Last Call For Separation Of Church And State Department

Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, like many large universities, get grants from the federal government to develop skills employers want, in this case, language skills necessary to help the State Department and intel community's insatiable need for countries and cultures of the Middle East.  No surprise here, this has been going on since 9/11.

What's new is that the Trump regime has decided that these NC schools aren't sufficiently portraying Islam as a threat to white Christian America enough, and that teaching people about Farsi or Arabic that also actually includes sufficient cultural context of Islam in the Islamic world is a problem, so much so to the racist, Islamophobic Trump regime that they are demanding this thorough and objective portrayal of 2 billion people as "not savages" be stopped immediately or all federal funding will be cut.

The Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, arguing that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance “ideological priorities” and unfairly promote “the positive aspects of Islam” but not Christianity or Judaism. 

An Aug. 29 letter from the U.S. Education Department orders the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies to revise its offerings by Sept. 22 or risk losing future funding from a federal grant that’s awarded to dozens of universities to support foreign language instruction. The consortium received $235,000 from the grant last year, according to Education Department data. 

A statement from the UNC-Chapel Hill says the consortium “deeply values its partnership with the Department of Education” and is “committed to working with the department to provide more information about its programs.” Officials at Duke declined to comment. The Education Department declined to say if it’s examining similar programs at other schools. 

Academic freedom advocates say the government could be setting a dangerous precedent if it injects politics into funding decisions. Some said they had never heard of the Education Department asserting control over such minute details of a program’s offerings. 

“Is the government now going to judge funding programs based on the opinions of instructors or the approach of each course?” said Henry Reichman, chairman of a committee on academic freedom for the American Association of University Professors. “The odor of right wing political correctness that comes through this definitely could have a chilling effect.” 

More than a dozen universities receive National Resource Center grants for their Middle East programs, including Columbia, Georgetown, Yale and the University of Texas. The Duke-UNC consortium was founded in 2005 and first received the grant nearly a decade ago. 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ordered an investigation into the program in June after North Carolina Rep. George Holding, a Republican, complained that it hosted a taxpayer-funded conference with “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” The conference, titled “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities,” included a rapper who performed a “brazenly anti-Semitic song,” Holding said in an April 15 letter.

In a response , DeVos said she was “troubled” by Holding’s letter and would take a closer look at the consortium.

The inquiry joins a broader Education Department effort to root out anti-Semitism at U.S. universities. Speaking at a summit on the topic in July, DeVos attacked a movement to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, calling it a “pernicious threat” on college campuses.

Betsy DeVos deciding that insufficient Islamophobia equals anti-Semitic teachings should concern everybody, regardless of religion.  But it's very interesting that Antisemitism here is described solely as "being critical of Israel". 

As I keep saying, we live in dark times.

Tidal Wave Of Trickery

With Donald Trump once again tweeting a red bullseye on Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar's head with his latest vile lie, Greg Sargent asks if Dems are ready for the coming flood of fecal foolery that will be the 2020 Trump campaign.

On Wednesday, President Trump used his Twitter feed to share a video that falsely depicted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) partying on the anniversary of 9/11. Yes, the president of the United States cheerfully trafficked in disinformation. 

This fact didn’t concern Trump in the slightest, since it afforded him the opportunity to thrill his followers with a disgusting display of anti-Muslim bigotry — or so he seemed to believe, anyway, which doesn’t speak too highly of Trump’s view of his supporters. 

You can find the whole backstory here. Trump retweeted a tweet from one of his favorite conspiracy theorists — one whose work he has amplified before — that had pirated a video of Omar dancing on another occasion from another tweet. Trump declared: “The new face of the Democrat Party!” 

Which raises a question: Are Democrats prepared for the tsunami of shamelessly propagandistic media manipulation and rank disinformation tactics that Trump and his network will unleash during the coming election?

One, Trump's stochastic terrorism is absolutely going to get at least one Democratic politician hurt or killed before the end of the 2020 campaign, that's a near-guarantee.   I truly hope Capitol Police are taking steps to protect Rep. Omar from, well, Donald Trump.

Two, the Democrats are completely unprepared for the ballistic barrage of bullshit coming.

One way to combat this problem that Democrats have discussed concerns adopting a kind of official party doctrine about the scourge of disinformation. Politico recently reported that Democratic state chairs are urging the Democratic National Committee to adopt a pledge in which the party and its committees and all leading candidates would forswear the use of such tactics, as well as vow not to utilize information obtained through hacks and other illicit means. 

The basic idea here is that the party should stand for the principle that all this amounts to an extremely serious state of affairs for liberal democracy. It’s a component of a much larger international trend in rising illiberal authoritarianism, and the broader goal is to undermine confidence in shared facts, information gathered in good faith and institutional sources of empirical inquiry as the basis for democratic deliberation.
Joe Biden has spoken about the problem in these sorts of terms. Yet it’s not clear the DNC is willing to adopt a pledge like this. 

Another approach has been to pressure social media companies. Beto O’Rourke’s campaign recently took this tack after a conspiracy theory falsely connected O’Rourke to the gunman who carried out recent mass murders in Texas. 

The claim was amplified by a couple of shadowy but prominent allies of Trump — which makes this a preview of what we’re likely to see directed at the Democratic nominee. 

In response, the O’Rourke campaign sent letters to top executives at Twitter, Facebook and Google, pointing out that these platforms are “being used every day to proliferate misinformation,” and “if they don’t do better in 2020, we may lose our democracy forever.” 

One move here might be to continue raising a big fuss in demanding more action by tech companies, though it’s not clear how much it will help. 

Still another idea, suggested by Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, is for many elements of the party to try to come together to forge a grand strategy for proactively combating disinformation. 

This might involve multiple party committees investing real money in people and technology designed to track and “out” disinformation, officials from party committees and leading campaigns agreeing to work together against the problem, and possibly even enlisting armies of outside supporters to swarm social media to snuff out disinformation before it gains traction. 

And, of course, another question is whether the news media is prepared for all of these possibilities.

A combination of all three responses would be most effective, as they address three different areas of the same problem, stopping Democrats from using misinformation, stopping the spread through social media, and proactively countering it are all needed.

But it's that lst observation, whether the media is ready, that's actually more important.

They're not.  Trump will string them along like puppets.  We've already seen them dance to his lies and repeat them constantly and uncritically.  Cutting Trump off from his supply of media glory would hurt him the most, but that will never happen.  Our media would never dare.

And so they will be part of the problem more than the solution.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Again, ever since the Barr Justice Department made it clear they were seeking a grand jury indictment against forme FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the leaks from the intel community against the Trump regime have stepped up considerably.

As part of that fight, last week House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff issued a subpoena to the office Director of National Intelligence over a formal whistleblower complaint that Schiff says was never acted upon.  The DNI's office refused to give the complaint to Schiff and things are getting very tense.  Greg Sargent:

The latest development: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that he will not forward a whistleblower’s complaint to the committee, as required by law.

Yet the legal rationale for refusing to do this appears specious — and raises further questions as to why this is happening at all.

This all started when Schiff announced that the Inspector General at the ODNI had alerted him to a whistleblower’s complaint that had been submitted to him. Schiff noted that the IG assessed the complaint as “credible.”

But as Schiff noted, the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has not forwarded the complaint to the Intelligence Committee.
There is a process for whistleblowers in such situations, one that has been established by federal law. A whistleblower must first submit a complaint to the IG, who determines whether it’s an “urgent concern” and “credible.” If so, the DNI “shall” forward the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees.

The idea here is that this process allows a member of the intelligence community to raise concerns about potential lawbreaking or other abuses with Congress, so it can exercise oversight over those abuses, while ensuring that classified information remains protected. This is done via the independent inspector general at first, insulating the whistleblower against agency-head retaliation, which is also provided for in the statute.

In this case, Schiff announced, the inspector general notified the committee that this whistleblower’s complaint did constitute an urgent concern and is credible — yet Maguire still hadn’t forwarded the complaint and relevant associated materials to the committee.

So Schiff called on the DNI to forward the materials, and if he failed to do that, to appear before Congress on Thursday.

Now Maguire has sent a new letter to Schiff once again refusing to forward the complaint.

But late last night the stakes on the mysterious complaint became huge.

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. 

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.

And now things become clear.  The DNI's office was almost certainly instructed by Bill Barr to ignore the law on the complaint because it directly involved Donald Trump doing something wildly inappropriate and quite possibly illegal to boot.

So the question is, who is the foreign leader, and what promise was made?  Off the top of my head, I can think of five leaders who would fit the bill of getting a wild Trump promise:

• Russia's Vladimir Putin
• Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan
• Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky
• UK's Boris Johnson
• Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu

There's also our strongman in Venezuela, Juan Guaido as a possibility, but he's not leader of the country.  Not yet, anyway, and not without, say, a promise of US military intervention.  Still, a long shot.

At this level of the game, the whistleblower would definitely earn every bit of Trump's seething vengeance against those he sees as disloyal to him.  It's also somebody who would have had access to Trump's conversations with foreign leaders, which means they have serious clearance and responsibilities.  Finally, it's somebody who came forward to burn Trump on this, the promise being so outlandish that the person felt the need to essentially end their career and to risk facing almost certain Justice Department harassment and possible prosecution.

It's a mystery to be sure, but I bet we're going to get answers, and soon.  Bonus exit question: is this the reason why former DNI Dan Coats resigned, because he was told by Barr to spike this whistleblower request, knowing full well what it was?

Leaks can be deadly, you know.  Trump pissed off the wrong people.

StupidiNews!

• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is apologizing for a 2001 incident in which he dressed up in blackface while a working as a teacher at a Vancouver school.
• Furious pushback from conservative groups and the NRA have all but scuttled Wednesday's White House proposal to support a bipartisan Senate firearms background check bill.
• Donald Trump is seeking options to deal with Iran short of military action including new sanctions as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Saudi Arabia.
• After the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter-point on Wednesday, Donald Trump  blasted Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on Twitter.
• A new study finds half of US homes will still not have access to fiber broadband by 2025, and it would take $70 billion to upgrade infrastructure to get that number to 90% by then.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

On one hand, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is furious at the way former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski treated Tuesday's House Judiciary hearing as a joke and as a national platform for his US Senate ambitions.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a group of lawmakers Wednesday evening that Corey Lewandowski should have been held in contempt “right then and there” when he talked over members, dodged their questions and promoted his Senate campaign from a House hearing. 

In a small huddle with lawmakers from across the caucus, Pelosi (D-Calif.) complained that no witness should be able to treat members of Congress like President Trump’s former campaign manager did during a Tuesday hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, according to three people familiar with the exchange. 

“I would have held him in contempt right then and there,” she said.

Several lawmakers in the room took her remarks as a dig at House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who chose not to hold Lewandowski in contempt for his defiant behavior on Tuesday.

Technically, staff would have had to draft up a contempt resolution to vote on in committee. And Democrats thought it would be better to keep the focus on Trump.

Others, however, were outraged and feel like the committee looked weak for not responding. The panel, however, could choose to move forward with contempt at a later day.

Pelosi spokeswoman Ashley Etienne confirmed the exchange, saying in a statement that “in a meeting today, a member commented on the level of disrespect that Lewandowski displayed at the hearing for the Committee and Congress’s authority to uncover the truth.”

“Speaker Pelosi agreed that his behavior was beyond the pale and contemptible,” she said. “The Speaker went on to say that he could have been held in contempt right then and there.”

On the other hand, she also is furious at House Judiciary Democrats for wanting to impeach.

In a closed-door meeting last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stunned lawmakers and aides with a swipe at Democratic staff on the House Judiciary Committee. 

Pelosi criticized the panel’s handling of impeachment in harsh terms, complaining committee aides have advanced the push for ousting President Donald Trump far beyond where the House Democratic Caucus stands. Democrats simply don’t have the votes on the floor to impeach Trump, Pelosi said. 

“And you can feel free to leak this,” Pelosi added, according to multiple people in the room. Pelosi’s office declined to comment on the meeting. 

It was the latest sign of the widening schism between Pelosi and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, two longtime allies who are increasingly in conflict over where to guide the party at one of its most critical moments. 

Both Pelosi and Nadler, who have served in the House together for more than 25 years, insist their relationship remains strong. But their rift over impeachment is getting harder and harder to paper over amid Democrats’ flailing messaging on the topic and a growing divide in the caucus. 

Whether the two veteran lawmakers can get on the same page will determine whether the party avoids a rupture that threatens its chances of holding on to the House majority and beating Trump in 2020. 

“I think the speaker wants to be careful of all the different members of the caucus,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a vocal impeachment advocate. “She doesn’t always want to use the word ‘impeachment’ but believe me, she signed off on every piece of what has been put forward.”

Pelosi's going to need far more than just the 55-60%  of House Dems currently favoring impeachment, and it's pretty clear that enough of them don't want to proceed...and never will.

So, Pelosi can be mad at Jerry Nadler all she wants to be, but if she keeps walking down the middle of the road on this issue, she's going to get run over by a truck eventually.

On the gripping hand, Lewandowski did all but admit to obstruction of justice once Democratic party lawyers at the hearing got a hold of his ass.

As it turns out, though, the morning session with all the committee members having their say was just the warm-up act. In its vote last week, the committee had passed a rule allowing staff counsel to pose questions for half an hour in these public impeachment hearings. Barry Berke, a lawyer for the Democratic members, then took over the hearing and it was like night and day. 

Most of the press has focused on the moment when Berke cornered Lewandowski by showing that he lied repeatedly on television about this incident and his interactions with the Mueller team. After much hemming and hawing his explanation was "I have no obligation to be honest with the media because they are just as dishonest as everybody else." (Who else? )

But Berke teased out another colorful detail that has passed unnoticed. Despite the White House order that Lewandowski shouldn't speak of any conversations with the president other than those specifically referenced in the Mueller report, it turns out that he has written a couple of books one of which is called "Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency." It features many conversations with the president, which the White House apparently had no objections to publishing. One of the anecdotes has Trump suggesting to Lewandowski that he might join the administration at the level of Jared Kushner to run the Russia 2016 election interference investigation. 

As Berke went on with his relentless fusillade of questions, Lewandowski became increasingly distressed. He had repeatedly claimed that he had never read the Mueller report. As Berke's 30 minutes were almost done, he asked Lewandowski whether he took the report lightly, reminding him that he had been autographing copies of the report just last week, while joking that he couldn't sign every page where his name appeared because there were too many of them. Lewandowski became upset and said:

I'm outraged at your characterization of my statements. Never have I said that, never have I called into question the validity of the Mueller Report or alluded to the fact that I wanted Russia to interfere ... 

Every time one of the principal figures confirms the Mueller report, another impeachment count gets its wings. 

Whereas Lewandowski had been cocky and derisive toward the members in the early session, he was crumbling after 30 minutes of solid questioning designed to show him as the weasel he is. It was the most effective line of questioning we've seen in a hearing in ages and it shows how important it is that Democrats allow staff lawyers to interrogate the witnesses rather than having members of Congress get cut off after five minutes, only to move on to another questioner from the other side and a completely different subject.

The Dems are actu ally getting somewhere, and Nadler is leading the way.

Pelosi sure as hell is making it hard for him though.

Filling In For The Mustache

Continuing a tradition of Donald Trump going "This marginally qualified person would be great for the job because they are loyal to me!" and filling White House vacancies caused by firing people who dared to disagree with him, Trump has named career diplomat Robert O'Brien to the post of National Security Adviser, replacing the fired John Bolton's mustache.

O’Brien was among a list of five contenders Trump named the day before, a list that had apparently been narrowed from about 15 in the days immediately after Bolton’s ouster.
Unlike Bolton, O’Brien is not a big name in the intelligence and national security world — Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s former chief of staff who was also considered for the post, said he knows next to nothing about O’Brien except that he “seems to have pretty good credentials on paper.” 

Asked whether the Senate Intelligence Committee knew anything about O’Brien, an aide said, “nope, not really.” 

O’Brien, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, comes aboard as Trump faces a number of crises in the Middle East, including attempts to broker peace in Afghanistan with the Taliban as well as between the Israelis and Palestinians. 

The administration is also grappling with how to confront an increasingly hostile Iranian regime, on which Trump announced a fresh package of sanctions just moments before revealing that he'd tapped O'Brien for his new post. 

Trump has also thrown out the possibility of a third nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un prior to next year’s election, in addition to the prospect of reaching a new arms deal with Russia and continuing efforts to beat back the Islamic State — all of which will require O’Brien’s involvement. 

Prior to joining the Trump administration, O’Brien served as co-chairman of the State Department's public-private partnership for justice reform in Afghanistan under both President Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He also served as a U.S. Representative to the U.N. General Assembly in 2005, where he worked alongside Bolton. 

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force one Wednesday, Trump praised O’Brien, an aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with whom he’s worked with to free Americans held captive abroad, as “fantastic.” 

Trump has frequently touted his administration’s record in freeing American hostages — sometimes referring to himself as “chief hostage negotiator” — at times giving himself an outsize role in efforts to free American hostages. The president recently made a show of dispatching O’Brien to Sweden to assist in the case of rapper A$AP Rocky, who’d been jailed on assault charges.

O'Brien made Trump look smart, and he's familiar with foreign policy, so he gets the job.  Whether he actually wants it as the world is rapidly speeding towards a US shooting war with Iran, is yet to be determined.  Remember: this is still someone willingly working for Donald Trump.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Don't look now, but the "roaring" Trump economy just sprang a $53 billion leak and needed the most repairs since the bad old days of the 2008 Great Recession.

Borrowing rates skyrocketed on Tuesday in a corner of the markets the public rarely notices but that is critical to the functioning of the global financial system. 

The spike in overnight borrowing rates forced the New York Federal Reserve to come to the rescue with a special operation aimed at easing stress in financial markets. 

It was the NY Fed's first such rescue operation in a decade, the last occurring in late 2008. 

"It's unprecedented, at least in the post-crisis era," said Mark Cabana, rates strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. 

On Tuesday morning, the NY Fed launched what's called an "overnight repo operation," during which the central bank attempts to ease pressure in markets by purchasing Treasuries and other securities. The goal is to pump money into the system to keep borrowing costs from creeping above the Fed's target range . 

The first attempt by the NY Fed was canceled because of "technical difficulties." 

Minutes later, the NY Fed successfully injected $53 billion into the system.
The episode demonstrates evidence of emerging strains in financial markets and raises concern that the Federal Reserve could be losing its grip on short-term rates. 

"The funding markets are clearly stressed," said Guy LeBas, managing director of fixed income strategy at Janney Capital Markets. "It's going to require Fed action." 

The NY Fed announced plans late Tuesday to hold another repurchase agreement operation on Wednesday that would aim to repurchase up to an additional $75 billion. 

The rate on overnight repurchase agreements hit 5% on Monday, according to Refinitiv data. That's up from 2.29% late last week and well above the target range set in July by the Federal Reserve, which is 2% to 2.25%. The surge continued Tuesday, with the overnight rate hitting a high of 10% before the NY Fed stepped in. 

Although it doesn't get as much attention as the Dow or the 10-year Treasury rate, this overnight market plays a central role in modern finance. It allows banks to quickly and cheaply borrow money, for short periods of time, often to buy bonds like Treasuries. This market broke down during the 2008 financial crisis. 

However, analysts drew a distinction between the current period of stress and what happened during the crisis. Back then, investors were deeply worried about the financial health of banks. Today, banks are hauling in record profits and balance sheets look sturdy. 

It's unclear what exactly is causing the stress in the overnight market, or how long it will last. 

"No one knows why this is happening," Jim Bianco CEO of Bianco Research, said on Twitter. "If it persists more than another day or two, it will be a problem."

If this all is starting to smell like we're back in 2007, heading for disaster in 2008, there are now a lot of similarities, too many in fact to ignore.  And Donald Trump is in charge of fixing this.  I'll tell you what happened, the markets honestly think Trump is going to bomb Iran and send us all to hell.

Stay tuned.  It's only going to get worse from here.  Much worse.

StupidiNews!

• An 18-year-old Oklahoma woman was arrested after purchasing an AK-47 rifle and making threats about attacking her former high school and killing "400 people" there.
• Pennsylvania GOP state Sen. Michael Folmer was arrested Tuesday and charged with several counts relating to child pornography, a search warrant finding images on his phone.
• Israel's main opposition candidate Benny Gantz is claiming victory in Tuesday's national elections after PM Benjamin Netanyahu, facing bribery indictments, was unable to form a government.
• Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is ruling out bilateral talks with Donald Trump ahead of the annual UN meeting of world leaders unless the US lifts sanctions.
• Comcast is joining the ranks of streaming content providers with its NBC Peacock service, expected to launch in April 2020.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Heads To The Red Suburbs

Millennials are moving away from the big blue cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco because they can't afford to live there.  But as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson notes, they're moving to bluer urban areas of red states, and that's starting to affect voting patterns in places like NC, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

These movers are U-Hauling to ruddier states in the South and West. The five fastest-growing metros of the past few years—Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Orlando, Florida—are in states won by Trump. The other metro areas with a population of at least 1 million that grew by at least 1.5 percent last year were Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; Tampa, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. All of those metros are in red or purple states.

It’s not just liberals moving to the South. After all, movers to Florida are often retirees who fit squarely in the Fox News demo, and some of the people moving from California to Texas are conservatives. But today’s domestic migrants are often college graduates of the exceeding liberal Generations Y and Z. “The current migration to these suburbs is mostly people in their 20s and 30s, or Millennials, who are more diverse and liberal than the rest of the population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. According to his research, Americans ages 20 to 40 are three times as likely to move as people ages 50 to 70.

This drip-drip-drip of young residents trickling down into red-state suburbs is helping to turn southern metros into Democratic strongholds. (Of course, migration isn’t the only factor pushing these metros leftward, but more on that later.) In Texas, Democrats’ advantage in the five counties representing Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin (the “Texas Five” in the graph below) grew from 130,000 in the 2012 presidential election to nearly 800,000 in the 2018 Senate election.

In Arizona, from 2012 to 2016, Democrats narrowed their deficit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, by 100,000 votes. Two years later, in the 2018 Senate election, the county swung Democratic, with Democrats gaining another 100,000 net votes.

In Georgia, from the 2012 presidential election to the 2018 gubernatorial elections, the four counties constituting most of Atlanta and its suburbs—Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett—increased their Democratic margin by more than 250,000.

What’s remarkable about these changes isn’t just their size, but their resemblance to Trump’s 2016 margins. Trump won Texas in 2016 by 800,000 votes. He won Arizona by 90,000 votes. He won Georgia by 170,000 votes. If these states’ biggest metros continue to move left at the same rate, there is every reason to believe that Texas, Arizona, and Georgia could be toss-ups quite soon.

As noted above, migration isn’t the only reason southern metros might be shifting to the Democratic Party: Longtime residents may be switching parties in response to Trump, for instance. Republicans have likely hurt themselves by moving further to the right to galvanize their white exurban and rural base, even as their support has thinned in the suburbs and among working-class white women.

But domestic migration is key. Just look at Texas. CNN exit polls for the state’s 2018 Senate election showed that Beto O’Rourke was buoyed by recent movers, winning more than 60 percent of those who had moved to Texas within the past 10 years. At current migration rates, the “Texas Five” counties could easily add another 200,000 votes from 2016 to 2020, putting more pressure on Trump’s margin in the state. A September poll conducted by Univision and the University of Houston found the top-six Democratic presidential contenders all leading Trump in Texas.

Outside of national elections, the blue flood of the Sun Belt could have other political implications, such as more showdowns between blue cities and red states. As The Atlantic’s David Graham has argued, North Carolina’s GOP-led general assembly has waged war against liberal cities such as Charlotte—for instance, by reversing a local ordinance that banned discrimination against LGBTQ people. This sort of state-city showdown could become a regular feature of southern politics. In the past six months, both the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer have run features bemoaning the Californication of northern Texas, with the former noting that “conservatives fear these domestic migrants will bring with them a liberal ideology that would disturb the Texas way of living.”

In 2020, the big three presidential battleground states are no longer Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Florida, NC, and Wisconsin.  Pretty soon, maybe by 2024, that's going to be Florida, Texas, and Georgia.

But don't count out Rust Belt states either.  Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and yes, even Ohio, remain important states that Democrats are going to have to find a way to compete in.  But they're starting to get a hand from people leaving California and New York for places like Columbus, Philly, Detroit, Madison, and the Twin Cities.  Even Iowa and Kansas are getting bluer.

Turns out blue megatropolis areas and their terrible housing markets are actually the thing Democrats needed to be competitive in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt.  Who knew?

But don't worry too much about California.  Their Republicans are heading for the hills anyway.

Spies Like Us, Con't

I can't help but notice that as the Trump regime draws closer to possibly bringing charges against former FBI Director Andrew McCabe for his role in the Mueller probe, we get more and more leaks detailing just how much damage against the US intelligence community Donald Trump is personally responsible for with his criminal relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.

The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.

Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.

“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.

American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.

The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017. The asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

In other words, Putin and the Russians were running a long con against the US for nearly all of the Obama administration, with the intent of ultimately manipulating the 2016 presidential election so that Obama's successor in the White House would be their man, someone who would have every reason to hate and distrust American federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Donald Trump was the perfect choice.  And Trump has waged war on the FBI, CIA, and NSA better than Putin ever could have expected in order to protect his own criminal actions.

Yes, Obama's "reset" with Russia was a massive mistake, and the one thing Mitt Romney was right about in 2012 was that Russia was indeed our biggest enemy.  The Snowden operation did untold damage to our intel capabilities and its success was directly responsible for making the 2016 election operation possible.  That failure is absolutely on him.

But as Obama fought to try to close the barn door after those horses got loose and clean up the messes in a post-Snowden era, remember it was Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, that Vladimir Putin wanted in the White House, and he got his way.  And Trump has made sure that everything Obama tried to do to prevent another Snowden was reversed.

What all this means is that Trump has made everything with Russia worse.  Oh yeah, they helped him become president, too.

Meanwhile, Here In Bevinstan...

Cincinnati is down to its last abortion clinic, and the legal fight to keep it open rages on, but with the Trump regime defunding Title IX money for Planned Parenthood, the area is already losing two clinics that didn't offer abortions. 

Now we find out a Kentucky man planned to blow up the abortion clinic in Cincinnati and was stopped by police.

A Kentucky man accused of threatening to blow up a Planned Parenthood facility in Cincinnati was ordered held on $100,000 bond Monday after police found a "homemade destructive device" at his home. 

WXIX-TV reports Daniel Kibler was arrested Sunday after police searched his home in Independence. He is charged with possession of a destructive device, terroristic threatening and eight counts of wanton endangerment. His arrest citation says Kibler admitted to creating the destructive device and storing it in his home he's shared with his wife and seven children. 

A judge revealed during Kibler's arraignment on Monday that the business he allegedly targeted was a Planned Parenthood office in Cincinnati. 

Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio President Kersha Deibel said in a statement Monday that the facility was open to serve patients needing care. 

"We are here for our patients today and we will continue to be here for our patients, no matter what. For the women, men and young people we serve, the care we provide isn't about politics — it's about their well-being, and we remain focused on ensuring our patients are able to access that care safely."

Surprise, more violence by the anti-choicers, egged on by Trump and his ilk.   Stochastic terrorism at its finest, right here in the Bluegrass State.

StupidiNews!

• The White House continues to direct all House Judiciary Committee subpoena targets to refuse to talk to congressional investigators, asserting executive privilege over Corey Lewandowski and two others.
• The Manhattan DA's office has subpoenaed eight years of Donald Trump's federal tax returns in the NY state criminal investigation into Trump's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
• Hong Kong city administrator Carrie Lam says she will begin "dialogue sessions" with protesters this week, but stated again that protests and violence in the city must come to an immediate end.
• China is siding with its Asian rivals over oil prices as the world waits to see what the Saudi and US response will be to Saturday's Abqaiq oilfield attacks.
• Netflix has won the streaming war for exclusive rights to Seinfeld starting in 2021, beating out Hulu's current $180 million deal.

Lat Call For Courting Disaster, Con't

As Greg Sargent points out, the damage Trump has done through the courts will be with us for decades, if not the rest of our lifetimes, and we have to face the very real possibility that the Roberts Court will destroy the remaining paths to fixing climate change and doom all of us, no matter who wins in 2020, according to a new study.

Imagine that a Democratic president and Congress were to enact some sort of Green New Deal-oriented program that includes extensive investments in green energy technologies, and new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions by both industry and the agricultural sector.

Such efforts would be implemented by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department. No matter how clearly the statutory commands to these agencies are written, the study argues, “a determined Court can undermine attempts to realize the legislation by reading agencies’ statutory authority extremely narrowly.”  

The study posits that the conservative justices could invalidate climate legislation through a creative reading of the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property for “public use” without “just compensation.”

For instance, the study notes, the court might narrowly construe what counts as a “public purpose,” as previous conservative justices have suggested in dissents. In this scenario, the court might strike down legislation dramatically restricting oil drilling as an unconstitutional “taking” from a corporation engaged in it.

“Though oil companies arguably are implicated in wreaking affirmative harm on society,” the study concludes, the court might simply deny that the policy in question would actually serve a public purpose. How? By concluding that it “would not remedy the affirmative harm that climate change poses to society,” or worse, that “climate change does not pose a sufficient harm in the first place.”

Another possibility is that the conservative justices might be animated by a newly emerging doctrine called “regulatory takings.” This doctrine reads not just eminent domain but also certain regulatory acts as “takings” requiring compensation.

Imagine a law that requires new levels of monitoring on fossil-fuel drilling sites to keep extractions below a certain threshold. The study posits that the justices might allow that the regulation does serve a public purpose, so it can stand, but also that it’s still a “taking” and thus requires compensation.

“Requiring the government to pay to regulate could pose problems for the fiscal feasibility of climate change legislation,” the study concludes.

Other possibilities suggested by the study: Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce underpins many environmental laws, but the conservative court could invalidate, say, new regulations affecting natural resources by arguing that the commerce clause does not authorize intrusions into regulatory authority typically reserved to the states.

Or the conservative court could invalidate, for instance, new regulatory standards created for states by concluding that the mechanism to do so runs afoul of an “anti-commandeering doctrine” developed by conservatives to limit the federal government’s ability to exert influence over state governments.

The bottom line subtext of the study: In response to the climate crisis, the federal government is going to have to exercise its powers to a much greater degree — and a major collision between this and the conservative court majority is inevitable.

Once again, you can thank the third party purity scolds, the misogynists, and the "LOL Trump would be a funny president!" idiots for this.  The damage is already done, and putting the ideas of Medicaid for All and a Green New Deal out there to be crushed by the courts will just be a recipe for more disaster, and more Trump.

We're in triage mode now.  Survival is all that matters. 

The Saudis And The Houthis, Con't

In the last 18-24 hours or so, the US and Saudi position on Saturday's attack on the Saudi oilfields of Abqaiq has gone from "Yemeni Houthi rebels made a successful drone attack" to "It was Iranian cruise missiles the whole time" and the Trump regime is all but promising a new shooting war in the Middle East against Iran.

Iran launched nearly a dozen cruise missiles and over 20 drones from its territory in the attack on a key Saudi oil facility Saturday, a senior Trump administration official told ABC News Sunday.

It is an extraordinary charge to make, that Iran used missiles and drones to attack its neighbor and rival Saudi Arabia, as the region teeters on the edge of high tensions.

President Donald Trump warned the U.S. was "locked and loaded" to respond to the attack on Sunday, waiting for verification of who was responsible and for word from Saudi Arabia on how to proceed.

The Trump administration, in particular Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has blamed Iran for the attack since Saturday, but so far, there's been no public accusation that Iran launched missiles.

The Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen claimed responsibility for the assault, which hit one of the world's largest oil processing facilities, hundreds of miles from the Yemen-Saudi border, and sharply impacted global oil supplies.

But a senior U.S. official told ABC News Saturday that was false: "It was Iran. The Houthis are claiming credit for something they did not do."

Pompeo tweeted that there was "no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."

The Saudis are going along with this too.

The Saudi-led military coalition battling Yemen’s Houthi movement said on Monday that the attack on Saudi Arabian oil plants was carried out with Iranian weapons and was not launched from Yemen according to preliminary findings.

Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said that an investigation into Saturday’s strikes, which had been claimed by the Iran-aligned Houthi group, was still going on to determine the launch location.

“The preliminary results show that the weapons are Iranian and we are currently working to determine the location ... The terrorist attack did not originate from Yemen as the Houthi militia claimed,” Malki told a press conference in Riyadh.

He said authorities would reveal the location from where drones were launched at a future press briefing.

Iran has dismissed as “unacceptable” U.S. accusations that Tehran was responsible for the assault on Saudi oil facilities that cut almost half of the kingdom’s production, or 5% of global oil supply.

Malki said the Gulf Arab state, the world’s top oil exporter, was capable of protecting vital energy and economic sites. “This cowardly act largely targets the global economy and not Saudi Arabia.”

Cool, so we just had our selling point for another two decades of war in the Middle East.  The drums of war are the loudest they've been since 2002.  The governments of Israel, the US, and Saudi Arabia all desperately want a war with Iran to maintain their current political and economic power.

This is bad, folks.  Real bad.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy is apparently on FOX News promising indictments not only against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, but against former FBI DIrector James Comey as well. (Gross FOX News link through Do Not Link)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., promised that guilty parties will be held accountable after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz releases his report on the FBI's alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the Russia investigation, and predicted that former bureau leaders James Comey and Andrew McCabe will face criminal charges after what he described as an attempted "coup" to take down President Trump. 

The report will address concerns with whether or not the FBI acted improperly in obtaining a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the early stages of their investigation of Russian election interference and possible Trump campaign connections. The Inspector General's office has already turned over a draft of its findings to Attorney General Bill Barr, and a final report is expected in the near future.

"We came the closest ever to this country having a coup, and now we need accountability," McCarthy told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures." "I respect this attorney general so greatly, that the way he has handled this, he believes in accountability, but more importantly, he believes in the rule of law." 

When asked if there will really be accountability, McCarthy promised, "Yes."
James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who were the director and deputy director of the FBI when the Russia probe began, have been the subjects of separate IG investigations, and McCarthy believes they will both face consequences. 

"We will see an indictment," he said of McCabe, who is facing the prospect of federal charges after Horowitz faulted him in a separate inquiry over statements he made during a Hillary Clinton-related investigation. The review found that McCabe "lacked candor" when talking with investigators, but the former FBI official has denied wrongdoing. Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu recommended charges against McCabe after the DOJ rejected his appeal. 

Comey was chastised in a recent report from Horowitz that discussed how Comey improperly maintained records of his conversations with President Trump, and leaked sensitive information about the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. While the report found that Comey violated department policy, the DOJ opted not to press charges. McCarthy believes that there will be more to come for Comey. 

"In the end, I do not believe that Jim Comey will get off," McCarthy predicted, adding, “Anyone that has had any association with trying to create this coup should be held accountable.”

Of course, as we discussed over the weekend, to get an indictment, you need convince a grand jury.  So far, that hasn't happened, at least not yet.  It could happen of course, and probably will, but unless McCarthy is giving away the scam he's not supposed to know about, he's lying.

Still, this is FOX News feeding red meat of locking up Trump's political enemies.  Everyone should be against this.