Last Call For That's Real White Of You, Con't

As I mentioned earlier this week, Virginia Democrat and Hillary veep pick Sen. Tim Kaine is running for re-election and his opponent is Republican/Actual White Supremacist™ Corey Stewart, who is already calling for Kaine to be investigated and jailed because of the crime of being Hillary's veep pick, or something.

After responding to his victory rally crowds’ “Lock her up” chants by saying it “might just happen,” the Republican Senate candidate who won the GOP primary in Virginia on Tuesday evening, Corey Stewart, again suggested that his opponent should be jailed. 

During a turbulent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night, Stewart suggested that his opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) was at the “center” of reports that a government informant was deployed to meet with members of the Trump campaign to probe their contacts with Russian officials at the start of what we now consider the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. President Donald Trump, Stewart —who claims he won because he fully aligned himself with Trump — and other far-right Republicans have seized on reports of the informant as evidence that a spy was sent to infiltrate Trump’s campaign. The President himself has dubbed the whole ordeal “spygate.”

“’ll tell you something, I really do believe that Tim Kaine has been at the center of all this stuff that you’re seeing with regard to the FBI, you know the whole problem is having the FBI spying by federal agency on a presidential campaign,” Stewart told Cuomo, who interrupted him to say there was “no proof” to back up his allegations. 

Stewart shot back: “We’re not in a court of law are we?” 

“That doesn’t mean the truth doesn’t apply, my brother,” Cuomo said. 

Stewart then repeated his claim that Kaine and the entire commonwealth of Virginia were at the “center” of the informant controversy. 

“I would not be surprised if there’s an investigation of Tim Kaine before the year is out,” Stewart said. “Look here’s the question, at the end of the day people have to ask themselves, what has Tim Kaine accomplished in his six years in the United States Senate? Tim Kaine can’t point to a single accomplishment in the United States Senate for Virginia or Virginians. The only thing that Tim Kaine has done in the past six years is run for vice president, and he didn’t even do a very good job at that, I might add.”

Then this morning, Stewart tweeted that Kaine is a terrorist.

Virginia's sitting senator approves of and even applauds his son's participation in a known terrorist organization, #Antifa.

Let that sink in. https://t.co/7foEPLKYHT

— Corey Stewart (@CoreyStewartVA) June 14, 2018

It's only Thursday.  Stewart has been the GOP candidate for Senate for less than 48 hours.  And when I say Stewart is a white supremacist, I'm 100% not being hyperbolic.

He once stood proudly before a Confederate flag, declaring it was not a symbol of hatred, but “about our heritage.” 

After the march of torch-carrying white supremacists in Charlottesville last year, which led to the death of a counterprotester, he criticized “weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough.” 

As officials around Virginia have grappled with whether to remove Confederate statues, he has compared those politicians to leaders of the Islamic State. 

Now Corey Stewart, a county official who for years has played to the hard-right fringe, captured the Republican nomination for Senate in Virginia. 

He did so in a low-turnout primary on Tuesday when many centrist Republicans apparently stayed home, unhappy with a three-way race among candidates all professing strong loyalty to President Trump and given to fiery culture war pronouncements. 

Mr. Stewart, the chairman of a county board of supervisors who briefly led Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia, received a congratulatory overnight tweet from the president, who called Mr. Stewart’s Democratic opponent, Senator Tim Kaine, “a total stiff.” 

Tellingly, though, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm, said it would not support Mr. Stewart, who lags far behind Mr. Kaine in fund-raising and has a history of cozying up to white supremacists and anti-Semites that threatens to make him an albatross for down-ballot Republicans. 

White House officials said the president was unlikely to cross the Potomac River to campaign personally for Mr. Stewart unless there were signs that his race against Mr. Kaine had become competitive. 

The real worry for national Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that Mr. Stewart’s nomination may cost some incumbent Republicans in Virginia their seats in Congress.

When he loses, I hope he takes the rest of the Virginia GOP down with him.

Trump Cards, Con't

It looks like New York AG Barbara Underwood is picking up where her predecessor Eric Schniederman left off (before it turned out he was an abusive monster towards multiple women as he resigned in shame last month) and has now filed suit against the Trump Foundation, Donald Trump, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. for charities fraud.

In the suit, filed Thursday morning, attorney general Barbara Underwood asked a state judge to dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation. She asked that its remaining $1 million in assets be distributed to other charities and that Trump be forced to pay at least $2.8 million in restitution and penalties. 

Underwood also asks that Trump be banned from leading any other New York nonprofit for 10 years — seeking to apply a penalty usually reserved for the operators of small-time charity frauds to the president of the United States. 

In the suit, Underwood noted that Trump had already paid more than $330,000 in reimbursements and penalty taxes since 2016. New York state began probing the Trump Foundation in response to an investigation by The Washington Post.

But she asked the judge to go further, and require Trump to pay millions more. She said a 20-month state investigation found that Trump had repeatedly violated laws that set the ground rules for tax-exempt foundations — most importantly, that their money is meant to serve the public good, and not to provide private benefits to their founders.

“This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal law,” Underwood wrote in the legal complaint. 

The White House and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump has been president of the foundation since he founded it in 1987. In late 2016, he had promised to shut down the Trump Foundation — but could not while the attorney general’s investigation continued. 

Underwood was promoted to the position of attorney general only weeks ago, succeeding Eric Schneiderman (D) after he resigned following allegations that he had physically abused several romantic partners. Underwood was a career staffer, not an elected official. She has promised not to seek election for a full term as attorney general in the fall.

Underwood declined to comment on the case beyond issuing a written statement. “As our investigation reveals, the Trump Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality,” Underwood said in the statement.

Underwood said she had sent letters to both the IRS and the Federal Election Commission, identifying what she called “possible violations” of tax law and federal campaign law by Trump’s foundation. 

Underwood has jurisdiction over the Trump Foundation because the charity is based at Trump Tower in Manhattan and registered in New York State. 

Trump’s children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump were also named in the lawsuit because they have been official board members of the Donald J. Trump Foundation for years. Under the law, Underwood said, board members are supposed to scrutinize a charity’s spending for signs that its leader — in this case, their father — was misusing the funds.

But in reality, Underwood wrote, the three Trump children exercised no such oversight. The board had not actually met since 1999.

The Trump Foundation is most likely guilty of all the things Trump accused the Clinton Foundation of doing, being a personal slush fund and money laundering vehicle for the Trump family to take kickbacks from for decades.  Believe me when I say Mueller and his team of forensic accountants are follwing this money trail, and as I've said all along, even if Trump fires Mueller and pardons himself on all federal charges, the state charges brought by NY are going to be much harder to make disappear.

That doesn't mean Trump can't find a federal judge to tie up this lawsuit like rope day at a contortionist's convention, but it's not like Trump can fire Underwood or pardon himself from the lawsuit.  Most importantly, his slimy kids are in real trouble from this.  Dad might be able to smokescreen this for a while but Ivanka and her rotten brothers will not have that luxury.

And if these "multiple violations of state and federal law" turn into possible criminal indictments complete with possible prison time, things are going to get real fun around family gatherings.

Oh, and it directly ties into the Trump campaign's constant illegality too.

In violation of state and federal law, senior Trump campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski, dictated the timing, amounts, and recipients of grants by the Foundation to non-profits. pic.twitter.com/7MnLbwDqlY

— New York Attorney General (@NewYorkStateAG) June 14, 2018

It also means the DoJ will have to certainly open yet another federal investigation into the person in the Oval Office, an investigation that AG Jeff Sessions, having been a member of the Trump campaign at the time, cannot be allowed to oversee.

Congress too should look into this as well.  Republicans certainly would if the legal complaint that the NY AG is producing here were directed towards the Clinton Foundation.

Stay tuned.  The family that crimes together, does time together.

Sayonara, Mouths Of Sauron!

CBS News is reporting that Trump Regime Minister of Disinformation White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah are out.

Two of the most visible members of the Trump administration are planning their departures, the latest sign of upheaval in a White House marked by turmoil.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders and principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah are both heading for the exits, according to sources inside the White House and close to the administration. Sanders, who has become a confidante of President Trump since the departure of former communications director Hope Hicks, has told friends that she plans to leave the administration at the end of the year.

Shah is also considering his exit, but he has not yet settled on an exact date. Neither Sanders nor Shah responded to repeated requests for comment before this story was published. When reached Wednesday evening, both declined to comment on the record, and Sanders tweeted that she is "honored to work for @POTUS."

Several other lower-level positions in the communications department left vacant in recent weeks are likely to remain unfilled, with more departures expected in the coming weeks, according to a former official.

Numerous staffers have left the White House over the last several months, some voluntarily and others having been forced out. Those departures include Hicks; Jared Kushner's top communications aide, Josh Raffel; homeland security adviser Tom Bossert; National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton; Trump personal aide John McEntee; director of White House message strategy Cliff Simms; communications aide Steven Cheung; congressional communications director Kaelan Dorr; assistant press secretary Natalie Strom; and deputy director of media affairs Tyler Ross.

Now she didn't exactly deny the story in the tweet, which is the tell.  Trump often leaves Huckabee-Sanders and Shah out to dry by tweeting one thing and then leaving them having to deal with the "White House position" being the opposite of what Trump tweeted earlier in the day, and this happens several times a month, if not several times in the same week. It's exhausting having to cover for the worst liar on Earth.

Having said that, the two of them are getting paid handsomely to do it, and nobody's forcing them to, you know, actively work for Donald Trump.  If either of them had any shred of decency they would have resigned months ago or better yet never taken the job to begin with, knowing exactly what Trump was all about.  My sympathies, especially for Huckabee-Sanders, are precisely zero in this situation.  Besides, they'll land at FOX News within a week of leaving.

Somebody in the White House has it out for the two of them, and it could very well be John Barron Donald Trump himself, so who knows.  I'm thinking that neither Huckabee-Sanders nor Shah have what it takes to handle the press once Mueller closes in on Trump, and with Michael Cohen reportedly about to flip, that time could be sooner rather than later.

Of course, Jeff Sessions and John Kelly have been "heading for the exits" for over a year now, so who knows in the end.

StupidiNews!

• Heavy rain, wind and even a possible tornado injured six in Pennsylvania last night as a line of storms ripped through the Wikes-Barre area, including damaging a major shopping center.
• New volcanic activity in Guatamala has closed airports near the Pacaya volcano, just ten days after the eruption of the Fuego volcano killed more than 100 and left 200 more missing.
• Israeli forces have attacked Iranian-backed militia fighters in Syria on Thursday, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is claiming the military action will prevent an exodus of more Syrian refugees to Europe.
• Cable giant Comcast and entertainment juggernaut Disney are locked in a battle for 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets in the wake of the approval of the AT&T/Time Warner merger this week.
• A massive dust storm on Mars has put NASA's Opportunity rover to "sleep", blocking solar panels as the storm forces the rover to hibernate in low-power mode until it passes, which could take months.

Last Call For A World Cup Date Update

The joint North American bid for the 2026 FIFA World Cup by the US, Canada, and Mexico won over Morocco and the tournament will be returning to the states in eight years.

A combined bid from the United States, Mexico and Canada won the hosting rights for soccer’s 2026 World Cup on Wednesday, bringing the tournament to North America for the first time since the 1994 event on a pledge of record crowds, record revenues and, perhaps crucially, a record $11 billion in profits for FIFA, world soccer’s governing body. 

The North American bid defeated its only challenger, Morocco, by a vote of 134-65.
“Thank you for the incredible privilege,” U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro told the FIFA members in a short speech after the vote, adding, “Football today is the only victor.” 

It will be the first time the World Cup is hosted by three countries, but a vast majority of the tournament will be on United States soil. Of the 80 matches, 10 will be held in Canada, 10 in Mexico and 60 in the United States — including the final, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. 

The last time the men’s World Cup was in North America was when the United States hosted in 1994. It was held in Mexico in 1970 and 1986, and Canada has never hosted.

Wednesday’s vote was the first in which each FIFA member association was given a say on where the World Cup would be held, and the North Americans rode to victory on a wave of support from the Americas, Europe and Asia, plus a few votes poached from Africa. 

After months of meetings and arm-twisting, a campaign that began last August when Morocco jumped into the race on the final day that countries could announce their intention to bid, ended in an instant: with electronic vote totals suddenly flashing onto a giant screen. 

The victory spared U.S. Soccer a second stunning defeat in less than a year; the United States men’s team is missing the World Cup this summer, its first absence since 1986. The American federation spent more than $6 million — out of a combined budget of about $8 million — to bring the World Cup back to North America, and its first-term president, Carlos Cordeiro, had criss-crossed the globe to meet voters since his election in February.

Both new MLS member cities Nashville and Cincinnati are in the running as one of the 17 possible US sites, but odds are pretty long that any of the games will be played in the Midwest, outside of Dallas's obviously massive stadium complex, Atlanta's transportation hub logistics advantage and Philly's sports capital status, expect all the US games to played on the coasts.

Here's the thing though: Cincy and Nashville, along with Kansas City and Denver, should be thankful.  The FIFA World Cup will probably end up with a net cost of well over $20 billion to host if the 2014 Brazil version is any indication, and hey, Brazil nearly went bankrupt and their government collapsed in scandal after the one-two punch of the World cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

In other words, it's money much better spent on infrastructure, roads, social programs, anything else.  I kind of hope Trump wrecks the bid somehow, because for the first time his belligerence would actually be doing us a favor.

Of course hey by then he won't be in the Oval Office.

Right?

It's Mueller Time, Con't

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds that Donald Trump's constant attacks on the Mueller investigation are starting to pay off politically.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s public image has sunk to an all-time low since he began his probe into possible collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. 

Months of sustained conservative attacks led by President Donald Trump and his allies has harmed Mueller most among Republicans, with a record 53 percent now saying they view the lead Russia investigator in an unfavorable light. That’s a 26-point spike since July, when the poll first started asking voters whether they viewed Mueller favorably or unfavorably.

Mueller’s unfavorable numbers have hit highs among both Democrats and independents, at 24 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Thirty-six percent of all registered voters are also seeing Mueller unfavorably, which represents the highest level since the polling first raised the topic 11 months ago. Back then, 23 percent of all voters said they viewed Mueller negatively. 

The spike in the special counsel’s unfavorable ratings come as he begins his second year on the job. Mueller has already publicly netted five guilty pleas and 18 indictments of people and companies tied to his work examining Moscow meddling in the 2016 election. But he’s nonetheless faced sharp attacks from the president, his lawyers and other associates. 

Voters interviewed for the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll also have changed direction on whether they think the Mueller investigation has been on the up and up. In the latest survey, 40 percent of voters said it had been handled unfairly, compared to early February when 34 percent said the probe wasn’t being handled fairly. The percentage saying the investigation was being done fairly remained unchanged from February at 38 percent.

I understand that Mueller's probe is not subject legally to the whims of polls, the antelope can take all the polls they want to about the lioness and she still hunts them, but in the end this was always going to be about politics, not just rule of law. Nixon resigned in 1974 only because leaders in both parties made it clear he was not only going to be impeached but that well more than 67 Senate votes were there to remove him from office.  The Constitution makes it pretty clear that there's only two ways to remove a president, impeachment and the 25th Amendment, and both of those are political, not just legal acts.

However, not all is rosy for Team Orange here.

The latest poll also has bad news for the president. Forty-eight percent of voters believe Trump has attempted to impede or obstruct the Russia investigation, up from 44 percent who offered the same view in early February. Democrats by a wide margin — 79 percent — said Trump was trying to obstruct Mueller’s probe. But 70 percent of Republicans said the president wasn’t meddling in the investigation. 

Trump also may want to rethink his comments about pardoning himself if he’s found guilty of a crime. The president last week told reporters he had the “absolute right” to make that move, but a majority of voters — 59 percent — said they opposed the idea of Trump issuing a self-pardon. Twenty percent said the president should pardon himself, while 21 percent were without an opinion or responded that they didn’t know. 

The breakdown among party affiliation on pardons is also against the president. About a third of Republicans — 34 percent — agree with the idea that Trump should issue himself a pardon. The same number of Republicans also said he should not pardon himself. Among Democrats, just 13 percent said the president should pardon himself, while 77 percent rejected the idea. Only 15 percent of independents said they thought Trump should pardon himself, while 63 percent said no.

Politics, after all, can cut both ways.  Meanwhile, it looks like Michael Cohen is ready to cooperate with Mueller's investigation.

As attorneys for Michael Cohen rush to meet Judge Kimba Wood’s Friday deadline to complete a privilege review of over 3.7 million documents seized in the April 9 raids of Cohen’s New York properties and law office, a source representing this matter has disclosed to ABC News that the law firm handling the case for Cohen is not expected to represent him going forward.

To date, Cohen has been represented by Stephen Ryan and Todd Harrison of the Washington and New York firm, McDermott, Will & Emery LLP. 

No replacement counsel has been identified as of this time. 

Cohen, now with no legal representation, is likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York, sources said. This development, which is believed to be imminent, will likely hit the White House, family members, staffers and counsels hard.

If Cohen flips on Trump, and all indications are this is happening and happening soon, then Trump is done and he knows it.

Things will move quickly now if this story is true. Cohen is all but asking for a pardon and for the Trump to step in on his sate case in Virginia..  The question is now whether or not he'll get it on the federal level, and if Trump can make arrangements to defend him.

We'll see what happens, but my guess is that Trump will make our ongoing Constitutional crisis exponentially worse by the weekend.

Primary Motivations, Con't

A good night for Democrats last night as primary contests were held in Virginia, Maine, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Nevada, plus a couple of special elections in Wisconsin. Overall, it was a pretty good night for Team Blue, especially for women.

Virginia is quietly one of the most important states in the race for the House — at least four seats should be competitive in November — and Democrats have now nominated a woman as their candidate in every one of those important elections.

In the Virginia Second, they nominated veteran Elaine Luria to challenge Rep. Scott Taylor, In the Seventh, Abigail Spanberger got the nod and is now tasked with toppling Dave Brat, one of the most conservative members of the House. And Jennifer Wexton emerged from a crowded primary and will now face Rep. Barbara Comstock, long considered to be one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in the country, in the 10th.

And prior to primary day, in a local Democratic convention, the party picked Leslie Cockburn in the campaign to replace outgoing and scandal-plagued Republican Rep. Tom Garrett. Each of this races is pegged by election forecasters to be either a toss-up or to lean slightly toward the Republicans. These seats would absolutely be in play in a wave year, especially in a state that is consistently trending bluer all the time.

We’ve seen again and again this year that Democratic primary voters want women to be their candidates. Virginia is maybe the starkest evidence yet.

This is a good thing.  Increasing the percentage of women in Congress has been badly needed for, I dunno, 240-plus years or so and Democrats in Virginia are leading the way. Oh, and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's veep pick in 2016, lucked out last night too as Virginia Republicans decided on white-supremacist adjacent Corey Stewart as their party's candidate for challenging Kaine in November, not that Kaine was in real trouble before.

Wisconsin was also a place for Dems fighting back against GOP Gov. Scott Walker.

After two Republican state lawmakers stepped down to take spots in Walker’s administration, the Wisconsin governor decided to just not call special elections as state law seemed to clearly demand. His lawyers cooked up a farcical literal reading of state law to justify the decision, but Democrats — led by former Attorney General Eric Holder — intervened, the state courts laughed off Walker’s case as absurd, and so the elections were called.

That was the first part of the liberal win, and the second part came on Tuesday, when Democrats prevailed in one of those special legislative elections. Caleb Frostman won in Senate District 1, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 17 points in 2016.

One out of two isn't bad considering both special elections were considered safe seats a year ago.  And Walker himself?  He's got to be feeling nervous as he runs for a third term in November.

Last month we found Scott Walker trailing Democratic front runner Tony Evers 49-45 for reelection. Between the polling, the Supreme Court race, and these legislative specials, it's really looking like the climate is such that Walker could lose

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) June 13, 2018

Oh, and as I mentioned this morning, Mark Sanford did indeed lose his primary contest.  Don't feel too bad for him though.

I'm sure Mark Sanford's MSNBC contract has already been drafted.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 13, 2018

Onward towards November.

StupidiNews!

• Primary contests in South Carolina and four other states concluded last night and GOP Rep. Mark Sanford has been defeated in his re-election bid after Donald Trump endorsed his opponent.
• North Carolina Republicans are sponsoring legislation that would give police investigating any drug-related crime full access to prescription drug records of a suspect without a warrant.
• Britain's high court has ruled that a self-employed plumber is entitled to workers' benefits, a ruling that could profoundly change "gig economy" services in the UK.
• A sweeping federal court ruling in favor of AT&T's $85 billion merger with Time Warner will spur mergers put on hold in several industries as corporate America waited for Tuesday's ruling.
• Three of the four major broadband providers in the US say they have no current plans for paid prioritization of internet traffic for now, but Charter will only commit to no blocking or throttling.

Last Call For Put A Corker In It, Bob

Outgoing Trump party Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee is really upset that Trump's tariffs are going to destroy the (admittedly 100% union-free) auto manufacturing industry in his state, and is kind of grouchy that the rest of the Trump party refuses to back him over, well, Trump.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) ripped his GOP colleagues on Tuesday, asserting they are afraid to vote on his tariff legislation because it could provoke backlash from President Trump.

"'Gosh, we might poke the bear!' That is the language I've been hearing in the hallways. 'We might poke the bear. The president might get upset with us as United States senators if we vote on the Corker amendment,'" Corker said during a heated speech where he was yelling from the Senate floor. 

He added that the Senate is "becoming a body where, well, we'll do what we can do, but my gosh, if the president gets upset with us, then we might not be in the majority, and so let's don't do anything that might upset the president."

Corker's floor speech comes as he has tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get a vote on his legislation requiring congressional approval for tariffs enacted for reasons of national security amid broader scrutiny of Trump's recent trade moves. 

The Tennessee Republican has pushed for a vote on the measure as part of the Senate's debate on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). 

Though GOP lawmakers have publicly fretted over Trump's tariff policies, GOP leadership has shown little interest in formally pushing back against the president.

Here's the thing though, Bob... you hitched your wagon to Trump, and now you're all mad because that wagon is headed for a cliff.  It's going to take your party with it, and November's going to be a bloodbath.  If you think voters in your state are mad at the Trump party now, wait until the layoff stories start rolling in on the evening news over the next several months.

And when the economic damage really kicks in next year, we'll see what the Trump party is willing to do as far as reining in Trump.

Of course, Corker will be long gone by then.

The New Robber Barons, Con't

Last month I talked about Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and the city's plan to alleviate King County, Washington's affordable housing crisis by taxing the multi-billion dollar companies that have served to make the situation exponentially worse.

The tax targets 500-600 businesses in the city that gross at least $20 million a year. The companies would be charged a “head tax” at $500 per employee. In 2021, the head tax would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax. The payroll tax would windup costing Amazon more than the initial head tax, considering Seattle Amazon employees are paid about an average of $110,000 per year, according to data from job-reviews site Glassdoor. 

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” a spokesperson for Amazon told The Seattle Times. 

The city council is expected to vote on the tax on May 14. 

The city estimates the tax would raise an estimated $75 million annually, with Amazon paying roughly $20 million in 2019 and 2020. One might think for a company that pulled in $1.6 billion last quarter, they could afford to help out the city of Seattle and its most vulnerable residents, especially considering the extent to which Amazon’s presence in the city has exacerbated the housing crisis there.

Since 2010, when Amazon opened its first headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, housing costs have skyrocketed. 

The median cost of a single-family home has more than doubled to $820,000, and rents have increased 64 percent, according to the Seattle Times. The average two-bedroom home in Seattle costs more than $2,000 per month. Only a third of condominiums in Seattle are priced below $500,000.

Seattle's City Council voted unanimously to approve the tax.

That was four weeks ago.  Take note of that.

Because in less than a month, Amazon, Starbucks, and the rest of the new robber barons leaned so hard on Seattle's City Council that they shattered and the cowards are now scrambling to repeal the ordinance.

Less than a month after roiling Seattle and making national headlines by voting unanimously to pass a controversial head tax on big businesses such as Amazon, the City Council now plans to abruptly reverse itself and vote to repeal the tax. 

Council President Bruce Harrell announced the move without warning Monday and vowed to move at lightning speed to kill the measure, responding to a backlash from business leaders and residents who say they don’t trust the council to spend wisely.

Harrell scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday and said he would sponsor the repeal legislation, which appears to have enough votes. He and six others on the council joined Mayor Jenny Durkan in a statement Monday signaling their support for nixing the $275 per employee, per year tax, which was supposed to raise about $47 million per year starting in 2019 to fund low-income housing and homeless services.

Council members said talks with constituents had persuaded them to change course.
The news of the sudden turnaround — unprecedented in recent Seattle politics — also comes as the council stares down the prospect of a long and bitter battle for votes.

A business-backed campaign called No Tax on Jobs had planned to submit petition signatures on Tuesday to qualify a referendum on the head-tax for the November ballot, having raised more than $200,000 and attracted a small army of volunteers.

The new robber barons made it painfully clear that Amazon now 100% controls Seattle, and that any opposition to it will be smashed into oblivion.  Imagine the level of threats that it took to move a major US local government to act this quickly to completely reverse a unanimous vote.

This is terrifying.

We all live in company towns, it seems.  And everyone works for the company whether they want to or not.

Mr. Trump Goes To Singapore

Donald Trump managed to get a number of vague statements out of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, but basically nothing in the way of details or verification of "denuclearization" while the US apparently is giving up joint military exercises with South Korea in exchange for a piece of paper.

President Trump said he “developed a very special bond” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their historic summit here Tuesday and proclaimed the start of a new era that could break a cycle of nuclear brinkmanship and stave off a military confrontation.

“Yesterday’s conflict does not have to be tomorrow’s war,” Trump said at a news conference in Singapore following more than four hours of talks with Kim.

Trump said Kim “reaffirmed” his commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and also agreed to destroy a missile site in the country.

“We’re ready to write a new chapter between our nations,” the president said.

Trump sounded triumphant following his meeting with Kim, expressing confidence that the North Korean leader was serious about abandoning his nuclear program and transforming his country from an isolated rogue regime into a respected member of the world community.

But Trump provided few specifics about what steps Kim would take to back up his promise to denuclearize his country and how the United States would verify that North Korea was keeping its pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons, saying that would be worked out in future talks. 

“We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done,” he said of the process to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons.

Trump announced that he will order an end to regular “war games” that the United States conducts with ally South Korea, a reference to annual joint military exercises that are an irritant to North Korea.

Trump called the exercises “very provocative” and “inappropriate” in light of the optimistic opening he sees with North Korea. Ending the exercises would also save money, Trump said.

The United States has conducted such exercises for decades as a symbol of unity with Seoul and previously rejected North Korean complaints as illegitimate. Ending the games would be a significant political benefit for Kim, but Trump insisted he had not given up leverage.

“I think the meeting was every bit as good for the United States as it was for North Korea,” Trump said, casting himself as a leader who can secure a deal that has eluded past presidents.

South Korea’s presidential office seemed blindsided by the announcement on the joint exercises.

“We need to try to understand what President Trump said,” a spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in said.

So in the last 48 hours, Trump has effectively isolated the US from its G-7 allies, directly angered Canada and insulted PM Justin Trudeau, backed out of a joint statement with our oldest allies, and then signed on to a statement with arguably the most repressive and bloody dictator on earth.

The pundits are absolutely correct to call this both historic and unprecedented, and none of it is a good thing.  The message this sends to both our allies and to the world's most vicious dictators is unmistakable: the legitimacy you crave is for sale by Trump.  The scale and magnitude of Kim's propaganda victory here can't be overstated.  Trump has proven that pursuit of a nuclear program will get you recognition by the US as a potential ally.  There isn't a dictator on earth who isn't now considering a nuclear weapons program as the path to power and legitimacy.

This has been the worst week for US diplomacy in decades.

Oh, and South Korea wasn't consulted at all.  They had no clue.  Trump is more accommodating to Kim than he is Moon. And recall that Republicans were screaming at how awful the Iran nuclear deal supposedly was, and they're falling all over themselves calling Trump the greatest president in US history for a "promise" from a dictator not to lie.

China is laughing up its sleeve.  Russia couldn't be happier.

Trump is the Dunning-Kruger poster boy in the party of cognitive-biased fools.
 

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's initial meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore Tuesday produced some vague promises in a joint statement but little in the way of actual action.
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions now says that the US can refuse asylum seekers escaping domestic abuse and gang warfare and has denied asylum to a Salvadoran woman as a result.
• Voters in five states head to the polls for primaries today in Virginia, North Dakota, Maine, South Carolina and Nevada, choosing candidates for several House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.
• A US federal judge is expected to rule on AT&T's proposed $85 billion deal to buy Time Warner this afternoon, the deal faces stiff opposition from the Trump regime over CNN's coverage of Trump.
• Washington state's net neutrality law took effect on Monday, countering the FCC's ending of national net neutrality rules, legislation in several more states including California remains pending.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

The DoJ investigation into the NRA's ties to Russian crooks, illegal campaign contributions, and money laundering ahead of the 2016 elections just got a whole lot nastier as Peter Stone and Greg Gordon at McClatchy find a whole lot of witches to hunt.

Several prominent Russians, some in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle or high in the Russian Orthodox Church, now have been identified as having contact with National Rifle Association officials during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, according to photographs and an NRA source. 

The contacts have emerged amid a deepening Justice Department investigation into whether Russian banker and lifetime NRA member Alexander Torshin illegally channeled money through the gun rights group to add financial firepower to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. 

Other influential Russians who met with NRA representatives during the campaign include Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month served as a deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov, head of one of Russia’s largest philanthropies, the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. The foundation was launched by an ultra-nationalist ally of Russian President Putin. 

The Russians talked and dined with NRA representatives, mainly in Moscow, as U.S. presidential candidates vied for the White House. Now U.S. investigators want to know if relationships between the Russian leaders and the nation’s largest gun rights group went beyond vodka toasts and gun factory tours, evolving into another facet of the Kremlin’s broad election-interference operation. 

Even as the contacts took place, Kremlin cyber operatives were secretly hacking top Democrats’ emails and barraging Americans’ social media accounts with fake news stories aimed at damaging the image of Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and boosting the prospects of Republican Donald Trump. 

It is a crime, potentially punishable with prison time, to donate or use foreign money in U.S. election campaigns. 

McClatchy in January disclosed that Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating whether Torshin or others engineered the flow of Russian monies to the NRA; the Senate Intelligence Committee is also looking into the matter, sources familiar with the probe have said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiries, which are part of sweeping, parallel investigations into Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. elections, have not been publicly announced. 

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said, however, that the FBI has not contacted the group. 

A photograph taken during a 2015 trip to Russia by leaders of the powerful group showed them meeting with Torshin, Rogozin and Rudov, and a source knowledgeable about the visit confirmed the gathering. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships. 

The NRA, Trump’s biggest financial backer, spent more than $30 million to boost his upstart candidacy; that's more than double what it laid out for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, and the NRA money started flowing much earlier in the cycle for Trump.

Surprise, it wasn't just Alexander Torshin, who I've talked about several times before, but a whole network of Russian Putin buddies who ended up giving possibly tens of millions to Trump.  Remember, Torshin approached Jared Kushner about a Trump-Putin meeting before the election and planned to meet with Trump officials at the 2016 NRA convention in Louisville.

Since then, the evidence of Russian contributions to Trump laundered through the NRA has only gotten more solid.  Now we find out multiple Russian oligarchs were in on it, not just Torshin.

My question is how much Wayne LaPierre knew at the time.  It's gonna be fun when the indictments start dropping on this one, folks.

Stay tuned.

Having Supreme Difficulty With Voting

If it's a Monday in June, it's a major Supreme Court decision, and this week we got Husted vs. Raldolph Institute, the Ohio voter registration purge case, just in time for the 2018 midterms.  In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Alito, SCOTUS decided that Ohio's mass voter purges by GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted did not violate the Voter Rights Act.

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Ohio a victory Monday in a fight over the state's method for removing people from the voter rolls, a practice that civil rights groups said discourages minority turnout.

At least a dozen other politically conservative states said they would adopt a similar practice if Ohio prevailed, as a way of keeping their voter registration lists accurate and up to date.

Prof. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, predicted that a win for Ohio would escalate voting wars between the political parties. 

"You'll see more red states making it easier to drop people from the voter registration rolls," he said. 

All states have procedures for removing from their registration lists the names of people who have moved and are therefore no longer eligible to vote in a given precinct. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether a voter's decision to sit out a certain number of elections could be the trigger for that effort. 

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, said the court’s job was not "to decide whether Ohio’s supplemental process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not."

Ohio election officials send notices to anyone who fails to cast a ballot during a two-year period. People who do not respond and don't vote over the next four years, including in two more federal elections, are dropped from the list of registered voters.

And of course the groups least likely to vote in consecutive elections and therefore trigger having their voter registration dropped are young voters and minority voters, and Ohio purged hundreds of thousands of those voters in 2016.  Expect basically every other red state to take up this practice, as well as to take up Ohio's aggressive timeline to purge voters before 2020.

Republicans want as few people eligible to vote as possible for a reason, and this is just one more weapon to use against voter registration drives.  Don't be surprised if red states in fact take up even more aggressive voter purges too, apparently it's open season now on "use it or lose it" as a "right" to vote.

What this means is voting is no longer a protected right, but something that can be taken from you by the states for the reason of choosing not using it.  Alito and the conservative majority on the court aren't concerned with voting rights, they are concerned with Republicans winning, period.

SCOTUS got this wrong, and once again you can thank Republicans who stole a Supreme Court pick from Democrats...and the morons who said both parties are the same and voted third party or stayed home.

And now if you stay home in states like Ohio?  You lose your right to vote.  Might want to consider exercising that right in November, yes?

The Party Of Trump, Con't

There are still a number of 2018 GOP primary contests left to go through the summer, and in South Carolina, Rep. Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford suddenly has a real primary challenge on his hands from state lawmaker Katie Arrington for the crime of not being Trumpist enough.

Sanford, long known for wearing his emotions openly and speaking his mind, has been one of the most high-profile Republican Trump critics in Congress. He’s called the president’s tariffs on steel and aluminum “an experiment with stupidity.” He’s called Trump’s disparaging remarks about Haiti and African nations “something stupid.” He’s said that Trump has done some “weird stuff” in office. 

During the 2016 campaign, Sanford said Trump should “just shut up” and stop focusing so much on his critics. He’s said that the president was “partially” to blame for the toxic rhetoric that led to the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). He’s said that “trading slights seems essential” to Trump’s personality, and he gave an extensive interview to POLITICO Magazine in which he said the president had “fanned the flames of intolerance.” 

Sanford insists that his discord with the president isn’t anything personal, but rather rooted in deeply held beliefs. As an example, he points to his dispute with the administration over its proposal to open the South Carolina coastline to drilling. After hearing complaints from constituents, he said he had little choice but to raise concerns with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, to whom he’d grown close while they served together in Congress — and who was almost his roommate. 

“I’m not looking for disagreement with the administration,” Sanford said. “But it comes to, you cannot walk away from it if you’re really listening to the people I spend so much time with here at home.” 

Yet he’s given an opening to Arrington, who’s betting that voters in the conservative district, which stretches from the Georgia border to north of Charleston, want a congressperson who’s in lockstep with the president. The 47-year-old state representative has aired a spree of TV commercials portraying Sanford as an avowed Trump opponent, including one that shows the congressman savaging the president in a series of spliced-up cable news interviews. 

Much of her bid has been oriented around the president. She has tapped Mike Biundo, who served as national senior adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign, as a top strategist. 

In a Sunday afternoon interview following an event at the welcome center for the U.S.S. Yorktown battleship, Arrington said voters in the district had grown tired of Sanford’s opposition to the president. 

“We need a seat at the table. Our president is going to be the president until 2020 at a minimum, or 2024, and Mark has ostracized him to the point where there will never be a seat at the table for him,” she said.

Sanford's own internal polling is clearly setting off alarm bells, because he's spent nearly $400,000 in advertising on the primary in just the last couple of weeks.  Once you're in the party of Trump, your political career only leaves in a sandwich bag.  I'm honestly surprised that Sanford thought he could just skate by, but we'll see if he pays the price tomorrow.  North Dakota, Nevada, Maine, and Virginia also have GOP primaries on Tuesday.

Also, could you imagine the reaction by the press, the GOP, and the horseshoe theory end of the far left if a Democratic candidate had made this kind of pronouncement about President Obama in the 2010 or 2014 midterms, where a Democratic primary candidate declared a that a sitting House Democrat who was a vocal critic of Obama would "never have a seat at the table?"

It would have been a national scandal for months, proof of Obama's fascist tendencies or something.  Alas, such a pronouncement these days of course about a the Trump party having no seat at the table for a Trump "critic" like Sanford (who still votes with Trump 73% of the time, by the way) doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

By the way, SC-1 is an R+10 district, definitely a GOP advantage but not an overwhelming or unbeatable one in a blue wave scenario.  Democrats running in the primary include Charleston attorney Joe Cunningham, who announced his bid last June, and former Charleston mayoral candidate and non-profit director Toby Smith, who says she's running as a protest candidate.  Cunningham will most likely win, and he's been gunning for Sanford for over a year now.

Sanford may have much larger troubles in November at this rate...that is if he survives tomorrow, not a sure thing.