Last Call For Race To The Bottom, Con't

If we're somehow still surprised at the notion that white voters pulled the lever for Trump out of racism, Thomas Wood finds the 2016 American National Election Study has been released, and the motivating factor for Trump voters was -- surprise! -- race.

Many observers debated how important Trump’s racial appeals were to his voters. During the campaign, Trump made overt racial comments, with seemingly little electoral penalty. Could the unusual 2016 race have further affected Americans’ racial attitudes?
To test this, I use what is called the “symbolic racism scale” to compare whites who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate with those who voted for the Republican.  

This scale measures racial attitudes among respondents who know that it’s socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced. Rather than asking overtly prejudiced questions — “do you believe blacks are lazy” — we ask whether racial inequalities today are a result of social bias or personal lack of effort and irresponsibility. 

In the chart below, you can see the scores for white voters who supported the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates between 1988 and 2016. For clarity, the second and fourth items have been reversed so that the larger values always indicate higher animosity.

Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions. The biggest movement was among those who voted for the Democrat, who were far less likely to agree with attitudes coded as more racially biased. 

Finally, the statistical tool of regression can tease apart which had more influence on the 2016 vote: authoritarianism or symbolic racism, after controlling for education, race, ideology, and age. Moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile in the authoritarian scale made someone about 3 percent more likely to vote for Trump. The same jump on the SRS scale made someone 20 percent more likely to vote for Trump. 

Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.

So race was not just one factor in the 2016 elections, it was the big factor in elections, particularly among white voters, and especially among white voters without college degrees.  Basically if you agree with the notion that African-Americans are lazy and that systemic racism is a myth, you were massively more likely to vote for Trump, period.

But of course we knew Trump's appeal to racism was the plan, and the plan worked.  But both parties are still pretending that it didn't work, and that the answer to solving this problem of racism is class, education, or anything other than addressing racism head-on.

And so it goes.

The Business Of Government Is Giving Us The Business

To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge in the Trump era, at any rate.  Maybe it should be "The government of business is funny business" to paraphrase the Marx Brothers.  The Trump Regime asked corporate America what they wanted Trump to get rid of (the only voters who really count, by the way) and the majority said that the Environmental Protection Agency needed to go, so apparently that's what we're doing.

Just days after taking office, President Trump invited American manufacturers to recommend ways the government could cut regulations and make it easier for companies to get their projects approved. 

Industry leaders responded with scores of suggestions that paint the clearest picture yet of the dramatic steps that Trump officials are likely to take in overhauling federal policies, especially those designed to advance environmental protection and safeguard worker rights. 

Those clues are embedded in the 168 comments submitted to the government after Trump signed a presidential memorandumJan. 24 instructing the Commerce Department to figure out how to ease permitting and trim regulations with the aim of boosting domestic manufacturing. The Environmental Protection Agency has emerged as the primary target in these comments, accounting for nearly half, with the Labor Department in second place as the subject of more than one-fifth, according to a Commerce Department analysis.

Asking the American people whether or not they'd like clean water or air didn't make the list, since the Trump regime is literally asking corporations to set American environmental and labor policy.

Among the notable items on industry’s to-do list: 

• BP wants to make it easier to drill for oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico by reducing how often companies must renew their leases. 

• A trade association representing the pavement industry wants to preclude the U.S. Geological Survey from conducting what the group says is “advocacy research” into the environmental impact of coal tar. The Pavement Coatings Technology Council says this research could limit what it uses to seal parking lots and driveways. 

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to reduce the amount of time opponents have to challenge federal approval of projects. Challenges would have to be filed within two years, down from six. 

• The Chamber also wants to jettison a requirement that employers report their injury and illness records electronically to the Labor Department so they can be posted “on the internet for anyone to see.” 

• And in its 51-page comment, “Make Federal Agencies Responsible Again,” the Associated General Contractors of America recommended repealing 11 of President Barack Obama’s executive orders and memorandums, including one establishing paid sick leave for government contractors.

Three senior administration officials in different departments said the White House is inclined to accept many of these suggestions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a process that is underway.

Pretty sure all of them are fair game.  But transparency in worker safety records, paid sick leave, and the environment are not what corporate America wants to pay for, so "populist" Trump will make sure his corporate donors get what they paid for.

As Greg Sargent notes, Trump is now fully jettisoning his economic populism stances to become -- surprise! -- a standard war hawk corporate Republican.

But it has long been obvious that Trump was going to govern in ways that Wall Street aligned GOP elites are perfectly comfortable with. Trump’s agenda has long included elements that conventional conservative Republicans support: deregulation of Wall Street; a rollback of regulations to protect the environment and combat climate change; deep tax cuts for the rich and businesses. All of that has been underway or in the planning stages since the beginning. 

Trump’s reversals on trade and Ex-Im should only be surprising if you took his economic populism seriously during the campaign. But there was never any grounds for thinking it amounted to anything concrete at all in policy terms. Trump blustered a lot about trade, but he never detailed an actual agenda on it, let alone one that would help workers. He talked tough about raising taxes for the rich before releasing a tax plan that would slash them dramatically. 

Pundits told us for months that Trump’s economic nationalism represented a heterodox combination of hard-line immigration restrictionism and a decisive break with Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian Republicanism on Keynesian spending and social insurance and the safety net. But the second half of that was always mostly nonsense, and all that’s happening now is that this is getting confirmed.

So what we're getting with Trump is the worst of Austerity poor-shamers twisting morality into draconian cuts, on top of outright racist white nationalism, now combined with vicious saber-rattling and military belligerence.  We're looking at a regime that combines the absolute worst qualities of the GOP mashed into one awful package, and we're not even 100 days in.

Trump's pivot was to actually become the monster those of us who knew that he always was was capable of being. The rest of us?  Well, you folks didn't actually think Trump gave a damn about you, did you?

Nobody's Business But The Turks, Con't

Meanwhile in Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demonstrates yet another play in the "soft-to-hard" dictatorship book as he's claiming victory in a Sunday referendum to abolish parliament and give both executive and legislative power to himself.

President Tayyip Erdogan declared victory in a referendum on Sunday to grant him sweeping powers in the biggest overhaul of modern Turkish politics, but opponents said the vote was marred by irregularities and they would challenge its result.

Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast and its three main cities, including the capital Ankara and the largest city Istanbul, looked set to vote "No" after a bitter and divisive campaign.

Erdogan said 25 million people had supported the proposal, which will replace Turkey's parliamentary system with an all-powerful presidency and abolish the office of prime minister, giving the "Yes" camp 51.5 percent of the vote.

That appeared short of the decisive victory for which he and the ruling AK Party had aggressively campaigned. Nevertheless, thousands of flag-waving supporters rallied in Ankara and Istanbul in celebration.

"For the first time in the history of the Republic, we are changing our ruling system through civil politics," Erdogan said, referring to the military coups which marred Turkish politics for decades. "That is why it is very significant."

Under the changes, most of which will only come into effect after the next elections due in 2019, the president will appoint the cabinet and an undefined number of vice-presidents, and be able to select and remove senior civil servants without parliamentary approval.

There has been some speculation that Erdogan could call new elections so that his new powers could take effect right away. However, Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek told Reuters there was no such plan, and the elections would still be held in 2019.

If there was still somehow any doubt that last year's comically bad abortive coup was being used to turn Turkey, an EU member and US NATO ally, into a full dictatorship, that went up in flames last night.  Opposition lawmakers are still planning to challenge the vote, but my guess is after all is said and done that Erdogan will be the last one standing in this game.

Also please note that Turkey's constitution can be changed and the legislative branch abolished by a simple majority referendum, and Erdogan is the guy counting the votes.  He's eligible to remain in power until 2029, unless you know, the goalposts are moved again.  Who's going to stop him?  In just ten months, Erdogan has wrapped up near total power at a speed that even Vlad Putin would be impressed by.

This won't be good for anyone in the neighborhood, starting with of course Turkish Kurds.  We'll see where Erdogan goes, but my guess is he's the new dictator for life on the block and he has both an EU and NATO freebie card in his pocket.

StupidiNews!

• Mike Pence is warning North Korea "not to test" America's resolve, pointing to recent airstrikes in Afghanistan and Syria.
• Justice Neil Gorsuch will hear his first arguments as a Supreme Court Justice this week, including arguments Wednesday on a Missouri state ban on churches receiving state money.
• Cleveland Police are asking a man who they say posted video of him committing a murder on Easter Sunday to Facebook to turn himself in.
• Impeached former South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been officially indicted and will face trial later this year on multiple charges including bribery and abuse of office.
• Microsoft says the Windows exploits leaked by hacker group Shadow Brokers and purportedly used by the NSA were all patched last month by the software giant's regular security updates.

Last Call For The Pence-ive Diplomat

For some reason, the Trump regime sent Mike Pence into the Korean DMZ to...you know, I'm not really sure.

Vice President Pence, in the midst of a 10-day Asia trip, is making an unannounced visit to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, according to pool reports.

At 9:30 a.m. local time, a Blackhawk helicopter carrying Pence landed at Camp Bonifas, South Korea, the gateway to the DMZ.

Pence is expected to move inside the DMZ shortly, according to the pool report.

The visit comes amid growing tensions between North Korea and the U.S.

North Korea attempted to launch a ballistic missile Sunday on its east coast but failed. That attempt came one day after North Korea held a military parade showing off its latest missiles.

Pence was briefed on the launch while on Air Force Two en route to South Korea on Saturday night. It’s the first part of his multi-nation trip to reaffirm U.S. ties to the region, officials said.

That failed missile launch seems to have taken the starch out of Kim Jong Un's pants, and I guess we're sending Pence in because he's the relatively sane one, I guess.  Who knows.

Sunday Long Read: He Didn't See It Coming

Hoping everyone is having a good holiday this weekend, not much from me today but I did want to draw attention to this BuzzFeed News piece by Hayes Brown about the Obama White House reaction to Russia's interference as they discovered what was happening, and the realization that it was far too late to stop it.

No one from the Obama administration seems to remember when they figured out they were falling victim to one of the greatest intelligence operations in history. 

"This was the kind of realization that came incrementally," a former senior State Department official told BuzzFeed News. "There wasn’t a moment where you realized that Pearl Harbor had been hit by kamikaze or that the World Trade Center has been hit." 

Now, as two congressional committees and the FBI investigate Russia's role in the election, former Obama officials find themselves grappling with a new legacy, one that formed at the 11th hour of their time in power. As they looked toward a world where pariahs like Iran and Cuba were won over with diplomacy, they fell victim to a sneak attack by an old adversary. And they let it happen, offering up stern warnings and finger-wagging instead of adequately punishing Russia for achieving something that even the Soviet Union at the height of its power couldn’t manage: meddling in the US election and rattling Americans’ trust in their democracy. 

Initially, news that Russia-backed hackers had infiltrated the email systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) split the Obama administration. White House staffers struggled to wrap their heads around the scale of what occurred and found themselves unsure of how to respond without appearing to give Hillary Clinton a boost. The State Department's staff were torn over how far to press the matter with Russia, given other priorities like struggling to find an endgame for the Syrian civil war. Across the Potomac, the Defense Department was pushing for a strong response against Russia. "The White House was more in listening mode," a former Defense Department official told BuzzFeed News. 

The official described what ensued as "endless discussion after endless discussion." 

After weeks of intense debate, the White House’s ambivalence won. On Oct. 7, a Friday afternoon, they released a carefully worded, three-paragraph statement, saying that the US intelligence community was "confident" that the Russian government was behind the hack. White House staffers thought publicly blaming Russia would draw the public’s attention and keep Moscow in line by making clear the US was willing to call them out. They also functioned under the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win and take a more robust approach down the line. 

"When we rolled that out on Oct. 7, we thought this would get a huge amount of pickup and play and be a catalyzing moment for the country, when the United States government — the intelligence community and DHS — announced jointly that Russians were trying to hack our election," Ned Price, then the chief spokesperson for the National Security Council (NSC), told BuzzFeed News. 

"A colleague of mine at another department was on the phone with a reporter, who was asking him questions about the statement," Price said. "My colleague then recalled hearing from the reporter, ‘Oh my god. I’ll have to call you back.'" 

One hour after the statement dropped, the Washington Post published the 2005 "grab them by the pussy" tape. Less than half an hour later, WikiLeaks began dumping a new series of emails, this time hacked from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. 

The reporter never called back. 

Former officials have placed a lot of hype in the statement — the key point of which was that Russia was behind the leaks, something that had been reported for months by cybersecurity companies and journalists — during the months since leaving office. But the fact remains that the brief release had been a small shot — and it missed. 

Was a press release released on a Friday afternoon, months after the hack, too little, too late? Not according to Obama administration officials. Just naming Russia, they say, should have been a sharp response enough to brush Russia back. And it wasn't their fault if no one paid attention to this press release, they say. “It was the Trump team that really took all of the oxygen out of the room and led to relatively scant coverage of that statement," said Price. "I think that was not received in the way that some of us had hoped, that it would be sort of a galvanizing force."

It wasn't.  Not by a long shot.

Look, let's be honest here. The Obama White House made a number of miscalculations as to how America and the world would respond to major events, severely underestimating the GOP response to Obamacare in 2010, getting essentially the entire Arab Spring movement wrong (especially Egypt and Syria), and being overly pragmatic on a number of decisions when it came to race relations in the US.  Don't get me wrong, I love the guy and I wish he could have gotten four more years.  He wasn't perfect, but compared to both his predecessor and his successor, he's a genius and he's still a top 10 president of all time, hands down.

But the lasting effects of Obama taking his eye off Putin long enough for Moscow to screw us over with Trump will be with us for years, maybe decades, and it's high time we had a pretty frank conversation as a country about that.

I'm not putting the blame on Barack Obama here.  He's not the one that sabotaged our country.  But defending it was his stated job at the time, and that defense wasn't good enough.  We need to learn the lessons from that at some point.  If he had made a massive deal about it, we'd instead be blaming him for driving the country to vote GOP by starting a massive conspiracy theory or something.

Of course, lesson number one is dealing with Trump and those who enabled him, and getting rid of all of them, and dealing with the sixty million plus people who voted for the guy,  They're the real problem with America, and we're going to have to deal with that, too.

No Sanctuary From Trump

Trump's executive order threat to remove federal funding from sanctuary cities, made public last month by AG Jeff Sessions, is now going before a judge in California.  Both San Francisco and neighboring Santa Clara County, home of San Jose, are taking the order to court to get an injunction. 

A Trump administration lawyer told an apparently skeptical federal judge Friday that President Trump’s executive order against so-called sanctuary cities, such as San Francisco, doesn’t deprive them of federal funding — at least not yet — but merely encourages them to follow immigration laws.

“There’s been no action threatened or taken against the cities,” Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler said at a hearing in San Francisco on a lawsuit by San Francisco and Santa Clara County. He said Trump, in a Jan. 25 order that spoke of withholding federal funds from cities and counties that refused to cooperate with federal immigration agents, was just using a “bully pulpit” to advocate compliance.

But U.S. District Judge William Orrick III said Attorney General Jeff Sessions has publicly identified San Francisco as a sanctuary city, and Trump has also criticized the city’s immigration policy.

In the first legal test of Trump’s executive order, Orrick is considering San Francisco and Santa Clara County’s request for an injunction that would halt enforcement of the order against more than 300 cities and counties nationwide. After a 70-minute hearing in his San Francisco courtroom, Orrick said he would issue a ruling “as soon as I can.”

Readler had argued that the two counties lacked standing — the right to challenge the executive order — because they faced no prospect of immediate harm. But Orrick noted that San Francisco has received as much as $2 billion a year in federal funding, and Santa Clara County $1.7 billion.

That's a lot of damage at stake.  The question is whether or not local governments can sue at all.  The Trump regime of course says no, but it's pretty easy to conclude that the removal of billions of dollars in funds from a city or county would do lasting and immediate harm.

There's also the question of the order forcing local law enforcement into immigration enforcement activities.

But administration officials have also demanded that cities and counties hold immigrant detainees after their scheduled release dates when immigration officials want to take them into their custody for possible deportation.

San Francisco and Santa Clara County say any such prolonged confinement would be unconstitutional, a position shared by many other local governments that the administration has defined as sanctuary cities. Readler told Orrick the administration was issuing only requests, not orders, to keep immigrants in custody, and that local compliance was “voluntary.”

But Orrick said Sessions has classified local governments that fail to go along as sanctuary cities, meaning they are covered by Trump’s order.

At one point in the hearing, Orrick said he was inclined to conclude that the local governments faced the prospect of financial harm, a prerequisite for allowing them to continue challenging Trump’s order. To issue an injunction, he would also have to find a likelihood that the order exceeded the president’s legal authority.

So we'll see.  I expect an injunction will come at some point, if not in California than in New York, Washington State, Hawaii, or Minnesota.  Flordia and Texas stand to lose a lot of money from this too, so you can bet cities like San Antonia and Miami will be watching this very closely.  After all, the Trump regime doesnt have a very strong record so far in the courts.

Bordering On Ridiculous

Meanwhile, along the US-Mexico border, as the Trump regime grows its deportation force those who give aid to the undocumented on both sides of the border aren't chancing a border crossing and those who are already here are too scared to come out and take help any longer.

In the 35 years Gilda and Juan Francisco Loureiro have been running a shelter in northern Mexico for undocumented immigrants, they’ve never seen a week like this one.

The shelter, called Albergue San Juan Bosco, is perched on a steep hillside looking over the busy border town of Nogales, Mexico. Its walls are painted bright turquoise and tangerine, and its wide-open double doors look west over low hills and Highway 15. Since they opened it, upward of 1 million people have slept there on their way to the U.S. But on the day I visited, it was almost empty.

It didn’t used to be this way, Gilda and Juan Francisco, known as Paco, explained. In the decades since they opened the space to give migrants a place to shower and sleep before crossing the border, the shelter—with separate rooms full of bunkbeds for men and women—would regularly house 100 migrants per night. Sometimes, that number would hit 300 or more, and Gilda and Paco would pull out thin mattresses to fit everyone on the floor.

But today, those mattresses are neatly stacked in a closet, untouched. And the shelter is almost empty—no women travelers, and fewer than a dozen men. That’s despite the fact that April, with its mild weather, should be the busiest time of year for migrants. The place is all but dead. Gilda and Paco have never seen anything like it.

They can only think of one explanation: President Donald Trump.

Trump hasn’t yet made good on his bombastic campaign trail promises. The wall is still just a twinkle in his eye, and the deportation force hiring sprees haven’t happened yet. ICE agents have conducted raids targeting undocumented immigrants, but they aren’t actually that different in scale from raids that happened during the early years of the Obama administration.

But the symbolism of Trump in the Oval Office and the threat of extended detention has already deterred many migrants. Migrants are scared, explained Jose, a young Honduran man staying at the San Bosco shelter in hopes of getting to the U.S. They might be less scared in the future, he said, but for now they’re waiting.

The Trump administration seems to have figured this out. In a speech on the Arizona side of the border the day before, Attorney General Jeff Sessions noted that the number of people caught illegally crossing the border had dropped by 72 percent from December 2016 to March 2017.

“This is no accident,” Sessions told an audience of reporters and Customs and Border Protections officials.

The Trump regime's climate of constant fear is working to depress new immigrants, but it's also working to depress US tourism from across the globe, even our neighbors are looking elsewhere for vacations and visits.

Demand for flights to the United States has fallen in nearly every country since January, ­according to Hopper, a travel-booking app that analyzes more than 10 billion daily airfare price quotes to derive its data. Searches for U.S. flights from China and Iraq have dropped 40 percent since Trump’s inauguration, while demand in Ireland and New Zealand is down about 35 percent. (One exception: Russia, where searches for flights to the United States have surged 60 percent since January.)

The result could be an estimated 4.3 million fewer people coming to the United States this year, resulting in $7.4 billion in lost revenue, according to Tourism Economics, a Philadelphia-based analytics firm. Next year, the fallout is expected to be even larger, with 6.3 million fewer tourists and $10.8 billion in losses. Miami is expected to be hit hardest, followed by San Francisco and New York, the firm said.       

The administration’s travel ban deals a blow to an industry that has only recently recovered from a $600 billion loss following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“In the aftermath of 9/11, at first people didn’t feel safe coming here, and then they didn’t feel welcome,” said Jonathan Grella, an executive vice president at the U.S. Travel Association. “Our industry still refers to that as ‘the lost decade.’ There is a very real risk that that could happen again.”

Fear is the only tool Trump knows how to use, and it's going to cost our economy thousands of jobs, millions of tourists and billions of dollars.  But you elected him toe "Make America Great Again" folks. 

And now we all pay the price for your ignorance.

Going After The Spies

It seems that our good friends in Russia are bound and determined to destroy America's counterintelligence capability so that they can continue to pull the strings unopposed, as second-order Snowden fallout has arguably reached its highest level yet.  Nick Weaver at Lawfare Blog:

The Shadow Brokers are back. Back in August, the group released a large number of stolen tools purportedly hacked from “the Equation Group,” which is near-unanimously believed to be the NSA. In addition to the released files, Shadow Brokers announced an “auction” for the sale of an addition batch of NSA tools. At the time, it seemed the auction was more publicity stunt than money-making endeavor and that suspicion was confirmed last week, when they released the password for the auction tools for free.

The “auction” file materials were underwhelming, but today those wiley and sarcastic (and probably Russian) hackers dumped the really amazing stuff: operational notes from the NSA’s active targeting of banks in the Middle East and the NSA’s collection of Microsoft Windows exploitation tools. This may well be the most damaging dump against the NSA to date, and it is without question the most damaging post-Snowden release.

The operational notes on the NSA’s program extracting SWIFT data from Middle Eastern banks appear to date from September 2013, so this represents post-Snowden stolen data. The material is almost certainly legitimate—a spot check of data shows a large amount of consistency. This details exact targets, such as particular systems in eastnets.com to leverage access into the SWIFT systems of client banks, and sql queries designed to extract, in bulk, transactions of interest. Any access NSA maintained is now as good as eliminated, since this provides a detailed roadmap to how the NSA accessed this critical information.

So yes, the NSA's tools to get into Windows machines have now been blown wide open and given to a planet full of hackers to be used against everyone else.  Fun!  Weaver does ask the right question though.

The real mystery here is why the Shadow Brokers released this data. Ordinarily, a hostile intelligence service wouldn’t tip their hand by showing that they had obtained this information but there are some clear strategic benefits to that kind of signalling. Releasing the vulnerabilities themselves goes a step further. It ensures not only that the NSA is unable to use the Windows 0-days against targets, but that you aren’t either. It is a matter of short time before these tools are patched, and thus unavailable to anyone. These are tremendously valuable tools to just burn that way, so it does make one wonder (and worry): what exactly is the intended payoff here? 

The obvious answer is that both Putin and Trump have a massive enemy in the American intel community.  Crippling the NSA's cyber operations like this only helps the Russians, since the NSA are, or were, the top dogs at using cyber exploits like this.  Leveling the playing field through scorched earth only helps everyone who's not the NSA, and it has the added benefit of letting them know what the consequences are of leaking say, plans for North Korea or more info on Trump's Russian connections.

There's no mystery here, this is payback, plain and simple.  My guess is that it's payback for this story.

As Syrian president Bashar al-Assad called videos of last week’s chemical attack a “fabrication,” a piece of propaganda promoted by a Russian cyber operation and bearing the hashtag #SyriaHoax has gained traction in the United States, analysts tell ABC News.

Following the chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians on Tuesday, Al-Masdar News, a pro-Assad website based in Beirut, published claims that "something is not adding up in [the] Idlib chemical weapons attack." Its author cited "holes" in the accounts provided by the "Al-Qaeda affiliated" White Helmets leading to the conclusion that "this is another false chemical attack allegation made against the government."

That hoax story was promoted by a network of Russian social media accounts and ultimately picked up by popular alt-right personalities in the United States, including Mike Cernovich, one of the leading voices in the debunked 'Pizzagate' conspiracy theory. Cernovich popularized its new hashtag -- #SyriaHoax -- and sent it soaring through cyberspace. According to Trends24, within hours of the retaliatory missile strike President Donald Trump launched on Thursday night, #SyriaHoax was the No. 1 trending Twitter topic in the United States.

J.M. Berger of The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, who studies propaganda and social media analytical techniques, said #SyriaHoax is "a clear example of a Russian influence campaign" designed to undermine the credibility of the U.S. government.
"The point of an influence campaign is to get people involved who wouldn't otherwise be involved," Berger said. "A lot of people in the alt-right would not necessarily characterize themselves as being pro-Russian, but they're receiving influence from this campaign."

Hours after the #SyriaHoax story was pinned on Russia, we got the Shadow Broker NSA tools leak.  You do the math.

Last Call For The Last Mall

Trump's world chaos isn't exactly helping the retail industry, with many consumers deciding that buying new stuff in the Trump era isn't exactly as important as it used to be when you've got a Republican party in charge that's looking to trash health care, the environment, and global politics.  As a result, retailers already operating under slim margins are going under at a rate unseen since the Bush-era days of the Great Recession.

Retailers are filing for bankruptcy at an alarming rate that's quickly approaching recessionary levels.

It's only April, and nine retailers have already filed for bankruptcy since the start of the year — as many as all of last year.

"2017 will be the year of retail bankruptcies," Corali Lopez-Castro, a bankruptcy lawyer, told Business Insider after she attended a recent distressed-investing conference in Palm Beach, Florida. "Retailers are running out of cash, and the dominoes are starting to fall."

Payless ShoeSource, hhgregg, The Limited, RadioShack, BCBG, Wet Seal, Gormans, Eastern Outfitters, and Gander Mountain are among the retailers that have filed for bankruptcy so far this year, and most are closing hundreds of stores as a result. On top of those closures, retailers that are staying in business — at least for now — are shutting down a record number of stores.

More than 3,500 stores are expected to close over the next several months.

Annual retail bankruptcies peaked at a total of 20 in 2008 — a level that the US could reach by September if the current rate of filings continues, according to CNBC.

During the recession, private equity firms and banks came to the rescue of some retailers and brought them out of bankruptcy through restructuring.

But there aren't many firms willing to rescue dying retailers these days, according to RBC Capital Markets.

"Private-equity firms [and] banks seem less willing now to step in to save these failing retailers as the issues this time around are more structural rather than quick operational fixes," RBC analysts wrote in a recent research note.

Given Trump's familiarity with bankruptcy filings, it's only right that America should expect to see a lot more of them. And as thousands of stores go away and tens of thousands lose their jobs, maybe America will realize that Trump and the GOP aren't the answer to any of their problems.

If there's a recession on top of everything else I expect to happen in the next few years, the GOP is going to get wiped out in 2018.  Unfortunately, that may go for our entire economy as well.

Whose House? Trump's House!

President Obama regularly released White House visitor's logs, saying the people of the United States had the right to know who entered the President's house.  The Trump regime doesn't agree and refuses to do the same, and thinks the people of the United States have the right to whatever Trump decides they have the right to have, when he decides they can have it.

President Donald Trump will not release records of visitors to the White House, his administration announced Friday, breaking with President Barack Obama and raising concerns about transparency.

The Obama administration had posted the visitor logs online. But White House communications director Michael Dubke said in a statement Trump had decided to withhold them because of “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.” Time first reported the reversal.

Under Obama, the White House released records about three months after the visits occurred. The policy contained a series of exceptions, however, allowing the White House to withhold the names of people it believed were sensitive or personal visitors to the Obama family.

Several groups have already filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump White House turn over the records, as well as logs of visitors to his homes in New York and Florida. Transparency advocates say the logs give a lens into who the president meets, including lobbyists and lawmakers, and who shapes his thinking.

You didn't think Trump was ever going to tell you who comes to kiss his ring, did you?  Silly citizen, Trump is above your antiquated notions of petty morality.  You are no longer necessary to his continued rulership.

The Shortest Of Honeymoons

I said months ago that nothing would happen to Trump from a legal standpoint unless his base turned on him, and angered GOP primary voters were willing to look the other way as "RINO"s in Congress took action. Politico puts forth the argument that Trump's base may be reaching this point.

Donald Trump’s true believers are losing the faith.

As Trump struggles to keep his campaign promises and flirts with political moderation, his most steadfast supporters — from veteran advisers to anti-immigration activists to the volunteers who dropped their jobs to help elect him — are increasingly dismayed by the direction of his presidency.

Their complaints range from Trump’s embrace of an interventionist foreign policy to his less hawkish tone on China to, most recently, his marginalization of his nationalist chief strategist, Steve Bannon. But the crux of their disillusionment, interviews with nearly two dozen Trump loyalists reveal, is a belief that Trump the candidate bears little resemblance to Trump the president. He’s failing, in their view, to deliver on his promise of a transformative “America First” agenda driven by hard-edged populism.

"Donald Trump dropped an emotional anchor. He captured how Americans feel," said Tania Vojvodic, a fervent Trump supporter who founded one of his first campaign volunteer networks. "We expect him to keep his word, and right now he's not keeping his word."

Earlier this week, Vojvodic launched a Facebook group called, “The concerned support base of President Trump,” which quickly drew several dozen sign-ups. She also changed the banner on her Facebook page to a picture of Bannon accompanied by the declaration: “Mr. President: I stand with Steve Bannon.”

"I'm not so infatuated with Trump that I can't see the facts," she said. "People's belief, their trust in him, it’s declining."

The swiftness and abruptness of Trump’s shift from bomb-throwing populist outsider to a more mainstream brand of Republican has taken the president’s stalwarts by surprise.

“It was like, here’s the chance to do something different. And that’s why people’s hopes are dashed,” said Lee Stranahan, who, as a former writer at Breitbart News, once worked with Bannon. “There was always the question of, ‘Did he really believe this stuff?’ Apparently, the answer is, ‘Not as much as you’d like.’” 

I think the real issue is that "Trump the winner" is turning out to be "Trump the giant loser", and nobody likes a loser, particularly angry racist white Trump voters who finally thought they were in charge of America and that the rest of us were second-class citizens at best.  Suddenly the fact that the GOP can't govern worth a damn domestically and has no idea what they are doing on foreign policy is hitting home, and they don't like it one bit.

We'll see how much this affects his popularity, but this is the kind of thing that needs to happen in order for Republicans to be more scared of the people who want Trump gone than the people who want Trump to reign forever.

Last Call For Two Toddlers With Big Guns

Well, if this report from NBC News is true, this weekend is about to get a whole lot more interesting, and in a very bad way.

The U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test, multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

North Korea has warned that a "big event" is near, and U.S. officials say signs point to a nuclear test that could come as early as this weekend.

The intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site.

American heavy bombers are also positioned in Guam to attack North Korea should it be necessary, and earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.

The U.S. strike could include missiles and bombs, cyber and special operations on the ground.

The danger of such an attack by the U.S. is that it could provoke the volatile and unpredictable North Korean regime to launch its own blistering attack on its southern neighbor.

"The leadership in North Korea has shown absolutely no sign or interest in diplomacy or dialogue with any of the countries involved in this issue," Victor Cha, the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told NBC News Thursday.

Well, so we're basically going to restart the Korean War?

Yeah, I'm going to need a drink.

Running Government Like A Business

Since the purpose of government in the Trump era is to enrich Trump at taxpayer expense whenever possible, it's funny to finally see one piece of government oversight catch up to the regime: Florida health inspectors would like to have a few words about the kitchen at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Just days before the state visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach private club, Florida restaurant inspectors found potentially dangerous raw fish and cited the club for storing food in two broken down coolers. 

Inspectors found 13 violations at the fancy club’s kitchen, according to recently published reports — a record for an institution that charges $200,000 in initiation fees.
Three of the violations were deemed “high priority,” meaning that they could allow the presence of illness-causing bacteria on plates served in the dining room. 

According to their latest visit to the club Jan. 26, state inspectors decided Mar-a-Lago’s kitchen did meet the minimum standards. 

But they had a field day with elements that could give members of the high-class club and foreign dignitaries some pause: 

▪ Fish designed to be served raw or undercooked, the inspection report reads, had not undergone proper parasite destruction. Kitchen staffers were ordered to cook the fish immediately or throw it out. 

▪ In two of the club’s coolers, inspectors found that raw meats that should be stored at 41 degrees were much too warm and potentially dangerous: chicken was 49 degrees, duck clocked in a 50 degrees and raw beef was 50 degrees. The winner? Ham at 57 degrees. 

▪ The club was cited for not maintaining the coolers in proper working order and was ordered to have them emptied immediately and repaired. 

The other violations weren’t so serious. Water at the sink where employees wash their hands was too cold to sanitize hands. And Mar-a-Lago was also written up for keeping rusted shelves inside walk-in coolers.

I'm betting a few health inspectors get fired this weekend, not to mention a new White House focus on cutting the FDA's budget for assisting with restaurant inspections.  Remember the Food Safety Modernization Act passed in early 2016?  I'm betting that suddenly funding for implementation magically vanishes.

Nobody gives a Trump restaurant a crap inspection grade and lives to tell the tale.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/restaurants/article144261894.html#storylink=cpy

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime continues to take steps to build a national deportation force to be used against immigrants as the regime's top domestic priority appears to be the de facto mass incarceration and deportation of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living the US.

The Trump administration is quickly identifying ways to assemble the nationwide deportation force that President Trump promised on the campaign trail as he railed against the dangers posed by illegal immigration.

An internal Department of Homeland Security assessment obtained by The Washington Post shows the agency has already found 33,000 more detention beds to house undocumented immigrants, opened discussions with dozens of local police forces that could be empowered with enforcement authority and identified where construction of Trump’s border wall could begin.

The agency also is considering ways to speed up the hiring of hundreds of new Customs and Border Patrol officers, including ending polygraph and physical fitness tests in some cases, according to the documents.

But these plans could be held up by the prohibitive costs outlined in the internal report and resistance in Congress, where many lawmakers are already balking at approving billions in spending on the wall and additional border security measures.

Administration officials said the plans are preliminary and have not been reviewed by senior DHS management, but the assessment offers a glimpse of the department’s behind-the-scenes planning to carry out the two executive orders Trump signed in January to boost deportations and strengthen border enforcement.

The one thing that might actually stop these efforts?  Of all things, it could very well be congressional Republicans balking at the multi-billion dollar price tag.

For example, Trump has called for CBP to hire 5,000 new agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional 10,000. The DHS assessment said the cost of hiring just 500 agents would reach $100 million.

Republican leaders have proposed delaying a decision on Trump’s initial request of $1.5 billion for the wall and an additional $2.6 billion for more border security next year until after a new spending bill is approved this month in the hope of averting a government shutdown.

In other words, Trump's plan might die in the House because Republicans are cheap assholes.

Yay America!