Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Miami Beach cops stop what looks like an attempted criminal arson terrorism event here in a age of the American neo-Nazi.

A resident at a Miami Beach condo was angry after learning he was about to be evicted so he planned to burn down the building and had one group, in particular, targeted, police say. 

Along with gasoline and some of the materials he planned to use to fan the flames, detectives found artifacts with swastikas and books of Nazi ideology inside his apartment. 

Miami Beach police said their quick action responding to a tip stopped a condo complex on Collins Avenue from going up in flames Thursday afternoon. 

“We are confident the work of our detectives prevented an imminent crisis at 5601 Collins Ave.,” police said Friday morning after the arrest of Walter Edward Stolper on a charge of attempted arson in the first degree. 

Police say Stolper, 72, was angry over being served eviction papers and had expressed anger and aggression toward other residents at the condominium on several occasions.
On Thursday, police say Stolper told witness Luis Diaz that he was “going to burn down the building with all the f------ Jews,” according to the arrest report. 

According to the affidavit, Diaz said Stolper told him he was going to fill plastic containers with gasoline, pour the fuel down the building’s main line, and ignite the gas. Stolper told Diaz that he purchased two electrical fans “to fan the flames and cause maximum amount of damage.” 

Diaz also told police Stolper bought padlocks and painted them red and told him he had intended to place the locks on the condo’s fire hoses to prevent the fire department from putting out the fire. 

A resident at the Collins condo, Viannette Justino, told police Stolper had recently been served with eviction papers, but it is not clear why the association wanted him removed.
When Miami Beach officers Raymond Diaz (no relation), Sergio Campos and Fulgencio Medina arrived at the condo at about 5:45 p.m. they saw Stolper in the parking garage moving two plastic containers using a shopping cart. According to the affidavit, police smelled gasoline coming from the shopping cart and Stolper’s car. 

Justino told police that several residents “could smell a strong odor of gasoline in the hallways and elevators.” 

Police found eight plastic containers filled with gasoline in the garbage chute dumpster that had been tossed down the chute. Gasoline had also been poured down the chute from the 15th floor, police said. 

Officers said the gas-filled containers in the dumpster matched the gas-filled containers Stolper had with him in the garage. 

Detectives interviewed Stolper inside his apartment and he gave consent to search the unit, police said. There, police found the two black electrical fans, along with the swastikas and Nazi books. 

“I bought the gas to make a small barbecue,” Stolper told detectives, the arrest report said.

He was just having a cookout for the Jewish community, guys.  As Trump says, these are very fine people.

Trump Cards, Con't

Trumpian "foreign policy" means "everyone's a rival and nobody is to be trusted, and only one nation can win in Donald Trump's book.

Coming off a contentious NATO summit and a trip to the U.K. in which he seemed to undercut the government of America's closest ally, President Trump took aim at another Western institution just days before his high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In an interview with "CBS Evening News" anchor Jeff Glor in Scotland on Saturday, President Trump named the European Union -- comprising some of America's oldest allies -- when asked to identify his "biggest foe globally right now." 

"Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe. Russia is foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe. But that doesn't mean they are bad. It doesn't mean anything. It means that they are competitive," Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Turnberry, Scotland.

"I respect the leaders of those countries. But, in a trade sense, they've really taken advantage of us and many of those countries are in NATO and they weren't paying their bills," he added. 

On Sunday, British Prime Minister Theresa May told the BBC that Mr. Trump had encouraged her to "sue the EU" rather than negotiate over the U.K.'s departure from the bloc. May's conservative government is deeply split over her handling of Brexit, and her hold on power was further weakened by Mr. Trump's comments to a British tabloid that her approach had likely "killed" any chance of a new trade deal with the U.S. once Brexit is complete. (Mr. Trump tried to walk back his criticism in a joint press conference on Friday.) 

At the summit of NATO allies in Brussels last week, Mr. Trump took a hard line toward member nations for failing to meet targeted defense spending goals. He claimed his tough stance had paid off in getting allies to spend more on defense, telling reporters on Thursday that members had "upped their commitments and I am very happy." 

The president kicked off the NATO summit by blasting Germany as "totally controlled" and "captive by Russia" over a natural gas pipeline project, known as the Nord Stream 2. The U.S. fears the deal could give Moscow greater leverage over Western Europe. In Saturday's interview, the president reiterated the criticisms he made in Brussels. 

"Germany made a pipeline deal with Russia. Where they're going to be paying Russia billions and billions of dollars a year for energy, and I say that's not good, that's not fair. You're supposed to be fighting for someone and then that someone gives billions of dollars to the one you're, you know, guarding against. I think it's ridiculous, so I let that be known also this time," Mr. Trump told Glor. "I'll tell you what, there's a lot of anger at the fact that Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars. There's a lot of anger. I also think it's a very bad thing for Germany. Because it's like, what, are they waving a white flag?" 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, told reporters after the president's comments in Brussels that she had "experienced myself how a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union" and said her country today made "independent policies" and "independent decisions. 

In the CBS News interview, Mr. Trump also continued to criticize the special counsel's Russia investigation, saying it is having an impact on America's standing in the world. "I think we're greatly hampered by this whole witch hunt that's going on in the United States," the president said. "I think it hurts our relationship with Russia. I actually think it hurts our relationship with a lot of countries. I think it's a disgrace what's going on." 

Mr. Trump heads to Helsinki on Sunday ahead of his meeting with Putin on Monday. He told Glor he has "low expectations" for the summit. "Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out," he said.

Anger, projection, ignorance, mistrust, and blame-shifting.  All classic Trump personal traits, now they are America's traits in the arena of diplomacy and foreign policy.   The fact that this summit is still even happening at this point is proof enough of how much of a disaster this is going to be.

Keep in mind Trump is fully compromised by Putin.  The damage to the country will continue until Trump is removed from office, and will probably continue for decades after.

But we have to be rid of him first, and there's so much that Putin can do to us with the clear advantages he has.  You'll never convince me that he doesn't have the congressional GOP in his pocket either, House GOP members Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes, Darrell Issa and Dana Rohrabacher especially.  He probably has plenty on McConnell in the Senate too, but at this point, McConnell's gotten just about everything he's wanted to accomplish done, so it matters little to him.

It was Barack Obama who wanted to issue a joint statement condemning Russian election meddling with Republicans, but Mitch McConnell refused to cooperate. It was the Obama administration that secured documents relating to the Russia investigation so that they couldn’t be destroyed by Trump and the Republicans. It was Obama who warned for years that America’s election system and infrastructure needed to be upgraded and repaired. (A warning that was ignored by Republican state and local election officials.)

McConnell went even further. When Congress wanted to act, the Senate Majority Leader expressed doubt about the intelligence that Russia was attacking the United States and stopped Congress from taking action against Russia. 

The Republican Party prevented President Obama and the Democrats from doing anything to stop the Russian attack. In hindsight, we now know that this is because Republicans were also benefiting from the Russian activities. 

Trump knows why Obama didn’t do anything to stop his treason. Mitch McConnell is the reason why Russia was able to attack our country. McConnell was also a big part of why Trump was able to win the election. 

It'll take arguably the rest of my lifetime to fix this mess.  If ever.  But let's stop pretending Trump's perfidy wasn't aided and abetted by Republican leaders who knew damn well what Russia was up to and did everything they could to cover for Trump so that he would deliver what they wanted from him, just as much as Putin wanted Trump to deliver what he wanted from him.

They knew.  They deserve the same prison cell Trump does.

Sunday Long Read: Saving The Internet From Itself

The man who created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has lived long enough to see his creation responsible for the rise of the dark era of the nexus of tech, politics, misinformation and racism that is America today.  Now he's trying to do something to fix it.

For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades earlier, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.

At 63, Berners-Lee has thus far had a career more or less divided into two phases. In the first, he attended Oxford; worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN); and then, in 1989, came up with the idea that eventually became the Web. Initially, Berners-Lee’s innovation was intended to help scientists share data across a then obscure platform called the Internet, a version of which the U.S. government had been using since the 1960s. But owing to his decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all—his brainchild quickly took on a life of its own. Berners-Lee’s life changed irrevocably, too. He would be named one of the 20th century’s most important figures by Time, receive the Turing Award (named after the famed code breaker) for achievements in the computer sciences, and be honored at the Olympics. He has been knighted by the Queen. “He is the Martin Luther King of our new digital world,” says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. (Berners-Lee is a former member of the foundation’s board of trustees.)

Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it. While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, as he recalled his reaction to the Web’s recent abuses, Berners-Lee quieted; he was virtually sorrowful. “Actually, physically—my mind and body were in a different state.” Then he went on to recount, at a staccato pace, and in elliptical passages, the pain in watching his creation so distorted.

This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in 2009 to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. Sometime this November, he estimates, half the world’s population—close to 4 billion people—will be connected online, sharing everything from résumés to political views to DNA information. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

His invention was weaponized and used against hundreds of millions of people.  It will be used against billions more in the future unless it can be contained.  But there's no real movement to do so.  The 2016 US elections proved beyond a doubt what the power of the web can do.  Nobody is going to give up that power voluntarily unless it is taken from them by people who demand they relinquish it.

Suddenly Not So Feinstein

California Dem Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been in office for 24 years now and is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  She’s gotten a lot of crap for civil liberties issues from the hard left in her home state, but she’s been able to weather the storm for some time now.  Until tonight, that is, as the California Democratic Party just officially endorsed her primary opponent.

The California Democratic Party on Saturday endorsed U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s challenger, highlighting the moderate lawmaker’s political disconnect with liberal activists in her home state.

The nod provides Kevin de León with a boost of momentum for his long-shot bid to unseat the 26-year-incumbent. After finishing second and 32 points behind Feinstein in the June primary, de León spent months calling more than 300 members of the party’s executive board to earn their support.

His work paid off Saturday when 65 percent of the voting members endorsed him over Feinstein at a gathering in Oakland. Feinstein had asked board members not to endorse either candidate. 

“We want the party to be focused on the competitive congressional races,” said Bill Carrick, Feinstein’s longtime political advisor. “We don’t want them having to figure out whether they are going to do a slate mailer with the guy who got 12 percent.” 

Feinstein’s call for “party unity” was echoed by several others within the party, including a half-dozen Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives that the veteran senator held a fundraiser for this week. Feinstein’s team sent out a campaign email Saturday afternoon touting her endorsements from Democratic heavyweights Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jerry Brown, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi.

Anita Narayana, a board member from Aliso Viejo, did not endorse either candidate.

She pointed to Feinstein’s overwhelming victory in June and said she’s cautious of the party falling out of step with voters. “I’m really concerned about the integrity of the party,” Narayana, 32, said. “When we have had races where Democratic endorsed candidates don’t win, that’s really bad. I want the endorsement to mean something.”

This is a spectacular self-own right now, considering what’s going on in the Senate Intelligence Committee and given the upcoming Kavanaugh Supreme Court fight.  Feinstein already won the Dem nomination in the primary last month.

But a message had to be sent, and that message is “The most populous state in the nation and the largest state Democratic Party in the nation needs to get its act together, because the petulant toddlers are apparently in charge of both major parties in the Golden State.”

Nice going guys, this is the 100% absolute perfect time to refight a lost primary battle from a month ago.  Good job.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

I think it's now becoming apparent just how completely compromised by the Russians that Donald Trump and the GOP are at this point.  Yes, it's true that at this point, no Americans have been indicted yet as far as the Clinton/DNC/DCCC hacks go, and that no evidence or indictments based on Trump campaign collusion with the Russians involved in these hacks has been released.  

The operative word here of course is "yet".  That part is coming.  Whether or not the Trump counterattack against Rosenstein and Mueller will happen before we find that information out, I don't know.  I do know that the survival of the republic may depend on which one happens first. The Daily Beast's David Rothkopf:

This is an extraordinary moment. It is without equal not only in American history but in modern history. A hostile foreign power intervened in our election to help elect a man president who has since actively served their interests and has defended them at every turn.

Trump may deny collusion. But given that this the attack continues, denying it is collusion, distracting from it is collusion, obstructing the investigation of it is collusion — because all these things enable it to go on.

That the president is abetted in his aid for the Russians — again, in the midst of this ongoing attack — by the leadership of the Republican Party makes the situation all the more extraordinary and dangerous. As they seek to undermine the investigation, they serve Russia as directly as if they were officers of the GRU. Some now reportedly seek to impeach Rosenstein on trumped up charges. To attack one of the leaders of our national defense as we are being attacked and to do so to benefit our foreign adversary is textbook treason.

That is strong language. But consider this: If we updated our definitions of war to include cyberwar, then aiding a foreign power engaged in such a war against us would certainly meet the Constitutional definition: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

When only semantics protect our president and our ruling party from the harsh sentences treason demands, we need to recognize the severity of the situation. But more importantly, we need to recognize one of the most important implications of yesterday:

that while we who watch or chat on cable news have lost the plot here, while GOP makes it about personal attacks on FBI officers, while the President makes it about him, while many of us make it about partisan politics, Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein have kept their eye on the ball.

They recognize as does Coats and as do the leaders of our intelligence community and as does every law enforcement and national security expert with whom I have spoken that this is, above all and most urgently, is a national security crisis for the United States.

Again, the painstaking details in the indictments prove that Mueller has the goods.  This is not a fishing expedition.  This is not a witch hunt.  This is a crisis, and there is no other objective conclusion to make at this point based on Trump's own actions other than that the leader of the free world is fully compromised by a hostile foreign power, and that foreign power is managing him much like an employee would be managed. Marcy Wheeler:

It is my opinion that Russia manages Trump with both carrots — in the form of election year assistance and promises of graft — and sticks — in this case, in the form of grave damage to US security and to innocent people around the world.

And Trump is poised to head into a meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday — showing no embarrassment about the proof laid out yesterday that without Putin, Trump wouldn’t have won the election — to discuss (among other things) a deal on Syria.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, says the lights are blinking red like they were in advance of 9/11.

Rather than doing the things to prepare for an attack, Trump has virtually stood down, firing his very competent cyber czar and providing no order to take more assertive steps to prepare for an attack. 

Trump is compromised.  The GOP is compromised.  As such, America is compromised.  We are wide open for a massive attack against our interests.  The timing of the release of this info, happening the Friday before a Monday Trump meeting with the man behind the plan to compromise our country, is not an accident.  It is absolutely a warning from our law enforcement and intelligence community.  The Lawfare team reminds us that the DNC/Clinton/DCCC hacks were the reason James Comey was fired:

This is the investigation Comey confirmed on March 20, 2017, when he told Congress, “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.”

This was also the investigation that multiple congressional committees have spent more than a year seeking to discredit—most recently Thursday, when two House panels hauled the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Department, Peter Strzok, a career FBI agent who worked on the Russia probe, up to Capitol Hill for 10 hours of public, televised, abusive conspiracy theorizing. When the president of the United States derides the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt,” and when congressional Republicans scream at FBI agents, this is the investigation they are trying to harass out of existence.

It is, therefore, fitting that this indictment comes less than one day after the astonishing display House Republicans put on in the Strzok hearing. If Mueller had been trying to remind the public of what the investigation is really about and what the stakes are in it, if he had been trying to make a public statement in response to the Strzok hearing, he could not have timed this action better.

But, to be clear, Mueller was not trying to make a press statement. We know that not merely because that’s not the way Mueller operates but also because Rosenstein said specifically at his press conference that he had briefed the president on the matter before Trump left town—days before the Strzok hearing yet also mere days before Trump has a scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The timing of the indictment given the upcoming Helsinki summit is a powerful show of strength by federal law enforcement. Let’s presume that Mueller did not time this indictment to precede the summit by way of embarrassing Trump on the international stage. It is enough to note that he also did not hold off on the indictment for a few days by way of sparing Trump embarrassment—and that Rosenstein did not force him to. Indeed, Rosenstein said at his press conference that it is “important for the president to know what information was uncovered because he has to make very important decisions for the country” and therefore “he needs to know what evidence there is of foreign election interference.” But of course Rosenstein and Mueller did not just let Trump know. They also let the world know, which has the effect—intended or not—of boxing in the president as he meets with an adversary national leader.

Put less delicately: Rosenstein has informed the president, and the world, before Trump talks to Putin one-on-one that his own Justice Department is prepared to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, in public, using admissible evidence, that the president of the Russian Federation has been lying to Trump about Russian non-involvement in the 2016 election hacking.

The White House's response to this is to blame Obama and to insist that the meeting with Putin will go forward anyway. Let that sink in.

Again, Robert Mueller is warning the world that he is ready to make a criminal conspiracy case against a dozen Russian GRU agents.  The only real question is who else will be named as co-conspirators in the future.

In other words, which Americans helped the Russians do this to us.

The Disaster In Puerto Rico Continues

The government's own report on FEMA's obscenely bad response in Puerto Rico is brutal, and it proves just how inept the Trump regime handled the aftermath of Hurricane Maria ten months ago.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency experienced personnel shortages, was caught with a critical lack of aid supplies, had trouble coordinating logistics and found itself struggling to do the work of the territorial government while responding to Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico last September, according to an official after-action report released late Thursday.

Despite repeated Trump administration efforts to play down federal failures in responding to a humanitarian crisis on the island territory, the new report is a public acknowledgment of systemic failures during what was one of the most destructive hurricane seasons — and costliest disaster responses — in the nation’s history.

[Read the FEMA after-action report]

It shows that responses to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida taxed the agency and left it understaffed and out of position for the catastrophe that unfolded in Puerto Rico, where millions of U.S. citizens suffered through widespread communication blackouts, massive infrastructure failures and lengthy power outages.

FEMA officials said Thursday that the responses to back-to-back mainland hurricanes sapped federal disaster resources and left an extraordinarily short window to prepare and build up for Maria. Once Maria hit, they said, they had difficulties with logistics and had a hard time coordinating with local officials in Puerto Rico, who were themselves victims of the storm.

The sobering report runs counter to the White House narrative that President Trump presented at the time, when he praised FEMA’s performance and characterized the devastation on the island as not being “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

The three major hurricanes that made landfall on U.S. soil — along with wildfires and other natural disasters — ravaged the country and its territories in 2017, affecting nearly 50 million Americans and U.S. nationals spread across the South, West and Caribbean. The disasters cost nearly $300 billion, according to FEMA estimates. 

It was a critical failure across the board, one that cost thousands of lives.  It should have ended the Trump regime as US citizens were killed by government malpractice, but then again, America itself isn't exactly working for the people these days, and especially not for the people of Puerto Rico. 

Someone's head has to roll for this, and increasingly it looks like the political fallout will land on the heads of politicians in San Juan and not Washington as suddenly the DoJ is very interested in the island's government finances.

A mayor and two former government officials in Puerto Rico face public corruption charges in separate cases that involve a total of $8 million in federal and local funds, authorities said Thursday. The suspects are the mayor of the southwest town of Sabana Grande and the former directors of finance for the northern town of Toa Baja, which has struggled to pay its employees amid an 11-year recession.

U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez told reporters that the former officials from Toa Baja are accused of using nearly $5 million worth of federal funds to pay the town's public employees and municipal contractors.

"Not only is that illegal, it's immoral," she said.

Officials said former finance director Victor Cruz Quintero deposited some $2.5 million worth of funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into the town's general and payroll accounts in October 2014.

He also is accused of making similar deposits and transfers of more than $1.75 million in funds from HUD and the Department of Health and Human Services from September 2014 to February 2016.

Toa Baja's former interim finance director, Angel Roberto Santos Garcia, is accused of making similar transactions worth $650,000 using funds from those two federal agencies.

It was not immediately clear if Cruz and Santos had attorneys.

Rodriguez said the investigation into alleged corruption in Toa Baja is ongoing because officials believe other people are involved.

Puerto Rico's finances were a mess long before Hurricanes Maria and Trump killed thousands, and there will have to be a reckoning for it all, but let's not forget that this level of sheer dereliction of duty was monstrous, and wouldn't be tolerated in any US state or by its voters.  In a territory that has no real political representation however, well...

We see how that went.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I said on Thursday, the Trump regime now has the pieces in place to make their move on the Mueller investigation with the confirmation of Brian Benczkowski to the DoJ as a possible replacement for current Deupty AG and Mueller boss Rod Rosenstein:

Which mean should Rosenstein be fired, Robert Mueller's boss would almost certainly become Benczkowski, a person with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, somebody already tainted, if not compromised by Russian money laundering, and somebody who worked for Donald Trump's campaign directly. And no, he hasn't said that he would recuse himself should that become the case.

Yesterday's major slew of Russian indictments by Mueller included a number of huge developments.

This is pretty huge, as we now have Mueller flat out saying that a dozen GRU agents raided the Clinton campaign and stole information. The Russians conducted an operation to attack our elections, which is what I told you guys 23 months ago. At the very least Trump should cancel that meeting with Putin and start expelling Russian diplomats like baseballs in a pitching machine. 

We're finally getting to the point where Trump won't be able to let the Mueller probe continue without permanent damage to himself.

Both these events happened within the last several days.  Put them together, especially with the knowledge that Rosenstein briefed Trump on the Friday Russian indictments before Trump left for Europe and you arrive at one conclusion:

The move by the GOP to shut down the Mueller probe has immediately shifted into a new, much more urgent phase.

House conservatives are preparing a new push to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to three conservative Capitol Hill sources — putting the finishing touches on an impeachment filing even as Rosenstein announced the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the 2016 election. 

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, in fact, had the impeachment document on the floor of the House at the very moment that Rosenstein spoke to reporters and TV cameras Friday. 

Conservative GOP lawmakers have been plotting to remove Rosenstein for weeks, accusing him of slow-walking their probe of FBI agents they’ve accused of bias against President Donald Trump. 

Democrats contend Republicans’ fixation on Rosenstein is really an effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller, who reports to Rosenstein and has been making inroads in his investigation of the Russian election interference plot. Mueller’s probe has entangled members of Trump’s inner circle and Trump has increasingly assailed it as a politically motivated “witch hunt” as it’s presented greater danger to him and his allies. 

Conservative sources say they could file the impeachment document as soon as Monday, as Meadows and Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) look to build Republican support in the House. One source cautioned, however, that the timing was still fluid.

I'm not sure how far this will go, it seems almost certain that this will be political cover for Trump to fire Rosenstein and replace him with the newly-installed Benzckowski.  How quickly this will happen, I don't know, but if House Republicans go through with this, expect Trump to make his move as it will be his best chance.

Mueller’s indictments open the door to future collusion and conspiracy charges.  Having read through the indictments there are painstakingly blatant statements that all but guarantee future indictments are coming.  It’s the prosecutorial equivalent of announcing checkmate in eight moves, or an action movie hero announcing his intent to kick the bad guy’s ass is a promise, not a threat.

House Republicans are scared, scared to the point of screamingly obvious interference by the attempted impeachment of Rosenstein being the more preferable option both politically and legally right now then letting the Mueller probe continue.  That should tell you everything that we need to know about possible guilt.

I want to be wrong here, I want this to be a stupid gamble by panicked House Republicans to give away the game and get people to talk Trump down, but Trump isn't in town right now to be talked down, now and is he?  He'll be meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland on Monday.

If Trump follows through as I believe he will, from that point, all bets are off.

Sounding The Torn-NATO Warning

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan reminds us as Donald Trump heads to Russia to check in with Vladimir Putin next week that the European Union remains in real trouble, and the NATO alliance is on the brink of fracture and has been for some time.

The transatlantic community was in trouble even before Trump took office. The peaceful, democratic Europe we had come to take for granted in recent decades has been rocked to the core by populist nationalist movements responding to the massive flow of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. For the first time since World War II , a right-wing party holds a substantial share of seats in the German Bundestag. Authoritarianism has replaced democracy, or threatens to, in such major European states as Hungary and Poland, and democratic practices and liberal values are under attack in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. France remains one election away from a right-wing nationalist leadership, and Italy has already taken a big step in that direction. Meanwhile, Britain, which played such a key role in Europe during and after the Cold War, has taken itself out of the picture and has become, globally, a pale shadow of its former self. The possibility that Europe could return to its dark past is greater today than at any time during the Cold War. 

Some of that has to do with the changing attitude of the United States in recent years. It’s little secret that President Barack Obama had no great interest in Europe. Obama, like Trump, spoke of allied “free riders,” and his “pivot” to Asia was widely regarded by Europeans as a pivot away from them. Obama rattled Eastern Europe in his early years by canceling planned missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic as an inducement to Vladimir Putin to embrace a “reset” of relations. In his later years he rattled Western Europe when he did not enforce his famous “red lines” in Syria. Both actions raised doubts about American reliability, and the Obama administration’s refusal to take action in Syria to stem the flow of refugees contributed heavily to the present strain.

Obama was only doing what he thought the American people wanted. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the 2008 financial crisis, left Americans disenchanted with global involvement and receptive to arguments that the alliances and institutions they supported for all those years no longer served their interests. The Obama administration tried to pare back the American role without abandoning the liberal world order, hoping it was more self-sustaining than it turned out to be. But the path was open to a politician willing to exploit Americans’ disenchantment, which is precisely what Trump did in 2016. 

NATO has never been a self-operating machine that simply chugs ahead so long as it is left alone. Like the liberal world order of which it is the core, it requires constant tending, above all by the United States. And because it is a voluntary alliance of democratic peoples, it survives on a foundation of public support. That foundation has been cracking in recent years. This week was an opportunity to shore it up. Instead, Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

NATO's next big test against Russian military aggression, most likely in Estonia and its Baltic NATO member neighbors, may not be its last, but it will certainly be a far different outcome than Russia's invasion and annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine.

Of course the worst-case scenario is that the outcome isn't any different from Crimea: that the NATO Batlic states get new management and both the EU and the US realize that there's no political appetite to actually do anything about it, much like Crimea.

Of course that would be the end of NATO as we know it.

Maybe that's the goal.  It's certainly Putin's goal, at least.  The question these days is "Is it also Trump's goal?"

Evidence is pretty shaky that those aren't aligned.  We'll know more next week, I suspect.

Last Call For The Trump Tax Scam, Con't

The GOP tax cut bill was supposed to put more money in American workers' paychecks and lead to a bright economic future.  Of course, anyone with a half-a-brain would have told you that was complete nonsense and that corporations already making record profits would use that windfall to make themselves richer rather than give a dime to the workers who made it possible, and now the numbers are in that prove not only that corporate America looted all that money at taxpayer expense, but that worker wages in 2018 have actually gone down for most Americans.

Six months after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law, there's still little evidence that the average job holder is feeling the benefit.

Worker pay in the second quarter dropped nearly one percent below its first-quarter level, according to the PayScale Index, one measure of worker pay. When accounting for inflation, the drop is even steeper. Year-over-year, rising prices have eaten up still-modest pay gains for many workers, with the result that real wages fell 1.4 percent from the prior year, according to PayScale. The drop was broad, with 80 percent of industries and two-thirds of metro areas affected.

"Now, economic confidence has been good, we're in a strong economy, GDP is growing, but the question has been, where's the paycheck?" said Katie Bardaro, vice president of data analytics at PayScale.

The answer is, largely, in the companies' coffers. Businesses are spending nearly $700 billion on repurchasing their own stock so far this year, according to research from TrimTabs. Corporations set a record in Q2, announcing $433 billion worth of buybacks — nearly doubling the previous record, which was set in Q1.

In just the first six months of the year, companies took the generous gift that Republican lawmakers gave them at our expense and have spent more than $700 billion on stock buybacks and workers didn't get a penny.  In fact, thanks to higher prices at the pump and the grocery store -- and now thanks to much higher prices coming due to Trump's trade wars with China, the EU, Mexico and Canada -- things are going to get a lot worse for the average American in the second half of the year.

Prices are going to go up, and wages are going down.  But that's what our corporate masters wanted from the GOP, and that's exactly what they got: record profits and by the end of the year it'll be well over a trillion bucks taken out of taxpayer pockets to make corporations even richer.

Of course, that was the whole point of the bill...

It's Mueller Time, Con't

As Donald Trump continues his European trip and will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday in Finland, Special Counsel Robert Mueller just handed him a Siberian-sized diplomatic headache with almost exquisite timing.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses related to the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

The 12, who are members of the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency, are accused of stealing usernames and passwords of volunteers in Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including its chairman John Podesta. They also hacked into the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in an operation starting around March 2016.

The charges include conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S., aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to launder money. They are accused of releasing the stolen emails on the web.

The announcement came only three days before President Donald Trump is to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. 

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters Friday that “I briefed President Trump about these allegations earlier this week. The president is fully aware of the department’s actions.”

Now I know that federal prosecutors are, as a rule, rat bastards.  But it's damn funny when they are actually rat bastards towards somebody who deserves to be screwed over by rat bastards.

Rosenstein said two separate Russian units of the GRU intelligence agency stole emails and information from Democrats and then disseminated it via online personas, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. He also said there’s no allegation in the indictment that any American was involved in the operation. 

“The object of the conspiracy was to hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election," the indictment said. 

The Russians masked their activities by using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to buy servers, register Internet domains and make other payments in the hacking operation, according to the indictment. It said the Russians also funded the operation in part by “mining” Bitcoin. 

With the charges, Mueller’s prosecutors have marked out another Internet pathway they say Russia used to influence the U.S. election. On Feb. 16, his prosecutors charged 13 Russians and three Russian entities they said were part of a broader effort to sow discord among U.S. voters through social media -- which they used to impersonate Americans, coordinate with unwitting U.S. activists and even plan rallies.

Trump told reporters in London Friday that he will “absolutely firmly” ask Putin about the finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that he authorized the campaign of interference. But he added, “I don’t think you’ll have any ‘Gee, I did it, I did it, you got me” confession.

Spoilers: The Russians did it, and Putin ordered it, and both Trump and Putin know it.  They hacked into the DNC and the Clinton campaign with the absolute intent to interfere in the 2016 election.  And Donald Trump and the GOP have regularly stated that they do not want this investigated because they directly benefited from this.

Mueller knows all that too.  This is pretty huge, as we now have Mueller flat out saying that a dozen GRU agents raided the Clinton campaign and stole information.  The Russians conducted an operation to attack our elections, which is what I told you guys 23 months ago.  At the very least Trump should cancel that meeting with Putin and start expelling Russian diplomats like baseballs in a pitching machine.

We're finally getting to the point where Trump won't be able to let the Mueller probe continue without permanent damage to himself.  Ryan Reilly at HuffPo breaks it down as the witch hunt sure has found a lot of actual practicing spellcasters, guys.

Here are the most crucial revelations the 29-page grand jury indictment brings to light.

• Chiefly, the indictment names names. The defendants were part of the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU). GRU units 26165 and 74455, the indictment says, “conducted large-scale cyber operations to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
• The defendants, according to the indictment, were specifically involved in the effort to hack Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The Russians also “monitored the computers of dozens of [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and DNC employees.”
• The Russians searched DCCC computers for terms like “hillary,” “cruz,” and “trump” and copied a folder titled “Benghazi Investigations.”
• “DCLeaks” ― a website launched in June 2016 to post hacked emails mostly targeting Democrats ― claimed to be run by “American hacktivists.” It wasn’t. The same computer that ran the DCLeaks Twitter account also managed a Twitter account called @BaltimoreIsWhr that posted images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.
• Using the name “Guccifer 2.0,” the Russians told Trump associate Roger Stone ― identified in the indictment as “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” ― that it would be their “great pleasure” to help.

Oh and this bit:

• As the journalist Marcy Wheeler points out, the indictment also indicates that Russia had access to the Clinton team’s analytics, which could offer the Russians a guide to targeting voters as part of their effort to hurt Clinton’s campaign.

The Russians had Hillary's campaign battle plan.  They knew exactly what her campaign team was telling her.  You wanna bet they offered that info to Trump's guys?   Like say, this would be helpful info for formulating an attack on her in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, right?

This one is particularly fun:

• WikiLeaks ― named as “Organization 1” in the indictment ― worked with the Russians to time the release of hacked emails to have the greatest impact on the election. WikiLeaks thought Clinton had only a 25 percent chance of losing to Trump, but evidently thought “conflict between [Vermont Sen.] bernie [Sanders] and hillary” could help.

I told you WikiLeaks was a Russian front this two years ago as well.

But here's the money shot:

• Last but not least, on Aug. 15, 2016, a “candidate for the U.S. Congress” requested stolen documents from the Russians posing as Guccifer 2.0. They obliged, and “sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” The congressional candidate in question hasn’t been identified.

You can absolutely bet that candidate was a Republican, and that the candidate in question is sweating bullets the size of tank rounds about right now.  I fully expect that candidate won that election in 2016, and is most likely in Congress today.  Now, it's possible that this particular member of Congress is one of the many Republicans who announced their retirement this year, but whoever that person is?

They are done.  That's collusion, guys. And I'm betting this person wasn't alone, either.  I bet there's a lot more people who requested info from the Guccifer 2.0 Russians, including stolen DNC emails. Suddenly that explains why so many Republicans are so hellbent on not investigating this Russian operation.

Stay tuned.  Mueller just opened this biggest can of worms so far in this investigation.

More is on the way.

How Much SUV Could A Woodchuck Chuck...

...if a woodchuck could chuck Paul Ryan's SUV?

Winter in Wisconsin is tough.

So tough, in fact, that living creatures might go searching for shelter in unlikely places.

House Speaker Paul Ryan explained Thursday that a family of woodchucks moved into his Chevy Suburban recently, eating the wiring, and rendering the car useless.

"My car was eaten by animals," Ryan said, to laughs from an audience at an event hosted by the Economic Club of Washington D.C. "It's just dead."

The car was parked at his mother's house in his hometown in Wisconsin, and when she came back from her annual trip to Florida for the winter, it wouldn't start. As a top congressional leader Ryan has a security detail and hasn't been allowed to drive in three years.

"So I towed it into the dealer, they put it up, and they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban," Ryan said.

Ryan told the story after giving a speech about how he feels Republican policies, like last year's tax overhaul, have helped the economy. He disagreed, however, with President Trump's decisions to impose tariffs on a number of nations, most recently on China.

"The rule book for the global economy of the future is being written right now," Ryan said. "The question is whether the United States will be holding the pen."

Much like Paul Ryan's SUV, the United States has an vicious orange rodent underbody problem.  Besides, the only pens these clowns deserve to get are the federal kind with the decidedly substandard housing options.  For right now, he's too busy running interference for Trump and the rest of the GOP's vast stable of serial sexual abusers.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday indicated he opposed a congressional ethics probe into fellow Republican Rep. Jim Jordan after numerous former Ohio State University wrestlers alleged the lawmaker ignored reports of sexual misconduct when he was an assistant coach at the school in the 1980s and 1990s.

The House Ethics Committee, Ryan said, "investigates things that members do while they’re here, not things that happened a couple of decades ago when they weren’t in Congress."

Ryan said he called Jordan over the weekend to discuss the allegations, as well as to "check in on" the Ohio Republican following news that his nephew had been killed in a car accident.

"I have always known Jim Jordan to be a man of honesty and a man of integrity," Ryan said during a weekly press conference alongside other GOP House leaders.

The retiring speaker's remarks came after President Barack Obama's ethics czar, Norman Eisen, and another government watchdog filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics calling for a "preliminary inquiry" into whether Jordan's response to the allegations.

"If Rep. Jordan’s recent statements — that he had no knowledge that student wrestlers under his supervision were being sexually abused — are false, his present conduct in connection with this serious matter would fail to 'reflect creditably on the House'" in violation of House rules, their letter to the OCE says.

But Ryan will certainly land on his feet somewhere in the vast Right-wing Noise Machine come 2019.  There's no way a former House Speaker doesn't cash in on K Street or FOX News, and he'll have plenty of money to buy a new SUV or six.

The rest of his former constituents in Wisconsin, well, not so much.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump tore into UK PM Theresa May during an interview with a London tabloid as he criticized her Brexit policy after a state dinner with her and threatened to end any UK free trade deal.
• Iowa's Department of Public Health says a number of Cyclospora infections have been linked to McDonald's salads in at least two states, the fast-food chain is restocking from other suppliers.
• Thousands are protesting Donald Trump's visit to the UK as a nearly 20-foot tall blimp depicting Trump as an orange cartoon baby flew over the British parliament Friday.
• US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will divest himself of all stock assets within 90 days after the Office of Government Ethics warned him of facing potential criminal violations.
• The Trump regime is heading back to court to stop the AT&T/Time Warner merger as the DoJ will appeal a federal judge's decision to allow the merger to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Last Call For Missing What We Had

A new Pew Research poll finds Americans greatly miss the last guy in the Oval Office, because you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

When asked which president has done the best job in their lifetimes, more Americans name Barack Obama than any other president. More than four-in-ten (44%) say Obama is the best or second best president of their lifetimes, compared with about a third who mention Bill Clinton (33%) or Ronald Reagan (32%).

Not yet halfway through his term, 19% say Donald Trump has done the best or second best job of any president of their lifetimes. That is comparable with the share who viewed Obama as one of the best presidents in 2011 (20%).

The survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 5-12 among 2,002 adults, asks people in an open-ended format which president has done the best job in their lifetimes. The analysis is based on their first and second choices.

About one-in-ten adults (12%) say John F. Kennedy did the best job in office during their lifetimes. But Kennedy is named as the best or second best president by about a quarter of those who were alive during his presidency: 24% of Baby Boomers and 25% of those in the Silent Generation.

People’s views of the best president of their lifetimes are partly tied to their ages. Millennials, who are currently ages 22 to 37, are far more likely than older generations to name Obama as one of the best presidents in their lifetimes: About six-in-ten Millennials (62%) view Obama as one of the top two, with nearly half, 46%, naming him the best president.

Older generations are much more likely than Millennials to name Reagan as one of the best presidents. Reagan was president before most Millennials were born.

Gen Xers (ages 38 to 53) are divided in their assessments: 45% of Gen Xers name Reagan, while nearly as many mention Obama (41%) or Clinton (39%).

As a young Gen Xer, Obama/Clinton is an easy one-two for me, but the sentimentality for Ronald Reagan is something I just don't get at all even though he's the first president I actually remember.  You can draw a straight line from Reagan to Trump today, the GOP has been a bunch of racist, bigoted, corporate dickbags my entire lifetime.

It's good to see that we miss Obama, but the people who think Trump's been the best president in their lifetimes are really hideous.

No Time For A Garbage Pie

Local pizza magnate and racist jackass "Papa" John Schnatter is in trouble again as news broke this week of a racist slur he used on a marketing conference call on racial sensitivity training in May, which should tell you exactly how successful Papa John's racial sensitivity training was.

Papa John's founder and former CEO John Schnatter resigned from the University of Louisville Board of Trustees on Wednesday after he admitted to Forbes that he used the N-word and 'hurtful language' during a training session on race in May.

The resignation was effective immediately, said board chairman J. David Grissom in a statement late Wednesday afternoon.

"After speaking with John, I’m confident that his comments, while inappropriate, do not reflect his personal beliefs or values," Grissom said. "No member of the board of trustees condones racism or insensitive language regardless of the setting. The University of Louisville embraces and celebrates diversity and is a supporter of all its students and stakeholders regardless as to their identity. The board appreciates his two years of service and thanks him for his generous support for so many years.”

The incident began with conference call with Papa John's executives and marketing agency Laundry Service that included a role-playing exercise for Schnatter to prevent public relations messes, Forbes reported in a story initially based on an unnamed source. Schnatter was asked how he would distance himself from racist groups online.

Schnatter responded by downplaying his statement last fall that NFL player protests have hurt his pizza business, according to Forbes.

"Colonel Sanders called blacks n----s," Schnatter said, before claiming the KFC founder never faced public backlash like he has received.

During the same conference call, Schnatter also said other remarks that the marketing agency deemed offensive, Forbes reported. Schnatter said that when he grew up in Indiana, people would drag black people behind trucks until they died, the source told Forbes.

In a statement released to Forbes Wednesday afternoon, Schnatter confirmed the allegations against him.

"News reports attributing the use of inappropriate and hurtful language to me during a media training session regarding race are true," he said. "Regardless of the context, I apologize. Simply stated, racism has no place in our society."

A separate statement by Papa John's, also released to Forbes Wednesday, condemned racism "and any insensitive language, no matter the situation or setting."

What a coincidence, Papa John's pizza has no place in my home, either.  And I used to work there after college, too, so I know how it's made.  Don't eat there, trust me.  Even if the founder wasn't a racist jackass, the pizza's still crap.

Oh and apparently late last night, Schnatter left the company completely after the fallout became, well, the last slice of pizza in his garbage pie life.

Papa John’s International Inc.’s Chairman John Schnatter resigned after coming under fire for making racist comments that battered the shares of the pizza chain he founded.

The independent directors of the company accepted Schnatter’s resignation, the Louisville, Kentucky, company said in a statement late Wednesday. Papa John’s will appoint a new chairman in the coming weeks, the company said.

Just seven months after exiting the CEO role over critical comments about the National Football League’s national-anthem dispute, Schnatter came under pressure following a media report that he used a racial slur and graphic descriptions of violence against minorities on a May conference call with a media agency.

I'm impressed it took this long for him to get fired.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Pay very close attention to this Justice Department confirmation news from Wednesday:

The Senate voted 51-48 on Wednesday to confirm Brian Benczkowski as an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, ending an 18-month delay in which its Criminal Division operated without a permanent leader.

Benczkowski, a Justice Department veteran who held top posts in the George W. Bush administration, had languished for months as critics raised questions about his legal work for a Russian bank and his close ties to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The attorney general praised Benczkowski on Wednesday after his confirmation was final and called attention to the central role he'll play within the department.

"At a time like this — with surging violent crime and an unprecedented drug epidemic — this position is especially important," Sessions said.

Senate Democrats had urged the White House to withdraw the nomination, citing "poor judgment," after Benczkowski acknowledged briefly performing legal work for Alfa Bank, which has ties to Russian government officials, in 2017.

"At a time when we need the Department of Justice's Criminal Division to help uncover, prevent, and deter Russian interference in our democracy, Mr. Benczkowski's choices so far have not inspired confidence that he is the right person to lead that fight," wrote Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Dianne Feinstein of California, two of the longest-serving Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

Senate leaders brought the matter to a head this week, voting 51-48 to end debate on the nominee.

Benczkowski has won support from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who said in a speech earlier this year that the nominee was "highly qualified."

Benczkowski has no prosecutorial experience, but he played a major behind-the-scenes role in managing the daily affairs of the Justice Department late in the Bush administration. He also led the transition team at DOJ for the incoming Trump era.

Now, why is this important?

Because the latest Trump regime DoJ org chart states that the number three official at the Justice Department is the head of the Criminal Division.  Behind his former boss Jeff Sessions, and Rod Rosenstein.

Which mean should Rosenstein be fired, Robert Mueller's boss would almost certainly become Benczkowski, a person with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, somebody already tainted, if not compromised by Russian money laundering, and somebody who worked for Donald Trump's campaign directly. And no, he hasn't said that he would recuse himself should that become the case.

Do we understand the problem now?  Because when Trump tries to fire Rosenstein, he now has the perfect flunky to replace him, ready to go to slow down or even end the Mueller probe.  When the previous number three official at the DoJ, Rachel Brand, announced her resignation in February, I said that her replacement would be expected to swing the axe on Mueller should Rosenstein be fired.  Brand was afraid she'd be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, and that's part of the reason why she resigned.

I said back then that Trump would have time to make a careful selection of somebody already willing to follow his orders on Rosenstein, and even should Trump somehow be talked out of firing Rosenstein, as head of the Criminal Division, Benczkowski could cause serious damage to the investigation through leaks to Trump or by delaying requests from Mueller's office.

The last piece of the puzzle Trump needs to make his move on Rosenstein and Mueller just fell into place.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Adult film star Stormy Daniels has been arrested at a Columbus, Ohio strip club, her lawyer Michael Avenatti believes the charges are in retaliation for Daniel's claims against Donald Trump.
• Details of this week's dramatic rescue of 12 boys from a flooded cave in Thailand are emerging, including news that the boys were sedated and put on stretchers to be evacuated.
• NATO leaders went into a special crisis session today after Donald Trump's blistering attacks on the treaty organization on Wednesday and threatened pullout over defense spending.
• NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is fighting back against US Border Patrol accusations that he crossed the US-Mexico border illegally while visiting a Texas migrant detention facility last month.
• Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he will turn his attention to fixing the water supply of Flint, Michigan, a city that still doesn't have clean water after nearly four years.

Last Call For The Abolition Position

Doug Mataconis has some hard truths for Dems about "Abolish ICE" and the midterms as only a quarter of Americans agree with getting rid of the agency.

Polls like this would seem to reinforce the argument I made late last week when I observed that rallying around the calls to abolish ICE could end up backfiring on Democrats. Yes, there is some support in the poll for this kind proposal among Democrats and one can make the argument that it is useful as a slogan to rally the base in advance of the elections, but even there support for the idea falls far short of being a majority. The more important numbers for Democrats to look at, I would maintain, are those that show majorities of both Republicans and Independents opposing the idea. This gap leaves Democratic candidates in anything other than a deeply blue state or district in danger of being tarred with the argument that their party is supporting ideas such as “Abolish ICE” that, according to Republicans at least, would mean weakening the Federal Government’s ability to enforce immigration laws and sounds as if they are essentially advocating for an end to the enforcement of immigration laws. That’s exactly how Trump and Republicans are framing the debate right now, of course, and if they succeed then Democrats could find that they’ve given Republicans a potent weapon come November.

ICE under Trump is an abominable weapon being used freely against immigrant families, and it's only a matter of time before it's unleashed against Americans.  But right now Trump and the GOP can deflect that by saying "Dems are for illegal immigration, we're against it."

The issue isn't ICE as much as it is the fact that ICE is controlled by Trump.

"Abolish ICE" isn't a position that's going to help Dems politically, even if you can make the case that it's morally right.  The reality is that it's another windmill to tilt at when the problem is Trump.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Trump's trade war has shifted into the scorched earth phase as today he planted a 60-day time bomb that will blow up in the faces of Republicans just in time for the midterm elections to heat up.

President Trump escalated his trade war with China Tuesday, identifying an added $200 billion in Chinese products that he intends to hit with import tariffs.

The move makes good on the president’s threat to respond to China’s retaliation for the initial U.S. tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods, which went into effect on Friday, and would eventually place nearly half of all Chinese imports under tariffs.

Administration officials said the tariff fight is aimed at forcing China to stop stealing American intellectual property and to abandon policies that effectively force U.S. companies to surrender their trade secrets in return for access to the Chinese market.

“These practices are an existential threat to America’s most critical comparative advantage and the future of our economy,” said Robert E. Lighthizer, the president’s chief trade negotiator.

Trump’s latest action will hit consumer products such as televisions, clothing, bedsheets and air conditioners, which were spared from the first import levies on Friday. But the new tariffs will not be imposed until the end of a two-month public comment period.

“This is where a painful situation gets more painful,” said Phil Levy, a former White House economist in the George W. Bush administration.

The current $34 billion in tariffs are going to hurt farmers and automakers especially, but the $200 billion coming August 30 will jack up prices for Chinese imports across the board and will quickly start damaging retailers and consumers everywhere in the US.

Early reaction to the president’s action was unfavorable. “Tonight’s announcement appears reckless and is not a targeted approach,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Beijing has vowed to respond in kind to any U.S. trade action. But China only bought about $135 billion in U.S. goods last year, meaning it will run out of American products to tax before it matches Trump’s latest move.

Chinese officials are expected to retaliate in other ways, hitting U.S. firms in China with unplanned inspections, delays in approving financial transactions and other administrative headaches.

“The Trump administration is gambling that by wielding such a big club, it will force China to back down,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That is almost certainly a serious miscalculation. China is far more likely just to find other ways to hit back in kind.”

The president has repeatedly described his resort to tariffs — which are paid by American importers — as a lever to extract negotiating concessions from U.S. trading partners.

A few rounds of talks with Chinese leaders this year made little progress, however, and no plans for additional meetings have been made public.

If these tariffs go through, the economic damage will be far higher than $200 billion.  Trump figures he can bully the Chinese in the same way he's bullied the EU, Canada, and Mexico, but the difference is the Chinese don't have to worry about the political fallout and they won't back down now. 

China fired back at President Donald Trump’s latest tariff barrage, saying it won’t back down in the trade war that was started unilaterally by the U.S.

China “never yields to threat or blackmail,” Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said in written comments to Bloomberg on Wednesday. “The U.S. side ignored the progress, adopted unilateral and protectionist measures, and started the trade war.”

When Americans start getting laid off by the tens of thousands and the economy goes south within a matter of months, Trump won't be so lucky.

Unfortunately, neither will the American people.

One Day In Louisville Makes A Hard Bevin Humble

Louisville, Bluegrass setting
And the city don't know that the city is getting.
The creme de la creme of the chess club
In a show with everything but Rand Paul!

Time flies doesn't seem a minute
Since Matt Bevin insulted the chess kids in it,
All change, don't you know that when you
Play at this level there's no ordinary venue...

Gov. Matt Bevin said in a promotional video featuring the West Louisville chess club that some people might be surprised by the connection between the club and the neighborhoods it draws children from, unleashing a barrage of criticism on social media.

"I'm going to go in and meet the members of the West Louisville Chess Club," Bevin said in the video. "Not something you necessarily would have thought of when you think of this section of town."

Bevin made his comments in a promotional video published online Tuesday. In the video, he took a tour of Nativity Academy, an independent private school in Phoenix Hill. The club often plays in locations around the city.

Also: Matt Bevin bashes Andy Beshear but won't say he's in governor's race

“Governor Bevin met with the West Louisville Chess Club to showcase an important program that is encouraging sportsmanship and character building among Kentucky’s youth,” Bevin’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Kuhn said in a statement. “It is disappointing that some are trying to shift the focus away from the incredible accomplishments of these talented kids.”

The West Louisville Chess Club "primarily targets" young children who live in the West End of Louisville, according to Lyndon Pryor with the Louisville Urban League.

The Louisville Urban League, located in the Russell neighborhood, is a partial source of funding for the club.

Councilman David James, who represents District 6 in Louisville, was present at the event where Bevin filmed the promo. James said it is a sign of Bevin's deteriorating relationship with the state's African-American community.

"It was just an obvious move by the governor to take photos with the African-American community," James said. "To perpetuate a stereotype of the African-American community like that is unbelievable."

As a black Kentuckian who likes to think that he plays chess fairly well, I have to say that Bevin perpetuating a stereotype of black Kentuckians is completely believable, because 1) he's a Republican and 2) he's a rather racist asshole, but I repeat myself.

Yes, his running mate, Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, is Kentucky's first African-American elected to statewide office.  And she's been as silent on Bevin's cartoonishly bad racism since the day she was sworn in.  Frankly I haven't heard a peep from her on this "deteriorating relationship" in 30 months, and she seems pretty eager to get out from behind Bevin's shadow and get out of here, so why should she start caring now?

Considering Bevin seems to regularly engage in behavior where when he's not checkmating himself with obvious blunders like this, he's flipping the board over like an angry toddler and making sure nobody wins, and I remain convinced there's a significant chance that he may not run for re-election next year.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump opened this year's annual NATO Summit in Brussels by attacking Germany as "captive" to Russian energy companies and demanding immediate EU military spending increases.
• House Democratic deputy leader Steny Hoyer is out of the hospital and recovering from pneumonia after a week in a Maryland hospital, he is expected to return to Washington later this week.
• After 17 days, all 12 boys from a youth soccer team and their coach have been rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand, the boys lost weight but all are in good condition at a hospital.
• The Trump regime has missed a court-imposed deadline to reunite immigrant children taken from their families at the border, with a deadline for all separated children looming on July 26.
• The Defense Department wants software to help government employees handle classified documents better by integrating protections into the Microsoft Office products the DoD already uses.