Last Call For Hong Kong, Kablooey

At least 500,000 protesters took to the streets this weekend in Hong Kong to march against a proposed extradition law that would allow suspects of crimes to be tried and jailed in mainland China, with city Chief Executive Carrie Lam's job very much up in the air.

Hong Kong was plunged into a fresh political crisis on Sunday night after more than half a million people took to the streets to thwart a proposed extradition law that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial.

Organizers said the turnout outstripped a demonstration in 2003 when 500,000 hit the streets to challenge government plans for tighter national security laws.

Those laws were later shelved and a key government official forced to resign. Sunday’s outpouring was already raising the pressure on the administration of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her official backers in Beijing.

“She has to withdraw the bill and resign,” veteran Democratic Party lawmaker James To told crowds outside the city’s parliament and government headquarters on Sunday night.

“The whole of Hong Kong is against her.”
After To spoke, thousands were still arriving, having started the march five hours earlier, filling four lanes of a major thoroughfare. Some sat in a nearby park singing “Hallelujah” while police increased their numbers around the area.

Lam had yet to comment on the rally. The demonstration capped weeks of growing outrage in the business, diplomatic and legal communities, which fear corrosion of Hong Kong’s legal autonomy and the difficulty of ensuring basic judicial protections in mainland China.

The protest descended into violence in the early hours of Monday as several hundred protesters clashed with a similar number of police outside the city’s parliament.

Protesters charged police lines to try to force their way into the Legislative Council building, and police charged back, using pepper spray, after warning the protesters. The standoff ended in the early hours of Monday.

U.S. and European officials have issued formal warnings - concern matched by international business and human rights lobbies that fear the changes would dent Hong Kong’s rule of law. The former British colony was handed back to Chinese rule in 1997 amid guarantees of autonomy and various freedoms including a separate legal system, which many diplomats and business leaders believe is the city’s strongest remaining asset.

 This would be the equivalent of a half million people taking to the streets of New York City. People are going to pay attention, and we'll see if Lam survives.

Sunday Long Read: Laugh Through The Pain

Stephen Colbert is doing tremendously well on CBS's The Late Show in the Era of Trumpian Excess, and this week's Sunday Long Read is the comic and late night host's interview with NY Times writer David Marchese.

Even though it has been a few years since Stephen Colbert stepped out of the blowhard conservative-pundit role that he played for nearly a decade on “The Colbert Report” and into the role of, well, himself, as host of “The Late Show” on CBS, the 55-year-old’s popularity only continues to grow. His show, already No. 1 in late night, took over the top spot among viewers ages 18 to 49 earlier this year, a demographic that had long been owned by Jimmy Fallon and “The Tonight Show.” As it turns out, what Colbert and his show offer — an “explicative deconstruction of the day’s news,” as he puts it — is exactly what many people want. “It’s so confusing today,” said Colbert, who is also an executive producer on Showtime’s animated comedy “Our Cartoon President.” “And that confusion leads to anxiety, and the anxiety makes the audience want the jokes.” Which, Colbert added, is “the same reason we want to do them.”

“The Late Show” is doing very well, and there are obvious explanations you could point to: You’ve had a few years to learn how to do the job. You’re benefiting from a Trump bump. But what’s your own hunch about why the show is resonating? 

By the spring of 2016, we had figured out how I want to do a monologue: We never do setup, punch, setup, punch. Instead, it’s always, I’m going to tell back to you what happened today. When the presidential campaign came around in 2016, that helped focus us on the things that we most enjoyed, which is the news of the day. But you say “doing very well,” and I know you mean numerically.1 This is a long preamble to the real answer to your question: It’s almost as if the president is trying to cast a spell to confuse people so they cannot know the true nature of reality, and what we do is pick apart the way in which the [expletive] was sold to you. I think that’s why it’s going well. Our job is to identify the [expletive], and there’s never been more.

I remember Jon Stewart2 saying, when he was on “The Late Show,” that he was glad he wasn’t digging in the turd mines anymore. Is it ever dispiriting to spend so much time engaging with bad news? 

The metaphor that I use is that there’s this pool of radioactive sludge, which is the daily news. My job is to be lowered like carbon rods into that radioactive sludge and absorb the radiation of the insanity that happened today. Then they take me out and put me in front of the camera, and I irradiate it back at the audience at a much lower, nonlethal rad level. That’s kind of the job. It’s a transformation of the poison into something entertaining. Do I feel poisoned by doing that? Yeah, a little bit. But I get to go do the jokes. I need the audience as much as some of them say they need the show. If the show really works and it feels organic, then the poison’s drained out of me.

The suggestion there is that comedy or satire can relieve people’s tension or anxiety about the world. But as far as I can tell, no one is feeling any less tense or anxious. Do you really think the show actually performs a stress-relieving function? 

Momentarily. You know, my doctor has informed me that if I could drink less during the week, that would be good. Because that would be one of the things I would want to do when I go home: have myself an old-fashioned that could stun a buffalo. It’s relaxing at first, but your blood pressure actually goes up again the next day because you drank four ounces of Maker’s Mark the night before.

If we take that as a metaphor, where do you fit in it? 

I’m the alcohol. I might be the alcohol. I don’t know what the next day is like for anybody. If the show goes well, maybe the audience sleeps a bit better. And maybe that’s all the show should be. I have said this before, but I know that when you’re laughing, you’re not afraid.

Is that true, though? Isn’t nervous laughter a laughter that comes from fear? 

Nervous laughter is not the same thing as laughing, in my opinion. I would say nervous laughter is evidence that I’m right, because that is your body autonomically trying to relieve tension. If someone can do that for you from the outside, it relieves that tension and fear, and you are momentarily not afraid. If you’re not afraid, you can think, and we have to think our way out of this one.

It's good stuff, and yeah, Colbert is just as indispensable as he was a decade or fifteen years ago now.

Deportation Nation, Con't

To the surprise of no one, the actions Mexico agreed to take "this week" to stop the flow of asylum seekers to the US from Central America were actually agreed upon earlier this year, but Trump decided he was going to nearly break the deal in order to create news to get the Democrats (and the bad jobs report) off the front page.

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s deal was an expansion of a program to allow asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal cases proceed. But that arrangement was reached in December in a pair of painstakingly negotiated diplomatic notes that the two countries exchanged. Ms. Nielsen announced the Migrant Protection Protocols during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee five days before Christmas.

And over the past week, negotiators failed to persuade Mexico to accept a “safe third country” treaty that would have given the United States the legal ability to reject asylum seekers if they had not sought refuge in Mexico first.

Mr. Trump hailed the agreement anyway on Saturday, writing on Twitter: “Everyone very excited about the new deal with Mexico!” He thanked the president of Mexico for “working so long and hard” on a plan to reduce the surge of migration into the United States.

It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico, which he began threatening less than two weeks ago.

Having threatened Mexico with an escalating series of tariffs — starting at 5 percent and growing to 25 percent — the president faced enormous criticism from global leaders, business executives, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and members of his own staff that he risked disrupting a critical marketplace.

After nine days of uncertainty, Mr. Trump backed down and accepted Mexico’s promises.

Officials involved with talks said they began in earnest last Sunday, when Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, met over dinner with Mexico’s foreign minister. One senior government official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the closed-door negotiations that took place over several days, insisted that the Mexicans agreed to move faster and more aggressively to deter migrants than they ever have before.
Their promise to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops was larger than their previous pledge. And the Mexican agreement to accelerate the Migrant Protection Protocols could help reduce what Mr. Trump calls “catch and release” of migrants in the United States by giving the country a greater ability to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico.

Once again, I smell Stephen Miller's spoor all over this mess.  This looks like a concerted effort to bury Kirstjen Nielsen's involvement and success in these negotiations completely while buying Trump several news cycles as a bonus.

Mission accomplished there, I guess.  But the real problem is now Mexico has given in to the bully's demands, and in the immortal words of Darth Vader in Empire...

Last Call For The Bad Sons

The Trump crime family doesn't pay their bills.  Dear old Dad doesn't, so why does anyone think Eric and Don Junior would ever pick up the tab?

THEY ENJOYED a warm welcome during their tour around the pubs of Doonbeg, but Eric and Donald Trump Jr may have forgotten one important detail from their epic bar crawl – the bill.

Donald Trump’s sons poses for pictures and pulled pints during a memorable night for the Co Clare town that left more than a few with sore heads the next day.

Caroline Kennedy, the owner of Igoe bar and restaurant, was full of praise of Eric and Donald Jr.

She told the Irish Mirror: "They were so lovely and down to earth and gave a great hello to everyone. I said, ‘Come on lads you have to come in and pull a drink’ so they did."

"They were so nice, they came into the restaurant and the local priest Fr Haugh presented them with a picture of the two castles of Doonbeg.

"They thanked everyone for their support and for coming out to meet them and said there was a drink for everyone in the house and it was their small gesture."

Unfortunately, when it came time to footing the bill, things hit a slight snag with neither of the brothers carrying any cash. 

Kennedy isn’t worried though, having been assured the hefty bar bill would be paid for.

"I don’t think we’ve to worry about getting paid for that," she said.

"I don’t think they carry cash. We were told it’d be all sorted later so there’s no problem.

Sure they will.

If this isn't a perfect metaphor for the Trump crime family so far, I don't know what is.

Deportation Nation, Con't

It seems that Mexico's offer to put federal troops on its southern border area with Guatemala was enough to get Trump to fold on tariffs for now.

President Donald Trump said Friday he will not put tariffs on Mexico after all, saying it has agreed to take new measures to stop the illegal flow of migrants into the United States.

"The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended," the president tweeted.

He added: "Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border."

Mexico Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard in a tweet confirmed the agreement. In a separate tweet, he thanked all who supported Mexico through its negotiations with the United States.

Mexican Ambassador Martha Bárcena also wrote in a tweet translated into English: After several days of negotiations and 12 hours today in the State Department, we reached an agreement with the United States to address the humanitarian crisis stemming from the recent migratory flows that have affected our two countries.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement said the joint obligations that the U.S. and Mexico negotiated will benefit both countries.

"The United States looks forward to working alongside Mexico to fulfill these commitments so that we can stem the tide of illegal migration across our southern border and to make our border strong and secure," Pompeo said.

But as I said earlier, once you give in to the bully...

Both countries agreed to "take further actions" if the measures adopted do not result in limiting migrants seeking asylum. It is unclear at the moment what the new actions might be. It is also unclear how the U.S. and Mexico will measure results.

Want to know what really happened on Friday to make Trump fold?

Job creation decelerated strongly in May, with nonfarm payrolls up by just 75,000 even as the unemployment rate remained at a 50-year low, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The decline was the second in four months that payrolls increased by less than 100,000 as the labor market continues to show signs of weakening. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 180,000.

In addition to the weak total for May, the previous two months’ reports saw substantial downward revisions. March’s count fell from 189,000 to 153,000 and the April total was taken down to 224,000 from 263,000, for a total reduction of 75,000 jobs.

Stock futures fell and bond yields dropped in reaction to the report. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures turned negativebefore reversing course and turning positive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to its lowest level since September 2017.

With the downward revisions, zero net jobs were created in May.

Zero.

Even Trump can count that high.  So he declared victory and ran.  Mexican tariffs will cost the US millions of jobs and he knows it. He's used up all his economic cushion losing to China.  He doesn't have anything left to hide job losses of a Mexican trade war.  The one thing keeping him in office is the economy he inherited, and he's coming close to breaking it now.

He'll try again of course, but it sure took that awful jobs number off the front page, didn't it?

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Last night we reached new depths of FOX News being Trump State Media, in a performance from Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity that would have Goebbels applauding for hours. Greg Sargent details the atrocities:

In his interview with Ingraham, Trump ripped into Pelosi for privately saying she wants to see Trump “in prison.” He blasted Pelosi as a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person” and claimed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report was a “disaster” that produced “nothing” (an incalculable absurdity, given its incredibly damning revelations). 

Trump also insisted that Mueller produced a letter to “straighten out” his recent public remarks, which were “wrong” (as Steve Benen shows, Mueller in no way backed off his devastating core assertions). And Trump called the investigation a “phony witch hunt,” absurdly suggesting the Russian attack on our political system, which Mueller extensively documented, was a big nothing never worth investigating.

“I think they’re in big trouble,” Trump said of Pelosi and Democrats, “when you look at the kind of crimes that were committed.”

This echoed Trump’s long-running argument that the only corruption that occurred was the Russia investigation itself, perpetrated by law enforcement and Democrats, an absurd rewriting of basic history that has generated one buffoonish pratfall after another.

Naturally, Hannity picked up this baton, tearing into Pelosi for wanting “a political opponent locked up in prison,” which “happens in banana republics".

Hannity also claimed it’s an “irrefutable fact that there was no collusion.” This is a severe distortion: Mueller said “collusion” isn’t a legally meaningful term and documented extensive efforts by Trump World to encourage, profit off, and, yes, conspire with the Russian attack. Hannity suggested Democrats “don’t state” what they believe Trump has done wrong — a ridiculous lie, since this is amply laid out in Democratic documents.

It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty — some level of artifice is an inevitable feature of politics — but rather is something much more insidious. What’s notable is the sheer comprehensiveness of the effort to create an alternate set of realities whose departure from the known facts seemingly aims to be absolute and unbridgeable.

As many have noted, it’s richly absurd that Hannity is claiming Pelosi is engaging in “banana republic” stuff, given that Trump has called for investigations into his political opponents for years. Indeed, in the Ingraham interview, Trump blasted Pelosi over this, then immediately segued into suggesting that Democrats will soon be held accountable for imagined crimes.

But this absurd duality should be understood as a feature of this kind of Trumpian disinformation. It won’t do to note its self-contradictory nature. The whole point is to wield this kind of absurdity as an instrument of power. It’s to use an alternate reality to supplant and extinguish good faith efforts to discern actual reality — to blot out the possibility of shared agreement on facts that are in front of all our noses through the sheer insistence that the alternate reality is supreme. The alt-reality doesn’t have to be proved as the true one; just established as the dominant one.

And this method is how Trump is going to start throwing his political enemies in jail in mass quantities.  The narrative is whatever Trump says it is, he has people to tell America this, and they listen.

And they obey.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Americans want Roe v Wade to remain the law of the land in a new NPR poll, but they also are overwhelmingly okay with restrictions on availability of abortion, and the group most likely to support restrictions is, surprise, Republican women.

The poll comes as several states have pushed to limit abortions in hopes of getting the Supreme Court to reconsider the issue. Abortion-rights opponents hope the newly conservative court will either overturn Roe or effectively gut it by upholding severe restrictions. The survey finds that while most Americans favor limiting abortion, they don't want it to be illegal and don't want to go as far as states like Alabama, for example, which would ban it completely except if the woman's life is endangered or health is at risk.

A total of 77% say the Supreme Court should uphold Roe, but within that there's a lot of nuance — 26% say they would like to see it remain in place, but with more restrictions added; 21% want to see Roe expanded to establish the right to abortion under any circumstance; 16% want to keep it the way it is; and 14% want to see some of the restrictions allowed under Roe reduced. Just 13% overall say it should be overturned.

Even though Americans are solidly against overturning Roe, a majority would also like to see abortion restricted in various ways. In a separate question, respondents were asked which of six choices comes closest to their view of abortion policy.

In all, 61% said they were in favor of a combination of limitations that included allowing abortion in just the first three months of a pregnancy (23%); only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman (29%); or only to save the life of the woman (9%).

And again, the biggest driving factor against abortion in 2019 are Republican women, even more so than Republican men.

The most acute divide among Americans on the issue of abortion, arguably, is not a gender divide but between the parties — and of women of different parties.

For example, 54% of men identified as "pro-choice," compared with 60% of women. For women of the different parties, 77% of Democratic women identified as "pro-choice," while 68% of Republican women identified as "pro-life." (A lower percentage of Republican men, 59%, considered themselves "pro-life.")

Throughout the poll, the divide was stark. On Roe, for example, 62% of Republican women said overturn it or add restrictions; 73% of Democratic women said keep it the way it is, expand it to allow abortions under any circumstance or reduce some of the restrictions.
Eighty-four percent of Democratic women said they are more likely to support state laws that decriminalize abortion and make laws less strict; 62% of Republican women said they are more likely to support laws that criminalize abortion or make laws stricter.

On requiring insurance companies to cover abortion procedures, 75% of Democratic women support that, while 78% of Republican women oppose it, higher than the 63% of Republican men who said the same.

Republican women also stand out for the 62% of them who said they oppose laws that allow abortion at any time during pregnancy in cases of rape or incest. They are the only group to voice majority opposition to that. Fifty-nine percent of Republican men, for example, said they would support such a law.

And Republican women are the only group to say overwhelmingly that life begins at conception. About three-quarters said so, compared with less than half of Republican men and a third of Democratic women.

It's a reminder that Republican women, in many ways, are the backbone of the movement opposing abortion rights.

As long as women are happily signing away their own bodies to men in order to force other women to do so, we remain on the road to Gilead.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Mexico is actually making a serious effort to stave off Trump's tariffs, but the Obrador government just doesn't understand that once you pay the bully, he always ups the toll. 

U.S. and Mexican officials are discussing the outlines of a deal that would dramatically increase Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts and give the United States far more latitude to deport Central Americans seeking asylum, according to a U.S. official and a Mexican official who cautioned that the accord is not final and that President Trump might not accept it. 

Faced with Trump’s threat to impose steadily rising tariffs on goods imported from Mexico beginning Monday, Mexican officials have pledged to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops to the area of the country’s border with Guatemala, a show of force they say will make immediate reductions in the number of Central Americans heading north toward the U.S. border.

The Mexican official and the U.S. official said the countries are negotiating a sweeping plan to overhaul asylum rules across the region, a move that would require Central Americans to seek refuge in the first country in which they arrive after leaving their homeland. 

Under such a plan, the United States would swiftly deport to Mexico any Guatemalan asylum seekers who set foot on U.S. soil. And the United States would send Honduran and Salvadoran asylum applicants to Guatemala, whose government held talks last week with acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan. Central American migrants who express a fear of death or torture if they are repatriated would be interviewed by U.S. asylum officers to determine whether the chances of such harm were more likely than not — a screening standard with a greater likelihood of rejection than current procedures. 

Mexico has repeatedly said it will not accept the kind of “Safe Third Country” agreement that the United States has with Canada, a pact that requires asylum seekers to apply for refuge in whichever country they first arrive in, as each is considered safe. But the Mexican official said the government is willing to make asylum changes for the sake of a coordinated regional approach.

Mexican negotiators also have made clear that they will withdraw their offers if Trump imposes the tariffs, telling their U.S. counterparts that the economic damage would undermine Mexico’s ability to afford tougher immigration enforcement.

The problem with reasonable, good faith efforts like Mexico's here in response to belligerent bully tactics is the bully always smashes you in the face again while yelling "What else ya got?"

The correct response for Mexico is hardball, not appeasement.  Closing the Nuevo Laredo crossing for "repairs" for instance for all southbound traffic for a week might get the attention of some big corporate donor types, for example.

But this plan?  It's already dead on arrival, hombre.

President Trump is planning to declare a new national emergency in order to implement sweeping tariffs on Mexico over the flow of Central American migrants to the U.S., according to a draft document of the declaration reviewed by The Hill. 

According to the document, the new emergency is necessary due to “the failure of the Government of Mexico to take effective action to reduce the mass migration of aliens illegally crossing into the United States through Mexico.” 

The new emergency declaration would follow a February emergency declaration, which Trump used to justify sending National Guard troops to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the southern border. 

The draft document signals that the White House believes that imposing the tariffs under the February emergency declaration might not pass legal muster. But it remains unclear if a final decision has been made to invoke another emergency. The White House did not answer questions about the document. 

Officials from the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department floated the idea of a new declaration this week during a closed-door meeting with Republican senators. 

The White House has said it plans to impose the tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to take unilateral action to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat” in times of national emergency. 

But a new national emergency is likely to spark widespread opposition on Capitol Hill from Republicans and Democrats who say Trump is overstepping his tariff authority and also could draw fresh legal challenges.

So all those Republican Senators worried about how tariffs would affect constituents in 2020 folded in just a couple of days as they were told what Trump was going to do, and that they were going along with it.

And don't expect a Roberts Court that sided with Trump on his Muslim ban to lift a finger here.

Like I said, give in to the bully once...

StupidiNews!

• School district officials in Jefferson County, Colorado are considering demolishing Columbine High School due to a "morbid fascination" with the infamous campus shooting there 20 years ago.
• Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani is leaving Donald Trump's legal team, saying his presence is "no longer needed".
• Major automakers are trying to broker an emissions standards deal between California and the Trump regime, saying failure to do so would lead to "litigation and instability".
• Under heavy pressure from Democrats, former VP Joe Biden now says he supports federal money being used for abortions by eliminating the Hyde Amendment.
• The 2019 measles outbreak in the US has now exceeded 1,000 cases as anti-vaccine activists held a disinformation rally in New York this week.

Last Call For It's The Economy, Dems

Here's why Joe Biden is ahead right now: white Democratic voters are almost solely concerned with health care and climate change, but for black and Hispanic Dems, it's health care and jobs as the Great Recession wiped out black and Hispanic wealth in 2007 and we're still dealing with that 12 years later.

A key base of support for the Democratic Party, black America, is lagging in its recovery from the recession and demanding more attention to economic issues than white voters. That divide could complicate presidential contenders’ attempts to woo African-American votes in 2020.

A decade after the financial crisis, with national employment below 4 percent and wage gains slowly accelerating for typical workers, white Democrats largely see economic issues as a lower priority, according to polling conducted for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. The opposite is true for African-Americans, who are struggling even as the economy is growing relatively fast, and who want candidates to focus on job creation above all else.

Black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to say they benefit “less than most others” from the current economy. They are significantly more likely than whites to call jobs and the economy the most important issue facing the nation. White Democrats are significantly more likely to cite health care as the top issue, followed by the environment, with jobs a distant third.

The difference holds even when controlling for age, education, employment status and other voter traits that are not related to race.

“There has been an economic boom for some people but not enough people, and certainly not enough people who look like me,” said Joyce Wilson Harley, a survey respondent and former Democratic elected official in South Orange, N.J.

Ms. Harley, who is black, said she was doing fine financially. But she said she didn’t have to look far to see people who were struggling. And she said mainstream Democrats, including many presidential candidates, had focused too little on jobs, wages and other core economic issues. If Democrats were listening to black voters, she said, “you’d be hearing more about economic opportunities.”

“It’s almost like they don’t get it,” Ms. Harley, 68, said. “The black women who carry the party, we were ignored and really highly disrespected, and our issues weren’t as important to the Democrats as they should be given that we’re the base of the Democratic Party.”

And the guy whose stump speeches every time are about how Trump is wrecking jobs and how he wants to bring back the good things Obama did is winning because that's what black and Hispanic voters want to get fixed.

Yes, Joe Biden is bullshit on Anita Hill, he's bullshit on the Clinton Crime Bill, he's bullshit on the Hyde Amendment.  But he's got a lot of juice with black folk especially for being Obama's veep, and he's talking jobs that are passing us by in the era of Trump's white supremacist bullshit.

Next week Trump's Mexico tariffs go into effect.  That's going to be a direct tax on American consumers and the folks who can afford it the least are gonna be black and Hispanic.  I want to hear Democrats shouting this fact from the mountaintops.

Everyone says the economy is "good".  It's not.  It's getting worse, and quickly, for those of us on the margins.  Joe Biden, for all his patriarchal Good Catholic space-invading carcerial state garbage, actually seems to understand that the most.

The point is, if other Dems hit this same message?  Other Dems who were, you know, better candidates overall than Biden, without sliding into "we've got to win back white working class America!" territory?

There's your path.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Nancy Pelosi is not going to allow impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump anytime soon, and she's not giving an inch on the matter.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi told senior Democrats that she’d like to see President Donald Trump “in prison” as she clashed with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler in a meeting on Tuesday night over whether to launch impeachment proceedings.

Pelosi met with Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several other top Democrats who are aggressively pursuing investigations against the president, according to multiple sources. Nadler and other committee leaders have been embroiled in a behind-the-scenes turf battle for weeks over ownership of the Democrats’ sprawling investigation into Trump.

Nadler pressed Pelosi to allow his committee to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump — the second such request he’s made in recent weeks only to be rebuffed by the California Democrat and other senior leaders. Pelosi stood firm, reiterating that she isn’t open to the idea of impeaching Trump at this time.

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison,” Pelosi said, according to multiple Democratic sources familiar with the meeting. Instead of impeachment, Pelosi still prefers to see Trump defeated at the ballot box and then prosecuted for his alleged crimes, according to the sources.
They said she was expressing solidarity with pro-impeachment Democrats who want to hold the president accountable while disputing the idea that it is now time to take that step. Pelosi has long argued that certain conditions must be met before Democrats begin impeachment — public support and strong bipartisan backing, neither of which have so far materialized.

Other Democrats said Pelosi’s comment wasn’t that surprising given her previous criticisms of the president, including saying Trump “is engaged in a cover-up,” that his staff and family should stage an intervention and that the president’s actions “are villainous to the Constitution of the United States.”

Ashley Etienne, a Pelosi spokeswoman said Pelosi and the chairmen “had a productive meeting about the state of play with the Mueller report. They agreed to keep all options on the table and continue to move forward with an aggressive hearing and legislative strategy, as early as next week, to address the president’s corruption and abuses of power uncovered in the report.”

Pelosi is counting on the House Democratic hearings this month to generate the kind of public support for impeachment.  FOX News won't cover them at all, of course, and who knows what Trump will do to knock the hearings off the front page?

We may already have the answer to that question.

The United Arab Emirates will present to U.N. Security Council members on Thursday the results of an investigation into attacks targeting four oil tanker vessels off the UAE coast last month, two diplomats said.

The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the briefing was expected to take place at the UAE Mission to the United Nations at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). One diplomat said Saudi Arabia and Norway were also expected to take part in the briefing.

Abu Dhabi-based television channel Sky News Arabia first reported the briefing.

U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said on May 29 that the attacks were the work of “naval mines almost certainly from Iran”. Tehran denied the accusations.

The UAE wants a US war with Iran even more than John Bolton's mustache does.  Stay tuned.

Checking The Tech Wreck Spec, Con't

With both the Trump regime and House Democrats going after Big Tech, the corporate tech giants are already well into the counterattack, and it's money money money all the way down.

Faced with the growing possibility of antitrust actions and legislation to curb their power, four of the biggest technology companies are amassing an army of lobbyists as they prepare for what could be an epic fight over their futures. 

Initially slow to develop a presence in Washington, the tech giants — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — have rapidly built themselves into some of the largest players in the influence and access industry as they confront threats from the Trump administration and both parties on Capitol Hill. 

The four companies spent a combined $55 million on lobbying last year, doubling their combined spending of $27.4 million in 2016, and some are spending at a higher rate so far this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying and political contributions. That puts them on a par with long-established lobbying powerhouses like the defense, automobile and banking industries. 

As they have tracked increasing public and political discontent with their size, power, handling of user data and role in elections, the four companies have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

Of the 238 people registered to lobby for the four companies in the first three months of this year — both in-house employees and those on contract from lobbying and law firms — about 75 percent formerly served in the government or on political campaigns, according to an analysis of lobbying and employment records. Many worked in offices or for officials who could have a hand in deciding the course of the new governmental scrutiny. 

The influence campaigns encompass a broad range of activities, including calls on members of Congress, advertising, funding of think-tank research and efforts to get the attention of President Trump, whose on-again, off-again streak of economic populism is of particular concern to the big companies.

Last month, the industry lobbying group, the Internet Association, which represents Amazon, Facebook and Google, awarded its Internet Freedom Award to Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and White House senior adviser.

“They are no longer upstarts dipping a toe in lobbying,” said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “They have both feet in.”

Considering the stock price hammering they got on Monday with announcement of Justice Department and House Judiciary Committee action against them was worth way more than $55 million, they'd consider straight purchase of lawmakers to be a hell of an investment.  And unlike the big banks and defense contractors, they have more money to burn.

This is going to get nasty, and quick.

StupidiNews!

• Indian military officials say a plane carrying 13 people has vanished, search operations were suspended Wednesday due to heavy rain.
• China has hit US automaker Ford with a nearly $24 million fine for "price fixing" as the trade war between Donald Trump and Beijing continues.
• Denmark's Social Democrat party has prevailed in national elections, meaning party leader Mette Fredericksen could become the youngest Prime Minister in the country's history.
• Despite Donald Trump's tweets of "no deal" the US and Mexico remain in trade talks as the deadline for tariffs on all Mexican imports looms on Monday.
• YouTube is finally taking action against white supremacists and Holocaust deniers on its videos, but critics point out the service still allows individuals to be targeted and attacked by harassers.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

It's the Trump regime way: create a crisis, profit from it, then make it worse.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is charged with caring for unaccompanied migrant children, is "scaling back" or canceling activities at shelters, citing the need for more resources. 

A swell of migrants crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the agency's facilities, which house unaccompanied children until they are placed with a sponsor in the United States. The shelters provide schooling and activities for the children during their stay, but the increase of children arriving to the border has strained the department's resources. 

"This week, ORR instructed grantees to begin scaling back or discontinuing awards for (unaccompanied minors) activities that are not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation," Evelyn Stauffer, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, said in a statement. 

The Washington Post first reported the decision to scale back or stop some programs.
The office receives referrals from the Department of Homeland Security, which tries to move unaccompanied children out of its custody within 72 hours. 

As of April 30, the office has been sent around 40,900 children this fiscal year, putting the agency on track to care for the largest number of unaccompanied children in the program's history.

Forty. Thousand.  Kids.

And Trump is taking away everything that makes them human.

Adam Serwer was right.  The cruelty is the point.

But the real cruelty will begin when these kids are deported back to their countries of origin with no family and no hope.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

In what shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, it turns out that Russia's infiltration of Twitter ahead, during, and after the 2016 election was far worse than reported and we're seeing the exact same warning signs now as Russia is using social media to manipulate Americans' political stances on specific candidates.

Russia's infamous troll farm conducted a campaign on Twitter before the 2016 elections that was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known, researchfrom cybersecurity firm Symantec out Wednesday concluded.

The Internet Research Agency campaign may not only have had more sway — reaching large numbers of real users — than previously thought, it also demonstrated ample patience and might have generated income for some of the phony accounts, Symantec found. 

The company analyzed a massive data set Twitter released in October 2018 on nearly 3,900 accounts and 10 million tweets.

The research discovered that the average lag between account creation and first tweet was 177 days. The most retweeted account garnered 6 million retweets, and less than 2,000 of those came from within the IRA-linked network of accounts. The huge delay points to a lot of patient preparation, and the retweets indicate that a lot of unaffiliated Twitter users were amplifying the IRA's message.

While most of the accounts were automated, they frequently demonstrated evidence of manual manipulation, such as slight wording changes in an apparent bid to dodge detection, according to Symantec.

"While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that," the company wrote. "It was planned months in advance and the operators had the resources to create and manage a vast disinformation network."

Some accounts also appeared to generate revenue via URL shorteners, with one account even earning as much as $1 million, although those were apparently rogue accounts operating outside the IRA's main mission.

The research also found that the accounts played to both sides of the aisle more than previously believed, and that most of them were fakes pretending to be regional news outlets, while a smaller subset amplified those messages.

"The campaign directed propaganda at both sides of the liberal/conservative political divide in the U.S., in particular the more disaffected elements of both camps," Symantec found.

And the company warned in the closing message of its study: "The sheer scale and impact of this propaganda campaign is obviously of deep concern to voters in all countries, who may fear a repeat of what happened in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016."

And remember, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are doing everything they can to block any and all efforts to harden US internet against Russian operations like this.

They fully expect Russia to win them power again in 2020.  And Russia did such a good job that they actually made substantial Twitter ad revenue off the platform.  No wonder Twitter didn't bother to shut them down until last year.