Last Call For The Drums Of War

Trump's generals are preparing for conflict.  They know Trump will order them to war, and soon.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, told troops Thursday that "there's a war coming" and urged them to be prepared. 

"I hope I'm wrong, but there's a war coming," Neller told Marines stationed in Norway, during a visit there, according to Military.com. "You're in a fight here, an informational fight, a political fight, by your presence," he added.

The commandant pointed to Russia and the Pacific theater as the next major areas of conflict, predicting a "big-ass fight" in the future.

"Just remember why you're here," he said. "They're watching. Just like you watch them, they watch you. We've got 300 Marines up here; we could go from 300 to 3,000 overnight. We could raise the bar." 

Neller's visit comes amid tensions between Russia and NATO allies. Russia warned neighboring Norway that the presence of American troops could hurt relations, after Norway decision to host a new unit of U.S. soldiers through the end of 2018.

The administration says the Marines are there to enhance ties with European NATO allies and train in cold-weather combat.

China, North Korea, Russia, Iran?  Who will Trump start World War III with in order to stay in power?  It's so obnoxious.

Trump Cards, Con't

So as I was talking about earlier this week, Thursday's UN General Assembly vote happened on America's stupid decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and yes, the world absolutely called out Trump's bluff.

In a stinging rebuke of President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel earlier this month, 128 countries, including some of the US’s most trusted and reliable allies, voted in favor of a United Nations resolution on Thursday calling for a reversal of his position. Only nine countries voted against it. 

Though the resolution doesn’t explicitly refer to the US, it’s clearly directed at the White House. The measure declares that any changes to the status of Jerusalem “have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded.” 

It also “calls upon all States to refrain from the establishment of diplomatic missions in the Holy City of Jerusalem” — another shot at the administration, which announced plans to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 

The closest thing the US got to support from allies was 35 abstentions. Friends of the US like Canada, Mexico, and Australia refrained from voting on the resolution — which means that while they didn’t support the US with a vote against it, they didn’t criticize the US either with a vote in favor of it. 

While the passage of the resolution isn’t binding — meaning the US doesn’t actually have to reverse its position — it’s a stark illustration of just how isolated the United States is in its stance toward Israel.

While Canada and Mexico understandably abstained (after all they both share very large borders with a dangerous and ludicrously armed rogue nation helmed by a madman) and Australia looked the other way, the other member nations of the UN Permanent Security Council all told Trump to go screw himself.  China, Russia, the UK and France all voted in favor of the resolution, as did India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia and Turkey.

We look like stupid assholes right now unless you think Honduras, Togo and the Marshall Islands are the arbiters of global diplomatic opinion.  Meanwhile, the rest of the world will simply deal with us and move on.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Sunday that he intends to open an embassy in East Jerusalem — the part of the city that Palestinians officially want as the capital of a future Palestinian state. That came days after he convened a gathering of Muslim leaders to call for the world to see East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. 

A statement signed by more than 50 Muslim-majority countries at that summit declared that the US had lost its role as a “sponsor of peace” in the Middle East. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech last week that Trump’s Jerusalem announcement was a “crime” and that he no longer wants the US to broker peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

The other major nations of the world will step up in our absence, most notably China.  We're handing them the reins apparently, because we're now headed by a petulant toddler.

Setting Up For Battle

With Dem Rep. John Conyers stepping down, the post of the Democrats' ranking member on the House Judiciary needed to be filled, and as the Washington Post's Paul Kane tells us, the Dems chose a happy warrior to go square after Trump.

To fill their top spot on the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats had a choice between experts in two critical policy arenas: a constitutional law ace with firsthand experience battling President Trump, and an architect of sweeping immigration legislation. 

By a wide margin, they chose the constitutional law expert. Why? To ready themselves for a battle with Trump that could end with impeachment proceedings. 

The selection of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) as the ranking member on Judiciary was the clearest sign yet of how seriously House Democrats consider the possibility of a full-blown constitutional showdown with Trump.

You wouldn’t know it from how many of them talk. When it comes to the I-word, most Democrats have walked a tightrope — with even Nadler hesitant to mention impeachment in interviews before votes were cast Wednesday.

Leaders have cautioned the rank and file not to push for impeachment because the public might view it as an overreach. The House’s few remaining moderate Democrats from swing districts have regularly warned the party’s liberal flank against making the 2018 midterm elections about Trump or the investigations into his presidential campaign.

Luckily, those swing district moderates were outvoted.  With Nadler in, the game is on.

Nadler won a secret ballot 118 to 72, demonstrating that this caucus wants to be ready to clash with Trump if it vaults into the majority after next year’s midterm elections. 

“There is nobody better prepared, if the president messes around with the Constitution, to handle it than Jerry Nadler,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after the vote.

Nadler's oppoenent in the race was California's Zoe Lofgren, who argued that immigration should be the Dems' top focus in 2018 heading into the midterms, and not Trump.  It's a nice thought and if the Dems had control of Congress and the White House, that would be a solid argument.

But right now we need to be on a war footing.  Trump must be removed from office.  It's good to see the Dems get serious about this.

Last Call For Austerity Attack

As I've been warning about for months now, and as GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan has been smugly hinting at for years, massive austerity cuts to government social spending by the GOP are coming, and they are going to destroy the economy.

House Speaker Paul Ryan regards 2018 as a chance to fulfill the ambitions he brought to Congress 20 years ago: reshaping the social safety net for the poor and disabled, as well as programs including food stamps and Medicaid. He said Wednesday he’s focused on getting people from welfare to work.

“People want able bodied people who are on welfare to go to work, they want us to get people out of poverty, into the workforce,” Ryan said in a Fox News interview late Wednesday. “That’s good for them, that’s good for the economy, that’s good for the federal budget.”

Of course the level of cuts Ryan and Trump are talking about would be a humanitarian disaster, exploding the homeless population, wrecking millions of lives, and blasting a hole in the economy.

The White House has laid groundwork for cutting welfare programs. The president’s 2018 budget proposal sought steep reductions in food stamps, Medicaid health insurance payments, Social Security disability benefits, low-income housing assistance and block grants that fund meals-on-wheels for the elderly.

House Republicans released a policy blueprint last year for reshaping poverty programs with more work requirements, stronger protections against abuse and more leeway for states to alter rules. The document targeted Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and Social Security’s Supplemental Security Income program for disabled and elderly people with very low incomes.

White House officials have offered varying -- and ambitious -- signals on where the president will focus his attention after returning from his holiday break.

Trump keeps talking about his infrastructure program, but it will never happen.  We will be told that America has to tighten its belt and make those cuts to keep the economy going.  If you thought people were suffering under the Trump regime before, well, 2018 is going to get worse, if not bloody, and the butcher's bill is going to start pretty early in 2018, I would suspect.

But you know who might prevent the worst from happening?  The one Republican who's expected to still be around to deal with the bill in 2019. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Thursday morning crushed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) dream of making cuts to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in 2018 now that Congress has passed tax cuts. 

McConnell said that the Senate would not be able to pass legislation making changes to those programs without support from Democrats, making it unlikely that his chamber would attempt to pass major legislation addressing those programs. 

He made the comments during an interview with Axios’ Mike Allen, who asked McConnell where infrastructure and “entitlement reform” fall on his 2018 to-do list. 

“I think the Democrats are not going to be interested in entitlement reform, so I would not expect to see that on the agenda,” McConnell replied. “And what the Democrats are willing to do is important because in the Senate, with rare exceptions, like the tax bill, we have to have Democratic involvement.” 

He added that it’s more likely the Senate would tackle infrastructure since both parties are interested in such legislation.

No Senate Republican wants to have to deal with a vote to cut Social Security next year in 2020 or 2022 after Paul Ryan has long adios'd the place, but we'll see.

After all, they have to get this all done before Mueller finishes his impeachment recommendations.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Again, there's no greater confirmation that the GOP is terrified of the multiple investigations into the Trump regime -- and proof that the investigations have grown into lives of their own -- than the reaction by House GOP members trying to come up with any way to derail Mueller and his team in a manner where they can sell shutting it all down to the American people.

A group of House Republicans has gathered secretly for weeks in the Capitol in an effort to build a case that senior leaders of the Justice Department and FBI improperly — and perhaps criminally — mishandled the contents of a dossier that describes alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia, according to four people familiar with their plans. 

A subset of the Republican members of the House intelligence committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes of California, has been quietly working parallel to the committee's high-profile inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. They haven't informed Democrats about their plans, but they have consulted with the House's general counsel.

The people familiar with Nunes' plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence. 

That final product could ultimately be used by Republicans to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether any Trump aides colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign — or possibly even to justify his dismissal, as some rank-and-file Republicans and Trump allies have demanded. (The president has said he is not currently considering firing Mueller.) 

Republicans in the Nunes-led group suspect the FBI and DOJ have worked either to hurt Trump or aid his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, a sense that has pervaded parts of the president’s inner circle. Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” and on Tuesday, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president. 

The sources familiar with the separate inquiry said it was born out of steadily building frustration with the Justice Department's refusal to share details of the way the Trump dossier was used to launch the FBI's investigation of his campaign team last year — or whether it was the basis for any court-ordered surveillance of Trump associates.

House Republicans are trying to criminalize the Steele dossier and blame everything on the "Obama Deep State" at the FBI, as if there's somehow a group of rogue agents working at President Obama's command to destabilize the government.

The problem is you have a bunch of politicians (and Republican ones at that, none too bright these guys) trying to pin something on actual law enforcement types who know how the system works.  It's not going well, and apparently somebody has leaked that Rep. Devin Nunes (who has supposedly recused himself from the House investigation into Trump!) is leading a secret counter-investigation into the Trump investigation.

That's not a good look for the GOP right now.  An off-the-books secret screw job makes it look like, I dunno, these guys are working for Dear Leader Trump and putting party over country. Surely that's not what's going on, right?

Right?

Trump Cards, Con't

The United States of America inches closer towards rogue nuclear nation status under the Trump regime as Dear Leader decides he's going to take UN votes against the US as personal insults. Those offending countries will be subjected to a heavy price.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that vote in favor of a draft United Nations resolution against his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. 

“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” Trump told reporters at the White House. 

The 193-member U.N. General Assembly will hold a rare emergency special session on Thursday at the request of Arab and Muslim countries on the controversial U.S. decision.

The US can't veto a General Assembly resolution, but who is exactly going to enforce it?  Russia?  China?  The EU?  UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (now back on Trump's good side) has all but issued a guaranteed threat.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warns the US will be "taking names" of the countries that vote in favor of a resolution that condemns the Trump administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. 

"At the UN, we're constantly asked to do more and give more -- in the past we have. So, when we make a decision, at the will of the American people, about where to locate OUR embassy, we don't expect those we've helped to target us," Haley wrote on Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday evening. "On Thursday, there will be a vote at the UN criticizing our choice. And yes, the US will be taking names."

We'll see what happens with Thursday's vote, but if we won't stand up to Trump, why should anyone else?

In addition to her admonition on social media, Haley also sent a letter to fellow nations warning them of the potential impact of their vote. 

"As you consider your vote, I want you to know that the President and U.S. take this vote personally." she wrote. "The President will be watching this vote carefully and has requested I report back on those countries who voted against us."

The answer to that question is "We're a dangerous rogue nation that has to be stopped."

StupidiNews!

• Police in Melbourne, Australia say an SUV that plowed into a crowd of pedestrians injuring 18 was a deliberate act, but stopped short of calling it terrorism.
• Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken will step down from office on January 2nd after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced earlier this year.
• Fishermen in the Philippines rescued hundreds from the sea as a ferry capsized near Manila, killing four as bad weather sank the craft.
• Defections by North Korean soldiers in 2017 reached their highest rate in years as another soldier defected across the DMZ early Thursday morning.
• Apple is working on a plan to allow software publishers to create a single app that will run on both iOS mobile devices and MacOS computers.

Last Call For Ballot Barrage

Like I said, I'm feeling really, really good about the Dems winning in 2018.  2020, not so much.  It only took voters 2 years to fully turn upon the Democrats in 2010 and wipe them out in the House.  The good news is, as I said, that works against the GOP too (at least in the short term).  CNN's latest generic ballot finds Democrats now with a whopping 18-point lead.

Democrats' already wide advantage over Republicans in a hypothetical Congressional matchup has grown, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. At the same time, enthusiasm about voting next year has increased among Democrats nationwide following an unexpected win in Alabama's Senate special election and a strong showing in Virginia's state government elections last month. 

Among registered voters, 56% say they favor a Democrat in their congressional district, while 38% prefer a Republican. That 18-point edge is the widest Democrats have held in CNN polling on the 2018 contests, and the largest at this point in midterm election cycles dating back two decades. The finding follows several other public polls showing large double-digit leads for Democrats on similar questions. 

Related: Full poll results 

Independent voters favor Democrats by a 16-point margin, 51% to 35%, similar to the 50% to 36% margin by which they favored Democrats in fall of 2005, ahead of Democrats' 2006 recapturing of the House and Senate. The Democrats hold a larger lead overall now because Republicans make up a smaller share of the electorate than they did in 2005. 

And those Republicans who are still in the electorate are less enthusiastic about voting next year than Democrats. Overall, 49% of registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for Congress next year, compared with 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters who say the same.

That's not the funny part.  This is.

The poll was conducted before the passage of Republicans' signature tax reform bill this week, which the GOP hopes will boost their electoral prospects next year. Findings from the same poll released earlier this week found that the bill's unpopularity on the rise, with few expecting tangible benefits for themselves once it becomes law.

It's going to actually get worse for the GOP.in 2018, believe it or not.  In the crosstabs of the poll, Dems lead with men 49-42%, women 59-34%(!!!), and are tied with white voters at 46% each.  Non-white voters go with Dems 70-23%.

White non-college voters still favor the GOP, 52-40%, but they are offset by college-educated white voters, who favor the Dems by 21 points, 58-37%.  Dems also lead all age groups, even age 50-64 Boomers 46-44%.  Among Gen X voters 35-49, Dems win by a staggering 60-29%.

It's going to be a good year in 2018 for Dems unless you know, that war comes along and we rally around the flag.  Also keep in mind Dems had a 2 point lead in this same CNN poll in October 2014 and the GOP smashed the Dems thanks to record low turnout.

Somehow I think people are going to be motivated in November to vote however.

The New Normal, Con't

David Corn recaps 2017 as the year Donald Trump broke America.

Creeping authoritarianism, creeping autocracy, creeping kleptocracy—call it what you want. But the creep has turned into a sprint. The offenses to good government and fundamental values are happening each day, often several times a day—and in such a fusillade that there is often not enough time to ponder the horrendous implications of each one. And not enough space to consider the fundamental deterioration under way. Another aquatic metaphor: We are too busy being slammed by what’s coming out of the fire hose to see the water damage that is being done.

In recent days—like any set of recent days—the outrages have been many. During a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Trump, according to a White House “readout,” thanked the Russian leader “for acknowledging America’s strong economic performance in his annual press conference.” And they discussed working together to “resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea.” Apparently they spoke not a word about Russia’s attack on the United States during the 2016 campaign. Which seems to be the pattern. Since Trump took office, there has not been a single sign he has pressed Putin regarding Moscow’s operation to subvert American democracy. And as a much-noticed Washington Post piece pointed out, Trump has throughout the last year adamantly refused to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia engaged in information warfare to help him win the presidency—and has taken no measures to prevent a rerun. So here we have an American president abdicating—out of pique—his most fundamental obligation: to protect the nation from foreign attack. And his party colleagues barely bat an eye at Trump’s negligence. 

If a dogcatcher refused to catch dogs, he would be deemed unfit for the position. But Trump has abdicated the top responsibility of the commander in chief, and this does not scandalize the congressional majority. The Constitution awards power to the president so he can safeguard the nation. Trump uses this power to safeguard his own power.
Trump’s reckless disregard for norms and rules has been embraced by his champions and foot soldiers. Claiming to be a law-and-order sort of guy, he has viciously attacked law enforcement that might affect him and his cronies. Angered by the ongoing FBI investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, he claimed the bureau is “in tatters.” And Fox News, a for-profit state news organ, dutifully puts on air a conservative activist who compares the current FBI to the KGB and essentially calls for the entire bureau to be shut down. (About a year ago, Trump equated the US intelligence community with Nazi Germany.) Others on and off Fox cheer for Trump to become a strongman leader who readily dispatches his perceived enemies. Though Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, Trump’s minions still rally to the cry of “Lock Her Up” and demonstrate their belief that extremism in the name of defending Trump is no vice. It’s not just party over country; it’s Trump over party over country. 

Trump and his comrades regularly assault the institutions of government that can impose a check on a president. Trump dismissed FBI chief James Comey in an attempt to protect himself. And Trump’s congressional allies in the past weeks have intensified their criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller, devoting far more vitriol to his investigation than to Putin’s secret war on a US election. The same folks who were fine with over a dozen Benghazi inquiries now look to undermine a duly authorized probe—led by a Republican!—that threatens to reveal truths inconvenient for the president. And they are eager to shutter or distract the congressional investigations that are supposed to deliver to the public the truth about the 2016 campaign. These GOPers are joining Trump in embracing political power instead of principle and, like the president, making it easier for a foreign foe to assault the United States and then escape consequences. This is a violation of their oath of office, and they don’t care. 

Nope.  And until we get rid of them, they will continue not to care.  Maybe the 55% of America who didn't (or couldn't) vote in 2016 will give a damn in 2018, I dunno.  It would be nice if we could overcome the GOP once and for all, but the reality is that there's tens of millions of us who are actively cheering for Trump's authoritarian regime actively and violently punishing the Obama Coalition, because they think they'll be in charge.

They won't be, but they'll still be better off than those people and that's all that matters anymore to them when they turn out in 2018 and 2020 for Trump and the GOP.  It's okay with them as long as they suffer less as white Christians than everyone else in establishing a new baseline of misery.

Taxing Our Patience, Con't

The Great GOP Tax Scam will soon be law, and while Republicans are more than happy to congratulate themselves on "saving the American people more of their own money" the reality is that most of us are screwed.

The hostility to redistributive democracy at the ideological center of the American right has made standard policies of successful modern welfare states, happily embraced by Europe’s conservative parties, seem beyond the moral pale for many Republicans. The outsize stakes seem to justify dubious tactics — bunking down with racists, aggressive gerrymandering, inventing paper-thin pretexts for voting rules that disproportionately hurt Democrats — to prevent majorities from voting themselves a bigger slice of the pie. 

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights. 

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in “Why Nations Fail,” ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other people’s stuff. 

In “Inequality and Democratization,” the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isn’t driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. It’s driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights. 

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

At a time when America’s faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. It’s easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than what’s in it. Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

We live in, and have lived in all my life dating back to the Reagan era when I was a toddler, an era where protecting the wheels of government from getting dirty from the unwashed masses has always been the point of the federal government.

With the singular exception of Obamacare (which will soon be completely broken thanks to this tax bill) the American federal government has always been classified as "the enemy of the people" while simultaneously I have been told all my life that the word "democracy" itself is dirty word, that it represents the basest tyranny of the majority, but only when the wealthiest among us disagree with that majority.

This bill is going to wreck the economy and the Republicans know it, the real test comes when the GOP is voted out of office and they can go back to blaming the Democratic majority voted in next year for not fixing things quickly enough in 2019, something that should lead to a brand-new GOP majority in Congress in 2020 (and a second Trump term) by my calculations.

By the way, this is where wealth inequality in America was at five years ago, before the GOP bill makes it exponentially worse.  We're already the most unequal developed country on earth by a long shot.  We're now headed deep into New Gilded Age territory.



Maybe I'm a cynic, but Poly Sci has been a pretty harsh mistress all my life, and History is far more violent than she is.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans have passed their $2.2 trillion tax cut bill for the rich in a 51-48 vote overnight, the bill will get one final House GOP vote before going to Donald Trump's desk.
• Disgraced former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, died in Rome at the age of 86, Law was known for covering up the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals.
• The man accused of a plot to assassinate British PM Theresa May earlier this month will go on trial in June for charges under British terrorism law.
• Uber has been classified as a transport service by the EU's highest court, meaning the ride-share service must meet taxi and limo licensing regulations across Europe.
• House Republicans are looking into passing legislation that would permanently end net neutrality and prevent states and the FCC from regulating internet service providers at all.

Last Call For Vote Like It Matters

Next time somebody tells you your vote doesn't matter in local and state races, remember 2017 in Virginia.

A Republican seat flipped Democratic in a wild recount Tuesday - with the Democrat winning by a single vote - creating a rare 50-50 tie between the parties in the House of Delegates and refashioning the political landscape in Richmond.

Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th District of the House of Delegates, seizing the seat from Republican incumbent David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.

Of the 23,866 votes cast in the Newport News district on Election Day, Yancey held a tenuous lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.

But five hours and much nailbiting later, after painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed before it gradually disappeared and then reversed, allowing Simonds to beat him by one vote.

The final tally: 11,608 for Simonds to 11,607 for Yancey.

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise. Committee chairs have to be negotiated as does the person who will serve as Speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance. Republicans hold a slight 21-19 edge in the state senate but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties, and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

One vote flipped a seat from GOP to Democratic.  That one flipped seat in turn tied up the State House of Delegates rather than giving the GOP control.

One single vote.

One single vote may be the difference between Medicaid expansion in Virginia and no expansion, which the GOP in the House of Delegates swore to block.

One single, solitary vote.

No wonder the GOP is trying to do everything they can to disenfranchise Democratic voters.  One vote can change everything.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Mueller probe continues (for now at least) and so do the House and Senate investigations. They're following the money, separately and in tandem, and apparently the trail of Russian meddling and the 2016 election has led to the doorstep of one third-party candidate: Green Party gadfly Dr. Jill Stein.

The top congressional committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has set its sights on the Green Party and its nominee, Jill Stein.
Dennis Trainor Jr., who worked for the Stein campaign from January to August of 2015, says Stein contacted him on Friday saying the Senate Intelligence Committee had requested that the campaign comply with a document search. 

Trainor, who served as the campaign’s communications director and acting manager during that time, told BuzzFeed News that he was informed of the committee’s request because during his time on the campaign, his personal cell phone was “a primary point of contact” for those looking to reach Stein or the campaign. That included producers from RT News, the Russian state-funded media company, who booked Stein for several appearances, Trainor said. 

“Then I was told by Jill just to wait for further instructions,” Trainor said, adding that he was told the campaign would contact him in the next week with instructions, presumably from the Senate Intelligence Committee, for executing the document search, including precise search terms. That has not happened yet, Trainor said. 

When asked Monday what the committee was looking for from the Stein campaign, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the committee’s chairman, responded, "collusion with the Russians." Burr said that the committee is "just starting" its work investigating two campaigns, but did not elaborate. 

Stein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trainor, who has done on-and-off work for Stein since formally leaving the campaign in 2015, said he is inclined to cooperate with the committee’s request but wants to first seek legal counsel. He said he believes Stein plans to comply as well and post the documents on her own website “in an effort to show complete transparency and kind of wage her own war against [...] what I imagine she thinks is an overblown investigation into collusion.” 

Stein has not previously been a major focus during the Russia investigations on Capitol Hill, but her name has surfaced occasionally. The Senate Judiciary mentioned her in a letter to Donald Trump Jr. in July, requesting copies of “all communications to, from, or copied” to the president’s son that related to Stein and a long list of other, more prominent figures in the investigations. 

Trainor said he would be surprised if Stein ever communicated with Trump Jr., who participated in an interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors for more than nine hours last Wednesday. “Don Jr. has been incredibly cooperative with the committee,” Burr said Thursday. 

Stein’s name has also come up in the context of a 2015 dinner hosted by RT in Moscow. Stein sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first White House national security adviser until he was ousted just 24 days into the job. Flynn recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting a criminal investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

Trainor said he expects the Senate Intelligence Committee will want to know more about the Moscow dinner, but that he wasn’t employed by the campaign at that time and therefore wouldn’t have any documents related to the event. Stein has said that unlike Flynn, she was not paid to attend the dinner and paid for her own travel costs.

That Russia Today dinner with Flynn and Putin has always struck me as weird, if not outright bad news.  Sure, you couldn't find a better third-party foil to mess up America's elections than Jill Stein, especially if you were trying to throw the election away from Clinton by attacking her from the left.  I always figured Stein was Putin backup plan, considering he had the man he wanted, Donald Trump, squarely in the spotlight.

Then again, Stein's margin in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are what cost her those states and the election.  If she hadn't siphoned votes from Clinton, Hillary would have won.

I don't feel bad at all that she's drawn the attention of investigators.  Meanwhile a Washington Post piece from last week is getting attention because it flatly points out that the nation's intelligence services knew the Trump campaign team was compromised by the Russians, but Trump refused to lift a finger to do anything to stop them...and still hasn't done so.

In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.

They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.

The story goes on to say that the intelligence bureaus straight up told Trump that they had evidence that Putin himself had given these orders to interfere in the election, but Trump's ego refused to allow him to believe that he was helped to a victory he clearly felt he had been granted by dint of his own glory.

And Trump still has yet to deal with Russia. He's not going to, because he's a Russian asset.  Don't take my word for it though, take Jim Clapper's.

While his career had its ups and downs—you don’t work in any trade for over 50 years without missteps—the former far outweighed the latter. Clapper, a retired Air Force three-star general, is widely respected in national security circles, across partisan lines, as a guy who knows his stuff and focuses on the job. Naturally, he’s exceptionally discreet as well. 

That changed yesterday, when Clapper went on CNN to drop an unimaginably large bombshell on President Donald Trump. Since the inauguration in January, Clapper has made a few critical comments regarding the president and his strange ties to Moscow, but these have been largely anodyne. Clapper began showing his hand in September, with a comment that the IC assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election raised questions about why Trump was in the White House: it “cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory in the election,” he stated. 

At the end of October, in an interview with Politico, Clapper added more about Kremlin interference in the 2016 election: “The Russians have succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations.” Clapper dismissed President Trump’s repeated attacks on the investigation of his Moscow links as “fake news” with a warning that the Russians “have been emboldened and they will continue to do this.” 

Clapper went considerably further yesterday in his appearance on CNN’s The Lead, in which he finally let his top secret mask drop to say what he really thinks about our 45th president: 

I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president … You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president. 

When pressed about what exactly he was saying, Clapper explained that he meant his words “figuratively,” but that barely mitigates the shock value of what he said. To be perfectly clear: America’s most experienced spy boss publicly termed our president an asset—that is, a witting agent—of the Kremlin who is being controlled by Vladimir Putin. Even if meant only “figuratively,” this is the most jaw-dropping statement ever uttered about any American president by any serious commentator.

Once again, Trump is attacking our intelligence services because they have the evidence that he is a Russian asset.

And most of the rest of the GOP knew this and went along willingly.

The Blue Wave Builds, Con't

Democrats continue to hold a double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot numbers as Trump is now dragging the GOP down like a millstone.

If this lead continues to hold (or grows, certainly possible if things start going south on the economy or otherwise) then Democrats are looking to make big gains in the suburban swing districts that will allow them to retake the House.

From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican-held seats filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump. 

“If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who as a member of Congress in 2006 helped Democrats win back the House. “The president’s conduct has basically given voters this permission slip to go against the Republicans.”
Congressional Republicans are scrambling to fortify their defenses. 

On Wednesday, the last five leaders of the House Republican campaign arm privately addressed Republican lawmakers, outlining the sort of suburban districts most at risk and imploring members to contribute to their colleagues. Former Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York said it had been aimed at dozens of lawmakers elected since 2010 who had never faced a Democratic wave. 

“The general tenor was: This is not a year like most of you have seen, because you’ve not seen wind in your face,” said Mr. Reynolds, who led the House campaign committee in 2006. 

While Mr. Trump has seemed eager to engage in the midterm races, it is unclear where he would campaign and unlikely his presence would help Republicans in many imperiled districts. Already, his unpopularity is luring candidates into races once considered long shots. Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House. 

In October, Mayor Ben McAdams of Salt Lake County, a Democrat, announced a bid to oust Representative Mia Love in Utah, a conservative state stocked with educated Mormon voters who view Mr. Trump with disdain. In early December, Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Ky., a Democrat, kicked off a campaign against Representative Andy Barr, about 40 percent of whose electorate is in Lexington, home to the University of Kentucky. 

Outside Philadelphia, Scott Wallace, a lawyer and philanthropist whose grandfather was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, is exploring a challenge to Representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a traditional haven for white-collar Republicans, people who have spoken with Mr. Wallace said. And P. G. Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati City Council member who briefly ran for Senate last year, is being recruited by House Democrats to challenge Representative Steve Chabot in a district that mixes African-Americans and urban and suburban whites. 

“It has all the trappings of a winnable seat if the climate cooperates,” Mr. Sittenfeld said.
Should that climate worsen, Republicans say, lawmakers not previously thought to be at risk could be endangered, like Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who is facing a former State Senate leader.

Beyond the biggest blue states, perhaps two dozen red-hued districts with significant suburban populations could be winnable for Democrats in a banner year, including those held by Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dave Reichert of Washington State; Ted Budd and Robert Pittenger of North Carolina; and Kevin Yoder of Kansas.

Seeing Steve Chabot knocked off in Cincinnati and Andy Barr knocked off in Lexington would be the kind of wins Dems need in order to take the House back.  And a 2010-style wave election could put dozens of seats in play for the Dems that gerrymandering has put out of reach, places where Dems would need a double-digit advantage to win.

That's why the GOP is running scared right now.  They know the axe is coming.

StupidiNews!

• Federal investigators say an Amtrak passenger train was speeding as the train derailed at a highway overpass in Washington State, killing 3 and injuring more than 100.
• Columbia, South Carolina may become the first US city to ban the sale of "bump stocks", the devices were used on several guns in October's deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas.
• The US is officially putting the blame for May's "WannaCry" cyberware ransom attack on North Korea, homeland security adviser Tom Bossert makes the charge in today's WSJ.
• House Republicans plan to take up a final vote on the GOP tax bill today and send the bill to the Senate where it will face Democratic senators looking to delay the legislation.
• Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab is suing the Trump regime for banning the company's software from government PCs over possible Russian cooperation to steal data.