Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

On Thursday Kentucky lawmakers passed a "heartbeat bill" banning any abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, and the ACLU was ready for them on Friday before Gov. Matt Bevin could sign the bill.

A federal judge in Louisville has issued a temporary order barring the state from enforcing a new abortion law, less than 24 hours after it was passed by the Kentucky General Assembly.

U.S. District Judge David Hale issued the order at 7:40 p.m. Friday, blocking the state from enforcing Senate Bill 9, the "fetal heartbeat" bill which bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually around the sixth week of pregnancy.

Hale's order comes the same day the America Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the new law, arguing the law would effectively ban abortion in Kentucky because most women don't realize they are pregnant until at least six weeks into a pregnancy.

Hale's order, citing the the "strong likelihood of success" of the ACLU's claim that the law is unconstitutional, ordered that enactment of the law be delayed for 14 days until he is able to hold a hearing on the matter.

"The Supreme Court has stated in no uncertain terms that regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability." Hale's order said, citing a previous ruling on the matter.

Hale's order said that if the law is enforced before a hearing, patients "would be immediately and irreparably harmed absent a temporary restraining order from this court."

It noted the law has an emergency clause that allows it to take effect as soon as it is signed into law by Gov. Matt Bevin. Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican, has pledged to sign it.

The lawsuit was filed Friday by the ACLU on behalf of EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville, the state's only abortion clinic.

SB 9 was enacted late Thursday as one of four bills meant to restrict or ban abortion in Kentucky by the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

Even as House members voted final passage of the law Thursday, some members warned it is unconstitutional including Rep. Chris Harris, a Pikeville Democrat.

"I consider myself pro-life," Harris said. "But the constitutionality of this legislation has already been decided."

Harris noted the state already is "embroiled" in three other lawsuits defending other abortion laws passed by the legislature. Federal judges have struck down two and a decision on a third is pending.

"We have a responsibility to the people not to waste their money and this is a waste of money," Harris said of SB 9.

You'd think lawmakers would get that, but they all want to be the "heroes" who go down in the history books of American theocracy, with their names attached to the chains around the necks of women.  That's the glory they want.

The best part is they couldn't care less about the babies born, because this same Bevin administration and GOP-controlled General Assembly has done everything it could to remove Medicaid, school funding, environmental protections, and just about everything else from kids born and living in this state.

They just want to loot the treasury before the place burns down.

Finally, the wort part is how many Kentucky Democrats voted for the House and Senate bills, ten of the 39 House Democrats voted for it (and another ten voted absent) including Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Rocky Adkins, and four of the nine Senate Democrats voted for it, meaning barely half of Kentucky Democrats had to courage to vote against an obviously unconstitutional anti-choice bill.

But that's Bevinstan for you.

This Week In Trump Cards

America's slow but steady shift towards authoritarian pariah status continued this week as the Trump regime took more steps down a dark path.  First, Donald Trump's sprawling interview with hate site Breitbart featured open threats against Democrats and those investigating him.

President Donald Trump appeared to insinuate in a recent interview that his supporters -- the police, military and "Bikers for Trump," he claims -- could turn violent against Democrats.

"You know, the left plays a tougher game, it's very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don't play it tougher. OK?" Trump said in an interview with Breitbart News published Wednesday. "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump -- I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough -- until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." 

He added that "the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress." 

Several Democrats interpreted the comments as a threat. 

"I interpret that kind of comment as a danger to peaceful transition of power in our democracy," Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CNN's "New Day" on Friday. 

In a CNN op-ed, former White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton Joe Lockhart called Trump's remark a "thuggish threat of violence against his critics" and a continuation of Trump's "all-out assault on the basis of our democracy." 

Asked about Trump's comment, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told CNN's Chris Cuomo Thursday night that the President "didn't threaten any kind of violence." 

"You're just reading into it like you usually do. You have to read the entire interview," she said. "He was talking about how peaceful and gentle many people are who are otherwise tough."

In the same interview, Trump blames then House Speaker Paul Ryan for not allowing House Republicans to subpoena Hillary Clinton and other Obama administration officials. 

Trump told Breitbart News in an exclusive lengthy Oval Office interview that Ryan blocked issuance of subpoenas to people he thinks should have been investigated on the political left, and now that the Republicans no longer have the majority in the House, people Trump says Ryan protected may have gotten away with whatever they did that warranted investigation.

Trump said that House Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and his predecessor and fellow conservative Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) wanted to be tougher with the left, but that Ryan would not let them.

“Paul Ryan wouldn’t give the right to have any subpoenas,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Okay? Now in all fairness, Meadows and Jordan and all these guys, they wanted to go tougher, but they weren’t allowed to by leadership.”

Finally, State Department head Mike Pompeo says the US is ready to make good on National Security Adviser John Bolton's Mustache's threat to bar US entry to and expel from the country any International Criminal Court personnel if The Hague investigates any US or Israeli military action in Afghanistan as war crimes.

The United States will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel who attempt to investigate or prosecute alleged abuses committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere and may do the same with those who try to take action against Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.

Pompeo, making good on a threat delivered last September by national security adviser John Bolton, said the U.S. had already moved against some employees of The Hague-based court, but declined to say how many or what cases they may have been investigating.

“We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation,” Pompeo said.

He said any wrongdoing committed by American personnel would be dealt with in U.S. military and criminal courts.

The visa restrictions would apply to any court employee who takes or has taken action “to request or further such an investigation,” Pompeo said.

“These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies’ consent,” he said.

The ICC prosecutor has a pending request to look into possible war crimes in Afghanistan that may involve Americans. The Palestinians have also asked the court to bring cases against Israel.

Speaking directly to ICC employees, Pompeo said: “If you are responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of U.S. personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan, you should not assume that you still have or will get a visa or will be permitted to enter the United States.”

That comment suggested that action may have already been taken against the ICC prosecutor who asked last year to formally open an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by Afghan national security forces, Taliban and Haqqani network militants, as well as U.S. forces and intelligence officials in Afghanistan since May 2003.

The US never joined the ICC, but Afghanistan did, meaning if the ICC does investigate US war crimes there, things are going to get very ugly and fast.

Finally, Trump outright said Friday that there should be no Mueller report at all, because the investigation should be scrapped as "illegal".

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted there should be no report from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, denouncing the investigation as "illegal."

"So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be 'zero' crime when the Special Counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the Special Counsel...should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report," the president tweeted Friday.

Trump has repeatedly called Mueller's probe into whether Russia colluded with the president's 2016 campaign a "witch hunt." Despite his criticisms, the president has maintained that he has cooperated fully with the investigation, which also includes whether Trump tried to obstruct justice.

A small thread now lies between insistence and an Oval Office order, and the Mueller report goes away.

And so does America as a free country.

A Light Of Hope In Gunmerica

Connecticut's Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a lawsuit filed by Sandy Hook families suing AR-15 Bushmaster manufacturer Remington can go forward after all, reversing a lower court decision.

The ruling comes as yet another twist in the lawsuit’s circuitous path through the court system, one that continued far longer than many, including legal experts and the families, had initially expected.

The ruling had been delayed after Remington, the manufacturer and one of the nation’s oldest gun makers, filed for bankruptcy last year as its sales declined and debts mounted.

The lawsuit, brought by family members of nine people who were killed and a teacher who was shot and survived, was originally filed in 2014, then moved to federal court, where a judge ordered that it be returned to the state level.

The families were given a glimmer of hope when a State Superior Court judge, Barbara N. Bellis, permitted the case to approach a trial before she ultimately dismissed it. She found that the claims fell “squarely within the broad immunity” provided by federal law.

In 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which restricts lawsuits against gun sellers and makers by granting industrywide immunity from blame when one of their products is used in a crime. Lawmakers behind the measure cited a need to foil what they described as predatory and politically driven litigation.

The law does allow exceptions for sale and marketing practices that violate state or federal laws and instances of so-called negligent entrustment, in which a gun is carelessly given or sold to a person posing a high risk of misusing it.

In the lawsuit, the families pushed to broaden the scope to include the manufacturer, Remington, which was named along with a wholesaler and a local retailer in the suit.

The lawsuit said that the companies were wrong to entrust an untrained civilian public with a weapon designed for maximizing fatalities on the battlefield.

Lawyers pointed out advertising — with messages of combat dominance and hyper-masculinity — that resonated with disturbed young men who could be induced to use the weapon to commit violence.

“Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years,” Joshua D. Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the families, told the panel of judges during oral arguments in the case in 2017. The weapon used by Mr. Lanza had been legally purchased by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also killed.

Lawyers representing the gun companies argued that the claims raised in the lawsuit were specifically the kind that law inoculated them against. They said that agreeing with the families’ arguments would require amending the law or ignoring how it had been applied in the past.

James B. Vogts, a lawyer for Remington, said during oral arguments that the shooting “was a tragedy that cannot be forgotten.”

“But no matter how tragic,” he added, “no matter how much we wish those children and their teachers were not lost and those damages not suffered, the law needs to be applied dispassionately.”

It's a long shot, but it has the gun lobby running scared.  They know the discovery process on this alone may sink Remington, the NRA, and possibly the entire industry.  I expect swift federal action on this by Republicans, either to add closing the negligent entrustment loophole to must-pass legislation, tying this up until the Supreme Court's five conservatives can end it, or most likely both. Unfortunately, I don't see this case ever reaching the trial phase because the damage would be catastrophic to the gun lobby, and they damn well know it.

We'll see how this shakes out.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

There's no longer any doubt now after a massive new Stanford University multi-year study of nearly 100 million traffic stops that black drivers are much more likely to be pulled over by police and searched for no reason whatsoever, while white drivers are far more likely to have illegal items in their vehicles.

Using information obtained through public record requests, the Stanford Open Policing Project examined almost 100 million traffic stops conducted from 2011 to 2017 across 21 state patrol agencies, including California, Illinois, New York and Texas, and 29 municipal police departments, including New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and St. Paul, Minnesota.

The results show that police stopped and searched black and Latino drivers on the basis of less evidence than used in stopping white drivers, who are searched less often but are more likely to be found with illegal items. The study does not set out to conclude whether officers knowingly engaged in racial discrimination, but uses a more nuanced analysis of traffic stop data to infer that race is a factor when people are pulled over — and that it's occuring across the country.

"Because of this analysis, we're able to get to that anecdotal story to say this is really happening," said Sharad Goel, an assistant professor in management science and engineering at Stanford and a co-author of the study.

Police pull over about 20 million drivers across the United States each year, according to researchers. And while the extreme cases grab the spotlight, such as the fatal police shootings after traffic stops of Walter Scott in South Carolina, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati and Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis — all black men — most end without anyone getting hurt. Still, for drivers of color who are stopped by police, the suspicion that racial bias played a role can linger.

"There's no longer the idea of Officer Friendly, who might help you understand why they pulled you over. Now, it's about using racial profiling to control people and place fear in them," said David Lowery, founder of the Living & Driving While Black Foundation in Chicago, an advocacy group calling for an end to racial profiling.

"Then, you've got money tied up into this," he added. "Who can write the most tickets? Who can put the most people in jail and into the court system? It’s no longer about a simple traffic stop for safety."

The Stanford study sliced the data in three distinct ways to search for evidence of racial bias:

• Police stops: A "veil of darkness" test was done to analyze whether black drivers are being pulled over at a higher rate during the day than at night, when officers would have a harder time distinguishing race from a distance. After adjusting for the variation in sunset times across the year, researchers found a 5 to 10 percent drop in the share of stopped drivers after sunset who are black, suggesting black drivers are being racially profiled during the day. 

• Police searches: Researchers reviewed the rate at which drivers were searched and the likelihood that those searches turned up illegal drugs and guns. There was evidence that the bar for searching black and Latino drivers is lower than that for white drivers, even though white drivers were more likely to have contraband. Across states, contraband was found in 36 percent of searches of white drivers, compared to 32 percent for black drivers and 26 percent for Latinos. 

• Impact of marijuana legalization: After the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington state, there has been a reduction in searches of both white and minority drivers. But the search rate remains twice as high for minorities, a trend also noted in a 2017 Stanford study.

Stanford's research is based on numbers provided by state and city agencies, but not all police departments track that data or are willing to release it. While the majority of states responded to the Stanford group's public records requests and offered at least some traffic stop data, four states said they didn't have information on drivers' race and 15 failed to say whether they collect any data at all.

Ohio provided data for this study as well as Cincinnati and Columbus police departments.  There's no doubt that this is happening right now, as we speak, where I live and work.  Race is the major basis of policing in America today.

It must end.

Another Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

The Democratic field for 2020 is only getting more crowded, not less, as March soldiers on, and as he's been hinting at for weeks now, Texas Congressman Beto O' Rourke is running for the White House.

Beto O'Rourke announced Thursday he is running for president, entering the 2020 race with a call for Americans to look past their differences in order to confront the challenges facing the country. 

"This is a defining moment of truth for this country and for every single one of us," the 46-year-old Democratic former congressman from Texas said in a video announcing his candidacy. "The challenges that we face right now, the interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy and our climate have never been greater." 

"They will either consume us, or they will afford us the greatest opportunity to unleash the genius of the United States of America," he added. 

O'Rourke, who is starting a three-day swing through eastern Iowa on Thursday, said he will hold a kick-off rally for his campaign in El Paso, Texas, on March 30. 

His entrance into the race is the culmination of his two-year, out-of-nowhere rise from a back-bench congressman largely unknown outside El Paso to Democratic stardom as a record-breaking fundraiser, the subject of an HBO documentary and the target of two separate efforts to draft him into the presidential campaign. He joins a crowded field of more than a dozen Democrats vying for the party's nomination. 

In his announcement video, O'Rourke said he would run a "positive campaign that seeks to bring out the very best from every single one of us, that seeks to unite a very divided country." 

"We saw the power of this in Texas, where people allowed no difference, however great or however small, to stand between them and divide us," O'Rourke said. 

O'Rourke last year lost that race in Texas, a bid to oust Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Still, the Senate race thrust O'Rourke, who served three terms in the House, into the national spotlight. He shattered fundraising records, ending with an $80 million haul, and finished less than 3 percentage points behind Cruz -- much closer than other Democrats had come in recent years against Republicans in a state that's long been a GOP stronghold. But a presidential bid will be a much different test for O'Rourke, who will face serious pressure from the left for the first time in his political career. 

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, O'Rourke said the 2020 campaign has "got to be about the big things that we hope to achieve and enact and do for one another." 

He said that "the most pressing, the most urgent, the most existential challenge of them all is climate. And the scientists, beyond a shadow of a doubt, know that we have at a maximum 12 years in order to enact significant change to meet that threat and reduce the consequences of the decisions that we made in the past -- the consequences that our kids and the generations that follow will bear."

"But he couldn't beat Ted Cruz in his home state" is a fair criticism of his campaign.  "He should be running against John Cornyn, but he'd almost certainly lose anyway" is less so, but still somewhat valid.

I just don't think there's a good reason for Beto to be in the race, given who's already there.  I don't honestly know what he brings to the table.  If he does win the primaries, then he'll prove me wrong and I'll support him 100%.

But that's what primaries are for, for candidates to make that case.  Initially, I'm not buying it.  The strongest case for Beto is that he could accelerate a Blue Texas scenario. Nate Cohn explains:

Mr. O’Rourke’s close result wasn’t because of an exceptional turnout that will be hard for other Democrats to repeat in 2020. Republican voters, defined as those who have participated in a recent Republican primary, turned out at a higher rate than Democratic ones. Neither the Hispanic nor youth voter share of the electorate was higher than it was in 2016, when President Trump won the state by nine points.

On the contrary, Democrats in 2020 can be expected to enjoy a more favorable turnout because presidential races tend to draw in more young and Hispanic voters. Mr. O’Rourke might have won Texas last November if turnout had been at the level of a contested presidential race, based on an Upshot analysis of Times/Siena poll responses, actual results and voter file data from L2, a nonpartisan voter file vendor.

The data yields an estimate of how every registered voter in Texas would have voted, based on a long list of geographic and demographic factors that predicted vote choice in the Times/Siena polling. Importantly, turnout in 2018 is among those factors, which allows us to fully untangle how much of Mr. O’Rourke’s strength was because of strong turnout among his supporters.

The data indicates that two opposing turnout trends influenced the results. The electorate was older, whiter and more Republican than the state as a whole — or than the 2016 electorate. But an O’Rourke supporter was generally likelier to vote than a demographically and politically similar supporter of Mr. Cruz. This was the pattern nationwide, so it is not obvious that this can be attributed to Mr. O’Rourke specifically; it could have been the favorable Democratic environment more generally.

Either way, the extra turnout boost probably cut Mr. Cruz’s margin of victory by two points.

Mr. O’Rourke might have won with a turnout of around 10 million voters. (The actual turnout was around 8.4 million.) Without the extra edge of a Democratic wave year, it might have taken 11 million votes, a number that is not out of the question in 2020 if Texas is contested as a battleground state.

In other words, Beto did well enough with white Texas midterm voters that if he got presidential year level turnout, he could win the state.  That could happen for a number of Democratic candidates, but if Beto can show he has a clear shot to beat Trump (which has to be an easier prospect than beating John Cornyn) then he can make a major tactical case as to why he should be the nominee.

Of course, he has to win primaries to do that.  And Josh Marshall makes the case that Beto is already done.

The problem I see for O’Rourke is that these endorsements and the tendency behind them makes him look – maybe accurately – like the presidential candidate of Democratic ‘centrists” – a very thin constituency in Democratic politics at the moment. This may sound like I’m saying the energy of the party is on the left and you’re out of luck if you’re playing to a constituency on the right-center. Not exactly. I think the power and pull of high profile left-wing members of Congress like Ocasio-Cortez and others are greatly exaggerated by their media profiles. As is usually the case, I suspect a successful candidacy will be one who has appeal and acceptability on the left of the party without being owned by it or being perceived as a factional candidate of the left. You may or may not agree with me on that point. But let’s leave that argument for another day. What I’m really quite certain about is that the Democratic nominee is not going to be the factional candidate of Democratic centrists. And the way the roll out played O’Rourke made a good start toward becoming that guy.

This isn’t the first time this has come out. During the Beto-mania that followed the November election a number of high-profile Sanders supporters scalded O’Rourke in a series of much-discussed opinion pieces. The aim was pretty clear: knock the new guy down several pegs to leave the road open for the Bernie millennium. Some of these attacks were downright dishonest or tendentious. Others more reasonably pointed out that for all the excitement about O’Rourke’s campaign against the odious and oleaginous Ted Cruz he actually has a pretty middle of the road voting record and even more than a few votes with Republicans. That spectacle showed the unloveliest parts of the sectarian left around Sanders. But Beto himself did a decent job today validating that critique and positioning himself in the contest in a way that will make winning the nomination a steep challenge.

This is also a fair point, and one that's probably far more applicable.  The "incrementalist centrist"is not going to be the nominee, and if Beto is headed for that slot, he's toast.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The House has unanimously passed a resolution urging the release of the Mueller report to the public, in a move that I'm even surprised by.  It's very telling that no Republican in the House would go on record to say they were against it, not even the regular slate of loonies, racists, and assholes like Gohmert, Steve King, or my district's own Thomas Massie (he had the shame to be a coward and vote "present".)

The House on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the Justice Department to make special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings and full report public and available to Congress.

The 420-0 vote came after a fiery debate on the House floor, during which some Democratic lawmakers were admonished for their criticisms of President Donald Trump.

Republicans said the resolution was unnecessary and a waste of time, but ultimately joined Democrats to approve it. Four Republicans — Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — voted “present.”

Democrats used the resolution to put pressure on Attorney General William Barr, who during his Senate confirmation hearings did not commit to making Mueller’s highly anticipated findings public.

“A vote for this resolution will send a clear signal to both the American people and to the Department of Justice that Congress believes transparency is a fundamental principle necessary to ensure that government remains accountable to the public,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the lead sponsor of the effort.

It's still a pro move by Pelosi.  Mitch McConnell will be under a lot of pressure for a similar Senate resolution, especially after the vote against Trump's emergency declaration nonsense, but Lindsay Graham blocked it by objecting to the vote, calling for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and Democrats.

Still, yes, this puts scores of House Republicans on record saying they want the Mueller report released to the public, and they won't be able to dodge it.

The question is why.  After more than a year of refusing to protect the Mueller report, suddenly 420 of 435 Representatives signed on to this bill with no real warning it was coming.

Either the Mueller report is so mild that Republicans are more than happy to approve its release, or the table is being set for Mike Pence.  This resolution coming a day after Pelosi said that there would have to be overwhelming evidence to impeach still means both of those possibilities are in play.

The "not worth it" caveat makes me unfortunately think that it's the first scenario, especially when combined with Thursday's news that Mueller's top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, is planning to leave the Mueller team.

I want to be wrong here. We'll see if I am.

StupidiNews!

• Twelve GOP senators and all Democratic senators voted to end Donald Trump's emergency wall declaration in a 59-41 vote, Trump is expected to issue his first veto to strike the bill down.
• In an 85-334 vote, the UK Parliament rejected the notion of a second Brexit referendum, meaning the UK still has no path forward on Brexit with just two weeks to go before the EU deadline.
• New Zealand police say gunmen opened fire in two Christchurch mosques during Friday prayers, killing several and injuring dozens, police have captured four suspects.
• US lawmakers say the company's 737 MAX jets could be grounded through April as the aerospace giant needs to apply software fixes to hundreds of planes worldwide.
• More than 800,000 Dodge and Jeep vehicles are being recalled by Fiat-Chrysler for emissions issues, the recall is voluntary but California law is compelling owners to fix vehicles in its state.

Last Call For Critical Massie

When I say that my Congressman, GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, is a national embarrassment, idiocy like this is what I mean.

The House passed a series of bills on Tuesday meant to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for his country's actions, including a measure condemning the Russian leader and his government for their alleged roles in covering up the 2015 assassination of Putin political opponent Boris Nemtsov.

The package of legislation, all aimed at adding scrutiny on the Russian government, largely passed by voice vote.

The bill concerning Nemtsov's assassination overwhelmingly passed the House, with only one lawmaker — Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — dissenting.

“It's been four years since his death, but there's been no proper investigation of his assassination and the cover-up and zero accountability for those responsible — that's certainly an outrage," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said in a floor speech ahead of the vote. "This resolution condemns the Kremlin's systematic targeting of its political opponents and calls on the administration to impose sanctions on those responsible for Nemtsov's murder and cover-up.”

Nemtsov, a member of the opposition party who had eyed challenging Putin for the presidency in 2018, was shot and killed in 2015.

Five Chechen men have been charged in his death, but Tuesday’s resolution — introduced by Engel and Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) — claims that Russian officials have prevented others responsible for his murder to be charged.

A bill condemning the Russian annexation of Crimea also easily passed the House, with 427 lawmakers supporting the act. Again only Massie voted against it.

Under the legislation, led by Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Steve Chabot(R-Ohio), federal departments and agencies are barred from recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea, which sparked international outrage in 2014.

Out of the entire House of Representatives, apparently this jackass believes that the people of Northern Kentucky want to side with Putin's assassination of Nemtsov and his invasion of Crimea.   Could have voted present or skipped the vote, fine.

But to vote no on these?

To openly side with Putin against his country?

What an arrogant asshole.

Construction Of A Scam

If you actually cared to know what former Trump chief racist strategist and human slouch/flop sweat elemental Steve Bannon has been up to lately, we'll he's been crossing the country screaming at white people in red states to give him money to build a private border wall, and I see no reason to dissuade stupid racists from losing their money to him.  He was here in Cincinnati on Tuesday playing to a crowd of...dozens...along with fellow racists Kris Kobach and David Clarke.

Even if the federal government doesn't build a wall along the Mexican border, Steve Bannon and a group of conservative activists will build one anyway, as early as next month.

Bannon, who is President Donald Trump's former chief strategist and the controversial right-wing editor of Breitbart, and the leaders of the group called We Build the Wall came into downtown Cincinnati on Tuesday to raise money and promote the effort to build a Mexican border wall on private land with private money.

We Build The Wall organizers chose Cincinnati as the second stop on a nationwide tour despite 1,400 miles separating the Mexican border and Cincinnati. Next stop is Detroit on Thursday.

"I'm in Cincinnati, because the border crisis is in Iowa," Bannon told the crowd of more than 200 people who came to the Hilton Netherland Plaza in Downtown Cincinnati. Some traveled as far away as rural West Virginia. "It's in Ohio. This border crisis is a national crisis."

When it comes to the border wall with Mexico, the country should have the president's back, Bannon said.

"This is a tragedy of biblical proportions," Bannon said. "The answer is not an open border...We can have President Trump's back to do it in the case he can't do it."

Construction on the privately funded wall will start in April, said Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran and triple amputee wounded in the Iraq War who founded We Build the Wall.

This is a great scam, frankly.  They can ask for money for decades, and these idiots will be dreaming of the day they can "use" castle doctrine or stand your ground laws to slaughter a truckload of "illegals" or something, and this will never, ever get built.

It's only a matter time before a lot of people go to jail for this, so enjoy the ride, I guess.

We Gotta Face The Facebook, Con't

The Justice Department has been extremely busy this week, announcing last night that social networking giant Facebook is now under a federal grand jury investigation over its business practices involving customer data.

A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users.

The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world’s dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users’ friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years.

“We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. “We’ve provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so.”

It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department’s securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump’s election campaign.

The Justice Department and the Eastern District declined to comment for this article.

The Cambridge investigation, still active, is being run by prosecutors from the Northern District of California. One former Cambridge employee said investigators questioned him as recently as late February. He and three other witnesses in the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity so they would not anger prosecutors, said a significant line of inquiry involved Facebook’s claims that it was misled by Cambridge.

If there's one thing that people on the left anf right can agree on, it's that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg needs to burn, and it looks like we're headed for some fun ahead.  There's the very real possibility that this will be settled as a fine and Facebook will throw a few hundred million dollars at the government to make this go away, but the company's stock is going to crater anyway, and maybe if Zuck loses a few billion off his net worth, so be it.

I still stand by Liz Warren's platform that Google and Facebook need to be broken up.

StupidiNews!

• A major "bomb cyclone" blizzard has left hundreds stranded in Colorado and is bringing snow, heavy rain and thunderstorms to the Midwest today and tomorrow.
• The Senate has passed a resolution to end US support for troops in Yemen 54-46 without specific legislation to do so, Donald Trump is expected to veto the measure if it passes the House.
• Facing intense international pressure, the Trump regime has grounded all US Boeing 737 MAX jets as Canada and Australia joined the EU in the flight ban after Sunday's deadly crash in Ethiopia.
• UK lawmakers are set to vote on a delay to the March 29 Brexit deadline as PM Theresa May faces crumbling support and a possible new no-confidence vote.
• NASA chief Jim Brindenstine says the space agency will consider private sector spacecraft for the Orion lunar mission in 2020.

Last Call For Paulie Walnuts' Bad Day

Paul Manafort's day was worse than yours.  It went from a truly bad day...

Paul Manafort was sentenced to 73 months in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday following his conviction on charges of unregistered foreign lobbying and witness tampering.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the former Trump campaign manager to 60 months on the first count, running concurrently to 30 months of the 47-month sentence imposed in his Virginia case last week.

She also sentenced him to 13 months on the witness tampering count to be served consecutively with the count one sentence and his Virginia sentence.

That would mean an additional 43 months overall, bringing the total time he faces behind bars, including the nine months that he has already served in Virginia, to 81 months.

Put another way, the combined sentences of 90 months amount to seven-and-a-half years.

The judge also ordered Manafort to pay one-time restitution of $6.16 million to the Internal Revenue Service, the same amount he was sentenced to pay in the Virginia case.
As he left the courthouse, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing told ABC News that he was "disappointed" in the sentence. He called Judge Jackson "hostile towards Mr. Manafort," with a level of "callousness" he said he hasn't seen in his many years of white-collar prosecution.

...to exponentially worse as soon as his sentence was announced.

President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted Wednesday by a state grand jury in New York on charges of residential mortgage fraud — the announcement coming just minutes after Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Washington to more than seven years in prison.

The charges filed against Manafort may stand as a kind of prosecutorial insurance policy against a possible presidential pardon — a scenario that Trump has refused to discuss as Manafort’s case worked its way through the federal court system. The president has called Manafort brave for fighting his case against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Under the Constitution, presidents have wide authority to pardon, but that power applies only to federal convictions, not state cases.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has urged the legislature to fix what Democrats call a “double-jeopardy loophole” in state law that could negate New York’s ability to prosecute anyone pardoned by the president.

State law protects people from repeat prosecutions for the same alleged crimes, and does not make an exception for instances where a pardon has been granted by the president.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market.”

To recap, even if Trump pardons Manafort tomorrow, he's stil;l facing state charges that Trump can do nothing about, and he's most likely going away for a very long time.

Bye, Paulie.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The US 6th Circuit just ruled to allow the end of state funding for Planned Parenthood in Ohio, and that most likely means an end to abortion services in both Cincinnati and Dayton.

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected Planned Parenthood’s constitutional challenge to an Ohio law depriving the organization of state funding because it performs abortions, handing a victory to anti-abortion advocates.

In an 11-6 vote, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati overturned a ruling last year by a three-judge panel of the court that the funding ban violated the due process rights of Planned Parenthood affiliates.

“The affiliates are correct that the Ohio law imposes a condition on the continued receipt of state funds,” Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote for the majority. “But that condition does not violate the Constitution because the affiliates do not have a due process right to perform abortions.”

Sutton also found no proof the ban posed an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion, a right he said belonged to women, not to Planned Parenthood.

Tuesday’s decision voided a lower court injunction against enforcing the 2016 law, which had been signed by then-Republican Governor John Kasich. The appeals court upheld the injunction last April 18.

Planned Parenthood said the law strips funding that helps it test for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conduct cancer screenings, and offer programs to reduce infant mortality and address domestic violence.

“It is unconscionable that politicians continue seeking to restrict people from accessing essential health care - which is a human right,” Chief Executive Leana Wen said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood did not say whether it might appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The reason why the ruling happened is very simple, 4 of the 11 judges on the court that voted to end funding were Trump appointees.  If they had been Clinton appointees instead, it almost certainly would have gone the other way.

You can thank white women voters in Ohio for that.  56% of them voted for Trump.  And no, I don't think Planned Parenthood will appeal to the US Supreme Court, because that case will be the 5-4 decision (the five being all men) that will allow all 50 states to end funding for abortion providers, meaning probably two dozen states will be without any abortion providers within a few years.

Roe v Wade becomes irrelevant.

And you can thank Donald Trump and the white women who voted for him for that too.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

There are now four major investigations into Donald Trump (the Mueller probe, House Democrats, Southern District of NY Federal, and NY State AG) and while we've heard a lot of recent action on the first three, it's the fourth one that should have Trump up sweating off his orange bronzer at night.

The New York attorney general’s office late on Monday issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records relating to the financing of four major Trump Organization projects and a failed effort to buy the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League in 2014, according to a person briefed on the subpoenas.

The inquiry opens a new front in the scrutiny of Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders willing to do business with Donald J. Trump in recent years. The bank is already the subject of two congressional investigations and was examined last year by New York banking regulators, who took no action.

The new inquiry, by the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, was prompted by the congressional testimony last month of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, the person briefed on the subpoenas said. Mr. Cohen testified under oath that Mr. Trump had inflated his assets in financial statements, and Mr. Cohen provided copies of statements he said had been submitted to Deutsche Bank.

The inquiry by Ms. James’s office is a civil investigation, not a criminal one, although its focus and scope were unclear. The attorney general has broad authority under state law to investigate fraud and can fine — or in extreme cases, go to court to try to dissolve — a business that is found to have engaged in repeated illegality.

The request to Deutsche Bank sought loan applications, mortgages, lines of credit and other financing transactions in connection with the Trump International Hotel in Washington; the Trump National Doral outside Miami; and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the person said.

Investigators also requested records connected to an unsuccessful effort to buy the Bills, the person said. Mr. Trump gave Deutsche Bank bare-bones personal financial statements in 2014 when he planned to make a bid for the team, The New York Times has reported. The deal fell through when the team was sold to a rival bidder for $1.4 billion.

Mr. Trump worked with a small United States-based unit of Deutsche Bank that serves ultra-wealthy people. The unit lent Mr. Trump more than $100 million in 2012 to pay for the Doral golf resort and $170 million in 2015 to transform the Old Post Office Building in Washington into a luxury hotel.

New Jersey-based Investors Bank was subpoenaed for records relating to Trump Park Avenue, a project it had backed.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday that it had received the subpoena.

Investors Bank declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Now again, this is a civil case so far.  But if it turns up criminal activity, and it most certainly will given Trump's deep history of money laundering and fraud, all bets are off.

The other issue is what Mueller is up to on the counterintelligence front, and as former US Attorney Nelson Cunningham explains, that report can't be buried.

The most public and familiar one is as a criminal investigator under the special counsel regulations. But Mueller has also carried a second charge, as a counterintelligence expert, with a much broader charge to determine and report the scope of any interference and any links to the Trump campaign—what Trump himself might refer to as “collusion.”

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that the Russia investigation was commenced “as part of our counterintelligence mission . . . also includ[ing] an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017 order appointing Mueller special counsel specifically and carefully incorporated this announced scope and mission.

From the start, then, Mueller has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation, while “also” assessing whether any crimes were committed. Not the other way around.

Comey and Rosenstein knew what they were doing. It is the mission of a criminal investigation to produce indictments and trials, which tell stories and render conclusions only imperfectly. Thanks to the special counsel regulations, there is also “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” But what will go into this report and what the Congress and public may ultimately see is highly proscribed.

It is the central mission of a counterintelligence investigation, however, to produce . . . well, a report. These findings and conclusions are shared with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and relevant agencies of the 17-member intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.). The report may be honed into a formal IC “assessment” reflecting the consensus view of the 17 agencies. It was just such a report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” that on Jan. 7, 2017 was shared with incoming President Trump. Its disclosure brought into public view the Intelligence Community’s bombshell conclusion that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered an effort to discredit Hillary Clinton and to “help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

Significantly, unlike a final criminal report, a Mueller counterintelligence report cannot be bottled up. By statute it must be shared with Congress. The House and Senate intelligence committees are legally entitled to be given reports, in writing, of significant intelligence and counterintelligence activities or failures. Mueller’s findings will certainly qualify.

Where matters are too delicate to share with all the members of the intelligence committees, statute and established practice provide that disclosure may be made to a smaller circle known as the “Gang of Eight:” the chair and ranking member of each intelligence committee, and the Democratic and Republican leaders of each chamber.

Already, these obligations have generated significant disclosures to Congress of Russia’s activities. In August 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed members of the Gang of Eight on the then-new signs of Russian interference and hacking. The explosive disclosure in the January 2017 IC assessment that Putin had ordered interference specifically to assist then-candidate Trump was also thanks to these provisions. And in May 2017, then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe informed the Gang of Eight that in the wake of Comey’s firing, the FBI had focused its counter-intelligence investigation on the president himself.

Mueller inherited this investigation just days later, and he inherited this reporting framework as well. Twenty-two months of relentless investigation have followed since.

Bottom line: the investigations into Donald Trump's criminality will continue for some time, because there's decades of filth to dig through.

 

StupidiNews!

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom will issue an executive order placing a moratorium on use of the death penalty, the state's 737 Death Row inmates will remain in prison.
• Former Vatican treasurer Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years in Australian prison after being convicted earlier this month for sexually assaulting two boys in the 1990s.
• UK PM Theresa May's revised Brexit deal went down in flames in Parliament on Tuesday, leaving no clear path forward with less than three weeks before a scheduled Brexit deadline. 
• Boeing stock is down more than ten percent as multiple countries have grounded its 737 MAX jet after Sunday's fatal crash in Ethiopia killed almost 160.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk's lawyers are calling the SEC's move to hold him in contempt for violating his agreement not to tweet about the company's numbers an "unconstitutional power grab".