unified. 

Citing the emir’s reported comments, the Saudis, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt immediately banned all Qatari media. They then broke relations with Qatar and declared a trade and diplomatic boycott, sending the region into a political and diplomatic tailspin that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned could undermine U.S. counterterrorism efforts against the Islamic State.

So the question is what did Trump say in that meeting in Saudi Arabia that gave the UAE the green light for all of Team Riyadh to leave Doha out to dry?  The UAE is of course denying the hell out of the move, but then again it's not like there isn't a reason to believe Trump does things like have other countries hack things to his benefit these days, right?

The revelations come as emails purportedly hacked from Otaiba’s private account have circulated to journalists over the past several months. That hack has been claimed by an apparently pro- Qatari organization calling itself GlobalLeaks. Many of the emails highlight the UAE’s determination over the years to rally Washington thinkers and policymakers to its side on the issues at the center of its dispute with Qatar. 

All of the Persian Gulf nations are members of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. More than 10,000 U.S. troops are based at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base, the U.S. Central Command’s regional headquarters, and Bahrain is the home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. All are purchasers of U.S. defense equipment and tied to U.S. foreign policy priorities in numerous ways. 

The conflict has also exposed sharp differences between Trump — who has clearly taken the Saudi and UAE side in a series of tweets and statements — and Tillerson, who has urged compromise and spent most of last week in shuttle diplomacy among the regional capitals that has been unsuccessful so far.

“We don’t expect any near-term resolution,” Tillerson aide R.C. Hammond said Saturday. He said the secretary had left behind proposals with the “Saudi bloc” and with Qatar including “a common set of principles that all countries can agree to so that we start from . . . a common place.”

Now, if you wanted to split the US coalition with both the Sunni and Shi'a Gulf states and leave a gigantic mess to take advantage of, having the Qatari emir's real thoughts on his Saudi 'friends' leaked all over the media is definitely the way to go.  The US position, thanks to the worst diplomats ever, is now that America clearly favors the Sunni side of the equation.

I'll give you three guesses as to which large country north of China is more than happy to exploit this rift here, and the first four don't count.

Donny's Crash And Burn

July has been the worst month for the Trump regime yet, and new historic lows for Trump's approval ratings at the six month mark means the Russia mess is definitely catching up to him.  As usual, the largest drop is among Trump's own supporters, who were willing to overlook a multitude of sins, but maybe not so much taking away their health insurance and you know, treason.

Americans give President Donald Trump the lowest six-month approval rating of any president in polls dating back 70 years, punctuated by questions about his competence on the world stage, his effectiveness, the GOP health care plan and Russia’s role in the 2016 election.

Just 36 percent of Americans polled in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll approve of Trump’s job performance, down 6 points from his 100-day mark, itself a low. The previous president closest to this level at or near six months was Gerald Ford, at 39 percent, in February 1975.

Sixty-three percent in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates, say it was inappropriate for Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager to have met with a Russian lawyer during the campaign. Six in 10 also think Russia tried to influence the campaign, and among those who say so, 67 percent think Trump aides helped, similar to results in April.

Yet the Russia controversy is just one on the list of Trump’s troubles. Just 38 percent say he’s making significant progress toward his goals; 55 percent think not. With no apparent help from the G-20 summit, two-thirds don’t trust him to negotiate with other world leaders -- or with Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically -- on America’s behalf. And about half say the country’s world leadership has grown weaker under Trump; just 27 percent say it’s gotten stronger.

Only Bill Clinton, who at this point in 1993 was facing the fallout from the crises of the first WTC bombing in February and the Waco Branch Davidian siege, coupled with his own "unpopular" health care ideas, was anywhere really close to where Trump is today.  Gerald Ford, who America turned to after Nixon and Agnew resigned, was similarly hamstrung.  One went on to two terms, one barely lasted 2 years.

But Trump has all the hallmarks of descending into an untenable position.  He'll either take the rest of the GOP with him...or the rest of the entire country.

Sunday Long Read: Life In Cancer Alley

When you think of American states that are environmental disasters, you might bring up Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, Ohio's burning rivers, Nevada's Yucca Mountain, or West Virginia's mountain strip mines, but the worst state for toxic environmental deaths is far and away Louisiana, home to Cancer Alley, and unlike those other states, there's basically zero effort to clean up the bayou and its petrochemical and refinery industries.

If you’re visiting New Orleans and want to see something truly amazing, take your beer or daiquiri to-go and walk a few blocks past the Superdome—you’ll find a school being constructed on an old waste dump.

“All the toxins from the landfill are still there,” says toxicologist Wilma Subra. These toxins include lead, mercury, and arsenic, exposure to which can lead to reproductive damage, and skin and lung cancer. Even more astonishing, Subra says hundreds of schools across Louisiana have been built on waste dumps. Why? Dumps represent cheap land often already owned by a cash-strapped town or city, plus serve as rare high ground in a flood-prone state. And this is just the beginning of Louisiana’s nightmare.

The risk of cancer in Reserve, a community founded by freed slaves, is 800 times the national average, making the community, by one EPA metric, the most carcinogenic census tract in America—the cause is a DuPont/Denka chemical plant adjacent to the town that annually spews 250,000 pounds of the likely carcinogen chloroprene into the air. If you think the situation in Flint is bad, there are approximately 400 public water systems in Louisiana with lead or other hazardous substances leaching into the drinking water. Meanwhile, hundreds of petrochemical plants peppered across the state’s lush swampy interior freely emit carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and neurotoxins into the air and water, as well as inject them deep into the earth.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Louisiana is ranked, according to different surveys, 47th in environmental quality, third in poverty, and 49th in education. Are you still gushing about your latest trip to New Orleans for Jazz Fest Presented by Shell, or French Quarter Festival presented by Chevron? “New Orleans is the best,” one visitor recently wrote to me, “you are so smart to live there!” But how smart is it to allow children to attend school built on toxin-laced waste? How smart is it to allow a community’s cancer rates to shoot off the charts? Louisiana is rich in culture, spirit, and faith, yet what type of state knowingly poisons its own people? What type of country stands by and allows it to happen?

While it is fashionable to critique President Trump for his scientific ignorance, science was misdirected long before Trump laid hands on it. It is time to open our eyes and see what is really going on in this world, to critique our society’s dinosaur methods, then step back and imagine what a new path forward might look like. It is with this aim that I begin a science column for Longreads. In my first story I’ll tour us through a land America should have never allowed to materialize—it’s what I’m calling the Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip. As the Trump administration chucks environmental science out the window, evaporates industry regulations, and cripples agencies charged with protecting the environment, this tale is relevant for all Americans, because the poisoning happening in Louisiana could happen in your state too—in fact, it is probably already happening.

But for now sit back, enjoy a signature New Orleans cocktail from the comfort of your couch or chair, and get ready to keep reminding yourself: Yes, this is occurring in 2017 in the United States of America.

Here's a heart-stopper: as awful as things are in places like Reserve and other rural parish towns where the entire economy is run on making deadly chemicals out of ground sludge, under the Trump regime it's only going to get exponentially worse as the GOP's austerity budget will hit these places first, and hit them the hardest.

Last Call For Sandoval's Desert Grit

One of the major key players in whether or not the Senate GOP Trumpcare bill can pass the upper chamber isn't actually a senator at all, but Nevada's GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval.  Sandoval controls what GOP Sen. Dean Heller is going to do as far as voting for this bill, and Sandoval, like Ohio's GOP Gov. John Kasich, has no illusions as to how rotten Trumpcare is going to be for his state.

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said a closed-door breakfast meeting on Saturday between Trump Administration officials and a large number of governors hasn’t changed his position on the Senate health bill — that it’s a cause for concern.
The Republican governor, whose opinions on health care policy have a major influence on swing voting Republican Sen. Dean Heller, said he plans to make a decision on his final stance next week and hopes to talk with Heller on Sunday or Monday. But he said he’s trying to reconcile conflicting analyses — including the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that the immediately preceding bill would have left 22 million more people uninsured, and the administration’s contention that nobody would lose access to care.

“What’s difficult is there’s a lot of dispute about the veracity of those numbers,” Sandoval told reporters in an interview at the National Governors Association meeting in Rhode Island. “As a governor, it’s incumbent on me to sort that out.”

Sandoval said the Trump Administration hasn’t offered him benefits unrelated to health care — such as concessions on the Yucca Mountain relicensing process that Nevada is fighting and the administration is pushing — in exchange for support of the health bill. But he said he didn’t support such a trade.

“Those are two separate issues that I won’t conflate under any circumstances,” he said.

Democratic governors were more blunt about the discussion, which featured Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma. Connecticut Gov. Dan Molloy, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association, said the administrators kept touting “innovation” as the solution to health care problems.

But he said they were unable to explain how innovation would compensate for reduced funding. The mood grew tense, he said, mostly out of a “frustration with being lied to.”

“They’re going to shift a massive amount of responsibility to the states without the support necessary to do that,” he said, adding that it would be the states that have to do the dirty work of paring down their Medicaid rolls.

I've been saying this for months now: the GOP Congress's plan is to dump all the blame for having to throw millions off Medicaid on to state governors and say "Well, we reformed Medicaid like you asked.  State governors like you authorized and took credit for Medicaid expansion, you can take the blame for rolling that back. We told you seven years ago that we thought the expansion was unsustainable, and here we are."

Sandoval meanwhile clearly doesn't like getting hung out to dry like this, and I suspect he's far from the only GOP governor who secretly hates Mitch McConnell for screwing him over this badly. I feel like that the aforementioned John Kasich is similarly in the same position, and that GOP Sen. Rob Portman is going to bail on it as well.  Mike Pence is outright lying about red states that have accepted Medicaid expansion and the governors of those states like Kasich are pissed.

In his speech, Pence also said Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid put “far too many able-bodied adults” on the program.

“I know Governor Kasich isn’t with us, but I suspect that he’s very troubled to know that in Ohio alone, nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck on waiting lists, leaving them without the care they need for months or even years,” said Pence.

The waiting lists Pence referred to apply to Medicaid’s home and community-based services, and have not been affected by the program’s expansion under the ACA. States have long had waiting lists for these services, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s executive vice president, Diane Rowland, noted that waiting lists in non-expansion states are often longer than in expansion states, which currently receive a 95 percent federal match for their newly covered beneficiaries.

Kasich spokesman Jon Keeling said in an interview that Pence’s suggestion that 60,000 disabled Ohioans remain on waiting lists “is not accurate,” adding that to suggest Medicaid expansion hurt the state’s developmentally disabled “system is false, as it is just the opposite of what actually happened.”

“That waiting list is nothing new, and to attribute it to expansion is absurd,” said Families USA’s senior director of health policy, Eliot Fishman.

Pence has declared war on red state governors who took the expansion, and that fight is not going to be one that he wins.

[UPDATE] And with Sen. John McCain scheduling surgery next week and "missing the vote" along with Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson coming out against the bill, Mitch McConnell has now pulled the vote for Trumpcare again.

BREAKING FROM @SenateMajLdr MCCONNELL pic.twitter.com/zkpBTLM6dt

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) July 16, 2017

This is starting to look like ballgame, guys.  Keep the pressure up.

Russian To Judgment, Con't.

It's getting to the point that the revelations about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with the Russians (now there were at least eight people in this meeting, we find out) are so indefensible that Trump mouthpieces sent out to do it are getting buzzsawed on live national TV.

Reid was unrelenting in questioning Fred Fleitz, the former chief of staff for Ambassador John Bolton, who persisted in explaining that the Trump meeting on June 9th was much ado about nothing because it was organized by music promoter Rob Goldstone

“What we have here is a playboy celebrity publicist who likes to hang out with Tina Turner and Miss America contestants, who lied to get a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. that he ordinarily would not have held,” Fleitz explained.”I’ve got to tell you that someone who is really involved in this intricate Russian intelligence operation would never have sent the email we discussed earlier, mentioning this operation exists.

“This guy was exaggerating, this guy was lying to get his client in front of Donald Trump Jr. That’s what happened here, all this other stuff is fantasy,” he remarked while holding up a photo of Goldstone wearing a pirate hat.

“Let me ask you a question,” Reid shot back,. “It’s not fantasy because the meeting took place. In your view, if this person said to Donald Trump Jr., ‘I’ve got this information from the Russian government.’ What would be the motivation of Donald Trump Jr. to say ‘yes,’ and take the meeting?”

“Because Donald Trump Jr. knows this guy is a flake,” Fleitz parried. ” Because he realizes he’s exaggerating to get the meeting but he’s a friend. he probably said, ‘well, look, there’s no Russian effort to help my father, but look, I’ll meet with this guy because he’s a friend.’ There’s simply nothing there to connect this as a Russian intelligence operation.”

During a frantic back and forth, with Fleitz attempting to dismiss and duck Reid’s questions, the conservative aide complained, “This is a rigged interview.”

No wonder then that the smart money is now on Trump firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller sooner rather than later.

Since then the “witch hunt” investigation into the Trump campaign and alleged collusion with the Kremlin has taken a decidedly more perilous and personal turn for the President. And that’s exactly why we think it won’t be longer than 100 days before Trump pulls the trigger and “Comey” Mueller (no he can’t technically fire him but he can certainly order it and make it happen). After all, as the campaign and his first few months in office prove, Trump puts his family above anything else. As information continues to seep out about the work that Mueller is doing and the subpoenas start coming, we believe the President will be increasingly frustrated and the administration will undoubtedly continue to seek to undermine Mueller’s credibility. And lets be clear, by any objective standard Mueller is an unassailable, apolitical public servant.

Now, many are saying there is no way the administration would risk the fallout from having Mueller fired. Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” regularly invoked. But really? It seems no matter what this President does — no matter how out of the ordinary or mainstream — that his most ardent supporters in the public and the media continue to defend him. Most important is that now that many are questioning whether his son Donald Trump Jr. committed, at the least, an election law crime when he took a meeting with someone who he thought was working for the Russian government. And, as investigators are now reportedly probing Jared Kushner‘s role in potentially helping to direct a Russian operation targeting voters with fake news about candidate Hillary Clinton, and as the specter of obstruction of justice in connection with firing Comey hangs over the President and his administration, we believe it now more likely than not that Trump will decide that Mueller must go.

As I said earlier, this isn't the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.  From here on out things start moving faster and get a lot darker.  If the dam on Trump's support among his base and more importantly the support for the Republicans propping his regime up crumbles, it's going to move very quickly indeed.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is considering dramatically increasing the speed of deportation of undocumented immigrants rounded up by ICE goons as Trump's virulent nationalism turns more and more Americans into ICE informants.

The Trump administration is weighing a new policy to dramatically expand the Department of Homeland Security’s powers to expedite the deportations of some illegal immigrants.

Since 2004, the agency has been authorized to bypass immigration courts only for immigrants who had been living in the country illegally for less than two weeks and were apprehended within 100 miles of the border.

Under the proposal, the agency would be empowered to seek the expedited removal of illegal immigrants apprehended anywhere in the United States who cannot prove they have lived in the country continuously for more than 90 days, according to a 13-page internal agency memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The new guidelines, if enacted, would represent a major expansion of the agency’s authority to speed up deportations under President Trump, who has made border security a top priority.

Two administration officials confirmed that the proposed new policy, which would not require congressional approval, is under review. The memo was circulated at the White House in May, and DHS is reviewing comments on the document from the Office of Management and Budget, according to one administration official familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

So not only are we throwing out due process for anyone who came in less than 90 days ago, we're also dispensing with it for anyone who can't prove they've been here for three months.  Considering the lengths that undocumented immigrants might go to in order to avoid leaving a paper trail, only heightened in Trump's climate of fear, that's exactly what the regime wants.

So now there's a burden of proof on getting due process.

Out the door you go otherwise.

Welcome to America.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Last night's Trump regime/Russia bombshell (so many these days) comes from Jenna McLaughlin at Foreign Policy magazine, reporting the same Russian lawyer that Donald Trump Jr. met with in June 2016, Natalie Veselnitskaya, was the central figure in a huge Russian money laundering case that Attorney General Jeff Sessions suddenly settled after Trump fired the lead US Attorney prosecuting the case: one Mr. Preet Bharara.

Democratic congressmen on the House Judiciary Committee want to know why Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly settled a money laundering case in May involving the same Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential election to offer “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

The civil forfeiture case was filed in 2013 by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — who was fired by Trump in March. The case alleged that 11 companies were involved in a tax fraud in Russia and then laundered a portion of the $230 million they got into Manhattan real estate.

The forfeiture case was heralded at the time as “a significant step towards uncovering and unwinding a complex money laundering scheme arising from a notorious foreign fraud,” Bharara said. “As alleged, a Russian criminal enterprise sought to launder some of its billions in ill-gotten rubles through the purchase of pricey Manhattan real estate.”

But Instead of proceeding with the trial as scheduled, the Trump Justice Department settled the case two days before it was due to begin. By then, Bharara had already been axed by the president. Bharara’s assistant did not immediately respond to request for comment.

“We write with some concern that two events may be connected—and that the Department may have settled the case at a loss for the United States in order to obscure the underlying facts,” wrote 17 Democratic Congressmen on the House judiciary panel in a letter to Sessions on Wednesday.

The Russian attorney who uncovered the tax fraud scheme, Sergei Magnitsky, mysteriously died in prison. As a result, U.S. lawmakers passed the Magnitsky Act, which levied sanctions on Russian officials—sanctions that Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney, worked to reverse.

This is so ridiculously quid pro quo that it's approaching cartoonish, but there you are.

A credible theory at this point is this: Preet Bharara was bringing a massive federal money laundering case against US companies working with Russian firms.  The probability that the Trump regime was directly involved in that case through its corporate entities is approaching like 99.999%, and the trial would have almost certainly publicly revealed not only the relationship between Trump's businesses and Russian money laundering but also the relationship between Veselnitskaya and Trump Jr. Ergo, Trump fired Bharara and Jeff Sessions settled the case to make it go away.

I really hope the Dems on the committee can crack this wide open, but it's painfully obvious when you look at the rest of the evidence what happened here.  Trump knew it, Sessions knew it, so Bharara had to go.

The money laundering side of the Russia/Trump story was always going to be the most criminal and most damaging, and it's where Trump and Sessions have taken the most action to cover themselves.  The Trumpies can deploy smokescreens on the collusion angle and make arguments all day about "being unpatriotic isn't treason" but there's not a whole lot they could do to polish the turd of "Trump helped Russians spend Moscow mobster money to buy Manhattan real estate and got a cut."

Ahh, dear reader, but there's more from this morning after the jump...

StupidiNews!

• London Metropolitan Police have made an arrest in connection with a series of acid attacks Thursday night on five men across the city as part of a robbery spree.
• Arctic researchers are warning that as polar bears increasingly lose their habitats due to climate change that the bears may turn to preying on human dwellings for food sources.
• Farm state lawmakers are warning the Trump regime not to trade away their states' deals with Mexico and Canada as bargaining chips for renegotiation of NAFTA over manufacturing.
• New research indicates that the top killer in US hospitals is sepsis from drug-resistant infections, a $27 billion yearly epidemic that has tripled since 2005.
• Federal law enforcement officials have taken down "dark web" drug website AlphaBay, site founder Alexandre Cazes was found hanged in his Thailand jail cell on Wednesday.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter

I missed this story last week but I'm correcting this oversight now: the trial of the murder of 19-year-old black man Jeremy Lake by his white girlfriend's father, a now-former cop named Shannon Kepler, has ended in a third mistrial in Tulsa.

"It's a six-six mistrial," Kepler's attorney Richard O'Carroll told KOTV "And these jurors specifically told the court and the state and the defense that they needed more evidence."
O'Carroll said he is prepared to defend Kepler five more times. 

Holmes had instructed jurors that they could convict Kepler of first-degree murder or the lesser charge of manslaughter. Manslaughter carries a sentence of four years to life in prison, while the sentence on a first-degree murder conviction is life in prison. 

The jury deadlocked 6-6, but Kunzweiler said it was unclear if the breakdown was six for conviction and six for acquittal or six for murder and six for the lesser charge of manslaughter. 

Kepler, who retired from the force after he was charged, was a 24-year-police veteran who said he was trying to protect his daughter, who had run away from home and was living in a crime-ridden neighborhood. O'Carroll said Lisa had been in and out of a homeless shelter after her father prohibited her from bringing men into his house. 

Kepler told investigators he was acting in self-defense because Lake was armed, but police didn't find a weapon on Lake or at the scene. Lake's aunt said her nephew was reaching out to shake Kepler's hand to introduce himself when Kepler fired. 

Pam Wilkins, Lake's aunt, said his extended family is deeply frustrated by the third mistrial. 

"But I'm not giving up hope," she said. "We're believing in God and justice for Jeremey."
Jurors in Kepler's previous two trials, in November and February, deadlocked 11-1 and 10-2 in favor of guilt and Judge Sharon Holmes was forced to declare mistrials. 

Although they couldn't agree on the murder charge, jurors in the first trial convicted Kepler of recklessly using his firearm.

This was always a crime of passion, a pissed-off white cop dad who as a career police officer knew full well he'd never be convicted in Oklahoma of more than a slap on the wrist of shooting a ni-CLANG!, so he executed the black man who was touching his daughter.  Period.  It's literally a crime as old as America itself.  This could have happened in 1717, in 1817, in 1917 with the same result, and happened in 2017.  I dare say it'll happen again in 2117.

Black Lives Matter.

Silver, Out-Foxing The Feds

Remember our old friend Sheldon Silver, the NY state Senate Dem leader who got rung up on federal corruption charges in 2015?  He was convicted on all seven counts in December of that year, but ever since the Supreme Court suddenly made federal corruption charges impossible to actually convict on in 2016 by overturning former GOP Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's similar corruption convictions, it was only a matter of time before Silver was sprung from the clink too.

A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the 2015 corruption conviction of Sheldon Silver, the once-powerful New York State Assembly speaker who obtained nearly $4 million in illicit payments in return for taking official actions that benefited others, according to evidence presented at his trial. 

In vacating Mr. Silver’s conviction, the appellate court cited a United States Supreme Court ruling last year involving Bob McDonnell, a former Republican governor of Virginia, that narrowed the definition of the kind of official conduct that can serve as the basis of a corruption prosecution. 

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan concluded, in light of the Supreme Court’s narrower definition, that the jury instructions given by the judge in Mr. Silver’s trial were erroneous and that a properly instructed jury might not have convicted him.

Prosecutors may retry Mr. Silver, a 73-year-old Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who served for more than two decades as Assembly speaker.

Mr. Silver was convicted on Nov. 30, 2015 of honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering in one of the most prominent corruption trials in New York City in decades.

This is all pretty important seeing as how we have the most corrupt administration in history running things, so if you think when it's all said and done that any of the Trump regime principals will spend a single night in prison, remember that SCOTUS made sure that political corruption charges are all but impossible to prove nowadays.

Something to keep in mind if you ever think these assholes will see justice in my lifetime.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The revelations this week that Donald Trump Jr. met with Russian nationals who promised campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton in June 2016 marks "the end of the beginning" of the legal case against the Trump regime, and as Donald Trump Sr. hides out in Paris this week, NY Times reporter Peter Baker asks the now central question: What did Trump know, and when did he know it?

At 6:14 p.m. on June 7, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. clicked the send button on an email to confirm a meeting with a woman described as a “Russian government attorney” who would give him “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.”

Three hours later, his father, Donald J. Trump, claimed victory in the final primary races propelling him to the Republican presidential nomination and a general election contest against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his victory speech, Mr. Trump promised to deliver a major address detailing Mrs. Clinton’s “corrupt dealings” to give “favorable treatment” to foreign governments, including “the Russians.”

The White House said the timing was a coincidence. The younger Mr. Trump said this week that he never told his father about the meeting with the Russian lawyer, and the president said on Wednesday that he did not know about it until a few days ago. But the time frame raised questions that investigators will presumably examine as they try to piece together who knew what, and when, last year during what American intelligence agencies have called a Russian effort to influence the presidential election.

The meeting with the Russian lawyer came at a crucial stage in the elder Mr. Trump’s against-the-odds campaign as he pivoted toward taking on Mrs. Clinton, who was widely seen as the front-runner for the presidency. With Mr. Trump’s party still divided, his team was eager for information that could be used against his Democratic opponent, just as any nominee would be at that stage. The difference was that the Kremlin, according to intelligence reports, was eager to play a role in the campaign, and was in the midst of unleashing an operation to damage Mrs. Clinton.

The younger Mr. Trump said the meeting with the Russian lawyer yielded no useful information about Mrs. Clinton, and instead turned into a discussion about a Russian-American diplomatic dispute. By happenstance or not, in the days and weeks after the meeting with the Russian lawyer, emails purloined from Democratic computers were made public, which investigators tied to Russian hacking.

As a candidate, the elder Mr. Trump, who had expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, took positions that summer that caused head scratching. He expressed openness to lifting sanctions on Russia that were imposed after its annexation of Crimea, and suggested he might not defend NATO allies that did not spend enough money on their own security. The Republican platform at the party convention in July 2016 was crafted to keep out a call to provide arms to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian separatists.

The president’s legal team declined to comment about the close timing of some of these events. A White House official said the president’s threat to air allegations about Mrs. Clinton on June 7 was part of a long-planned speech and was not related to his son’s decision to meet with the Russian lawyer. At a briefing on Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a White House spokeswoman, dismissed the latest articles about the emails and meeting as “much ado about nothing.”

Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he was not aware of the June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer at the time. “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” he told Reuters. He did not fault his son for sitting down with the lawyer. “I think many people would have held that meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

The notion that Trump the elder wasn't involved in his son's efforts to get dirt on the person he hated so much that he led chants of "Lock her up!" at his campaign rallies is ludicrous, but here we are, asked to believe yet another pile of Trump falsehoods.

The real issue remains the near-universal refusal by the GOP in Congress to do anything about this.  Yes, both the House and Senate intelligence committees want to question Junior, but the evidence is pretty clear that the Trumps' long-standing Russian relationships can no longer be dismissed as coincidental, as Shane Harris at the WSJ reminds us.

Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by U.S. intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former U.S. officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.

In some cases, the Russians in the overheard conversations talked about meetings held outside the U.S. involving Russian government officials and Trump business associates or advisers, these people said.

Russian officials are routinely monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, and it wouldn’t be unusual for them to discuss people who have business interests in Russia.

Mr. Trump held the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, was a globally recognized celebrity and sold properties to Russians. The intelligence gathering wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump or people in his circle, and it isn’t clear which Trump advisers or associates the Russians referred to, or whether they had any connection to his presidential aspirations.

The 2015 conversations were detected several months before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the White House. The conversations have been in investigators’ possession for some time, but officials said the Donald Trump Jr. news this week prompted them to look at them again.

It's looking more and more like Junior's meeting last year was the key piece of the puzzle that makes a lot of other very coincidental evidence look far less like coincidence and more like conspiracy.  Oh, and top of all this, it looks like the Russian lawyer Junior met with was in the country illegally. 

The irony in that borscht is thick enough not to need sour cream.