Last Call For Crime In Cincy

Cincy police are still looking for the suspect in a nightclub shooting early this morning that left one person dead and 15 injured.

Cincinnati police have yet to make arrests in a nightclub shooting early Sunday morning that killed one person and wounded at least 15.

Police said the violence started as a dispute between "local men" who were caught up in an argument.

The victim who died was identified by authorities Sunday as 27-year-old Obryan Spikes. Another victim is in critical condition, police said.

The shooting at around 1:30 a.m. at Cameo Nightclub created an atmosphere of "chaos," said police, who described the 21-and-over nightspot as one frequented primarily by young people.

"The bar was very crowded" at the time, with hundreds of people inside, police said.

“People were going to have a good time and ended up being shot. That is unacceptable,” the city's mayor, John Cranley, said at a press conference Sunday.

Police early on in their investigation ruled out terrorism as being behind the attack, but Cranley said that didn't diminish the tragedy.

"To the victims, what difference does it make?” the mayor said.

It makes a lot of difference actually Cranley, but that's besides the point.  Cincinnati police have a pretty decent post-2001 riots record, or did until Ray Tensing, but Cranley's still very much a blockhead on things like this.

Still, this looks like a beef gone very, very bad, so we'll see if arrests are made this week.

Meanwhile In Moscow...

Major anti-corruption protests in dozens of Russian cities ignited Sunday as opposition leader Alexey Navalny was detained along with hundreds of protesters in Moscow.

Prominent Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was detained during an anti-corruption protest in the heart of Moscow on Sunday, according to tweets by Navalny and his press secretary. 

Navalny downplayed his detention in a series of tweets and encouraged protesters to keep marching. 

"Today we are discussing (and condemning) corruption, not the detentions. Well, I was detained. So what. It ok. There are things in life that are worth being detained for," Navalny tweeted. 

Similar demonstrations were planned in 100 cities across Russia on Sunday, according to organizers. 

Hundreds of arrests were reported at the Moscow protest. Russian human rights group OVD Info tweeted that more than 700 had been detained -- while state-run news agency Ria Novosti said 500 had been held. 

The protest drew a heavy police presence but remained largely peaceful. Riot officers flanked crowds while plainclothes officers moved among the demonstrators. Police told those on the street that the protest is unsanctioned and asked them to move on. 

Navalny praised turnouts for the protests in early-morning tweets. "Far East started fine," he tweeted, referring to a photo of protesters gathering in the city of Vladivostok, located on Russia's far eastern coast. Navalny also shared photos and tweets from various parts of the country. 

The protests have been mostly aimed at Russian PM Dmitri Medvedev rather than Vladimir Putin.  Navalny has accused Medvedev publicly of gaining millions through corruption, and is expected to run against Putin next year, but rounding him up at this point shows you how worried ol' Vlad is right now, what with his Trump gambit coming apart.

Trump is strangely silent on Navalny's arrest, too.

Go figure.

Sunday Long Read: Bama's Bloody Race To The Bottom

For 20 years now auto manufacturing in right-to-work red states in the South has been a growing alternative to the union shops of the Rust Belt.  Good-paying jobs have been drifting south for decades now and the numbers prove it, but these jobs come at ore than just the cost of cheaper labor.  It also comes at the cost of lives.

Regina Elsea was a year old in 1997 when the first vehicle rolled off the Mercedes-Benz assembly line near Tuscaloosa. That gleaming M-Class SUV was historic. Alabama, the nation’s fifth-poorest state, had wagered a quarter-billion dollars in tax breaks and other public giveaways to land the first major Mercedes factory outside Germany. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai followed with Alabama plants of their own. Kia built a factory just over the border in West Point, Ga. The auto parts makers came next. By the time Elsea and her five siblings were teenagers, the country roads and old cotton fields around their home had come alive with 18-wheelers shuttling instruments and stamped metal among the car plants and 160 parts suppliers that had sprouted up across the state.

A good student, Elsea loved reading, horses, and dogs, especially her Florida cracker cur, named Cow. She dreamed of becoming a pediatrician. She enrolled in community college on a federal Pell Grant, with plans to transfer to Auburn University, about 30 miles from her home in Five Points. But she fell in love with a kindergarten sweetheart, who’d become a stocker at a local Walmart, and dropped out of school to make money so they could rent their own place.

Elsea went to work in February 2016 at Ajin USA in Cusseta, Ala., the same South Korean supplier of auto parts for Hyundai and Kia where her sister and stepdad worked. Her mother, Angel Ogle, warned her against it. She’d worked at two other parts suppliers in the area and found the pace and pressure unbearable.

Elsea was 20 and not easily deterred. “She thought she was rich when she brought home that first paycheck,” Ogle says. Elsea and her boyfriend got engaged. She worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, hoping to move from temporary status at Ajin to full time, which would bring a raise from $8.75 an hour to $10.50. College can wait, she told her mom and stepdad.

On June 18, Elsea was working the day shift when a computer flashed “Stud Fault” on Robot 23. Bolts often got stuck in that machine, which mounted pillars for sideview mirrors onto dashboard frames. Elsea was at the adjacent workstation when the assembly line stopped. Her team called maintenance to clear the fault, but no one showed up. A video obtained by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration shows Elsea and three co-workers waiting impatiently. The team had a quota of 420 dashboard frames per shift but seldom made more than 350, says Amber Meadows, 23, who worked beside Elsea on the line. “We were always trying to make our numbers so we could go home,” Meadows says. “Everybody was always tired.”

After several minutes, Elsea grabbed a tool—on the video it looks like a screwdriver—and entered the screened-off area around the robot to clear the fault herself. Whatever she did to Robot 23, it surged back to life, crushing Elsea against a steel dashboard frame and impaling her upper body with a pair of welding tips. A co-worker hit the line’s emergency shut-off. Elsea was trapped in the machine—hunched over, eyes open, conscious but speechless.

No one knew how to make the robot release her. The team leader jumped on a forklift and raced across the factory floor to the break room, where he grabbed a maintenance man and drove him back on his lap. The technician, from a different part of the plant, had no idea what to do. Tempers erupted as Elsea’s co-workers shoved the frightened man, who was Korean and barely spoke English, toward the robot, demanding he make it retract. He fought them off and ran away, Meadows says. When emergency crews arrived several minutes later, Elsea was still stuck. The rescue workers finally did what Elsea had failed to do: locked out the machine’s emergency power switch so it couldn’t reenergize again—a basic precaution that all factory workers are supposed to take before troubleshooting any industrial robot. Ajin, according to OSHA, had never given the workers their own safety locks and training on how to use them, as required by federal law. Ajin is contesting that finding.

An ambulance took Elsea to a nearby hospital; from there she was flown by helicopter to a trauma center in Birmingham. She died the next day. Her mom still hasn’t heard a word from Ajin’s owners or senior executives. They sent a single artificial flower to her funeral.

More and more we're seeing car parts made in the US by minimum-mage temp workers in states with no collective bargaining, no union benefits, no safety training and no help, all to maybe get on as a full-time worker working 60 hours a week making 35 grand a year.

America is the new Bangladesh, it seems.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves Here, Guys

Dave Weigel at the Washington Post has this story about the Democrats' grassroots efforts to beat the AHCA and how it helped stopped the vote in the House.  There's only one problem with it: Democrats didn't have a damn thing to do with stopping the ACHA, period.

On Friday afternoon, as congressional Democrats learned that the GOP had essentially given up on repealing the Affordable Care Act, none of them took the credit. They had never really cohered around an anti-AHCA message. (As recently as Wednesday, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was still using the phrase “make America sick again,” which most Democrats had abandoned.) They’d been sidelined legislatively, as Republicans tried to pass a bill on party lines. They’d never called supporters to the Capitol for a show of force, as Republicans had done, several times, during the 2009-2010 fight to pass the Affordable Care Act.

Instead, Democrats watched as a roiling, well-organized “resistance” bombarded Republicans with calls and filled their town hall meetings with skeptics. The Indivisible coalition, founded after the 2016 election by former congressional aides who knew how to lobby their old bosses, was the newest and flashiest. But it was joined by MoveOn, which reported 40,000 calls to congressional offices from its members; by Planned Parenthood, directly under the AHCA’s gun; by the Democratic National Committee, fresh off a divisive leadership race; and by the AARP, which branded the bill as an “age tax” before Democrats had come up with a counterattack.

Congressional Democrats did prime the pump. After their surprise 2016 defeat, they made Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) the outreach director of the Senate caucus. Sanders’s first project was “Our First Stand,” a series of rallies around the country, organized by local Democrats and following a simple format. Elected officials would speak; they would then pass the microphone to constituents who had positive stories to tell about the ACA.

“What we’re starting to do, for the first time in the modern history of the Democratic Party, is active grass-roots organizing,” Sanders said in a January interview. “We’re working with unions, we’re working with senior groups, and we’re working with health-care groups. We’re trying to rally the American people so we can do what they want. And that is not the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.”

Weigel goes on to say that because grassroots groups like Planned Parenthood, the AFL-CIO, MoveOn, and the AARP rallied town halls around the country, they were able to stop the bill.

That's a nice thought, guys.  It's also 100% not what happened.

What actually happened is that Republicans in the Freedom Caucus wanted a total repeal, and they were able to stay united to the point where the bill was pulled and the vote postponed until that happens.  Democrats taking credit for this would be like hen house chickens celebrating record egg production because the foxes were too busy arguing over whether or not to kill and eat all the hens or just some of them.

It's a nice rallying cry for Dems, it gives them something positive as a symbol to build on, it does provide hope for the future that grassroots opposition to Trump will be a factor going forward.

But in the case of the AHCA House bill?  Dems were 100% powerless, and pretending otherwise is also promoting a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts.  Let's not delude ourselves, guys.  We got lucky here that the Freedom Caucus, including my own Congressman Thomas Massie, decided that the perfect was the enemy of the evil.  They sank their own bill through incompetence.

And eventually it will be back.

Deportation Nation, Con't

I understand that "trying to understand and empathize with disappointed Midwestern Trump voters" is all the rage these days, but I just don't have it in me anymore.  Especially when people keep proving time and time again that voting for Trump was always about punishing those people and never thinking even once that electing Trump would have negative consequences for themselves.

When Helen Beristain told her husband she was voting for Donald Trump last year, he warned her that the Republican nominee planned to “get rid of the Mexicans.”

Defending her vote, Helen quoted Trump directly, noting that the tough-talking Republican said he would only kick the “bad hombres” out of the country, according to the South Bend Tribune.

Months later, Roberto Beristain — a successful businessman, respected member of his Indiana town and father of three American-born children — languishes in a detention facility with hardened criminals as he awaits his deportation back to Mexico, the country he left in 1998 when he entered the United States illegally.

“I wish I didn’t vote at all,” Helen Beristain told the Tribune. “I did it for the economy. We needed a change.”

Critics on the left have blasted Beristain for not taking the president’s rhetoric seriously and allowing his administration to plunge the country into what they consider a chaotic and inhumane immigration debacle. Critics on the right have inundated the family with racist threats and attacked Beristain for giving refuge to the love of her life, a man they consider a foreign interloper.

Caught in the middle of the fiery political clash are people like Roberto Beristain — people who have built a successful life inside the confines of the fuzzy legal limbo in which they exist. Supporters say the 43-year-old has never broken the law and doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record. The mayor of South Bend, Ind., the conservative community that the Beristains call home, called him “one of its model residents.”

But Roberto Beristain’s clean record didn’t stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from arresting him when he showed up for his annual meeting with the agency Feb. 6.

Beristain — who has a Social Security card, a work permit and a driver’s license — was expecting to return home to his family and business. Instead, he was taken into custody, setting off a last-ditch effort by family members and lawyers to free him. Thus far, those efforts have failed. Family members told the Tribune that ICE officials had informed them that Beristain would be deported Friday.

It continues to amaze me that tens of millions of voters absolutely did take Trump's rhetoric seriously and chose instead to vote for Hillary Clinton, and now have to live in our current nightmare scenario anyway.  Where's the empathy and the Washington Post profiles for the Clinton voters who have family members who face deportation like Roberto Beristain?

Seems to be in much shorter supply these days.  I wonder why that is.  Helen here says she wish she hadn't voted at all, not that she had voted for Hillary.  That thought never crossed her mind.  And she's still wondering why her husband was picked up by ICE and taken from her and her children.

Some people only learn when the lesson is applied by a 20-pound sledgehammer to the crotch.

Nobody's Business But The Turks

Remember our good friend Mike Flynn?  The guy who lasted all of a couple of weeks as National Security Adviser when he was basically working for Putin?  

Well, if you recall two weeks ago he finally admitted that he was working for the Turkish government as a consultant while being on the Trump campaign, and yeah, turns out Flynn didn't have any issues against helping Turkey shape US foreign policy either, let alone the Russians.  Flynn also admitted that his "lobbyist" position may have benefited the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, super spiffy strongman.

Now the other half of that pair of shoes has dropped, and in fact, the Erdogan government did have something of a favor to ask Flynn and he was ready to deliver, and by "favor" I mean "kidnapping and shipping Erdogan's top political enemy out of the States and back to Ankara".

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, while serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign, met with top Turkish government ministers and discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey, according to former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, who attended, and others who were briefed on the meeting.

The discussion late last summer involved ideas about how to get Fethullah Gulen, a cleric whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup, to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process, according to Mr. Woolsey and those who were briefed.

Mr. Woolsey told The Wall Street Journal he arrived at the meeting in New York on Sept. 19 in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.

The Turkish ministers were interested in open-ended thinking on the subject, and the ideas were raised hypothetically, said the people who were briefed. The ministers in attendance included the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country’s foreign minister, foreign-lobbying disclosure documents show.

Mr. Woolsey said the idea was “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” The discussion, he said, didn’t include actual tactics for removing Mr. Gulen from his U.S. home. If specific plans had been discussed, Mr. Woolsey said, he would have spoken up and questioned their legality.

It isn’t known who raised the idea or what Mr. Flynn concluded about it.

Price Floyd, a spokesman for Mr. Flynn, who was advising the Trump campaign on national security at the time of the meeting, disputed the account, saying “at no time did Gen. Flynn discuss any illegal actions, nonjudicial physical removal or any other such activities.”

Yeah, so that nasty "reverse coup" that Erdogan and his buddies threw down in Turkey in July?  How the Turks continue even now to arrest and purge tens of thousands of civil servants from the government as they might be supporters of Gulen?  This directly ties the Trump campaign to the mess in Ankara.

This just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

Last Call For The American Health Uncaring Act

And Trumpcare goes down in flames as Republicans are simply too incompetent to pass their own legislation.

House Republican leaders, facing a revolt among conservatives and moderates in their ranks, pulled legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act from consideration on the House floor Friday in a major defeat for President Trump on the first legislative showdown of his presidency.

“We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,” the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, conceded.

The failure of the Republicans’ three-month blitz to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement exposed deep divisions in the Republican Party that the election of a Republican president could not mask. It cast a long shadow over the ambitious agenda that Mr. Trump and Republican leaders had promised to enact once their party assumed power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And it was the biggest defeat of Mr. Trump’s young presidency, which has suffered many. His travel ban has been blocked by the courts. Allegations of questionable ties to the Russian government forced out his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Tensions with key allies such as Germany, Britain and Australia are high, and Mr. Trump’s approval ratings are at historic lows.

Republican leaders were willing to tolerate Mr. Trump’s foibles with the promise that he would sign into law their conservative agenda. The collective defeat of the health care effort could strain that tolerance.

Mr. Trump, in a telephone interview moments after the bill was pulled, tried to put the most flattering light on it. “The best thing that could happen is exactly what happened — watch,” he said.

“Obamacare unfortunately will explode,” Mr. Trump said later. “It’s going to have a very bad year.” At some point, he said, after another round of big premium increases, “Democrats will come to us and say, ‘Look, let’s get together and get a great health care bill or plan that’s really great for the people of our country.’”

Mr. Trump expressed weariness with the effort, though its failure took a fraction of the time that Democrats devoted to enacting the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010. “It’s enough already,” the president said.

I assume now that HHS Secretary Price will simply do everything he can to wreck Obamacare through neglect, I mean its not like anyone in the GOP leadership is going to be mad at him if he does manage to death spiral something.  It's only millions of lives and stuff.

No Gorsuch Thing As A Free Vote

With confirmation hearing for Neil Gorsuch now in the books and the an who nominated him facing an FBI investigation into ties to Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Senate Democrats are finally ready to say they'll filibuster Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Senate Democrats on Thursday vowed to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, signaling an imminent partisan showdown over the nominee’s fate and the future of century-old rules in the chamber.

As committee hearings on Judge Gorsuch concluded on Thursday, it appeared increasingly likely that Republicans hoping to elevate President Trump’s choice for the court would resort to replacing longstanding rules with a simple majority vote on his confirmation.

While a parade of witnesses addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee, trading dueling views of Judge Gorsuch, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, went to the Senate floor and announced that he would try to lead Democrats in blocking an up-or-down vote on Judge Gorsuch. The Senate’s “cloture” rule requires a supermajority of 60 votes to overcome such a filibuster.

“After careful deliberation I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court,” Mr. Schumer said, citing concerns over Judge Gorsuch’s record on workers’ rights and his degree of independence, adding, “My vote will be no, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.”

Judge Gorsuch must earn the support of at least eight Democrats to break a filibuster — a threshold he is not on track to meet, at least so far, according to interviews and internal party discussions.

The ball will now be in Mitch the Turtle's court as Schumer has called his bluff.

If Democrats band together, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has threatened to pursue the so-called nuclear option eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court selections. Mr. Trump has urged Mr. McConnell to take that step if necessary.

Some Republicans have expressed reservations about changing the rules, but Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Thursday that he would relent if it meant seating Judge Gorsuch. “Whatever it takes to get him on the court, I will do,” Mr. Graham told “The Mike Gallagher Show” radio program.

Mr. McConnell has said he wants the Senate to confirm Judge Gorsuch to fill the vacancy, which was created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia more than a year ago, before departing for a scheduled recess on April 7. Last year, Mr. McConnell led his party in refusing to consider President Obama’s choice for the seat, Judge Merrick B. Garland, during a presidential election campaign.

On Thursday, Mr. McConnell accused Democrats of engaging in “obstructionist tactics” to block a well-qualified nominee.

“Despite the judge’s outstanding performance, his exceptional background, and the extensive support he’s received from people of all political leanings, we know that some Senate Democrats will continue trying to come up with any reason to delay the confirmation process,” Mr. McConnell said of Judge Gorsuch.

So we'll see if the Senate is ready to kill the filibuster for a Supreme Court nominee.  The obvious argument here is that if Democrats refuse to use it, there's no point in having it anyway, so make the GOP do the work of getting rid of it.  Paul Waldman at the Washington Post agrees with the tactic even if Mitch will get Gorsuch nominated anyway.

A filibuster, on the other hand, is a way of raising the stakes of the nomination. If Democrats filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will hold a vote to change Senate rules to disallow filibusters on Supreme Court nominations, and Gorsuch will get confirmed — but not until after the controversy has been elevated into a more dramatic confrontation. (This would be even more dramatic if the Democrats mount an old-fashioned “talking filibuster” where they stop all other Senate business to make an extended case against Gorsuch.)

So why filibuster if the end result will be the same? The reason is that these are truly extraordinary circumstances. The Republicans’ refusal to allow Merrick Garland to get even a hearing to fill this seat was nothing short of a crime against democracy, a twisting of democratic norms beyond all recognition. Garland should be in this seat, and Democrats should go as far as they possibly can to avoid giving even a shred of validation to the way Republicans stole it.

There’s also an important political goal that can be served by elevating this controversy, even if Gorsuch can’t be stopped. Democrats in Congress have almost no institutional power at the moment, and the only way they’re going to get some of that power is if 2018 is a wave election. A wave election happens when one side’s voters are angry and motivated. Right now, Democratic voters are definitely angry and motivated, and it’s the job of Democrats in Congress to keep showing those voters what they ought to be angry about — and that their representatives are fighting as hard as they possibly can.

So yes, filibustering Gorsuch is the right thing to do, even if it won’t accomplish the short-term goal of stopping his nomination. There’s a lot more at stake.

If you're going to lose (and let's be honest here, Democrats will not be able to stop Gorsuch being confirmed in the end) at least have the balls to go down swinging.  At least there's a long shot that Democratic delays coupled with the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian collusion might be able to stop Gorsuch, even if that chance is 0.001% or whatever.

It's a flat zero if they don't filibuster, which coincidentally is the respect I'd have for Schumer if he didn't at least try to stop the obviously arch-conservative Gorsuch here.  It's not that I expect this to create too much additional momentum for the Dems, but it would bring everything to a screeching halt if they didn't use the filibuster here.

So yeah, cue up the string quartet on the deck of the Titanic, and let the band play on.

StupidiNews!

• After House Republicans delayed a vote on their Obamacare replacement plan, Donald Trump has delivered an ultimatum that the bill be voted on today or else "Obamacare stays."
• The Justice Department has asked the House Ethics Committee to pause its investigation into GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, the FBI is now looking into Hunter's use of campaign funds.
• Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak is free after being cleared of charges of having protesters against his regime killed in 2011, Mubarak was overthrown in the Arab Spring.
• British intelligence says they knew of the suspect who drove an SUV into a crowd near Parliament this week killing four before being killed himself by a security officer.
• A man sentenced to three years for threats on President Obama's life posted on Facebook in June has lost his court appeal that his online threats were protected free speech.

The Purge Continues

Meanwhile, over in the Trumpisphere, right-wing media outlets are gleefully printing lists of insufficiently loyal government employees who must be terminated in the name of Glorious Orange Leader.

Conservative news outlets, including one with links to a top White House official, are singling out individual career government employees for criticism, suggesting in articles that certain staffers will not be sufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump by virtue of their work under former President Barack Obama. 

The articles — which have appeared in Breitbart News, the Conservative Review and other outlets — have alarmed veteran officials in both parties as well as current executive branch staffers. They say the stories are adding to tensions between career staffers and political appointees as they begin to implement Trump’s agenda, and they worry that the stories could inspire Trump to try purging federal agencies of perceived enemies.

The claims posted on the conservative sites include allegations of anti-Israel and pro-Iran bias against staffers at institutions such as the State Department and the National Security Council. Breitbart News, whose former executive chairman Steve Bannon is now Trump’s chief strategist, has even published lists of workers that the president should fire. 

Washington veterans say they can’t recall similar targeting of government employees, who are required to stay apolitical and generally shun the spotlight.
“It’s deeply unfair to single people out and question their loyalty,” said William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former longtime diplomat. “It’s demoralizing for institutions. It’s demoralizing for professionals, and it’s offensive.”

The biggest bullseye continues to be on the back of the State Department career diplomats as the Trump regime continues the quest to dismantle American diplomacy and guarantee endless war.  The purge is especially targeting those who helped with the Iranian nuclear deal.

Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a career civil service officer in State’s policy planning office who's been targeted in the past, has come under renewed fire because of her role shaping the Iran nuclear deal and other Iran policy during the Obama administration. Nowrouzzadeh, an American-born U.S. citizen of Iranian descent who joined the government in 2005 during the Bush administration, also has been criticized for once working for the National Iranian American Council, an activist group that some on the right accuse of lobbying on behalf of the Iranian government. 

According to Nowrouzzadeh’s LinkedIn profile and NIAC, she was an intern in the organization more than a decade ago. NIAC President Trita Parsi said Nowrouzzadeh interned part-time as a college undergraduate. “At the time our organization was very new, and our focus was primarily on voter registration," Parsi said. "We had no profile or position on foreign policy matters at that time.” 

Parsi also denied suggestions that his organization is tied to the Iranian regime. “The idea we’re an agent for the Iranian regime is preposterous,” he said. “We are the largest Iranian-American grass-roots organization, sustained by our own community, who overwhelmingly opposes the government in Iran.” 

Alan Eyre, director of the Office of the Middle East and Asia at State’s Bureau of Energy Resources, has also been targeted. Eyre served as State’s first Persian-language spokesman, and he’s been involved in Iran nuclear talks and outreach to Iranians. 

Calling him a “leftist State Department official,” the Conservative Review published an article this week reviewing Eyre's Twitter feed, saying he’s retweeting articles that are critical of Trump. But Eyre’s Twitter feed also includes plenty of Trump-friendly retweets that the article doesn't mention. 

Other targets for conservative news outlets have included Chris Backemeyer, State’s deputy assistant secretary for Iran; Michael Ratney, who deals with Syria and Israeli-Palestinian issues at State; and Anne Patterson, a recently retired former ambassador to Egypt and Pakistan. 

Secretary of Defense James Mattis wanted to tap Patterson as his undersecretary of defense for policy, but he ultimately withdrew her name from consideration after encountering resistance from the White House, another chilling signal to career officials. In a statement to POLITICO, Patterson said: "I believe that it is important for our elected officials, their appointees, and career civil service and foreign service personnel to know and respect the boundaries between their different roles."

Considering executive departments are now being larded with Trump loyalists to make sure employees are faithful to Trump first, of course this is the result.   This is one of those nice little incremental changes from a democracy to a bloody, brutal dictatorship that's happening before our eyes: loyalty tests for civil servants, the state media calling for purges and pograms as those left from the previous administration must be traitors, and watchful eyes making sure that departments are run "correctly".

This is how we are losing the American republic, guys.  In real time.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

If you were wondering on the time frame of why Devin Nunes went to the press yesterday afternoon in a brazen attempt to wreck the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, wonder no more. Late last night CNN dropped a blockbuster on the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia:  leaks indicate that Trump campaign officials may have been involved with -- you guessed it -- the Russian leaks of DNC emails to hurt Hillary.

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, US officials told CNN. 

This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, according to one source. 

The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.

It's what many of us suspected all along, but finding proof of it remains the key and always has.  Again, the Trump regime has been busy attacking the investigation for a couple weeks now, implying that there's a massive Scary Black Guy conspiracy to wiretap Trump, and it especially serves to explain the sudden Nunes press conference that came out ahead of this story.  My guess is that CNN called and asked for a comment earlier Wednesday morning or late Tuesday, the White House refused, and then Nunes was dispatched yesterday afternoon.

One law enforcement official said the information in hand suggests "people connected to the campaign were in contact and it appeared they were giving the thumbs up to release information when it was ready." But other U.S. officials who spoke to CNN say it's premature to draw that inference from the information gathered so far since it's largely circumstantial. 

The FBI cannot yet prove that collusion took place, but the information suggesting collusion is now a large focus of the investigation, the officials said. 

The FBI has already been investigating four former Trump campaign associates -- Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Carter Page -- for contacts with Russians known to US intelligence. All four have denied improper contacts and CNN has not confirmed any of them are the subjects of the information the FBI is reviewing. 

One of the obstacles the sources say the FBI now faces in finding conclusive intelligence is that communications between Trump's associates and Russians have ceased in recent months given the public focus on Russia's alleged ties to the Trump campaign. Some Russian officials have also changed their methods of communications, making monitoring more difficult, the officials said. 

Last July, Russian intelligence agencies began orchestrating the release of hacked emails stolen in a breach of the Democratic National Committee and associated organizations, as well as email accounts belonging to Clinton campaign officials, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. 

The Russian operation was also in part focused on the publication of so-called "fake news" stories aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign. But FBI investigators say they are less focused on the coordination and publication of those "fake news" stories, in part because those publications are generally protected free speech. 

The release of the stolen emails, meanwhile, transformed an ordinary cyber-intrusion investigation into a much bigger case handled by the FBI's counterintelligence division.

Again, "largely circumstantial" evidence won't finish off Trump, and other journalists and outlets have implied the connection before.  But now we know what the stakes are being played for, and that the FBI is now suggesting that the DNC leaks are connected to the Trump investigation.  If there's proof, if somebody rolls over and talks on this, Trump goes down in flames.

We'll see what becomes of this, but again, this is the story of the century if it pans out.

Or hey, if it doesn't, that could still very well be true.

StupidiNews!

• London Metropolitan police say they have arrested seven in connection with yesterday's attack on Westminster Bridge that killed 3 and injured dozens as an SUV rammed through a crowd.
• Hawaii GOP State Rep. Beth Fukimoto says she'll switch parties after she was ousted as Hawaii's GOP House minority leader for participating in last month's Women's March.
• A last-minute rewrite on sharply reducing what health care must be covered by insurance plans is expected to entice GOP Freedom Caucus hardliners in today's expected Trumpcare vote.
• Reduced life expectancy for middle-aged white working class Americans could affect a generation as growing obesity, drug abuse, and suicide rates increase significantly.
• Some 17,000 AT&T employees went on strike in California and Nevada on Wednesday to protest what union reps say is the company breaking collective bargaining agreements.

Last Call For High Nunes

We now know what the Trump regime's response to Monday's devastating Russia testimony by FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers confirming that the Trump campaign was under investigation:  GOP House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes is now trying to outright interfere with an ongoing FBI investigation on behalf of Trump. Martin Longman:

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes called a press conference a little while ago to announce that he intended to commit a blatant act of criminal obstruction of justice with respect to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Trump and Trump associates’ connections to the Russians’ interference in our presidential election. Nunes began by declaring that President-Elect Trump’s personal communications may have been intercepted during the Transition due to “incidental collection” during an unrelated, completely legal and FISA-approved investigation. 

Let that sink in.  Intelligence community sources told Nunes and he called a press conference to leak it to the world while there's an ongoing investigation.

He then said that the potential surveillance was not related to Russia, that it wasn’t clear that it was collected at Trump Tower and that he was “alarmed by it.” 

He further stated that he had advised House Speaker Paul Ryan of his findings and that he was traveling to the White House this afternoon to share with them information that had been provided to him by the FBI in a classified setting for the purposes of advancing a congressional investigation into potential crimes committed by the people he will be meeting in the White House. 

Nunes also revealed that said “he discovered the potential surveillance of Trump himself while reviewing intelligence reports,” but he did not divulge that he kept his discovery from the Democrats on the committee who “appeared blindsided by Nunes’ announcement.”

To recap:

• GOP Rep. Devin Nunes is the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
• Nunes has been told of legal surveillance on foreign nationals that recorded conversations with not just the Trump campaign, but Trump himself. 
• He's going to the White House to brief Trump on this.
• He's not going to the Intelligence Committee to brief them on this.

Do we see the problem yet?

When Nunes arrives at the White House and begins sharing information about which Transition officials were captured on “incidental surveillance,” he will be committing what appears to be an obvious crime.

He claims that the surveillance is unrelated to Russia, and that may be his only criminal defense. He better hope that it will stand up in court. His press conference performance was a dishonest attempt to suggest that perhaps Trump wasn’t completely wrong when he said that Trump Tower was wiretapped at the behest of President Obama. He couldn’t assert either of those things but he made it seem like he had evidence pointing in that direction. 

And his failure to share this information with the Democrats or notify them that he would be holding the press conference shows just how disingenuous his “alarm” really is. 

But it’s his intent to share classified investigatory information with the subjects of a counterintelligence (and potentially criminal) probe that constitutes a crime. He must not be very bright. And he’s just destroyed his own committee’s investigation.

Which of course is the point, because within hours of Nunes's press conference this afternoon, this went out.

Team Trump fundraising off of what @DevinNunes (who was literally on Team Trump) just said. pic.twitter.com/Xhyzk851Cv

— justin kanew (@justin_kanew) March 22, 2017

The "vindicated" Trump regime now fundraising off this.  Guys, this was planned and executed. Nunes is sinking the investigation and remember he was a Trump transition team member.  He's working with Trump all the way through.

I'm hoping as Martin said that this catastrophically stupid and obviously rotten ploy will lead to a special investigator that will fry these Republican assholes up like catfish, but odds are that the Trump regime now has all the cover it needs for their supporters, and the results of this will be to derail the investigation completely.

Trump is trying to manufacture the "Obama wiretapped me!" conspiracy wholesale.  He just might get away with it.

Regrets, I've Had A Few

A "few" in this case being that only 3.5% of Trump voters in a new Washington Post poll say they would change their vote today, as Steve M points out over at his place.

According to this survey, Trump retains the passionate support of nearly his entire voting bloc. Remember that his most primal instinct is self-preservation -- does he really care whether Republicans suffer in the midterms or there's less security and prosperity in America and the world? Yes, the Gallup poll is bad for him -- but it may just be that angry anti-Trump voters are more willing to talk to pollsters these days than Trump backers, who tend to believe all mainstream media and polling outfits are deceitful. 

I believe that Trump is historically unpopular for a president in the first months of his term. But if he can sustain this level of support until 2020, he might just slip by a Democrat again, taking advantage of GOP voter suppression and a wealthy corporate donor community that will never bail on the GOP, not to mention campaign finance rules that are only going to get worse once Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court.

Reminder: Trump won the election with about 25% of the total eligible voting population, because of the electoral college and the fact only about 26% voted for Hillary.  If Trump's approval rating among voting eligible adults is 37%, and all of them vote for him, he'd win in a landslide.

People have to actually vote to beat Trump and the GOP, and so far not enough of us give a damn. So when Republicans shave off a couple percentage points with red state voter suppression tactics, it's a good move for them that will pay off for decades.  It already gave them the White House and Congress (and soon the Supreme Court).

Remember that Richard Nixon and George W. Bush won reelection before disapproval of them reached critical mass. It takes a long time for Republicans to lose faith in one of their own, even when the rest of the country has already done so. 

Credibility? Trump's base thinks he has all the credibility he needs, even now. And that base is essentially the entire GOP electorate.

The only way we win is a united front.  As Zandardad said yesterday, we had the chance to unite behind Hillary and enough of us chose not to so that Trump won.  We wouldn't be in this epic disaster documentary right now if we had just done the right thing.  And before the usual suspects come in and complain, ask yourself given Trump's actions right now and his Supreme Court nominee, would you rather have Hillary or Donald as president today?

If you can't answer that, you're the reason why we have Donald.  You picked a side, and it was Trump's. End of line.

Pink, Black, And Blue In Bevinstan

Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin has signed a raft of bills from the now deeply red GOP-controlled General Assembly, and Kentucky's transformation into yet another awful Republican state is pretty much complete at this point.

Planned Parenthood stands to lose any shot it had at government funding for family planning under a bill signed into law by Gov. Matt Bevin on Tuesday.

The law will puts Planned Parenthood at the back of the line among organizations seeking family planning funding in Kentucky.

Bevin has signed more than 50 bills into law since the start of this year’s legislative session, including another on Tuesday that allows attacks on police officers and other first responders to be prosecuted as hate crimes.

While the so-called “Blue Lives Matter Law” doesn’t increase penalties against those convicted of committing a hate crime, it is considered when violaters come up for sentencing, and it is included when it comes time to consider probation or parole.

Kentucky becomes only the second state, beside Louisiana, to enact such a law.

With the family planning funding law, pro-life advocates hope that, after health departments and similar organizations receive their money, none would be left for Planned Parenthood.

Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, sponsored the legislation, which established a tiered system for distributing federal family planning dollars.

“This would place Planned Parenthood, which does not provide comprehensive health services at the back of the line for federal family planning dollars,” Wise said last week.

Kentucky lawmakers have make implementation of the law dependent on Congress reversing the Obama administration’s action blocking states from withholding funds from Planned Parenthood affiliates. Wise said he included that provision to protect Kentucky against potential lawsuits.

Planned Parenthood supporters said the organization has voluntarily stopped accepting those family planning funds for its Kentucky operations. But Wise said he hopes his bill would cut off that funding source if Planned Parenthood seeks the dollars again.

Also passing: Kentucky will join the race to the bottom with charter schools that have already become major scandals in neighboring Ohio and Indiana.  As in other states, the bill was passes to help low-income and black and Latino students as they have the "most to benefit" but in Ohio's case at least, charter schools continue to be a complete disaster.

Meanwhile the bill most likely to go to court is the state's new "student religious freedom" law, which among other things allows students in public schools to openly participate in religious activities while on campus and would allow student religious organizations at publicly-funded schools and universities to openly discriminate against LGBTQ students for membership.

The law, Senate Bill 17, will allow students to engage in religious activities and to express religious views in public schools and in their assignments. It would also allow teachers to include lessons about the Bible in discussions of religion and history.

The legislation stems from a 2015 decision to remove references to Jesus Christ from a student production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

But LGBT rights groups assailed the new law, which they say codifies legal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. One provision of the law allows student religious groups to set their own rules for membership, which LGBT rights groups say is a path to discrimination.

“No student should fear being excluded from a school club or participating in a school activity because they are LGBTQ,” said Sarah Warbelow, legal director at the Human Rights Campaign. “While of course private groups should have the freedom to express religious viewpoints, they should not be able to unfairly discriminate with taxpayer funds.”

The bill passed both the state Senate and state House with broad bipartisan support. Just three state senators and eight House members voted against the new law.

Bevin's not off the hook on this one even facing the veto-proof margin, he gladly signed it anyway.

But this is my state now, Bevin has signed dozens of new GOP laws and they'll take effect later this summer, and any hope that Kentucky wasn't totally the joke of the nation will disappear in a flash.  Anyone who isn't a Christian white male cop isn't wanted here, it seems.

By the way, the first time a public school kid in Kentucky decides they want to pray towards Mecca under this new law, I wonder how it will hold up.