Last Call For Put A Corker In It, Bob

Outgoing Trump party Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee is really upset that Trump's tariffs are going to destroy the (admittedly 100% union-free) auto manufacturing industry in his state, and is kind of grouchy that the rest of the Trump party refuses to back him over, well, Trump.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) ripped his GOP colleagues on Tuesday, asserting they are afraid to vote on his tariff legislation because it could provoke backlash from President Trump.

"'Gosh, we might poke the bear!' That is the language I've been hearing in the hallways. 'We might poke the bear. The president might get upset with us as United States senators if we vote on the Corker amendment,'" Corker said during a heated speech where he was yelling from the Senate floor. 

He added that the Senate is "becoming a body where, well, we'll do what we can do, but my gosh, if the president gets upset with us, then we might not be in the majority, and so let's don't do anything that might upset the president."

Corker's floor speech comes as he has tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get a vote on his legislation requiring congressional approval for tariffs enacted for reasons of national security amid broader scrutiny of Trump's recent trade moves. 

The Tennessee Republican has pushed for a vote on the measure as part of the Senate's debate on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). 

Though GOP lawmakers have publicly fretted over Trump's tariff policies, GOP leadership has shown little interest in formally pushing back against the president.

Here's the thing though, Bob... you hitched your wagon to Trump, and now you're all mad because that wagon is headed for a cliff.  It's going to take your party with it, and November's going to be a bloodbath.  If you think voters in your state are mad at the Trump party now, wait until the layoff stories start rolling in on the evening news over the next several months.

And when the economic damage really kicks in next year, we'll see what the Trump party is willing to do as far as reining in Trump.

Of course, Corker will be long gone by then.

The New Robber Barons, Con't

Last month I talked about Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and the city's plan to alleviate King County, Washington's affordable housing crisis by taxing the multi-billion dollar companies that have served to make the situation exponentially worse.

The tax targets 500-600 businesses in the city that gross at least $20 million a year. The companies would be charged a “head tax” at $500 per employee. In 2021, the head tax would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax. The payroll tax would windup costing Amazon more than the initial head tax, considering Seattle Amazon employees are paid about an average of $110,000 per year, according to data from job-reviews site Glassdoor. 

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” a spokesperson for Amazon told The Seattle Times. 

The city council is expected to vote on the tax on May 14. 

The city estimates the tax would raise an estimated $75 million annually, with Amazon paying roughly $20 million in 2019 and 2020. One might think for a company that pulled in $1.6 billion last quarter, they could afford to help out the city of Seattle and its most vulnerable residents, especially considering the extent to which Amazon’s presence in the city has exacerbated the housing crisis there.

Since 2010, when Amazon opened its first headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, housing costs have skyrocketed. 

The median cost of a single-family home has more than doubled to $820,000, and rents have increased 64 percent, according to the Seattle Times. The average two-bedroom home in Seattle costs more than $2,000 per month. Only a third of condominiums in Seattle are priced below $500,000.

Seattle's City Council voted unanimously to approve the tax.

That was four weeks ago.  Take note of that.

Because in less than a month, Amazon, Starbucks, and the rest of the new robber barons leaned so hard on Seattle's City Council that they shattered and the cowards are now scrambling to repeal the ordinance.

Less than a month after roiling Seattle and making national headlines by voting unanimously to pass a controversial head tax on big businesses such as Amazon, the City Council now plans to abruptly reverse itself and vote to repeal the tax. 

Council President Bruce Harrell announced the move without warning Monday and vowed to move at lightning speed to kill the measure, responding to a backlash from business leaders and residents who say they don’t trust the council to spend wisely.

Harrell scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday and said he would sponsor the repeal legislation, which appears to have enough votes. He and six others on the council joined Mayor Jenny Durkan in a statement Monday signaling their support for nixing the $275 per employee, per year tax, which was supposed to raise about $47 million per year starting in 2019 to fund low-income housing and homeless services.

Council members said talks with constituents had persuaded them to change course.
The news of the sudden turnaround — unprecedented in recent Seattle politics — also comes as the council stares down the prospect of a long and bitter battle for votes.

A business-backed campaign called No Tax on Jobs had planned to submit petition signatures on Tuesday to qualify a referendum on the head-tax for the November ballot, having raised more than $200,000 and attracted a small army of volunteers.

The new robber barons made it painfully clear that Amazon now 100% controls Seattle, and that any opposition to it will be smashed into oblivion.  Imagine the level of threats that it took to move a major US local government to act this quickly to completely reverse a unanimous vote.

This is terrifying.

We all live in company towns, it seems.  And everyone works for the company whether they want to or not.

Mr. Trump Goes To Singapore

Donald Trump managed to get a number of vague statements out of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, but basically nothing in the way of details or verification of "denuclearization" while the US apparently is giving up joint military exercises with South Korea in exchange for a piece of paper.

President Trump said he “developed a very special bond” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their historic summit here Tuesday and proclaimed the start of a new era that could break a cycle of nuclear brinkmanship and stave off a military confrontation.

“Yesterday’s conflict does not have to be tomorrow’s war,” Trump said at a news conference in Singapore following more than four hours of talks with Kim.

Trump said Kim “reaffirmed” his commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and also agreed to destroy a missile site in the country.

“We’re ready to write a new chapter between our nations,” the president said.

Trump sounded triumphant following his meeting with Kim, expressing confidence that the North Korean leader was serious about abandoning his nuclear program and transforming his country from an isolated rogue regime into a respected member of the world community.

But Trump provided few specifics about what steps Kim would take to back up his promise to denuclearize his country and how the United States would verify that North Korea was keeping its pledge to get rid of its nuclear weapons, saying that would be worked out in future talks. 

“We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done,” he said of the process to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons.

Trump announced that he will order an end to regular “war games” that the United States conducts with ally South Korea, a reference to annual joint military exercises that are an irritant to North Korea.

Trump called the exercises “very provocative” and “inappropriate” in light of the optimistic opening he sees with North Korea. Ending the exercises would also save money, Trump said.

The United States has conducted such exercises for decades as a symbol of unity with Seoul and previously rejected North Korean complaints as illegitimate. Ending the games would be a significant political benefit for Kim, but Trump insisted he had not given up leverage.

“I think the meeting was every bit as good for the United States as it was for North Korea,” Trump said, casting himself as a leader who can secure a deal that has eluded past presidents.

South Korea’s presidential office seemed blindsided by the announcement on the joint exercises.

“We need to try to understand what President Trump said,” a spokesman for South Korean President Moon Jae-in said.

So in the last 48 hours, Trump has effectively isolated the US from its G-7 allies, directly angered Canada and insulted PM Justin Trudeau, backed out of a joint statement with our oldest allies, and then signed on to a statement with arguably the most repressive and bloody dictator on earth.

The pundits are absolutely correct to call this both historic and unprecedented, and none of it is a good thing.  The message this sends to both our allies and to the world's most vicious dictators is unmistakable: the legitimacy you crave is for sale by Trump.  The scale and magnitude of Kim's propaganda victory here can't be overstated.  Trump has proven that pursuit of a nuclear program will get you recognition by the US as a potential ally.  There isn't a dictator on earth who isn't now considering a nuclear weapons program as the path to power and legitimacy.

This has been the worst week for US diplomacy in decades.

Oh, and South Korea wasn't consulted at all.  They had no clue.  Trump is more accommodating to Kim than he is Moon. And recall that Republicans were screaming at how awful the Iran nuclear deal supposedly was, and they're falling all over themselves calling Trump the greatest president in US history for a "promise" from a dictator not to lie.

China is laughing up its sleeve.  Russia couldn't be happier.

Trump is the Dunning-Kruger poster boy in the party of cognitive-biased fools.
 

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's initial meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore Tuesday produced some vague promises in a joint statement but little in the way of actual action.
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions now says that the US can refuse asylum seekers escaping domestic abuse and gang warfare and has denied asylum to a Salvadoran woman as a result.
• Voters in five states head to the polls for primaries today in Virginia, North Dakota, Maine, South Carolina and Nevada, choosing candidates for several House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.
• A US federal judge is expected to rule on AT&T's proposed $85 billion deal to buy Time Warner this afternoon, the deal faces stiff opposition from the Trump regime over CNN's coverage of Trump.
• Washington state's net neutrality law took effect on Monday, countering the FCC's ending of national net neutrality rules, legislation in several more states including California remains pending.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

The DoJ investigation into the NRA's ties to Russian crooks, illegal campaign contributions, and money laundering ahead of the 2016 elections just got a whole lot nastier as Peter Stone and Greg Gordon at McClatchy find a whole lot of witches to hunt.

Several prominent Russians, some in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle or high in the Russian Orthodox Church, now have been identified as having contact with National Rifle Association officials during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, according to photographs and an NRA source. 

The contacts have emerged amid a deepening Justice Department investigation into whether Russian banker and lifetime NRA member Alexander Torshin illegally channeled money through the gun rights group to add financial firepower to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. 

Other influential Russians who met with NRA representatives during the campaign include Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month served as a deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov, head of one of Russia’s largest philanthropies, the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. The foundation was launched by an ultra-nationalist ally of Russian President Putin. 

The Russians talked and dined with NRA representatives, mainly in Moscow, as U.S. presidential candidates vied for the White House. Now U.S. investigators want to know if relationships between the Russian leaders and the nation’s largest gun rights group went beyond vodka toasts and gun factory tours, evolving into another facet of the Kremlin’s broad election-interference operation. 

Even as the contacts took place, Kremlin cyber operatives were secretly hacking top Democrats’ emails and barraging Americans’ social media accounts with fake news stories aimed at damaging the image of Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and boosting the prospects of Republican Donald Trump. 

It is a crime, potentially punishable with prison time, to donate or use foreign money in U.S. election campaigns. 

McClatchy in January disclosed that Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating whether Torshin or others engineered the flow of Russian monies to the NRA; the Senate Intelligence Committee is also looking into the matter, sources familiar with the probe have said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiries, which are part of sweeping, parallel investigations into Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. elections, have not been publicly announced. 

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said, however, that the FBI has not contacted the group. 

A photograph taken during a 2015 trip to Russia by leaders of the powerful group showed them meeting with Torshin, Rogozin and Rudov, and a source knowledgeable about the visit confirmed the gathering. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships. 

The NRA, Trump’s biggest financial backer, spent more than $30 million to boost his upstart candidacy; that's more than double what it laid out for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, and the NRA money started flowing much earlier in the cycle for Trump.

Surprise, it wasn't just Alexander Torshin, who I've talked about several times before, but a whole network of Russian Putin buddies who ended up giving possibly tens of millions to Trump.  Remember, Torshin approached Jared Kushner about a Trump-Putin meeting before the election and planned to meet with Trump officials at the 2016 NRA convention in Louisville.

Since then, the evidence of Russian contributions to Trump laundered through the NRA has only gotten more solid.  Now we find out multiple Russian oligarchs were in on it, not just Torshin.

My question is how much Wayne LaPierre knew at the time.  It's gonna be fun when the indictments start dropping on this one, folks.

Stay tuned.

Having Supreme Difficulty With Voting

If it's a Monday in June, it's a major Supreme Court decision, and this week we got Husted vs. Raldolph Institute, the Ohio voter registration purge case, just in time for the 2018 midterms.  In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Alito, SCOTUS decided that Ohio's mass voter purges by GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted did not violate the Voter Rights Act.

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Ohio a victory Monday in a fight over the state's method for removing people from the voter rolls, a practice that civil rights groups said discourages minority turnout.

At least a dozen other politically conservative states said they would adopt a similar practice if Ohio prevailed, as a way of keeping their voter registration lists accurate and up to date.

Prof. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, predicted that a win for Ohio would escalate voting wars between the political parties. 

"You'll see more red states making it easier to drop people from the voter registration rolls," he said. 

All states have procedures for removing from their registration lists the names of people who have moved and are therefore no longer eligible to vote in a given precinct. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether a voter's decision to sit out a certain number of elections could be the trigger for that effort. 

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, said the court’s job was not "to decide whether Ohio’s supplemental process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not."

Ohio election officials send notices to anyone who fails to cast a ballot during a two-year period. People who do not respond and don't vote over the next four years, including in two more federal elections, are dropped from the list of registered voters.

And of course the groups least likely to vote in consecutive elections and therefore trigger having their voter registration dropped are young voters and minority voters, and Ohio purged hundreds of thousands of those voters in 2016.  Expect basically every other red state to take up this practice, as well as to take up Ohio's aggressive timeline to purge voters before 2020.

Republicans want as few people eligible to vote as possible for a reason, and this is just one more weapon to use against voter registration drives.  Don't be surprised if red states in fact take up even more aggressive voter purges too, apparently it's open season now on "use it or lose it" as a "right" to vote.

What this means is voting is no longer a protected right, but something that can be taken from you by the states for the reason of choosing not using it.  Alito and the conservative majority on the court aren't concerned with voting rights, they are concerned with Republicans winning, period.

SCOTUS got this wrong, and once again you can thank Republicans who stole a Supreme Court pick from Democrats...and the morons who said both parties are the same and voted third party or stayed home.

And now if you stay home in states like Ohio?  You lose your right to vote.  Might want to consider exercising that right in November, yes?

The Party Of Trump, Con't

There are still a number of 2018 GOP primary contests left to go through the summer, and in South Carolina, Rep. Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford suddenly has a real primary challenge on his hands from state lawmaker Katie Arrington for the crime of not being Trumpist enough.

Sanford, long known for wearing his emotions openly and speaking his mind, has been one of the most high-profile Republican Trump critics in Congress. He’s called the president’s tariffs on steel and aluminum “an experiment with stupidity.” He’s called Trump’s disparaging remarks about Haiti and African nations “something stupid.” He’s said that Trump has done some “weird stuff” in office. 

During the 2016 campaign, Sanford said Trump should “just shut up” and stop focusing so much on his critics. He’s said that the president was “partially” to blame for the toxic rhetoric that led to the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). He’s said that “trading slights seems essential” to Trump’s personality, and he gave an extensive interview to POLITICO Magazine in which he said the president had “fanned the flames of intolerance.” 

Sanford insists that his discord with the president isn’t anything personal, but rather rooted in deeply held beliefs. As an example, he points to his dispute with the administration over its proposal to open the South Carolina coastline to drilling. After hearing complaints from constituents, he said he had little choice but to raise concerns with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, to whom he’d grown close while they served together in Congress — and who was almost his roommate. 

“I’m not looking for disagreement with the administration,” Sanford said. “But it comes to, you cannot walk away from it if you’re really listening to the people I spend so much time with here at home.” 

Yet he’s given an opening to Arrington, who’s betting that voters in the conservative district, which stretches from the Georgia border to north of Charleston, want a congressperson who’s in lockstep with the president. The 47-year-old state representative has aired a spree of TV commercials portraying Sanford as an avowed Trump opponent, including one that shows the congressman savaging the president in a series of spliced-up cable news interviews. 

Much of her bid has been oriented around the president. She has tapped Mike Biundo, who served as national senior adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign, as a top strategist. 

In a Sunday afternoon interview following an event at the welcome center for the U.S.S. Yorktown battleship, Arrington said voters in the district had grown tired of Sanford’s opposition to the president. 

“We need a seat at the table. Our president is going to be the president until 2020 at a minimum, or 2024, and Mark has ostracized him to the point where there will never be a seat at the table for him,” she said.

Sanford's own internal polling is clearly setting off alarm bells, because he's spent nearly $400,000 in advertising on the primary in just the last couple of weeks.  Once you're in the party of Trump, your political career only leaves in a sandwich bag.  I'm honestly surprised that Sanford thought he could just skate by, but we'll see if he pays the price tomorrow.  North Dakota, Nevada, Maine, and Virginia also have GOP primaries on Tuesday.

Also, could you imagine the reaction by the press, the GOP, and the horseshoe theory end of the far left if a Democratic candidate had made this kind of pronouncement about President Obama in the 2010 or 2014 midterms, where a Democratic primary candidate declared a that a sitting House Democrat who was a vocal critic of Obama would "never have a seat at the table?"

It would have been a national scandal for months, proof of Obama's fascist tendencies or something.  Alas, such a pronouncement these days of course about a the Trump party having no seat at the table for a Trump "critic" like Sanford (who still votes with Trump 73% of the time, by the way) doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

By the way, SC-1 is an R+10 district, definitely a GOP advantage but not an overwhelming or unbeatable one in a blue wave scenario.  Democrats running in the primary include Charleston attorney Joe Cunningham, who announced his bid last June, and former Charleston mayoral candidate and non-profit director Toby Smith, who says she's running as a protest candidate.  Cunningham will most likely win, and he's been gunning for Sanford for over a year now.

Sanford may have much larger troubles in November at this rate...that is if he survives tomorrow, not a sure thing.

StupidiNews!

• Both Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have arrived in Singapore in preparation for tomorrow's summit as the world looks on.
• Mexico's economy minister is calling for "sufficient flexibility" to rework NAFTA among the US, Canada, and Mexico ahead of three-party negotiations next month.
• A suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan has killed 12 and wounded at least 30 as the city's rural development ministry building was attacked, no group has immediately claimed responsibility.
• Financial analysts say this week could be the most important of the year with the US/NK summit, a possible Fed rate hike, a Brexit test in Parliament, and the opening of the FIFA World Cup.
• Bitcoin has now lost almost two-thirds of its value from its near-$20,000 December 2017 highs, but the cryptocurrency is still well ahead of its $2,800 trading mark from this time last year.

Last Call For The Rip-Off Artist

The Presidential Records Act is for losers, not for the great Donald Trump.

Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.

Staffers had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office as well as the private residence and send it over to records management across the street from the White House for Larkey and his colleagues to reassemble.

“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” Lartey recalled in an interview. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.” The restored papers would then be sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away.

Lartey said the papers he received included newspaper clips on which Trump had scribbled notes, or circled words; invitations; and letters from constituents or lawmakers on the Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” he said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”

This would be a running gag comedy trope best suited to a season or two of Julia Louis-Dreyfus on HBO's Veep if it wasn't actual reality.  I guarantee you if there were reports of Obama "ripping up papers like confetti" that it would have been a two-year investigation from House Republicans and probably a year from Senate ones, but with Trump?  Nobody cares.

Meanwhile, we're stuck with a "leader" who in the space of a weekend has enraged our closest democratic allies and is now planning to head out to spend time with some of the worst autocrats and dictators on Earth.  As four our reputation, I guess we'll piece it back together after he destroys it and hope for the best.

If that phrase doesn't best describe the last 17 months or so, I don't know what does.

Sunday Long Read: The Negatives Of Body Positive

Journalist Amanda Mull makes the case that the trend of advertisers to use a diverse array of women of different appearances, skin colors, body shapes, and more to advertise isn't "body positivity" at all, but more mass body shaming and manipulation of women to buy crap they don't need and never did.

In the beginning, there was the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It started innocuously enough, with a 2004 photography show in Toronto, then expanded to billboards, traditional print ads, and videos, all with similar messages: Women often feel bad about themselves and their appearance, and it’s bad that women feel that way.

The campaign first gained wide acclaim simply by showing a time-lapse version of a model in a faux beauty ad being photoshopped to unattainable perfection. The video contained no narration, but it demonstrated the manipulative nature of beauty advertising on both a level that ad giant Ogilvy & Mather intended and one it probably didn’t.

This was more than a decade ago, when the phrase “Facetuned Instagram” was total nonsense on a literal level instead of just a spiritual one, and an admission of photo editing still felt subversive to average consumers. The brands had been naughty, and Dove would gladly accept the praise for noting its own bad behavior.

The problem with using subversion as a corporate marketing tactic, though, is that if the brand is successful at it, the point it’s making becomes immediately non-subversive. And Dove was verysuccessful at it — the beauty industry had always worked so hard to obscure its tactics and encode its negativity that many consumers felt understandably relieved to see the manipulation acknowledged, even if the only solution Dove offered was the opportunity to buy its products.

As the viral campaign helped cultural knowledge of image editing spread rapidly, beyond just people who read the feminist websites that had long been critical of the practice, Dove had to up the ante. It did so by devising a series of ads that put unsuspecting women in various contrived situations — choosing to walk into a building through doors labeled “beautiful” or “average,” for example, or being spontaneously required to describe their faces to a sketch artist.

Those sketches were then compared to others’ descriptions of them, revealing for ad viewers just how much these women hate themselves. In the case of the door experiment, it’s unclear why anyone with a functional knowledge of how averages work could reasonably expect all women to consider their appearances “above average.”

That these later ads leave out any larger agent responsible for the body image epidemic isn’t a mistake. Dove and its ad agency had picked up on something important in the positive response to its first ad: They didn’t need to take responsibility or propose a solution. While the logical continuation of that thought for anyone who doesn’t work at an ad agency would be that maybe brands should mind their business instead of dabbling in ineffective cultural criticism — that maybe they’re not the institutions we should be looking to on these topics at all — they saw an opportunity.

The cultural narrative about women’s bodies was so bad that simply identifying the problem would get Dove full credit and move plenty of product, but the urge to talk about a broad cultural problem while refusing to name a bad actor left the blame squarely on the shoulders of the women who had the temerity not to love themselves sufficiently.

In the context of advertising, women’s self-perceptions are invented out of whole cloth, with no apparent connection to the circumstances of their lives. And so we have the marketing landscape as we know it now, courtesy of Dove: gentle, millennial pink, and passive-aggressively reproachful of women who have allowed themselves to feel bad about their bodies. On top of all the old, existing insecurities, Dove posited that women might adopt a lucrative new one: shame over feeling bad in the first place. The brands had become self-aware, and an idea broadly known as body positivity hit the big-time.

The enormous public success of Dove’s ads flipped a switch in the minds of other people in the attention business. The Real Beauty campaign launched a thousand imitators, but not because it inspired a wave of genuine self-reflection in the people who make a living inventing things for women to feel bad about. Instead, it taught brands like Aerie and Target, which have both received waves of positive public attention for Photoshop-free campaigns, that they could get exposure for pennies on the advertising dollar if they created content that people felt compelled to share themselves, above and beyond paid placements.

For that, Ogilvy execs should probably be tried at the Hague for war crimes, but I’d settle for the broad acknowledgment that body positivity, as we know it in 2018, is a load of horse shit.

In a way the concept has come full circle.  Instead of "you need our beauty product to look good enough" it's "you look good enough to need our beauty product."  And again, it's come down to generations of telling women that they are unworthy, less than human, undesirable, on a clock and statistically doomed to be alone in love.

Why don't we fix that problem instead?

Short-Term Gains Versus A Second Term For Trump

After 18 months of "only white suburban swing voters matter!" versus "only white working-class voters matter!" being the only argument as to how Dems can win against Trump, somebody finally comes up with the data that in 2018, both suburban and working-class voters are diverse and policies to help them are the key.

Democratic politicians and strategists identify a “suburban revolt” against President Trump and right-wing Republican extremism as the key to victory in the 2018 and 2020 elections. They point to Democratic successes in the off-year 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and the surprise triumph of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama, as evidence for the party’s plan to target college-educated white women, upper-middle-class moderates and even disillusioned conservatives in the affluent suburbs.

In primary contests last week from California to New Jersey, Democrats pursued that “electability” strategy through the “Red to Blue” project of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which targeted suburban swing voters by clearing candidate fields for moderate and conservative Democrats like Gil Cisneros in Orange County and Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey.

The nomination of centrist candidates may bring Democratic gains in the affluent suburbs in the midterms. But the electoral success of that strategy has previously been modest — and more important, the party has paid insufficient attention to the substantial policy costs of turning moderate and affluent suburbs blue. Democrats cannot cater to white swing voters in affluent suburbs and also promote policies that fundamentally challenge income inequality, exclusionary zoning, housing segregation, school inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration.

The political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights. Indeed, unlike traditional blue-collar Democrats, white-collar professionals across the ideological spectrum — for example, in the high-tech enclaves of California and Northern Virginia, which combined contain eight of the 15 most highly educated congressional districts in the nation — generally endorse tough-on-crime policies, express little interest in protections for unions and sympathize with the economic agenda of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

In these places, the Democratic suburban strategy of targeting affluent white professionals while appealing to nonwhite voters in diverse, fast-growing communities has had some success. In Virginia’s race for governor last fall, the moderate Democrat Ralph Northam followed the playbook and won 69 percent of the vote in the Northern Virginia suburbs and exurbs, 58 percent statewide from white women with college degrees, 54 percent from those with family incomes above $100,000 and overwhelming support from African-Americans and Latinos. But Mr. Northam secured only 26 percent of ballots cast by white Virginians without a college degree, slightly below even Hillary Clinton’s disastrous nationwide showing.

American suburbia today is far more racially and socioeconomically diverse than these upscale communities. In the largest metropolitan regions, more nonwhite and poor residents now live in suburbs than in central cities, and more than 60 percent of adult suburban residents nationwide are not college-educated professionals. Suburban neighborhoods also remain highly segregated by race and income, and therefore operate as engines of social and economic inequality, the consequence of historical policies of housing and school discrimination and their contemporary legacies like exclusionary zoning, unequal educational opportunity and selective law enforcement.

To explain the realignment of American politics and the migration of working-class whites to the Republican Party, observers usually focus on how politicians from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump have exploited white backlash against racial and cultural liberalism.

The flip side of this is the deliberate, long-term strategy by the Democratic Party to favor the financial interests and social values of affluent white suburban families and high-tech corporations over the priorities of unions and the economic needs of middle-income and poor residents of all races. It’s no coincidence that the bluer that suburban counties turn, the more unequal and economically stratified they become as well — a dynamic evident along Route 128 outside of Boston, in the once solidly Republican suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey, in boom regions such as Atlanta and Denver, and along the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego.

The shocking realization that "working-class" doesn't automatically mean "white" is something that Democrats should have figured out 20 years ago, and something Barack Obama was able to win on, but then the Dems ran away from him and back to the Clinton 90's.

No wonder then that over the last decade the GOP gave rise to Trump's virulent racism.  Dems need to remember who their base is and they need to stop chasing "never Trump" Republicans who vote GOP anyway.

Will Dems figure it out?  They making a strong case in 2018 with more women and more diverse candidates across the board.  We'll see if they can win again.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

Yesterday I talked about how Donald Trump was planning to ditch the G-7 summit to go hang out with his new dictator pals in Singapore, and today he made good on that threat, but not before storming out with the ultimatum that all nations wanting to do business with the US must drop tariffs, or else.

President Trump told foreign leaders at the Group of Seven summit that they must dramatically reduce trade barriers with the United States or they would risk losing access to the world’s largest economy, delivering his most defiant trade threat yet to his counterparts from around the globe.

But there were numerous signs here that other leaders stood their ground, having stiffened after months of attacks and insults. Each leader now faces crucial decisions about how to proceed.

Trump, in a news conference before leaving for Singapore, described private conversations he held over two days with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada. He said he pushed them to consider removing every single tariff or trade barrier on American goods, and in return he would do the same for products from their countries. But if steps aren’t taken, he said, the penalties would be severe.

“We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump said. “And that ends.”

The U.S. leader described the meetings with his counterparts as cordial, and he repeatedly blamed past U.S. leaders for what he views as a trade imbalance. He also said other nations had taken advantage of decades of U.S. complacency with regards to trade, something that he planned to end.

The two-day session under crystalline blue skies in Charlevoix, Quebec, put Trump’s transactional view of alliances, economic leverage and trade relationships into sharp focus for other nations often frustrated by Trump’s ad hoc decision-making.

At this second G-7 gathering of Trump’s presidency, the question of whether the U.S. leader would follow through on campaign boasts about punishing international freeloaders has been largely answered.

He did not back away or blunt his critiques, and despite first-name references to “Angela,” and “Justin,” Trump did little to disguise his distrust of the international consensus model of world affairs that the G-7 represents.

The thing is, our allies?  They're going to chose "or else".   They're not putting up with Trump's crap, and they are calling the bluff of a wildly unpopular elected official whose party is about to get crushed at the polls in five months.  When the economic damage of these tariffs starts to show up in jobs reports about September or October or so, you'll know what caused it.

Meanwhile, Trump is more than happy to go meet his actual boss Vladimir Putin in Vienna later this year, all while telling the G-7 allies to go to hell.

He's the best agent Putin could have asked for.

One of Us, One Of Us

The Bernie people aren't going to be happy about this, but it's something the DNC should have done years ago.

The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the at times bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016.

But while the rule change left some of Sanders’s top allies thinking the party was being driven by “spite,” it likely won’t affect him directly and could pave the way for one of his favorite reforms.

DNC member Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, posted a photo of the rules change shortly after it was added to the proposed draft call for the 2020 Democratic convention. Weingarten, who attended Friday’s DNC meeting in Providence, R.I., wrote that the party “changed the rules to ensure to run for President as a Democrat you need to be A Democrat.”

The new rule would force candidates in Democratic presidential primaries to state that they are Democrats, accept the party’s nomination if they win the 2020 primary and to “run and serve” as a member.

“At the time a presidential candidate announces their candidacy publicly, they must publicly affirm that they are a Democrat,” the rule says. “Each candidate pursuing the Democratic nomination shall affirm, in writing, to the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee that they: A. are a member of the Democratic Party; B. will accept the Democratic nomination; and C. will run and serve as a member of the Democratic Party.”

The rule seems like a clear response to Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate but has steadfastly maintained his status as an independent. Sanders ran to the left of Clinton and identifies himself as a “democratic socialist.”

Of course, the Bernie people knew this was coming and frankly don't care because they say it doesn't apply to Bernie anyway.

With Sanders’s independent status and push for inclusivity, the new rule change would seem to be a slap in the face and a potential roadblock should the Vermont senator decide to mount another presidential run in 2020. However, Sanders allies do not believe he would be affected by the measure thanks to a unique rule in his home state.

Sanders, who is currently running for reelection, typically runs in the state’s Democratic primary but declines the party’s nomination after winning. The move allows him to fend off Democratic challengers in the state while still running as an independent. Last month, the Vermont Democratic Party passed a resolution supporting this strategy and proclaiming that Sanders would still be considered a member of the party “for all purposes and entitled to all the rights and privileges that come with such membership at the state and federal level.” That membership could inoculate him against the DNC’s rules change.

So we'll be fighting over this rather than Sanders accepting the reality, joining the party, and moving on, because Sanders supporters think they don't need and don't actually want Democrats, they want Bernie, see.

Here we go again.

The Gunshine State Shines On

For some unfathomable reason, Florida's concealed carry permits are handled by the state's Agriculture department (because I guess gators really don't need to know if you're packing a Glock) but in a scathing new report from the office's inspector general, Ag Commissioner Adam Putnam, the GOP's candidate for Governor, apparently hasn't been checking any concealed carry permit applications against any federal databases because the employee doing it forgot his password for a year.

For more than a year, the state of Florida failed to conduct national background checks on tens of thousands of applications for concealed weapons permits, potentially allowing drug addicts or people with a mental illness to carry firearms in public.

A previously unreported Office of Inspector General investigation found that in February 2016 the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services stopped using a FBI crime database called the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that ensures applicants who want to carry a gun do not have a disqualifying history in other states.

The employee in charge of the background checks could not log into the system, the investigator learned. The problem went unresolved until discovered by another worker in March 2017 — meaning that for more than a year applications got approved without the required background check.

During that time, which coincided with the June 12, 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub that left 50 dead, the state saw an unprecedented spike in applications for concealed weapons permits. There were 134,000 requests for permits in the fiscal year ending in June 2015. The next 12 months broke a record, 245,000 applications, which was topped again in 2017 when the department received 275,000 applications.

Department employees interviewed for the report called the NICS checks "extremely important." Concealed weapons licenses "may have been issued to potentially ineligible individuals." If it came out they weren't conducted, "this could cause an embarrassment to the agency," the report said.

Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam has made it a priority to speed up the issuing of concealed weapons permits since he was elected in 2010. In 2012, he held a news conference to celebrate the state's one millionth concealed weapons permit, noting the time it took to process an application fell from 12 weeks to 35 days on his watch. There are now 1.8 million concealed weapon permit holders in Florida.

Now running for Florida governor as a Republican, Putnam's campaign touts his expansion of concealed carry permits as one of his top accomplishments.

And it was accomplished in record time for one reason: because the background checks weren't done at all.

Going to be interesting to see how Putnam's campaign defends this, especially in the light of the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Parkland High massacre.  My guess is they'll blame the employee and ignore it.  It'll also be interesting to see how the other Republicans in the primary, particularly Ron DeSantis, responds.  Florida's primary isn't until the end of August however, so there's plenty of time.

We'll see.  Putnam should resign his post and drop out of the race for such massive dereliction of duty, but that won't happen of course. Republicans never do actually give a damn about the job, only the power.

Last Call For Pardon The Interruption, Con't

Huffington Post's Capitol Hill team asked House Republicans if they would vote to impeach Trump should he move to pardon himself for any federal crimes, and a grand total of one Republican said that they would.

Four days before Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, the Justice Department told the 37th president that he couldn’t pardon himself. Three days ago, President Donald Trump tweeted that he knows better.

Because it has the power to impeach the president, Congress might be the final backstop if Trump did pardon himself ― the U.S. Constitution says the president has full power to pardon “except in cases of impeachment.”

So after Trump’s tweet, HuffPost attempted to get comment from the offices of all 235 Republicans in the House, where the impeachment process would start. We asked a simple question: If the president pardoned himself, would they support impeachment?

We didn’t get many yes or no responses to our survey question ― just three, in fact ― so we sought out Republicans in hallways and asked them the question directly. Still, only one Republican said definitively he would support impeachment if the president pardoned himself: the libertarian-minded Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan.

In interviews with more than two dozen Republican members on Capitol Hill, most avoided the question.

“I don’t wanna talk about hypotheticals,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) told HuffPost. Conaway helmed the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government, ultimately asserting that it had not.

“I’m not a constitutional scholar, so I don’t know if he’s got the authority to do it or not,” Conaway said. “That seems to be a red herring to foment unrest, trouble and nonsense.”

Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) also hid behind his ignorance. “I don’t want to brag, but I’m not a lawyer,” he said, noting he couldn’t answer whether the president had the power to pardon himself, and therefore couldn’t answer whether it was an impeachable offense.

A number of members delivered a variation of this line, saying they hadn’t looked into the matter seriously and therefore didn’t know if the president had that authority.

Three Republicans — Reps. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) — all said they didn’t think the president had the authority to pardon himself, but all of them avoided the question of impeachment. Lance and Jones said the issue would go to the Supreme Court relatively quickly, and Fitzpatrick just repeated that “he’s not going to pardon himself.”

Although almost all 235 Republicans either declined to answer, or said they couldn’t answer, only one Republican said the president did have the authority to pardon himself: Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).

Profiles in courage from the Trump party, including from "libertarian" Justin Amash, who of course is really nothing more than a Republican who thinks he's Rand Paul with a fraction of the actual attention-grabbing power.

In other words, nobody really cares to stop Trump.  And nobody in the party that enabled and elevated him will lift a finger to do so.  The real villains in America right now?  Not Trump, as I've said time and again, he's just the metastasized tumor.  The cancer is the Republican party.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Earlier this week the story broke that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was caught pressuring witnesses to lie in his Ukrainian lobbyist money laundering case and that Robert Mueller was recommending charges be filed as a result, as if somehow Manafort wasn't already facing a couple decades in prison.  Today Mueller made those charges official for Manafort and his chief Ukrainian lobbyist sidekick Konstantin Kilimnik.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, brought new obstruction charges on Friday against President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and added allegations against a close associate, who prosecutors suspect has ties to Russian intelligence.

Prosecutors said the obstruction charge relates to Mr. Manafort’s efforts to coach the stories of witnesses against him. He remains charged with money laundering, illegal foreign lobbying and lying to federal officials.

Mr. Manafort’s longtime associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, was added to the case, and was charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The charges are related to an effort by him, Mr. Manafort and other associates to have prominent European politicians vouch publicly for Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Russia former president of Ukraine, who was Mr. Manafort’s client.

Prosecutors allege that Mr. Kilimnik and Mr. Manafort tried to convince two associates who worked on the campaign involving the Europeans, whom they referred to as the “Hapsburg group,” to lie about its scope.

The new charges against Manafort are a direct result of his business associates giving up information on him to avoid prosecution.

The special counsel’s accusation this week that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, tried to tamper with potential witnesses originated with two veteran journalists who turned on Mr. Manafort after working closely with him to prop up the former Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, interviews and documents show.

The two journalists, who helped lead a project to which prosecutors say Mr. Manafort funneled more than $2 million from overseas accounts, are the latest in a series of onetime Manafort business partners who have provided damaging evidence to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Their cooperation with the government has increasingly isolated Mr. Manafort as he awaits trial on charges of violating financial, tax and federal lobbying disclosure laws.

Mr. Manafort’s associates say he feels betrayed by the former business partners, to whom he collectively steered millions of dollars over the years for consulting, lobbying and legal work intended to bolster the reputation of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine. Mr. Manafort has told associates that he believes Mr. Mueller’s team is using the business partners to pressure him to flip on Mr. Trump in a manner similar to the one used to prosecute the energy giant Enron in the early 2000s by a Justice Department task force that included some lawyers now serving on Mr. Mueller’s team.

“Anybody who is a student of the Enron prosecution sees a very close parallel,” said Michael R. Caputo, a former Trump campaign operative, who has known Mr. Manafort for three decades and spoke with him on Wednesday. Another associate said Mr. Manafort and some of his close allies were reading a book by the conservative lawyer and commentator Sidney Powell that claims misconduct in the Enron prosecution. And Mr. Caputo, who was interviewed by Mr. Mueller’s team last month, said that “when Paul decided to fight, he knew the lay of the land.”

Prosecutors assert that Mr. Manafort’s fight included trying to shape the accounts that former business partners offered prosecutors. In court filings this week, they said that starting in late February, Mr. Manafort repeatedly tried to reach the two journalists — with whom he had fallen out of contact until recently — to coordinate their accounts about their work to tamp down international criticism of Mr. Yanukovych for corruption, persecuting rivals and pivoting toward Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin. The prosecutors did not name the journalists, but three people familiar with the project identified them as Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager.

Both men fended off the overtures, which included phone calls and encrypted text messages from Mr. Manafort and a longtime associate, whom prosecutors have not named but was identified by people close to Mr. Manafort as Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former Russian Army linguist who prosecutors claim has ties to Russian intelligence.

Instead of engaging, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Sager informed Mr. Mueller’s team of the efforts to reach them, according to prosecutors. Mr. Friedman accused Mr. Manafort of trying to “suborn perjury” by persuading him to lie to investigators, according to a declaration by an F.B.I. agent on the case. Neither Mr. Friedman nor Mr. Sager could be reached for comment.

The prosecutors are arguing that because of these allegations, a federal judge should revise the terms of Mr. Manafort’s bail or even send him to jail while he awaits trial. Mr. Manafort, who posted a $10 million bond and has been confined to his home since October, has until Friday at midnight to respond to the prosecutors’ accusations. His spokesman brushed aside prosecutors’ allegations of witness tampering, but declined to comment on Mr. Manafort’s relationship with Mr. Friedman and Mr. Sager.

They join a growing list of lobbyists, consultants and lawyers who worked on various contracts related to Mr. Yanukovych’s government, political party or supporters and are now cooperating with the government’s prosecution of Mr. Manafort. His associates say he was most stung by the decision of his longtime business partner, Rick Gates, who served as Mr. Trump’s former deputy presidential campaign manager, to cooperate as part of a deal in which he pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

Remember, these are former Trump campaign employees saying Mueller is trying to flip Manafort, which immediately leads to the question "What did Trump do that Manafort can testify on?"

My guess is we're going to find out.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

Donald Trump's trip Thursday to the G-7 summit in Quebec -- or as French President Emmanuel Macron called it "the G-6 plus 1" -- was such an unmitigated disaster that Trump is picking up his ball and leaving early.

President Donald Trump continued to criticize Canada early Friday morning after the White House announced he will leave the G-7 summit before its conclusion following a day of back-and-forth with fellow world leaders that foreshadowed confrontations during the meeting of the world's largest advanced economies.

Trump will be depart the summit in Quebec at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and head directly to Singapore, the site of his June 12 meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. The G-7 summit is scheduled to wrap up later on Saturday.

Before the Thursday night announcement, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada both promised to confront Trump over his recent decision to impose tariffs on U.S. allies.

Trump, in response, laid into the two leaders on Thursday evening and Friday morning over those plans.

“Please tell Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron that they are charging the U.S. massive tariffs and create non-monetary barriers,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “The EU trade surplus with the U.S. is $151 Billion, and Canada keeps our farmers and others out. Look forward to seeing them tomorrow.”

On Friday a little after 6 a.m., he tweeted, “Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn’t tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers!” and “Looking forward to straightening out unfair Trade Deals with the G-7 countries. If it doesn’t happen, we come out even better!”

By pulling out early, Trump will skip sessions focused on climate change, the oceans and clean energy. He will also miss the traditional group-photo opportunity among fellow heads of state. The president may also miss the opportunity to host a summit-ending news conference, something world leaders traditionally do. The leader of the host nation, in this case Trudeau, also takes questions and gives closing remarks. Trump chose not to hold a news conference last year, becoming the only G-7 leader not to do so before leaving Italy, according to The Hill. He opted instead for a speech at a nearby naval air station.

The summit traditionally concludes with a joint statement spelling out the areas of agreement on the wide range of policy issues discussed. But before Trump's announcement, Macron urged the other five nations to hold strong and not let potential U.S. opposition water down their communiqué.

The 2017 statement, for example was notable for its explicit mention that the U.S. did not share its allies‘ support of the Paris Climate Accord. Less than a week later, Trump announced in the White House Rose Garden that the U.S. would be exiting the climate agreement.

“Maybe the American president doesn’t care about being isolated today, but we don’t mind being six, if needs be,” Macron said, part of his plea to confront Trump head-on.

Trump is such a petulant child, and his utter failure to even remain on the same continent with the G-7 leaders, our closest economic and military allies, proves beyond a doubt that the North Korean "summit" he's heading to next week in Singapore will be one of the most comical crash-and-burn cockups in US diplomatic history.

Our isolation from the world is proceeding at a brisk pace, and clearly the rest of the planet is willing to and prepared to operate without our "leadership" anymore.  It's probably the best option given the circumstances.

Oh, and Trump's biggest complaint?

Russia wasn't invited.  They haven't been since they, you know, invaded the Ukraine and took the Crimea region.

I wonder when we get kicked out?

Last Call For Plugging The Leaks

The New York Times is crying foul on the Trump regime for taking a reporter's email and phone records in the name of stopping leaks involving the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of Trump and Russia.

Federal law enforcement officials secretly seized years’ worth of a New York Times reporter’s phone and email records this year in an investigation of classified information leaks. It was the first known instance of the Justice Department going after a reporter’s data under President Trump.

The seizure — disclosed in a letter to the reporter, Ali Watkins — suggested that prosecutors under the Trump administration will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump has complained bitterly about leaks and demanded that law enforcement officials seek criminal charges against government officials involved in illegal and sometimes embarrassing disclosures of national security secrets.

Investigators sought Ms. Watkins’s information as part of an inquiry into whether James A. Wolfe, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s former director of security, disclosed classified secrets to reporters. F.B.I. agents approached Ms. Watkins about a previous three-year romantic relationship she had with Mr. Wolfe, saying they were investigating unauthorized leaks.

News media advocates consider the idea of mining a journalist’s records for sources to be an intrusion on First Amendment freedoms, and prosecutors acknowledge it is one of the most delicate steps the Justice Department can take. “Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of democracy, and communications between journalists and their sources demand protection,” said Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman.

A prosecutor notified Ms. Watkins on Feb. 13 that the Justice Department had years of customer records and subscriber information from telecommunications companies, including Google and Verizon, for two email accounts and a phone number of hers. Investigators did not obtain the content of the messages themselves. The Times learned on Thursday of the letter, which came from the national security division of the United States attorney’s office in Washington.

The records covered years’ worth of Ms. Watkins’s communications before she joined The Times in late 2017 to cover federal law enforcement. During a seven-month period last year for which prosecutors sought additional phone records, she worked for Buzzfeed News and then Politico reporting on national security.

Shortly before she began working at The Times, Ms. Watkins was approached by the F.B.I. agents, who asserted that Mr. Wolfe had helped her with articles while they were dating. She did not answer their questions. Mr. Wolfe was not a source of classified information for Ms. Watkins during their relationship, she said.

Mr. Wolfe stopped performing committee work in December and retired in May.

Ms. Watkins said she told editors at Buzzfeed News and Politico about it and continued to cover national security, including the committee’s work. Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed News, said in a statement, “We’re deeply troubled by what looks like a case of law enforcement interfering with a reporter’s constitutional right to gather information about her own government.”

Observations:

1) Couldn't resist that dig on Obama, could you, NY Times?  Even after you know Trump and Jeff Sessions was demonstrably worse and far more sinister towards the media, you just have to continue to blame the black guy, huh?  Bet you wish he was back, assholes.

2)  A reporter should never, ever, ever, get romantically involved with a goddamn source, or somebody later used as a source.  That's journalism ethics 101, guys.

3) You do know that Watkins and Wolfe are being served up as a warning now that Mueller is closing in, right?  Keep you eyes on who the bad guy really is here.  (Hint: it's not Barack Obama.)

4)

Conservatives: If you were pissed when Obama wiretapped a reporter, you should be furious now https://t.co/MyJQ3TiYG8

— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) June 8, 2018

5)  Wolfe is going to prison.  Watkins probably isn't.  Probably.  I guess it's going to take Trump tossing reporters in jail before they understand the problem here isn't Obama, but whatever.

We'll see.

Virginia Is For (Healthcare) Lovers

Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam today signed into law Virginia's Medicaid expansion, after a long a brutal battle under the state's Republican austerity scolds of the previous general assembly, but the fight with the Trump regime is just starting, and there's every reason to believe that the expansion will be rejected by the White House.

After five years of fierce, partisan battles, amid chants of “Yes we did” from the crowd of spectators, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill Thursday afternoon that will expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to cover up to 400,000 more low-income people in the state. 

“It has been a long road to get here,” Northam said. “It took longer than we would have liked. But I couldn’t be happier to sign this and give Virginians access to the care they need to live healthy and successful lives.”

Citing the Founding Father who designed the capitol building behind him, Northam thanked the lawmakers and advocates who made the passage of Medicaid expansion possible: “As Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Without health there is no happiness.'” 

But the triumphant bill signing on the capitol’s steps in Richmond will not be the culmination of the state’s Medicaid wars, but rather the beginning of a new chapter. The bumpy road ahead includes requesting permission from the Trump administration to implement work requirements and to require that Medicaid beneficiaries pay premiums. Those conservative policies won the GOP votes necessary to get the bill over the finish line, and, if approved, are likely to be the stuff of political and legal battles for years to come.

Under the new Virginia law, starting next January, state residents with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line will be able to enroll in Medicaid, massively boosting coverage among the currently uninsured. 

Some time later, depending on when the Trump administration approves the state’s waiver, Virginia will require those who depend on Medicaid to prove they are employed, studying or volunteering and to pay premiums for their health care. The work requirement will start at 20 hours per months and slowly ramp up to 80 hours, and will have a “three strikes and you’re out” enforcement approach — anyone who fails to certify for three months that they’ve met the work requirement will be booted from Medicaid and barred from reenrolling until the following year.

“That’s about as strict as you can get,” said Jill Hanken, a health law attorney and leader of the Health Care for All Virginians Coalition that campaigned for Medicaid expansion. 

“There are elements that are extremely punitive. Since most Medicaid enrollees are already working, we think setting up a whole new program for a very small slice of population isn’t the best use of those dollars, and we are quite concerned that people will lose benefits that they are entitled to because they get caught up in the red tape or make a small error.” 

As this process moves slowly forward, expansion advocates tell TPM they plan to make their voices heard on every step — lobbying the governor as he drafts the waiver, submitting comments to Trump’s health department as they weigh its approval, pressuring the state as it decides how to implement and enforce the rules, potentially challenging the measures in court, and launching education campaigns to help Virginians navigate the process. 

“If it’s approved, we’ll do our very best to make sure people eligible for coverage don’t lose coverage,” said Hanken. She added that should the balance of power shift in the state legislature, where Democrats came within one vote of controlling the lower chamber last year, groups will be calling on lawmakers to amend or scrap the restrictions. 

“Even if the federal government approves the waiver, the state can come back later and request any amendments they believe are necessary,” Hanken said. “Virginia has done that many times before with existing waivers.”

It's an ugly mess of an expansion, but it's better than no coverage at all for thousands.  However, the race will now be to throw as many of those 400,000 off the state's rolls as possible, and as quickly as possible, and the work requirements will unfortunately pare a big chunk of people from that group.

But it's a partial win, at least.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

In the two states where Donald Trump is the most popular (Alabama and West Virginia, where Morning Consult has Trump at 62-26%), Democratic senators are running for re-election, in this case Doug Jones and Joe Manchin.  In order to survive, they both believe that they have to acknowledge Trump's popularity among their constituents.  Manchin has been walking this tightrope for a lot longer than Jones, and at this point he's not shy about fully embracing Trump.

Joe Manchin wants you to know he really likes Donald Trump.

The West Virginia senator doesn’t put it quite that way. But more than any other Democrat in Congress, he's positioned himself as a vocal Trump ally. In fact, the senator, up for reelection in a state Trump won by more than 40 points, told POLITICO he isn’t ruling out endorsing Trump for reelection in 2020 — a position practically unheard of for a politician with a “D” next to his name.

“I’m open to supporting the person who I think is best for my country and my state,” Manchin said this week from the driver’s seat of his Grand Cherokee, insisting he’s game to work with any president of either party. “If his policies are best, I’ll be right there.”

Trump’s popularity in West Virginia has Republicans salivating over the prospect of knocking off the legendary 70-year-old senator and former governor this fall. In response, Manchin is sidling up to the president — his policies, his nominees, at times even Trump himself — as the independent-minded Democrat prepares for the toughest race of his career against GOP state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

The president recently mocked Manchin in front of the Senate GOP caucus as trying to hug him all the time — only a slight exaggeration, by Manchin’s telling.

“We just kind of do the man-bump type thing. That’s it. And I think he’s pulling me as much as I’m pulling him,” Manchin said in describing his physical embraces with the president.

Despite Trump’s recent criticisms of him, Manchin maintains a line with Trump. They last talked two weeks ago — after Trump teased him in front of GOP senators — and the Democratic senator is hopeful that Trump will treat him with kid gloves this fall. In Manchin’s estimation, he is often the “only thing” keeping the president from becoming a down-the-line partisan.

At times, Manchin was the only Democrat who clapped during Trump’s State of the Union address. This spring, Manchin killed liberals’ hopes of blocking Gina Haspel for CIA director by getting behind her early. Manchin supported Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, voted for now-embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and even backed the president’s hard-line immigration proposal.

“I’m with him sometimes more than other Republican senators are with him,” Manchin said.

But Manchin has been frustrated that every time he thinks he's got the president in a moderate place on immigration or background checks for guns, Trump goes to the right. And he hasn’t always been there for Trump, most conspicuously on the GOP’s tax reform bill, which attracted no Democratic votes. He also voted against Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, Tom Price to lead the Health and Human Services Department and Obamacare repeal.

And that gives the GOP enough of a lane to attack the centrist Democrat as someone who will never be a reliable ally of the president compared to a Republican.

“Joe Manchin is not fully supportive of the Trump agenda. If Joe Manchin says that he votes with the president 50-60 percent of the time? In my book that’s a failure,” Morrisey said in a telephone interview.

Technically, Manchin is a Democrat. In reality, he’s a man without a party. His discomfort is apparent all around: He needs to appeal to Trump voters in a historically Democratic state that’s turned blood red. He had an infamously chilly relationship with President Barack Obama — he still refuses to talk about who he voted for in 2012 — and now has regrets about supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016.

At this point, Joe Manchin is the guy behind the adage "If you walk down the center of the road, eventually you're going to get run over."  I'm pretty sure Manchin is going to get run over in November, but if he survives, I can't say he'd even stick with Chuck Schumer.

In the eternal battle between "more Democrats" vs "better Democrats", Manchin just might be neither.

Meanwhile, things are looking a bit better for Dems nationally as June polling starts coming in.

So far, however, the president's party has been unable to effectively link positive news to its effort to preserve control of Congress. Democrats hold a 10 percentage point edge over Republicans, 50 percent to 40 percent, when voters are asked which party they want to win midterm elections in November. 

More than that, Democrats hold a significant advantage in voter enthusiasm. Fully 63 percent of Democrats express the highest levels of interests in the fall election, compared to 47 percent of Republicans. 

"Democrats' enthusiasm matches Republicans' in 2014 and 2010," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with his Democratic counterpart Peter Hart. In 2010, Republicans captured control of the House; in 2014, they took over the Senate. 

Democrats have built that edge on their leads among independents (7 percentage points), voters under 35 (20 points), white college graduates (24 points), Latinos (24 points), and African-Americans (81 points). Republicans retain a narrow edge among whites (3 points) and a large one among white men who have not graduated from college (37 points).

It's worth noting that if the Republican edge among white voters overall is down to just 3 points, they are in serious trouble, but again, the key is going to be white college graduates.  Clinton won them, but not by enough.  a 24-point margin however is definitely a problem for the GOP.

We'll see.