Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

I've been warning about this coming for months now and the Trump regime's vengeance for last night's Trump tax story was the catalyst for a swift and brutal purging the White House press corps of credentials across the board.  

The White House today immediately instituted a "new standard" for credentials based on how often reporters were on the White House grounds, something of course that happens to get rid of credentials for most non-FOX reporters completely.  Again, the vast majority of press reporters, technicians, and camera operators for America's press organizations all lost their White House press credentials today.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank lays out, "exceptions" were made for some "senior" reporters, but those can now be revoked at will by the White House.  And those "senior" reporters do not include Milbank, who has covered the White House for 21 years.

The Post requested exceptions for its six White House reporters and for me, saying that this access is essential to our work (in my case, I often write “sketches” describing the White House scene). The White House press office granted exceptions to the other six, but not to me. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic. The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events, and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like.

White House officials provided me no comment for the record.

I’m not looking for pity. Trump’s elimination of briefings and other changes have devalued White House coverage anyway. But there’s something wrong with a president having the power to decide which journalists can cover him.

Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements — and therefore, in theory, can have their credentials revoked any time they annoy Trump or his aides, like CNN’s Jim Acosta did.

Last year, Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to restore Acosta’s press credentials, saying that the White House’s process for revoking his access (after Acosta had aggressively questioned Trump) was “shrouded in mystery.”

In response, it seems, the White House established a clear — if nearly impossible — standard: No credentials to any journalist who is not in the building on at least 90 out of the previous 180 days — in other words, seven of every 10 workdays. The White House wouldn’t provide numbers, but it appears most of the White House press corps didn’t qualify for credentials under the new standard, including regulars for The Post and the Associated Press. (Trump, who has spent more than 200 days at Trump properties and many more on travel, is barely in the White House this much himself.)

The White House said it would grant exceptions for “senior journalists” who are “consistently engaged in covering the White House” and for those with “special circumstances.” Though the culling properly eliminated some (including at The Post) who no longer needed credentials, the victims hurt most were freelance camera operators and technicians who now could lose their livelihood.

The White House, in rescinding my credentials, told me I had only been in the building seven times in the previous 180 days (two foot surgeries during that period kept me at home, though I never came close to the 90-day standard).

More important is that the White House is drastically curtailing access for all journalists. Briefings have been abolished in favor of unscheduled “gaggles” ( on the record, but impromptu and haphazard) in the White House driveway. The Pentagon and State Department have done similarly.

The fact that this policy was rolled out less than 24 hours after the Trump tax story hit the presses last night is no coincidence.  The White House was given the heads up on the story some time ago when the NY Times called for comment.  They had the time to work this out, and when the story landed with a bang last night, today was the revenge.

We've taken a dark and rapid turn into authoritarianism with a looming shooting war and possible impeachment hearings.  No doubt this message pitch for America's press is very clear: you will report what we want you to report, or you will be gone...

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Neither the Trump regime nor House Democrats were bluffing today when it came to carrying out their threatened actions this week on the impeachment front, as the House Judiciary Committee voted 24-10 to hold AG Bill Barr in contempt of Congress, and the Trump regime asserted executive privilege over the unredacted Mueller report.

President Donald Trump has asserted executive privilege over special counsel Robert Mueller's unredacted report as the House Judiciary Committee prepares to vote to hold his attorney general, William Barr, in contempt of Congress.

Faced with "blatant abuse of power" by Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the president "has no other option than to make a protective assertion of executive privilege," the White House said Wednesday.

The committee vote and Trump's assertion of privilege represents a major escalation of the battle between congressional Democrats and the president. It will likely lead to a protracted legal war over Mueller’s 448-page report on alleged obstruction of justice by Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

The Justice Department had told lawmakers Tuesday ahead of the session that it would recommend that Trump assert executive privilege to that material.

Members of the Judiciary Committee were expected to spend the Wednesday markup discussing the resolution to hold Barr in contempt, as well as a supporting 27-page report in which Democrats raised the prospect of impeachment as a result of their investigation relating to the Mueller probe.

In his opening remarks, Nadler said it was "not a step we take lightly," but rather the "culmination of nearly three months of requests, discussions and negotiations with the Department of Justice."

"In response to our latest good-faith offer, the Department abruptly announced that if we move forward today, it would ask President Trump to invoke what it refers to as a protective assertion of executive privilege on all of the materials subject to our subpoena. Just minutes ago, it took that dramatic step," Nadler continued.

"Let me be clear: The information we are requesting is entirely within our legal rights to receive and is no different from what has been provided to Congress on numerous occasions, going back nearly a century," he added.

Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., the ranking member of the committee, said in his opening statement that Democrats on the committee were rushing the oversight process because they are "angry" that "the special counsel's report did not produce the material or conclusions they expected to pave their path to impeaching the president" — sullying Barr's reputation in the process.

"I ask you to recognize that craven and insincere politics yield anemic dividends for Americans who have asked us to legislate," Collins said. "As I have told you on multiple occasions and proved at last week’s pharmaceuticals markup, I stand ready to work with you to promote solutions. I will not, though, become a bystander as you assail the attorney general and this committee. Our democracy deserves better."

Once the Judiciary Committee signs off on the contempt resolution, it will go to a vote in the full House. The timing of that vote would be up to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Pelosi, for her part, says Trump is becoming "self-impeachable".  Whatever that means.

“The point is that every single day, whether it’s obstruction, obstruction, obstruction — obstruction of having people come to the table with facts, ignoring subpoenas . . . every single day, the president is making a case — he’s becoming self-impeachable, in terms of some of the things that he is doing,” Pelosi said at a Washington Post Live event.

I agree with Greg Sargent.  The only Democrat right now really taking Trump's impeachment seriously as a necessary duty to preserve the republic is Elizabeth Warren.

Is President Trump an aberration whose defeat in 2020 would allow the nation to begin rebounding toward normalcy? Or does his ascendance reflect long-running national pathologies and deeply ingrained structural economic and political problems that will intractably endure long after he’s gone?

The answer to this question — which has been thrust to the forefront by the Democratic presidential primaries — is, in a sense, both. Trump represents both a continuation of and a dramatic exacerbation of those long running pathologies and problems.

As of now, Elizabeth Warren appears to be the Democratic candidate who most fully grasps the need to take both of those aspects of the Trump threat seriously. The Massachusetts senator is, I think, offering what amounts to the most fully rounded and multidimensional response to that threat.

In recent days, Warren has addressed the deeper issues raised by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report — and the reaction to it from Trump and Republicans — in by far the most comprehensive way.

In an important moment on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Warren took strong issue with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s profoundly cynical effort to treat this all as a closed matter. “Case closed,” McConnell said, speaking not just about Mueller’s extensive findings of likely criminal obstruction of justice by Trump but also about Trump’s eagerness to reap gain from Russia’s sabotage of our elections, which McConnell blamed on Barack Obama.

In response, Warren again called for an impeachment inquiry, but she did more than that: She indicted the Republican Party as a whole for shrugging off Trump’s epic misconduct and wrongdoing.

Warren has also pointed out more forcefully than any rival has that Trump tried to derail an investigation not just into his own campaign’s conduct, but also into the Russian attack on our democracy — which Trump has refused to acknowledge happened at all, hamstringing preparations for the next attack.

It is this dereliction of duty on Trump's part that poses the most serious threat.

Unfortunately, America just doesn't give a damn.

There's been a lot of bandwidth devoted to the Mueller Report.

The public mostly accepts the Democrats' conclusions, i.e. that Trump hasn't been honest, probably obstructed, probably committed crimes.

It doesn't think that warrants impeachment, though.https://t.co/yOWmcscfey https://t.co/cvM24aJNco

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 7, 2019

Contrast that, by the way, to the stories that have gotten the most news coverage, which of course includes Russia at/near the top. The idea that Democrats haven't done enough to focus the public's attention on Russia seems really wrong to me. https://t.co/jUXbPoAZsG pic.twitter.com/AgzdIJobhR

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 8, 2019

A grand total of zero respondents said it was the most important issue to their 2020 vote when CNN asked two months ago.

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) May 8, 2019

Liz Warren is "out of touch" for wanting to save the country and the country just doesn't want to deal with it.  Period.  Maybe that changes, but that's apparently up to Democrats to convince America that's the case and despite the massive coverage of it, the country literally could not care less about it.

That's where we are right now.  We were told Hillary didn't make the case she was going to be better than Trump in 2016.  Now we're being told Democrats haven't made the case for impeachment in 2019.

All evidence points to 2020's election being far too late.

The Drums Of War, Con't

Trump's efforts to get the media off Mueller and impeachment has now reached a critical juncture.  It's now a matter of time before we're in a shooting war, the only question is where.  On one side, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is all but asking Trump for US troops to enact bloody regime change.

One week after Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó's calls for mass protests failed to incite a military uprising and force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of office, Guaidó has suggested to CBS News that he is open to a U.S. military intervention in his country. 

"We are open to options that offer a low social cost and that will grant us the ability and the stability to hold a truly free election," Guaidó told CBS News' Adriana Diaz in Caracas. "We want the best exit out of this conflict, and if there are options we have to consider and alternatives, then we will." 

But it seems the United States isn't Guaidó's only option. A member of Guaido's team told Diaz that they are in touch with Russian officials, which Guaidó confirmed. He said those talks were happening in an unofficial capacity, with various officials from high to low levels in the Moscow government.

The U.S. and Russia accuse each other of interfering in the Venezuelan crisis. On Monday, speaking from Moscow, Venezuela's foreign minister said his country may expand the amount of Russian specialists there.

President Trump's top aides say all options — including military action — remain on the table.

As I said before, a simple US invasion won't happen.  What will happen could be much, much worse.  Look no further than Syria to see how this will go.  A civil war with Putin controlling both sides by proxy is a dream scenario for him and he knows it.

And as we get into a calculated dog and pony show in Caracas, we also come closer to a flamethrower in a fireworks factory scenario in Tehran.

Consequently, as the first anniversary of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord approaches, the action-reaction spiral the administration set in motion with its maximum pressure campaign has produced a very ominous situation—one in which the risk of military confrontation grows by the day. 

Thousands of U.S. troops and Iranian-backed forces operate in close proximity to one another in Iraq, Syria, and the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates continue to pursue their air campaign against Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen despite international outrage over the world’s worst humanitarian disaster there. And Israel regularly conducts military strikes against Iranian arms shipments and infrastructure in Syria. In this volatile context, the scenarios for an intentional or inadvertent U.S.-Iran war are legion. 

If Iran or its proxies respond to U.S. pressure in ways that draw American blood or deal a major blow to critical oil infrastructure in the region, things could quickly get out of hand.

All else being equal, Trump probably doesn’t want another U.S. war in the Middle East. But, if past is prologue, his gut instinct will be to respond (likely via Twitter) to any Iranian provocation with bellicose rhetoric that pours fuel on the fire. It is also easy to envision Iranian actions triggering intense political pressure from the president’s right-wing donors, congressional hawks, and regional allies—the same forces that pressed Trump to exit the Iran deal—for military action. And Trump is no longer surrounded by former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and other cooler heads. He is now enveloped by advisors like Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who have long called for war against Iran. Unlike in the latter years of the Obama administration, there are currently no high-level lines of communication between Washington and Tehran to manage a crisis. And hard-liners on all sides seem keen for a fight, looking for opportunities to escalate, rather than de-escalate, tensions.

Indeed, Trump’s advisors appear to be contemplating precisely this eventuality and its possible legal justifications. Last month, during a hearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Sen. Rand Paul asked Pompeo whether the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against al Qaeda and its associated forces gave the Trump administration the authority to go to war with Iran. Pompeo refused to give a straight forward answer, but—in a dark echo of the lead-up to the Iraq War—said the Trump administration believes there is a connection between Iran and al Qaeda.

It's going to be a long summer, and a bloody one.

StupidiNews!

• Two suspects are in custody after killing one student and injuring 7 more in a school shooting in Colorado, the attack took place less than ten miles from Columbine High School.
• US soybean farmers are urging Donald Trump not to raise tariffs on Chinese imports on Friday as stock markets plummeted again on Tuesday.
• A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court decision blocking the Trump regime from sending asylum seekers to Mexico to await case action.
• Former VP Joe Biden is attacking the Trump regime's immigration plan as he campaigns in Nevada, saying Trump is using immigration "to demonize people".
• German prosecutors are hitting automaker Porsche with a $600 million fine to settle prosecution from the diesel emissions cheating from 2018.

Last Call For A Taxing Explanation

Oh man.

This is gonna be good.

Somebody leaked Trump's taxes to the NY Times, at least his early stuff from 1985 to 1994, and it shows Trump lost more than a billion dollars over a decade.

By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.

Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.

The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, journalists at The Times and elsewhere have been trying to piece together Mr. Trump’s complex and concealed finances. While The Times did not obtain the president’s actual tax returns, it received the information contained in the returns from someone who had legal access to it. The Times was then able to find matching results in the I.R.S. information on top earners — a publicly available database that each year comprises a one-third sampling of those taxpayers, with identifying details removed. It also confirmed significant findings using other public documents, along with confidential Trump family tax and financial records from the newspaper’s 2018 investigation into the origin of the president’s wealth.

The Times contacted the White House for a statement.  Several times.  The statements kept changing.

Several weeks ago, a senior official issued a statement saying: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes.”

On Saturday, after further inquiries from The Times, a lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, wrote that the tax information was “demonstrably false,” and that the paper’s statements “about the president’s tax returns and business from 30 years ago are highly inaccurate.” He cited no specific errors, but on Tuesday added that “I.R.S. transcripts, particularly before the days of electronic filing, are notoriously inaccurate” and “would not be able to provide a reasonable picture of any taxpayer’s return.”

Mark J. Mazur, a former director of research, analysis and statistics at the I.R.S., said that, far from being considered unreliable, data used to create such transcripts had undergone quality control for decades and had been used to analyze economic trends and set national policy. In addition, I.R.S. auditors often refer to the transcripts as “handy” summaries of tax returns, said Mr. Mazur, now director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.

In fact, the source of The Times’s newly obtained information was able to provide several years of unpublished tax figures from the president’s father, the builder Fred C. Trump. They matched up precisely with Fred Trump’s actual returns, which had been obtained by The Times in the earlier investigation.

To recap:

Donald Trump is one of the worst businessmen in American history.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

So it turns out that four years after she died in a Texas jail, Sandra Bland filmed her police stop herself in new footage only now released thanks to a Dallas news station.

As Trooper Brian Encinia angrily threatened her with a stun gun from just outside her car window, Sandra Bland recorded the encounter on her cellphone, shown in a newly released 39-second video that has prompted Ms. Bland’s family to call for a renewed investigation into her arrest and death nearly four years ago.

Ms. Bland, a 28-year-old African-American from Chicago, was taken into custody in southeast Texas following the confrontational 2015 traffic stop and was found hanging in a jail cell three days later in what was officially ruled a suicide. The case, which drew international attention, intensified outrage over the treatment of black people by white police officers and was considered a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement.

The video surfaced for the first time publicly Monday night in an investigative report on the Dallas television station WFAA that included interviews with Ms. Bland’s family and supporters, who accused officials of concealing information that they say should have been made public early in the investigation.

The authorities released the trooper’s dashcam video days after Ms. Bland’s death but the fact that Ms. Bland recorded the encounter from the front seat of her car was not public knowledge. Cannon Lambert, a lawyer who represents the Bland family, said the video, by showing Ms. Bland with a cellphone in her hand, seriously undercut the trooper’s claim that he feared for his safety as he approached the woman’s vehicle.

“What the video shows is that Encinia had no reason to be in fear of his safety,” Mr. Lambert, who represented the family in a $1.9 million legal settlement, said in a telephone interview. “The video shows that he wasn’t in fear of his safety. You could see that it was a cellphone, he was looking right at it.”

Mr. Encinia said during internal interviews with Department of Public Safety officials that he had been worried about his safety. “My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time,” he told department interviewers.

Mr. Encinia was indicted on a charge of perjury — the only criminal charge arising from the case — after grand jurors accused him of making a false statement in his claim that he removed Ms. Bland from her car to more safely conduct a traffic investigation. But the charge was later dismissed on a motion by prosecutors in exchange for the trooper’s promise that he would never again work in law enforcement.

The prosecuting team concluded that Mr. Encinia’s permanent ban from law enforcement was the best option because there was no certainty of obtaining a conviction on the perjury charge, one of the prosecutors said at the time.

So another black person died because of police racism and hatred of black bodies in a country that has always allowed for black deaths at the hands of police.  And now, four years after Sandar Bland died, we find that police lied again.

Police exist to protect white America from black America, nothing less, and nothing more. 

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

As expected on Monday, Attorney General Bill Barr has now skipped out on delivering the full Mueller Report to House Judiciary Dems, and the contempt process is now underway.

The House Judiciary Committee will vote Wednesday to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt of Congress, after the Justice Department appeared to miss a Monday deadline to negotiate the delivery of Robert S. Mueller III’s full report, along with key evidence collected by the special counsel.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, said the vote would occur at 10 a.m. A 27-page report accompanying the vote notice on Monday recommends that Mr. Barr “shall be found to be in contempt of Congress for failure to comply with a congressional subpoena.”

The Democratic-controlled panel almost certainly will vote in favor of contempt unless the Justice Department meets the Democrats’ demands before Wednesday. The full House would then have to hold a vote. It is unclear when that would occur.

“Although the Committee has attempted to engage in accommodations with Attorney General Barr for several months, it can no longer afford to delay, and must resort to contempt proceedings,” the report submitted by Mr. Nadler said.

Jerry Nadler wouldn't be doing this without Nancy Pelosi's tacit permission, and Nancy Pelosi wouldn't be doing this unless she had the votes to hold Barr in contempt.  Now, there's room here for Pelosi to wiggle, as she by no means has to hold the vote right away.

Also, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is not turning over Trump's tax returns, and he says it's unconstitutional so he won't do it.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday told House Democrats he would not furnish President Trump’s tax returns despite their legal request, the latest move by Trump administration officials to shield the president from congressional investigations.

Mnuchin, in a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.), said he had consulted with the Justice Department and that they had concluded that it would not be lawful for the Trump administration to turn over the tax returns because of potential violations of privacy.

Mnuchin added that requests from Congress “must serve a legitimate legislative purpose” and that the request from Democrats does not.

A number of legal experts have said it would be unprecedented for Mnuchin to refuse to turn over the tax returns, as the power for lawmakers to seek the returns is written explicitly in a 1924 law.

But Mnuchin, Trump’s former campaign finance chairman, has fought to protect the returns from public disclosure and said it would create a dangerous precedent if the returns are released. Mnuchin’s announcement on Monday appears to be his final decision in the matter, though he has hinted for weeks that he would not allow the release.

Neal said in a statement on Monday evening, “I will consult with counsel and determine the appropriate response.”

So at this point both Mnuchin and Barr are daring House Democrats to do anything, and they're absolutely betting on this turning into "Well both sides do it!" rather than "Republicans are openly breaking the law."  That's already starting to be the case.

Besides the Trump regime is counting on nobody caring anyway. Steve M:

President Trump doesn't believe he needs legislative accomplishments in order to be reelected. (Being reelected is his only real goal as president, because he likes the glory and he wants to stay out of legal trouble.) He doesn't care about an infrastructure bill or a prescription drug plan. And because he's a malignant narcissist, he's not concerned about the harm he might do if he plunges the U.S. into another debt ceiling crisis, any more than he cared about the harm that came from shutting down much of the government late last year.

Trump has one goal from now until November: to maximize his lib ownage every day. He thinks he can win reelection with a base-only strategy, and he may be right: the Electoral College, vote suppression in red-but-trending-purple states, third-party candidacies, and the likely complicity of the mainstream media in catapulting GOP propaganda all mean that he could very well win. Sure, he'd take a couple of legislative accomplishments, but for his one win in that area, the tax bill, he relied on Mitch McConnell to do all the hard work, and since McConnell knows that the success of his delegation depends exclusively on lib ownage, he's not going to lift a finger -- certainly not to pass legislation that appeals to moderates and might get Democratic votes.

So, no, Democrats have no leverage -- not that they'd use it if they had it, because, y'know, they're Democrats. There's nothing Trump feels he needs that only they can provide, so they have no power over him at all.

Unless Dems are willing to start putting Bill Barr and Steven Mnuchin in jail for contempt, Steve is right.  Trump is going to win this, we'll never see his tax returns, we'll never see the full Mueller report, and nobody in America will give a good god damn about either way as long as there's not a recession.

Barr and Mnuchin will not be compelled to lift a finger, and that's basically the end of the ballgame for this country.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Trump regime Trade representative Robert Lighthizer says Donald Trump will move forward on billions in new tariffs on Americans buying Chinese imports starting Friday unless China relents.
• Canada has declared three species of whale, including the Sei Whale as threatened, officials say the whales are getting tangled in nets or hunted.
• Two Reuters reporters were freed from jail in Mynmar after more than 500 days behind bars, the news organization has been pushing both the Trump regime and Myanmar's government for release.
• Panama's Laurentino Cortizo is claiming victory in Sunday's presidential election, runner-up Romulo Roux has conceded to the Texas-educated businessman.
• A massive set of class-action suits against America's largest mobile carriers over selling phone location data to third parties could involve refunds for up to 300 million cellular customers.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan, Con't

Kentucky's primary for November statewide elections is coming up on May 21, and while Democrat Andy Beshear is expected to win his contest for the right to challenge GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, Republicans are eyeing Beshear's current job as Attorney General and are already dumping hundreds of thousands of dark money dollars into the primary race to assure Mitch McConnell protege Daniel Cameron is their candidate.

An independent “dark money” group from Washington reports spending $350,000 to influence the May 21 Republican primary in Kentucky’s attorney general race — more money than either candidate has in his own campaign.

The Judicial Crisis Network is promoting Daniel Cameron, former legal counsel to U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in his contest against state Sen. Wil Schroder of Wilder. In their most recent finance reports, Cameron and Schroder said they had raised $286,921 and $135,311, respectively.

The nonprofit is paying for a heavy rotation of television commercials in Lexington and Louisville that tout Cameron’s past work for McConnell in helping to get conservatives confirmed to the federal bench. Cameron is “tough” and “will defend the Trump agenda,” the ads say. President Trump, who is popular in Kentucky, is featured prominently.

Apart from the commercials, Schroder said the JCN also filed requests under the Kentucky Open Records Act for police reports at the addresses of his current and previous homes around Northern Kentucky, possibly hoping to find embarrassing incidents that could be used against him.

And it paid for a “push poll” that called GOP voters in the guise of asking their opinions to tell them unflattering things about him, Schroder said, such as the fact that he once was a registered Democrat and he has accepted donations from trial attorneys.

“As far as I can determine, it’s unprecedented for an outside group to come into a Republican primary in a down-ticket race on the state ballot and try to do something like this,” Schroder said. “I think they’re desperate. I think they’re doing anything they can do in order to discredit this campaign. You have to ask yourself who’s behind this and why?”

Founded in 2005, the JCN raises tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed sources, spending it on public relations battles to get conservatives into judgeships and Republicans elected as states’ attorneys general. The group works closely with McConnell, whose powerful political machine is backing Cameron, his onetime aide.

Asked why it was intervening in a Republican primary, JCN executive director Gary Marx told the Herald-Leader: “The Judicial Crisis Network is supporting Daniel Cameron for attorney general because he is an outstanding, experienced attorney who is committed to the fair and impartial enforcement of the law. Mr. Cameron’s public service has been exemplary, and his record demonstrates he will fight for the people of Kentucky protecting their rights, their families and their values.”

Beshear has been standing in the way of Bevin and the GOP machine here in Kentucky, and getting rid of him is a top priority (along with Alison Grimes as Secretary of State).  With them out of the way, Kentucky can go full red state, with massive voter suppression and more.

Mitch's machine buying a primary for his henchman is standard operating procedure these days.

Climate of Destruction, Con't

Humanity is going to suffer badly in the decades ahead due to climate change, and according to the most comprehensive UN report yet in the post-Paris Accord era, we're going to take thousands of species into extinction along with us while we do it.

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth’s ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.

“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.“

Unless we fix the problem now, the chain reaction will be impossible to stop.  We'll lose tens, if not hundreds of thousands of species in a mass extermination in just a few short decades.  Republicans certainly don't care, and if they do, they don't want to do a thing about it.

The Drums of War, Con't

Last night I said we were looking at three wars, one political, one trade, one shooting, this morning we're looking at maybe maybe four.

The United States is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East to send a clear message to Iran that any attack on U.S. interests or its allies will be met with “unrelenting force,” U.S. national security advisor John Bolton said on Sunday.

Amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Bolton said the decision was “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings.”

“The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or regular Iranian forces,” Bolton said in a statement.

It marked the latest in a series of moves by President Donald Trump’s administration against Iran in recent weeks.

Washington has said it will stop waivers for countries buying Iranian oil, in an attempt to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. It has also blacklisted Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Trump administration’s efforts to impose political and economic isolation on Tehran began last year when it unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal it and other world powers negotiated with Iran in 2015.

“The United States is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force,” Bolton said.

Bolton, who has spearheaded an increasingly hawkish U.S. policy on Iran, did not provide any other details.

Now US naval carrier task groups being sent to the Middle East is certainly nothing new, every president since Carter has done it at one time or another.  But Trump miscalculates badly, and Bolton plus Iran is nitro and glycerin on top of that.  We've already got North Korea spiraling out of control this week along with Venezuela, Trump's picking a full-on trade war with China, and now this?

The man will do anything to keep the headlines off of Putin and the Mueller report, won't he?

StupidiNews!

• Russian officials say 41 passengers and crew are dead after an airliner crash-landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport Sunday after catching fire in mid-air.
• Israeli PM Bejamin Netanyahu is vowing "massive strikes" will continue after rocket attacks from Gaza killed one, Israeli Defense Forces bombed hundreds of targets in response.
• Donald Trump is warning China that tariffs on more than $200 billion in imports will rise from 10% to 25% by the end of the week unless Beijing relents, China says it will end trade talks in response.
• North Korea's missile tests over the weekend may have included sanctioned ballistic missiles, leaving the Trump regime back at square one as Pyongyang is warning the US to end sanctions.
• Two Italian researchers argue that Leonardo da Vinci's right hand may have not been crippled later in his life by a stroke, but by a fall that damaged his ulnar nerve.

Last Call For Three Wars

Just a note that going into next week the Trump regime is looking at three wars right now:

a legal war with Democrats,

President Trump reversed himself on Sunday and said that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, should not testify before Congress, setting up a potentially explosive confrontation with Democrats over presidential authority and the separation of powers.

The president argued on Twitter that Mr. Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — which found no conspiracy between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign but did not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice — was conclusive and that Congress and the American people did not need to hear from Mr. Mueller. “Bob Mueller should not testify,” he said. “No redos for the Dems!”

On Friday, Mr. Trump had said it was up to Attorney General William P. Barr whether Mr. Mueller testified. The president’s about-face now puts new pressure on Mr. Barr, who must decide whether to accede to Mr. Trump’s call. Last week, Mr. Barr said he had no objection to Mr. Mueller testifying.

The conflict over Mr. Mueller escalates Mr. Trump’s fight with Democrats just as his re-election campaign is taking shape. It comes on top of numerous refusals by the administration to turn over records to Congress, including a request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Mr. Trump has also balked at testimony from his former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II.

A trade war with China,

The sudden escalation of trade tensions could badly catch investors off guard. Not only had US and Chinese officials signaled a trade deal was imminent, but hopes for trade peace helped drive US stocks sharply higher this year. 

Trump said that he believed talks were progressing too slowly and the tariff increase could happen "shortly." He also warned his administration could tax nearly all of the roughly $500 billion of Chinese exports to the United States. 

The two countries had planned a critical week of negotiations to end a yearlong tit-for-tat trade war.

And a shooting war in Venezuela.

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the U.S. has a full range of options available to help oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and didn’t rule out “ultimately” using military action on top of diplomatic, political and other pressure points.

“We’re preparing those for him so that when the situation arises, we’re not flat-footed,’’ Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week,” one of three scheduled appearances on Sunday morning political shows.

Pompeo said Sunday that he can’t predict when Maduro will be forced out of office -- whether days, weeks or months. But Maduro can’t feel good about his situation because while he might be ruling for the moment, he can’t govern, Pompeo said.

“There’s enormous poverty, enormous starvation, sick children that can’t get medicine,” Pompeo said. “This is not someone who can be part of Venezuela’s future.”

May will be messy.

Spawn Of The Nameless One Returns

The announced retirement of Wyoming GOP Sen. Mike Enzi this weekend clears the decks for Liz Cheney, daughter of former VP Dick Cheney, to take up her dad's old Senate seat for essentially a lifetime appointment.

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi will not run for reelection next year, the four-term Republican senator said on Saturday.

The 75-year-old Senate Budget Committee chairman announced his retirement in Gillette, Wyo., where he used to be mayor. The low-key Wyomingite said he wants to focus on budget reform.

“I don't want to be burdened by the distractions of another campaign,” Enzi said, according to the Casper Tribune.

Senate Republicans have been closely watching Enzi, figuring he may decide to call it quits after 24 years in the Senate, but most were unaware of his weekend plans. Enzi's office did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday morning ahead of the announcement.

Enzi is among the least flashy personalities in the Capitol. He often literally keeps his head down, immersed in either thought or reading, typically wielding an e-reader device.

He frequently ignores reporters to go about his day, which is likely focused on cutting spending and balancing the budget. He posts often about the “penny plan,” which would reduce spending by 1 percent each year. Enzi is term-limited from serving as budget chairman after next year.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who threatened Enzi with a primary challenge in 2014, praised him on Saturday for “fighting for a smaller, less obstructive, and more efficient federal government that would allow people to grow and thrive.” Her statement did not address whether she will run to succeed Enzi.

The Senate field is likely to be frozen until Cheney — already a statewide elected official — makes a decision. What she decides to do has outsized impact on House Republican politics, as well. If she runs for the Senate, it will remove a potential threat to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). If she decides to stay in the House, it's a sign she is interested in moving up in House Republican leadership in the coming years.

I will be utterly shocked if Cheney passes this up.  Like Enzi, she could easily spend a comfortable quarter-century in the Senate rather than struggling with constant campaigning and the GOP House clowns.  Unlike McCarthy, Mitch McConnell actually knows what he's doing.

Cheney could still decide not to go after Enzi's seat, but, you know, she already tried to primary him once.

Things will probably move quickly here.  We're not done with Liz by a long shot.

Sunday Long Read: Meteors And Meat-Eaters

Author Douglas Preston writes this week's Sunday Long Read for the New Yorker about what could be the greatest paleontology find in human history...if it's the real deal.

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species. 

And a graduate student named Robert DePalma claims to have found just that: the best evidence to date that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.  Scientists from all over are taking a look.

We'll know one way or the other rather soon, I would suspect.