Russian To Judgment, Con't

Like any good investigator, Bob Mueller is conducting interviews with witnesses in order to obtain information, and the witnesses he wants to talk to regarding Trump and Russia are a half-dozen aides, all high-level Trump regime personnel, to get them to roll on the boss.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has alerted the White House that his team will probably seek to interview six top current and former advisers to President Trump who were witnesses to several episodes relevant to the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the request.

Mueller’s interest in the aides, including trusted adviser Hope Hicks, former press secretary Sean Spicer and former chief of staff Reince Priebus, reflects how the probe that has dogged Trump’s presidency is starting to penetrate a closer circle of aides around the president.

Each of the six advisers was privy to important internal discussions that have drawn the interest of Mueller’s investigators, according to people familiar with the probe, including his decision in May to fire FBI Director James B. Comey. Also of interest is the White House’s initial inaction after warnings about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s December discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The advisers are also connected to internal documents that Mueller’s investigators have asked the White House to produce, according to people familiar with the special counsel’s inquiry.

Roughly four weeks ago, the special counsel’s team provided the White House with the names of the first group of current and former Trump advisers and aides whom investigators expect to question.

In addition to Priebus, Spicer and Hicks, Mueller has notified the White House he will probably seek to question White House counsel Don McGahn and one of his deputies, James Burnham. Mueller’s office has also told the White House that investigators may want to interview Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who works closely with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.

White House officials are expecting that Mueller will seek additional interviews, possibly with family members, including Kushner, who is a West Wing senior adviser, according to the people familiar with Mueller’s inquiry.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is always a fun scenario to see acted out.  And if Spicer and Priebus don't roll over, Donny's family seems pretty vulnerable and self-centered to me, just like dad.

Hell, Mueller might end up with too much information, a pretty rare occurrence in a criminal investigation of a politician as dirty as Trump.  White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is the latest to lawyer up over Russia, and she won't be the last Trump aide to play this game of musical chairs to see who gets the immunity prize when Mueller kills the tunes.

Stay tuned, folks.

Last Call For Outfoxed Again

Dylan Matthews at Vox reminds us that despite Rachel Maddow and MSNBC enjoying a ratings spike in the Trump era, America is still very much FOX News country, and remains powerful enough by itself to determine American elections.

Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel; in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.

A new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote.

"There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

Without FOX, America would be a far different place.  What's more, they are far more effective at moving Dems to the R column than anyone is at convincing Republicans to vote for the Democrats.

The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible; MSNBC, in 2000 and 2004, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 2004 and 2008, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year.

“Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. In 2000, they estimate that 58 percent of Fox viewers who were initially Democrats changed to supporting the Republican candidate by the end of the election cycle; in 2004, the persuasion rate was 27 percent, and 28 percent in 2008. MSNBC, by contrast, only persuaded 8 percent of initial Republicans to vote Democratic in the 2008 cycle.

These are big effects, with major societal implications. The authors find that the Fox News effect translates into a 0.46 percentage point boost to the GOP vote share in the 2000 presidential race, a 3.59-point boost in 2004, and a 6.34-point boost in 2008; the boost increases as the channel's viewership grew. This effect alone is large enough, they argue, to explain all the polarization in the US public's political views from 2000 to 2008.

In other words, you can singlehandedly blame FOX for the Dubya years. Long before Trump or the Russians, the Republicans already had a substantial built-in advantage, and there may not be any way to stop it now short of another 2008 financial crisis magnitude disaster.

That's Great, It Starts With An Earthquake

Hurricanes on the east coast, flooding in the Gulf, massive wildfires in the west and just because, now we get a major earthquake off the southern coast of Mexico.

At least 16 people have died after the most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in a century struck off the country's southern coast. 

During an interview with CNN affiliate Foro TV, Luis Felipe Puente, the country's national coordinator for emergency management, said 10 peopled died in Oaxaca state, four in Chiapas state and two in Tabasco state. 

The magnitude-8.1 quake, which was felt as far as Mexico City and Guatemala City, was registered off Mexico's southern coast just as heavy rains from Hurricane Katia lashed the east. The epicenter was in the Pacific Ocean, some 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) southeast of the capital and 74 miles (120 kilometers) from the Pacific coast. 

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said the quake was the strongest earthquake Mexico has experienced in 100 years. 

It hit just before midnight on Thursday, when many people would have been sleeping.

The planet will be fine long after we're gone, it'll adjust and keep being the third rock from the sun for several billion years.  Humans, well.  I'm thinking this particular trip around the sun that the earth might be reacting a bit to shed a few billion parasites.

Last Call For Checkmating The Credit Checkers

It was only a matter of time before hackers hit the Holy Grail of data jackpots: consumer credit agency Equifax was nailed by a breach that could have essentially exposed everyone with a credit record in the US.

Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.

The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people. Limited personal information for an unknown number of Canadian and UK residents was also exposed. Equifax—which also provides credit monitoring services for people whose personal information is exposed—said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July.

"Criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files," Equifax said in a statement late Thursday, without elaborating. That leaves open a wide range of possibilities, with injection bugs, faulty authentication mechanisms, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities topping the list of the most widely exploited website flaws.

This isn't the first time a garden-variety website flaw has been exploited to obtain a massive amount of sensitive data. Associates of Albert Gonzalez, a convicted hacker who was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, exploited a SQL-injection flaw that helped them obtain data for 130 million credit cards. On Wednesday, exploit code for a nine-year-old code-execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2—a software framework used by many large financial service websites—went public, but there was no immediate indication that the Equifax site uses it.

You read that right. One hundred forty-three million credit records exposed.  Equifax is offering free credit monitoring to anyone affected, but that's pretty much everyone in the US with an Equifax credit file.

Which is, you know, anybody who ever had a credit card or loan application in the last 25 years.

Needless to say, you should consider your identity compromised and should take steps.

Until the next massive data breach, that is.  If you're wondering about consequences for Equifax's corporate leadership, well...let's just say they knew what was coming and acted in their own self-interest.

Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.

The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.

In other words, they knew for over a month and didn't tell anyone, and sold shares before revealing the breach and the crash of Equifax stock.

Because corporate America.

Sure hope the credit records for these three aren't compromised, ya know?  That would be a shame.

Understanding Donald

Looks like Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress finally realized the best way to get Trump to do something is "couch it as revenge against those who wronged you" and voila!

President Trump and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) have agreed to pursue a deal that would permanently remove the requirement that Congress repeatedly raise the debt ceiling, three people familiar with the decision said.

Trump and Schumer discussed the idea Wednesday during an Oval Office meeting. The two, along with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), agreed to work together over the next several months to try to finalize a plan, which would need to be approved by Congress.

One of the people familiar described it as a “gentlemen’s agreement.”

The three people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the meeting.

Senate Democrats hope they will be able to finalize an arrangement with Trump by December.

On Thursday, Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House about abolishing the congressional process for raising the debt ceiling. He replied that "there are lots of good reasons to do that."

"It could be discussed," Trump said. "For many years, people have been talking about getting rid of [the] debt ceiling altogether."

He confirmed during the exchange with reporters at the White House that the issue was discussed during his meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday.

Of course the corollary to this is "Trump will immediately screw you over on any deal you make with him" so of course this is going to fall apart well before December, but in the meantime Trump loses nothing to piss off Republicans who didn't get Trumpcare passed, because that's how America's government works now.

Whoever can babysit Tang the Conqueror and make him think everything is his brilliant idea to begin with wins.

Last Call For Making A Huge Massie Of Things

Local libertarian douchecanoe for Rep. Thomas Massie is taking a hell of a lot of heat for being one of the only three jagoffs in the House to vote against Harvey funding, and that frustration boiled over to Twitter today.

The Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce tweeted out an explicit opinion of U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie. 

The tweet was deleted shortly after it was posted Wednesday afternoon.

"Wow, what a piece of sh*t," the Northern Kentucky Chamber tweeted with a link to a River City News story about Massie, R-Garrison, voting against relief aid for Hurricane Harvey victims. 

Northern Kentucky Chamber President Brent Cooper apologized for the tweet and said he'd launch an investigation into how such a tweet could have come from the chamber Twitter account.

"It doesn't reflect the feeling of the chamber of commerce," Cooper said. "I apologize to Thomas Massie or anyone else who saw it."

NKY's Rep. Thomas Massie one of three 'no' votes on Harvey relief

Cooper said only two chamber staff members have access to the account, he and one other staff member.

"I know it didn't come from me," Cooper said.

The other staff member, whom Cooper wouldn't name, is traveling and didn't tweet it, he said. The chamber also contracts with a company to manage the social media account. Cooper wouldn't name the company. 

"I'm in the process of changing the security information to ensure it doesn't happen again," Cooper said.

The NKY Chamber's terrible Twitter security practices aside, whoever did tweet that was frankly right. It takes a special kind of garbage human being to vote against disaster funding when you know it's needed and Massie has all the empathy of a burning oil refinery.

I'm really hoping that this is the straw that sends Massie home, but NKY is dead solid Trump country, and you can spot the Republican here in 2018 40 points.

Ralph's Korean Barbecue

Over at the NY Post, columnist Ralph Peters calls for the genocide of a million North Koreans.

No really guys, this isn't hyperbole or me being snarky, this is actually a published columnist in a published newspaper calling for the deaths of North Koreans in a brutal preemptive military strike.

Better a million dead North Koreans than a thousand dead Americans. The fundamental reason our government exists is to protect our people and our territory. Everything else is a grace note. And the words we never should hear in regard to North Korea’s nuclear threats are “We should’ve done something.” 

Instead, we should do something. Pyongyang’s Sunday test of a hydrogen bomb of devastating power begs for decisive action. Must we wait until Americans die?
A pre-emptive strike against Kim Jong Un’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs would be a terrible thing, demanding a vast military effort (if done properly) and leaving broad destruction in its wake. But that terrible option increasingly appears to be the least bad option. The question is whether we’ll delay action until it’s too late to save American lives. 

When we’re threatened with nuclear destruction by North Korea, a military response is not unethical. Rather, inviting a North Korean attack by hesitating endlessly — then witnessing the slaughter of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of our citizens — would be unethical and immoral. 

We do not want war. That much could not be more obvious. But we cannot sacrifice American lives to shield the consciences of intellectual elites who, from protected positions of immense privilege, insist that all human life is precious, not just our “deplorable” American lives. 

If there is any real hope of a peaceful solution, of course that would be preferable. But we cannot rely on miracles or mirages. A generation of talks has done nothing but protect North Korea’s weapons programs. Sanctions haven’t restrained North Korea either, since China, Russia, India and other states undercut them.

Nor have our displays of force in the region done anything to deter a regime conditioned to our empty pageantry. 

North Korea doesn’t believe we will act. Because we never have acted. 

Those wildly misnamed Washington institutions labeled “think tanks” find themselves stumped: Conditioned to group-think and addicted to that supreme intellectual opiate, negotiations, we hear — even from conservative voices — that there’s no military solution, while the left repeats that “War never changes anything.” 

As to the latter claim, warfare has been humanity’s ultimate means of resolving intractable issues since the first cave-dwellers went at the gang from the cave down yonder with rocks. We may not like it — I don’t — but to insist that war isn’t humanity’s sometimes-necessary default means of survival is to ignore all of human history.

Ahh, the same song they played in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.  Only this time the stakes are far higher and the death toll will be as many dead South Koreans as there are North Koreans when the trumpets of war sound.

Genocide is such a popular tune, isn't it?

Waking Up From The DREAM, Con't

Can we stop pretending that Trump's six-month punt on DACA isn't anything more than a cruel, fantastically racist and bloody-minded stunt to shore up the base after Harvey and Mueller, and that even if Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell could pull anything out of their asses and pass legislation keeping the referrals that Trump would ever sign it?

Can we stop the song and dance about Trump not being a monster?  Because he's not pretending anymore either.

White House talking points on Tuesday urged DACA recipients to prepare for a "departure from the United States," a much starker possible future than Trump administration officials used in public when announcing an end to the program.

The statement was contained in a background document that was sent by the White House to offices on Capitol Hill, obtained by CNN from multiple sources. 

In the "DACA talking points" memo, the White House laid out a number of bullet points for supporters on Tuesday's announcement outlining the administration's action. One bullet point suggests DACA participants should prepare to leave the country. 

"The Department of Homeland Security urges DACA recipients to use the time remaining on their work authorizations to prepare for and arrange their departure from the United States -- including proactively seeking travel documentation -- or to apply for other immigration benefits for which they may be eligible," the memo says. 

Neither the White House or Department of Homeland Security disputed the contents of the document to CNN. 

"As noted, we expect Congress to pass legislation so this will hopefully be a moot point," DHS spokesman David Lapan said. "However, of course we would encourage persons who are in the country illegally to depart voluntarily, or seek another form of immigration benefit for which they might qualify." 

"No one has an entitlement to live in the United States illegally," Lapan added. "Individuals have an independent obligation to comply with the laws that Congress passes, in all contexts."

Make plans to self-deport now, those of you whose families brought them over from another country at age 2.  Save Dear Leader Trump the expense of hunting you down and forcibly expelling you from glorious country America!

Or else.

That's the "heart" Trump is showing.  If he's going down, he's going to do as much damage as he can before he goes.  And if you're expecting congressional Republicans to play fair, they're already plotting the price that Dems will have to pay in order to save DACA...that is if Ryan can keep his caucus together.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill broadly agreed on Tuesday that something should be done about young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and who will eventually lose deportation protections if Congress does not step in to help them.

But Republicans are already placing conditions on their support that could kill the effort entirely. They are willing to vote for protecting so-called “Dreamers” ― but not without getting something in exchange for it.

“Hopefully there will be some give and take and we can accomplish something,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, suggesting Democrats could support efforts to boost border security.

Build Trump's wall or we deport them all...and Dems are stupid if they think the Republicans won't screw them over on this and do both.

Last Call For Trumped University

Over at Nate Silver's place, Dave Wasserman argues that the 2018 midterms could be the year where college educated white voters turn against the GOP and deliver a big win for the Dems.

Even with the political winds at their back, Democrats enter the 2018 congressional midterms at a historic geographic disadvantage. They also face demographic hurdles: Midterm electorates tend to be older and whiter than those that show up in presidential years. That’s part of the reason Republicans picked up so many House and Senate seats in 2010 and 2014. 

But there is one crucial demographic dynamic working in Democrats’ favor: The 2018 midterms are poised to feature the most college-educated electorate in American history. 

Almost exactly eight years ago, I argued that Democrats were in deep danger because 2010 could be the “Year of the Angry White Senior.” The premise was simple: Midterm elections had always skewed toward older voters, but never before had there been such a generational divide. In 2008, Barack Obama carried voters 18 to 29 by 34 percentage points but lost seniors by 8 points — a whopping 42-point gulf. Sure enough, Democrats’ young base stayed home in the midterms, and they lost 63 House seats. 

Eight years later, there’s an analogous dynamic working the opposite way. Midterms have always skewed toward college-educated voters, but never before has there been such an educational divide, particularly among whites. In 2016, exit polls found that Donald Trump carried white voters with a college degree by just 3 percentage points, but won whites without a college degree by 37 points — a massive 34-point gap. By contrast, this gap was just 14 points in 2008. 

This leaves Republicans dangerously exposed. Just as Obama’s legions of young supporters failed to show up at the polls for Democrats in 2010 and 2014, Trump’s base of whites without college degrees could leave the GOP stranded in 2018.

Sure, it's possible, especially if the Mueller investigation turns up massive corruption on the part of the Trump regime and then congressional Republicans do precisely nothing about it.  A lot could happen in the next 15 months: impeachment recommendations, resignations, war, illness, an event we haven't anticipated yet.

But all things being the same, I just don't buy this for a second.

The majority of college-educated white voters still voted for Trump knowing full well what he was going to try to do.  They still voted for the same GOP-controlled Congress that they voted for in 2010 and 2012 even as many of them pulled the lever for Obama then and for Hillary last year.  The fact is all the disapproval for Trump in the world doesn't mean that white folks with college degrees are going to stop being overwhelmingly Republican at the local/state/House/Senate level.

They're not going to start voting for the Democrats.  If anything, most of them are going to say "Well my reasonable Republican representative/senator is needed more than ever to stand up to Trump like they did on health care" conveniently forgetting that 97% of the GOP voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Dems need to stop chasing them and start turning out the base for midterms, and that would help by giving them a reason to come out.  "Stopping Trump" should be enough, but that clearly failed in 2016.  That wasn't enough for a lot of people.

Will it be enough in 2018 given all Trump's awfulness?

I don't honestly know and that frightens me.

Houston, We Have A Problem, Con't

As Houston remains flooded and the Caribbean and Florida prepare for Category 5 Irma later this week, the question of rebuilding after storms depends not just on drywall and dry roads to reach homes, but of labor too. The cruel irony of Trump's DACA announcement today is that his campaign of fear and terror among America's undocumented is going to make the response to Harvey that much more difficult.

It will take an army of workers to reconstruct a vast swath of Southeast Texas, including the sprawling metropolis of Houston, that was devastated by Hurricane Harvey. Whether the region can do it without fully embracing workers like Enríquez will soon be put to the test — with reverberations that could be felt nationwide.

Under President Trump, authorities in Texas have been bearing down on immigrants who are in the country illegally. Until a judge blocked the measure last week, they threatened to enact a new state law that would outlaw sanctuary cities. Texas also has been leading a group of 10 states demanding that Trump end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which granted reprieves from deportation to nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as minors. 

It is a harsher landscape for those in the country illegally than it was 12 years ago, when the Gulf Coast faced the similar-size task of cleaning up from Hurricane Katrina. Eight days after that storm made landfall, President George W. Bush bowed to pressure from construction firms and relaxed worker ID rules. By some estimates, that allowed more than a quarter of all government-paid recovery jobs to go to undocumented immigrants. 

But 10 days after Harvey struck Texas with record-setting rains and caused unprecedented flooding, the Trump administration has made no similar proclamation. Worse, immigrant rights groups say, federal authorities have sent conflicting signals about whether they might start simply detaining and deporting those flushed out into the open by the storm. 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who was critical of Bush’s decision, said in a statement Sunday that he sees even greater challenges in recovering from Harvey. “But that does not mean federal immigration laws should be ignored. Nor should regulations that require federal contractors to verify legal work authorization of their employers,” he said. “These policies were put in place to protect American workers and taxpayers.”

Weird, because American workers and taxpayers aren't exactly signing up for Harvey rebuilding jobs, Lamar.

 

More than 200,000 homes sustained damage in the storm, including more than 13,500 that were destroyed, according to early local estimates that don’t provide solid numbers for some of the hardest-hit areas. Leaders in the construction industry have begun sounding alarms that there will not be enough American-born workers to rebuild as quickly as needed. 

“If they would relax the rules, honestly, that would be great, we could use it,” said Jeffrey Nielsen, executive vice president of the Houston Contractors Association, whose members include the city’s largest firms that build roads, bridges and other public works.
Nielsen said that even before Harvey hit, almost every member of the association was grappling with a shortage of workers. With a crushing list of jobs now growing by the day, thousands need to be hired — and fast. 

Nielsen said he and other construction industry officials were told at a weekend briefing that roughly 30 percent of all roads in and around Houston will remain impassable without some construction work. 

“The truth is, there are not a lot of people jumping up and down to do civil construction work in Texas. It’s hot, and these jobs are pouring concrete or, worse, hot asphalt,” Nielsen said. “That’s the reality of it, and we need more people than ever.”

There are plenty in and around Houston who might consider taking on the work, which can pay $20 an hour or more, if ID requirements were relaxed, construction industry officials say.

So weird that we have a major need for workers and a major group of workers that want jobs and are willing to do the work, but Trump can't relax these requirements or his base will implode.  I'm sure the geniuses who believe Obama was president during Katrina won't care, but the fact of the matter is Harvey should serve as a refutation of modern Republicanism to its core.

And let's not forget, that core is white supremacist racism and "I got mine, screw you."

Bit Of A Break

On vacation this week, so light posting (as I've sure you've seen.)

Should be back to regular order next week.

Never Look A Gift Trump In The Mouth

Republicans are screaming masters of projection, and nobody's better (or worse) at it that Trump. If he has ever accused somebody of doing something immoral or illegal, I guarantee you it's because he's doing it himself, and accepting foreign contributions is no different.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for accepting money from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, complaining during one of the debates, “These are people that kill women and treat women horribly and yet you take their money.” 

That was, of course, before he made his first foreign visit as president to Saudi Arabia—and accepted dozens of gifts from the kingdom. In fact, during Trump’s visit, the White House accepted at least 83 separate gifts from Saudi Arabia, according to a document The Daily Beast has obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department.

The gifts range from the regal (“Artwork featuring picture of President Trump”) to the martial (multiple swords, daggers, leather ammo holders and holsters), to the baroque (tiger and cheetah fur robes, and a dagger made of pure silver with a mother of pearl sheath). Now when the president is contemplating the state of Saudi women’s rights, he can do so before a “large canvas artwork depicting [a] Saudi woman.”

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as a much better man named Jim once said before me.

Amusing as the gifts may be, they are emblematic of a more serious issue: Trump’s embrace of the Saudi regime, a stark reversal from his campaign rhetoric. During the campaign, Trump accused the regime of everything from being responsible for 9/11 to failing to “reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed,” going so far as to threaten to stop buying their oil if they didn’t shape up. 

Trump’s decision to make his first foreign visit to Saudi Arabia was a singular one, breaking with a long-standing presidential tradition of first visiting Mexico or Canada.

“Trump’s decision to visit Saudi first clearly signaled his top prioritization of America’s most profitable relationship with its number one weapons client in the world,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, told The Daily Beast. 

No less noteworthy than the visit itself was the administration’s conduct during it. During the visit, the Trump administration announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis, totaling $350 billion over 10 years. This represented a decisive reversal of the Obama administration’s 2016 policy of blocking certain arms sales to the regime because of civilian deaths in Yemen.

And yet this wouldn't even make the top 20 impeachable violations of the first seven months and change of the Trump regime.  Hell, it would barely make the top 100.

We still see the poison fruits of this deal too, a green light on a Saudi blockade of Qatar that is going into month four and now open calls for regime change in Doha.

A leading voice in Qatar’s political opposition has thrown his support behind an emerging contender for emir, asserting that new leadership in Doha is the only way to resolve a regional crisis over its policies. 

Khalid al-Hail, currently exiled in London after being imprisoned and tortured by the government in 2014, told The Jerusalem Post that a consensus candidate has emerged in his conversations with those in Doha’s political class seeking an end to the current Qatari regime.

That figure – Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali bin Abdullah bin Jassim al-Thani – recently met with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman at his summer home in Morocco, and the nation’s crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman. 

Qatar’s emir, Tamim bin Hamad, has in recent years reinforced his country’s support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, to the ire of Sunni powers and the United States.
As a result, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut all diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar on June 5. Together they refuse to normalize ties until Doha changes course, and pivots from its alliance with Iran. 

The crisis has shaken Qatar’s economy and the power dynamics of the region, striking fear in some that rising tensions there may lead to an armed conflict. 

“I consider it a long-term crisis, specifically because the Qatari government refuses to respond and cooperate with the international community in order to reach a resolution,” Hail said in a phone interview from London, speaking through his translator. “The only possible scenario [to end the crisis] is a new emir – and I don’t see an imminent compromise.” 

Yet Hail suggested Abdullah bin Ali might be that candidate, eventually. 

“He is an accepted personality both in the country and in the region, and therefore there are many voices in Qatar who support this person to be appointed the next emir in the country,” Hail said.

A quiet coup for the House of Saud as they appoint a satrap while America looks the other way? No wonder Trump is getting a boatload of gifts.

And this is only the beginning, I suspect.  From one oppressive regime to another.

L'Enfants Terrible, Nuclear Edition

Another nuclear test from North Korea, this time of a missile-mounted ICBM hydrogen bomb, and Trump's response is the promise of war.

North Korea’s detonation of a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday prompted the Trump administration to warn that even the threat to use such a weapon against the United States and its allies “will be met with a massive military response.’’ 

The test — and President Trump’s response — immediately raised new questions about the president’s North Korea strategy and opened a new rift with a major American ally, South Korea, which Mr. Trump criticized for its “talk of appeasement” with the North. 

The underground blast was by far North Korea’s most powerful ever. Though it was far from clear that the North had set off a hydrogen bomb, as it claimed, the explosion caused tremors that were felt in South Korea and China. Experts estimated that the blast was four to sixteen times more powerful than any the North had set off before, with far more destructive power than the bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. 

Yet after a day of meetings in the Situation Room involving Mr. Trump and his advisers, two phone calls between the president and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and even demands from some liberal Democrats to cut off North Korea’s energy supplies, Mr. Trump’s aides conceded that they faced a familiar conundrum. 

While the Pentagon has worked up a series of military options for targeted strikes at North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites, Mr. Trump was told that there is no assurance that the United States could destroy them all in a lightning strike, according to officials with knowledge of the exchange. Cyberstrikes, which President Barack Obama ordered against the North’s missile program, have also been judged ineffective.

Mr. Trump hinted at one extreme option: In a Twitter post just before he met his generals, he said that “the United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.’’

The country that does well over 80% of trade with North Korea is China.  Good luck stopping that, Donny.

Still, we have the very real threat of a Second Korean War on our plates, and possibly tens of millions of dead as a result.  I have no idea how we're going to get through this, but I do know the person at the helm of the US should not be Donald Trump for god's sake.

I don't quite think it's Cuban Missile Crisis time yet, but it's getting scary as hell.

Waking Up From The DREAM

As expected, Donald Trump will announce the end of DACA on Tuesday, but delay ending the program for six months in order to call Paul Ryan's bluff on a legislative fix.

President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises. 

Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. He has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program and struggled with his own misgivings about targeting minors for deportation.

Conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program, the two sources said, though White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made. 

In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.” 

Trump is expected to announce his decision on Tuesday, and the White House informed House Speaker Paul Ryan of the president’s decision on Sunday morning, according to a source close to the administration. Ryan had said during a radio interview on Friday that he didn’t think the president should terminate DACA, and that Congress should act on the issue.

Trump will call Ryan out on Tuesday it seems and leave the problem on his doorstep with a six-month time bomb attached.  Trump can blame Republicans in Congress for failing to fix DACA and he'll get away with it too as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are right now just about the only folks in Washington that everyone hates more than Trump.

If the Dems are smart they'll have a DACA fix bill ready.

But Trump is crafty here, he's not going to take the fall for DACA alone.  Should Ryan and McConnell get a bill through Trump won't sign it anyway, but there's no way one gets to his desk anyhow, the racists in the House GOP may not even let a fix out of committee.

Privately kicking DACA to March must be a relief for a lot of Republicans. A lot can happen in six months politically.

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Our First Drug Crisis

American minority communities ravaged by drugs and indifference is nothing new, folks.  While it only seems to reach "crisis" mode when the victims are suburban and white these days, those silent epidemics have been going on for centuries, all the way back to Native Americans and the oldest drug of all, alcohol.

Before they began to encounter European explorers and fishermen in the sixteenth century, very few indigenous people of the eastern coast of North America had ever tasted alcohol, and none had experienced anything more than the mild inebriation of fermented drinks used ceremonially. Nothing prepared them for the effects of distilled spirits. In 1609, explorer Henry Hudson offered alcohol to a group of Munsee Indians he encountered on Manhattan Island. His purpose in giving them drink was to determine “whether they had any treaherie in them,” but he was surprised when one of the Munsee became intoxicated. “[T]hat was strange to them, for they could not tell how to take it.” It must have been memorable for the Indians as well. (One theory of the origin of the word “Manhattan” is that the Indians named the island manahactanienk—the “place of general inebriation.”) 

The experience of getting drunk for the first time could be terrifying for anyone. Not long after Hudson’s encounter with the Munsee, Captain John Smith, the military leader of the colony at Jamestown, gave liquor to a native man who he was trying to revive. “[I]t pleased God to restore him againe to life, but so drunke and affrighted, that he seemed Lunaticke,” Smith said. The man’s brother was “tormented and grieved” by his wild behavior. 

Once the Indians lost their fear of alcohol, they fell in love with it. The euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death. A Jesuit attempting to convert the Cayuga Indians in the seventeenth century reported that they would announce their intention to get drunk before a drinking episode. “I am going to lose my head,” a man would shout. “I am going to drink the water that takes away one’s wits.” Another missionary noted that the native people appeared to relish the disorientation that occurred as the alcohol took effect. “They rejoice, shouting, ‘Good, good. My head is reeling!’ ” Once a man was drunk on alcohol, he found new powers in himself. When an Ottawa Indian was asked what brandy was made of, he said, “Of hearts and tongues. . . . [A]fter I have drank of it, I fear nothing and I talk like an angel.” The drinker experienced a surge of self-confidence. “[I]n their drunkenness, . . . they become persons of importance, taking pleasure in seeing themselves dreaded by those who do not taste the poison,” a third missionary said. Of course, inebriation also made Indians more vulnerable to manipulation by white men. 

The Europeans expressed shock over the self-destructive way the Indians drank. Alcohol abuse was certainly not unknown among whites, particularly those living on the frontier where many fur traders were killed in drunken brawls. But coming from cultures that had encountered alcohol centuries earlier, some of them had clear rules against abusing alcohol. Prohibitions against drunkenness were spelled out in Christian scripture, Western social etiquette, and even law, but the natives had no prohibitions against getting drunk. Wasn’t that the point? One Indian observed: “The Great Spirit who made all things made everything for some use, and whatever use he design’d anything for, that use it should always be put to; Now, when he made rum, he said, Let this be for Indians to get drunk with. And it must be so.” 

From the beginning, Indians drank to get drunk, to escape. “[G]ive two Savages two or three bottles of brandy. They will sit down and, without eating, will drink one after another until they have emptied them,” a missionary said. At first, there were limited supplies of alcohol in America. But if the Indians didn’t have enough brandy or rum to get everyone drunk, they gave it all to a chosen few. “And if any one chance to be drunk before he hath finisht his proportion (which is ordinarily a quart of Brandy, Rum or Strong-waters), the rest will pour the rest of his part down his throat,” a colonist wrote. The Europeans agreed that the Indians had a drinking problem. “They will pawne their wits to purchase the acquaintance of it,” Thomas Morton said in 1637. “Their paradise is drinking,” Louis Antoine de Bougainville observed a century later.

On the rez today, things aren't much different.  President Obama at least realized this and made crucial inroads to helping, but under Trump, well, under Trump we're basically all screwed, aren't we.

Houston, We Have A Problem, Con't

The effects of Hurricane Harvey will be felt in the Houston region for years, but the short-term effects are still potentially lethal.  The rains may have stopped, but history tells us that with infrastructure critically damaged for millions and the sheer scale of how widespread toxic waters are, the threat of a public health nightmare scenario is almost assured.

For the thousands of people traveled through Harvey’s flood waters to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, safety was not yet at hand. Although delivered from the worst of the storm, the packed masses were one of the loci of another brewing problem, one that officials expect might last a year or more after landfall.

Every flood disaster is also a public-health disaster, and even as Harvey dissipates over the Gulf Coast, the beginnings of that secondary calamity were on display in the Houston area. During the worst of the flooding, hospitals faced critical shortages of food and medicine, people with serious chronic diseases had to make difficult decisions between evacuation and sheltering in place, and hundreds of victims faced prescription shortages and mental-health issues. And based on the health problems people in New Orleans and elsewhere in the region faced after Hurricane Katrina, experts expect major public-health emergencies, environmental illnesses, and outbreaks will only intensify in the aftermath of Harvey.

Those challenges are already taxing the city’s health infrastructure. According to Bill Gentry, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and a former emergency management official, one key public-health issue that attends the early stages of any disaster is the set of risks facing people who are disabled or elderly and face special health needs. “With our push towards home health-care and taking care of more Americans in the home,” Gentry said, “it quickly turns into 'can we get their home health-care needs taken care of,’ with everything from oxygen to prescription meds to getting them clinical access, especially for dialysis. Those types of clinical worries compound as many days as the water stays up.”

Dialysis is a special concern, and for residents in Houston, already approaching crisis. As NPR reports, it’s important for patients with kidney failure to receive dialysis services every two to three days. But local dialysis centers are struggling with the demand, and with shortages of qualified staff, since several nurses who’d normally work in the centers are themselves displaced by the flood. And while companies like the DaVita Med Center and its locations around the Houston area are working around the clock to meet the area’s dialysis needs, as patients go longer without regular services and appointment reminders, the only solution to keeping them alive may be taking them to one of the area’s hospitals.

And the hospitals are running up against their limits, too. When I spoke to Mary Brandt, a pediatric surgeon at Texas Children's Hospital, she was driving home through receding floodwaters after five straight days of work. She and her colleagues had just completed the first shift of what she described as a “military kind of operation,” and fittingly had just been relieved by a team of reinforcements. “Texas Children's Hospital has leadership that has just gotten this down to an art,” Brandt told me. “Everything was covered.”

That military-like response among Houston-area hospitals was largely effective in dealing with some of the most immediate effects of the storm. Brandt’s team saw mostly children who’d faced non-life-threatening injuries and illnesses. Meanwhile, kids with ailments requiring management, like asthma, or those with fevers and other serious conditions were airlifted to the Texas Children’s Hospital building in The Woodlands, a suburb north of Houston. The triage and logistics systems in place for Houston’s hospitals helped ensure that patients with the most sensitive conditions received treatment and resources on time.

Still, there’s reason to suspect that effective disaster-management system will be stressed in the days to come. As Brandt notes, the bulk of patients with conditions directly related to the floods haven’t yet made it to hospitals. “Since the water's just subsiding,” Brandt said, “we're expecting there's going to be a huge number of patients that are going to come in today and tomorrow with problems that they needed to have taken care of in the last few days, but just couldn't get to us.” That “huge number” might be more than hospitals can handle, as Texas Children’s is already near its bed capacity, and local general hospitals like Ben Taub Memorial have already faced food and drug shortages.

Residents of the area will be facing major physical and health issue in the days and weeks ahead, and the misery will only be compounded by the austerity cuts and poor public planning of Texas officials.  The bill for that shortsightedness will come due, and the cost will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of lives.

Where the area goes from here, we don't know.  Americans pull together the most in times like these, but we're about to see if the nation's fourth largest city can hold itself in one piece in a worst-case public health scenario.

I don't have much hope.  I want Houston to prove me wrong, believe me.

The Golden (Brown) State

Harvey dumped a good 4-5 inches of rain here in the Cincy/NKY area over the last 24 hours and of course things are nightmarish in southeastern Texas and western Louisiana, but out on the West Coast the problem is record-smashing heat across California, spawning tinder-dry wildfire conditions as San Francisco and Los Angeles are baking in triple digit temps.

In almost 150 years of record keeping, it has never been as hot in San Francisco as it was on Friday.

Amid a brutal heat wave that has broiled California for a week while intermittently knocking out power to thousands and fueling more than a dozen wildfires, downtown San Francisco hit 106 degrees.

“San Francisco continues to climb. Latest high temperature for downtown is an incredible 106 degrees!” the National Weather Service’s Bay Area station tweeted Friday.

The previous record was 103 degrees, set in 2000. San Franciscans got creative on social media to document their pain.

But that was not even the worst of it for Northern California. By 3 p.m., the East Bay valley cities of Livermore and Pleasanton were at 110 degrees. Livermore was expected to flirt with its all-time record of 115 degrees Saturday — but came up short Friday, reaching 109 degrees.

“When we’re approaching all-time record highs, that’s very unusual,” said Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

The temperature reached 108 degrees in San Jose, breaking the city’s record for Sept. 1 of 101 degrees, set in 1950.

The heat wave marks the finale for what has ended up being the state’s hottest summer on record, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said.

All-time record highs in California, all-time record flooding in Texas, and more hurricanes on the way.   And it's not just America seeing awful weather, either.  As much as a third of Bangladesh is underwater with 1,200 dead and the toll rising dramatically as monsoon flooding in South Asia has inundated tens of millions from Nepal to Pakistan.

Welcome to the age of Chinese hoaxes climate change, guys.  As Captain Barbossa said in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, "Ye best start believin'" in climate change stories.  "Yer in one."

General Chaos In The White House

Martin "BooMan" Longman thinks Trump WH Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly is headed for the exits in Trumptempber:

I will be mildly surprised if Kelly lasts to the end of the month. I don’t see the point in what he is trying to do, and I doubt he’ll be able to see any point in it for much longer. He can’t save this administration or even keep it afloat. And I don’t think Trump will stop disrespecting him in front of the staff, so unless he enjoys being treated like Reince Priebus he’s going to take a walk or get himself fired before too much longer.

Things might be different if the administration were not taking on water faster than Kelly can bail it out, or if September were not set up as a crucible custom-designed to destroy the illusions of Republicans and Trump supporters everywhere. But playtime is over and the grim waiter has brought the check. Failure will begin to roll down like waters, and haplessness like a mighty stream. Brother shall deliver up brother, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause their political death.

Through it all, for as long as he lasts, Kelly will vainly try to steer the ship away from the shoals, and he’ll take the blame for errors not of his making and decisions made against his advice.

The real issue is what happens after Kelly departs, depending on how much damage is done with Trump ending DACA, possibly shutting down the government and wrecking the country's credit rating over the debt ceiling, botching tax reform, and running out of time for whatever hail Mary play on Trumpcare happens before September 30.

The same goes for Rex Tillerson, by the way.  He's not much longer for this State Department job in this dumpster fire of an administration, and neither is Treasury Secretary Gary Cohn.  It's possible and even likely that the three of them (along with Gen. Mattis at the Pentagon) get a hold on the country and run things as best they can for a while, but eventually they will realize that Trump is headed for history's septic tank and anyone along with him will be covered in crap.

It's even more likely that Mueller will come along and pull the plug anyway.  Where the country goes from there, I can't tell you.  Trump won't go quietly or peacefully and things could get violent pretty fast.  But Kelly could be a big part of directing the country towards the lifeboats.

Maybe.

We'll see. 

Scorched Earth, Hurricane Wind And Fired Staff: Trumptember

As Martin BooMan Longman reminds us, September is when Trump and the GOP will remember every cloudy day.

It’s happened. The Republicans’ month-from-hell has arrived. It’s the month I coined a meat-grinder. And it’s going to get off to the slowest of starts owing to the long Labor Day weekend holiday. There will much work for responsible government officials to do, and very little time for them to get it done. 

Yet, the president is the farthest thing from focused. The Russia investigation is terrifying him. He wants to fire his Secretary of State and it looks like Rex Tillerson would welcome that outcome. He’s fuming at his National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn because Cohn essentially called him a racist in public, but he doesn’t feel like he afford to fire him because he’s trying to pivot to a doomed tax reform effort. He’s chomping at the bit his chief of staff put on him to limit his access to fake news and crazy supporters and advisers. He’s still obsessed with his media coverage and the camera angles and attendance he gets at his political rallies. He’s more energized by his efforts to settle scores with Republican senators who have crossed him than he is with attracting the support of Democratic senators he will soon need. He’s recently made open war on the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, both of whom have been increasingly critical of his behavior and performance. Most of all, he misses the brief period during which the job of president was kind of fun.

And every day this month, more pictures of Hurricane Harvey's devastation will come in and the job of fixing it will be on his shoulders too.  Tillerson and Cohn might not survive the month as cabinet secretaries, hell Tillerson might not survive the weekend.

The job is hard, and Trump was never up for actually doing it.  Having the orange idiot at the helm is no longer funny or darkly humorous, but deadly serious (especially if Hurricane Irma comes to visit the US too).  Things are going to go extremely badly this month for Trump and for the country.

As Trump lashes out like a badger in a burlap sack, his attacks are not suited to his challenges. He threatens to force a government shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall, but he has absolutely no plan for getting the votes he’d need from Democrats to get his money. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get the debt ceiling raised or whether or not he should attach it to disaster relief. He doesn’t even have a theory of where the votes will come from or what he might need to trade for those votes. He says that he still wants Obamacare repealed but doesn’t understand that the opportunity to do that will end the moment the Republicans pass a new budget aimed at enacting tax reform. He senses that he’s completely blocked legislatively and calls for an end of the Senate’s filibuster, not realizing that he doesn’t and never will have anywhere near the votes he needs to make that change. 

This is how September is beginning for the president. Lord knows how it will end.

That's the killer.  There are plenty of very plausible scenarios right now where as bad as September is going to most likely be for us, October can easily be far worse, and a lot of those disturbingly plausible scenarios involve Trump saying "screw it" and doing something colossally stupid out of anger, frustration, dementia or a combination of all three.

Hope you enjoyed summer, because fall is going to be a killer.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

More Trump/Russia news on the Mueller investigation front today and it's both nerdily boring and delightfully schadenfreude-filled as the former FBI Director is going to the best forensic accountants in the world to handle Trump's twisted money trail by enlisting the IRS's top criminal investigators.

Special counsel Bob Mueller has teamed up with the IRS. According to sources familiar with his investigation into alleged Russian election interference, his probe has enlisted the help of agents from the IRS’ Criminal Investigations unit.

This unit—known as CI—is one of the federal government’s most tight-knit, specialized, and secretive investigative entities. Its 2,500 agents focus exclusively on financial crime, including tax evasion and money laundering. A former colleague of Mueller’s said he always liked working with IRS’ special agents, especially when he was a U.S. Attorney.

And it goes without saying that the IRS has access to Trump’s tax returns—documents that the president has long resisted releasing to the public.

Potential financial crimes are a central part of Mueller’s probe. One of his top deputies, Andy Weissmann, formerly helmed the Justice Department’s Enron probe and has extensive experience working with investigative agents from the IRS.

“From the agents, I know everyone has the utmost respect for both Muellerand Weissmann,” said Martin Sheil, a retired IRS Criminal Investigations agent.

And he said Mueller and Weissmann are known admirers of those agents’ work.

“They view them with the highest regard,” Sheil said. “IRS special agents are the very best in the business of conducting financial investigations. They will quickly tell you that it took an accountant to nab Al Capone, and it’s true.”

“The FBI’s expertise is spread out over so many statutes—and particularly since 9/11, where they really focused on counterintelligence and counterterror—that they simply don’t have the financial investigative expertise that the CI agents have,” Sheil continued. “When CI brings a case to a U.S. Attorney, it is done. It’s wrapped up with a ribbon and a bow. It’s just comprehensive.” 

Honestly surprised this didn't happen sooner.  The FBI has pretty good bookkeepers but hey, considering Trump has been hiding his tax returns for years now, I'd ask the IRS to help out too if I were Mueller.  We'll see what they can dig up on this mess, because it's the key to nailing the entire Trump regime to the wall and maybe, just maybe, saving this country.