Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump regime can't stop lying, and tens of millions will believe its every lie because they want to believe.  It's a cargo cult for America, and history tells us at the end of this road there's nothing but mass bloodshed.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders falsely claimed that President Donald Trump has created three times as many jobs for black workers as his predecessor Barack Obama did during his entire time in office.

Sanders asserted at a White House press briefing Tuesday that Trump had tripled Obama’s eight-year job creation record in just 18 months, quoting numbers that are not even close to accurate.

“This president since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders told reporters Tuesday. “That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this president took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans.”

The claim isn’t true, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Sanders backtracked hours later in a tweet. While the U.S. economy has added about 700,000 jobs held by black workers since Trump took office, it added about 3 million while Obama was in office, according to BLS data.

But it'll make your local news and you FOX-watching uncle will believe it until his dying day.  The regime lies with impunity and will continue to do so until it is deposed.

A Supreme Scandal In West Virginia, Con't

Last week I covered the growing state Supreme Court scandal in West Virginia, where the state House of Delegates, overwhelmingly under GOP control, was moving to impeach the entire state Supreme Court over lavish spending.  This week, the WV House of Delegates made good on their threat and voted to impeach all four remaining justices.

West Virginia lawmakers completed the extraordinary move of impeaching all four state Supreme Court justices Monday night for spending issues, including a suspended justice facing a 23-count federal indictment.

The state House of Delegates voted to impeach Justice Allen Loughry on eight articles, setting the stage for a trial in the state Senate.

Beth Walker became the final justice to be impeached when an article was approved stating all four justices abused their authority. It said they failed to control office expenses, including more than $1 million in renovations to their individual offices, and not maintaining policies over matters such as working lunches and the use of state vehicles and office computers at home.

Walker had dodged impeachment earlier Monday night when lawmakers decided to overlook her $131,000 in spending on office renovations. A short time later, another article was withdrawn against Chief Justice Margaret Workman, who spent $111,000 in renovations.

Justice Robin Davis was impeached for $500,000 in office renovations. And lawmakers approved articles against Loughry for spending $363,000 in renovations to his office; having a $42,000 antique desk and computers, all owned by the state, at his home; lying to the House Finance Committee about taking home the desk and a $32,000 suede leather couch; and for his personal use of state vehicles.

Loughry, Workman and Davis also were impeached for their roles in allowing senior status judges to be paid higher than allowed wages. Lawmakers say the overpayments violated state law and stopped when they were challenged by the Internal Revenue Service.

Another impeachment article was withdrawn dealing with an accusation Loughry used state money to frame personal items at his office.

Minority Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee that approved the articles last week had tried to speed up the impeachment process in the hopes of beating an Aug. 14 deadline for arranging a special election in November if any justice is removed from office or leaves office. Instead, the committee took its time, even conducting a tour of the state Supreme Court offices earlier this month.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice will be allowed to appoint new justices to replace any who are impeached — with no requirement that they be from the same party as the incumbent.

 It's that last part that makes this a coup against the judicial in the state.  Still, despite the impeachment vote, at least one justice is retiring now in order to force a special election.

A West Virginia Supreme Court justice has announced her retirement just hours after her impeachment.Justice Robin Davis announced her departure Tuesday at the state Capitol, saying the citizens of West Virginia now “will be afforded their Constitutional right to elect my successor in November.”

That means two of the five justices will be up for special election in November, but it also means Justice can appoint the other three should the Senate trials result in removal from office.

Needless to say, there's a lot going on here, and this is an absolute mess.

The Social(ist) Network

There's a lot of screaming, laughing, and pointing from the right about this latest Gallup poll on Democrats and "socialism".

For the first time in Gallup's measurement over the past decade, Democrats have a more positive image of socialism than they do of capitalism. Attitudes toward socialism among Democrats have not changed materially since 2010, with 57% today having a positive view. The major change among Democrats has been a less upbeat attitude toward capitalism, dropping to 47% positive this year -- lower than in any of the three previous measures. Republicans remain much more positive about capitalism than about socialism, with little sustained change in their views of either since 2010.

These results are from Gallup interviewing conducted July 30-Aug. 5. Views of socialism among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are particularly important in the current political environment because many observers have claimed the Democratic Party is turning in more of a socialist direction.

Socialist Bernie Sanders competitively challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, and more recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a candidate with similar policy views and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won the Democratic nomination in New York's 14th Congressional District. Several candidates with socialist leanings lost their primary bids in Aug. 7 voting, however, raising doubts about the depth of Democrats' embrace of socialism.

As several people have pointed out, "Socialism" to anyone older than myself means "The failed Soviet states, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and crippling poverty brought on by corrupt Communism" while "Socialism" to anyone younger than myself means "Scandinavia, the European Union, Australia, the UK, Canada, and a government that provides many basic services, the US being the one developed country on Earth that hasn't taken this route."

Right-wing bad faith critics all believe that Democrats want the former and not the latter, conveniently ignoring the fact that Europe and Oceania and our northern neighbor that we share thousands of miles of border with, you know, exist.

But that's how the right rolls, guffawing at the "stupid socialists" (You ever notice how Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is always called "stupid" or "ignorant" by these clowns?)

StupidiNews!

• The FBI is warning banks and credit unions that ATMs worldwide could be susceptible to hackers who could withdraw most, if not all cash in a machine.
• Cuba will overhaul its Constitution for the first time since 1976 as thousands will be able to vote for a new draft in 2019.
• The Trump regime's $716 billion defense bill rolls back US government controls on Chinese tech companies and authorizes spending on 77 new F-35 strike fighter jets.
• The Congressional Budget Office is cutting growth forecasts for the US based on increasing economic uncertainty due to US tariffs.
• Bitcoin has now lost two-thirds of its value from December highs of $20,000 to under $6,250 today as a broad selloff of cryptocurrency continues in 2018.

Last Call For Trump's State Media

FOX News is Trump State Media, and they're not even pretending anymore that there's any separation between the White House and the cable network.

It is “in the public interest” for the White House's top communicator to be excused from federal ethics laws so he can meet with Fox News, according to President Donald Trump’s top lawyer.

Bill Shine, Trump’s newly minted communications director, and Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economist, who worked at CNBC before his White House post, have both been excused from provisions of the law, which seeks to prevent administration officials from advancing the financial interests of relatives or former employers.

“The Administration has an interest in you interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

Kudlow, a former CNBC host, received a similar waiver allowing him to communicate with former colleagues.

Including Shine and Kudlow, the White House has granted a total of 20 waivers to provisions of various federal ethics laws and the ethics pledge that President Trump instituted by executive order the week he took office. Federal agencies have granted many more such waivers.

The news media has been a particular object of those waivers. Early in the administration, after The Daily Beast questioned the propriety of then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s communications with employees of Breitbart News, the pro-Trump outlet he led before and after his White House tenure, the White House issued a blanket ethics waiver allowing all senior West Wing appointees to freely communicate with the press.

That move was widely seen as an effort to retroactively cover Bannon for previous meetings that would’ve otherwise run afoul of ethics rules—a move that may itself have constituted a violation of those rules.

FOX News employees run the White House, and the White House runs FOX News.  Considering nearly half of Republicans want Trump to have the power to exterminate news organizations, it won't be long before FOX News is the only game left in DC.  Who will stop him?  A Roberts Court with Kavanaugh on board as the fifth vote?  A GOP Congress?  None of the checks and balances work right now.  Our last chance is November, and both sides know it.

Should Trump succeed in making sure the Democrats don't control the House or Senate in January, we're done as a nation and a republic.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who was one of the lead FBI investigators into the Trump-Russia case, has been fired by Trump-appointed Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich despite the agency policy recommending his temporary suspension.

The FBI has fired Agent Peter Strzok, who helped lead the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election until officials discovered he had been sending anti-Trump texts.

Aitan Goelman, Strzok’s lawyer, said FBI Deputy Director David L. Bowdich ordered the firing on Friday — even though the director of the FBI office that normally handles employee discipline had decided Strzok should face only a demotion and 60-day suspension. Goelman said the move undercuts the FBI’s repeated assurances that Strzok would be afforded the normal disciplinary process.

“This isn’t the normal process in any way more than name,” Goelman said.

The FBI declined to comment.

The termination marks a remarkable downfall for Strzok, a 22-year veteran of the bureau who investigated Russian spies, defense officials accused of selling secrets to China and myriad other important cases. In the twilight of his career, Strzok was integral to two of the bureau’s most high-profile investigations: the Russia case, and the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.

But when a Justice Department inspector general investigation uncovered politically charged messages that Strzok had exchanged with another FBI official, he was relegated to a position in human resources. Conservatives soon made Strzok the face of their attacks against the special counsel investigation into the president’s campaign, and the FBI took steps to remove him from its ranks.

The Trump regime finally got their head for the wall in a chilling message to the rest of the Justice Department: if you do your job and investigate this regime's criminality, you will be targeted and your career destroyed.  Add Strzok to the list along with Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and of course James Comey.

Strzok’s position in the bureau had been precarious since last summer, when Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz told Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III that the lead agent on his team had been exchanging anti-Trump messages with an FBI lawyer. The next day, Mueller expelled Strzok from the group.

The lawyer, Lisa Page, had also been a part of Mueller’s team, though she left a few weeks earlier and no longer works for the FBI. She and Strzok were having an affair.

President Trump has derided the pair as “FBI lovers,” and he and his conservative allies have pointed to their conduct in an attempt to discredit the Mueller probe. As recently as Saturday, Trump tweeted an attack on Strzok, Page and former FBI director James B. Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe.

“Will the FBI ever recover it’s once stellar reputation, so badly damaged by Comey, McCabe, Peter S and his lover, the lovely Lisa Page, and other top officials now dismissed or fired?” Trump wrote. “So many of the great men and women of the FBI have been hurt by these clowns and losers!”

This time though, Strzok has a case.  Trump has tweeted on more than one occasion that Strzok needed to be fired.  If I'm Goelman, I'm seeing if Trump violated civil service protections.

The bigger issue is of course firing agents investigating the White House because they said mean things about the White House in private.

Nobody's Business But The Turks, Con't

The Trump regime's economic sanctions and tariffs on Turkey this month has quickly gone from punishment over a detained US pastor to an economic wildfire in Ankara as the Turkish lira has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its value compared to the US dollar in just a few weeks.  But the main problem is Erdogan himself, who is treating this as an opportunity to remake Turkey's economic sector in his image by letting it be demolished.

Turkey is set for another week of financial-market turmoil with its face-off with the U.S. showing no sign of abating.

While officials in Ankara, Istanbul and Washington have the means to stem the mayhem that sent the lira down 25 percent in the past month, the will to deploy them was absent through much of the weekend, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan maintaining his defiance toward the U.S. and financial-market orthodoxy in speeches Sunday.

Pressured by U.S. sanctions and a new constitutional order that concentrates power in Erdogan’s hands, Turkey’s central bank and finance ministry did little more than monitor the worst market beating since the rout that took out much of the country’s financial sector in 2001. The nation’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency did step in early Monday to limit the amount of foreign currency and lira swaps, and swap-like transactions, to 50 percent of banks’ legal shareholder equity.

Finance Minister Berat Albayrak sought to calm investors Sunday evening in a newspaper interview. He said the ministry has prepared an action plan that will be announced Monday, with the nation’s institutions ready to take the “necessary steps” to calm markets.

Turkey is “living very dangerously,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “If the central bank in Ankara was truly independent, I think that it’d be raising interest rates now and rapidly so.

Turkey’s lira extended its precipitous slide Monday, with the selloff spreading to other emerging market currencies. It weakened past 7.23 per dollar to a new record low in thin trading in Asia, before paring losses to 7.0060 at 11:09 a.m. in Singapore. The South African rand also fell to its weakest in more than two years, while the Mexican peso dropped almost 2 percent against the greenback.

While investors are pleading for dramatic central bank action to bolster the lira, Turkish officials fear that even a huge increase in borrowing costs could be quickly offset by another round of U.S. sanctions, according to two people familiar with the thinking of the country’s economic administration.

The bottom line in this line of thinking in Ankara: Until relations between the two NATO allies are restored, no policy lever is worth pulling.

As of Sunday, Erdogan showed no willingness to meet President Donald Trump’s condition for mending ties: releasing a U.S evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, who’s been imprisoned in Turkey for almost two years on charges of participating in a 2016 attempted coup.

Given Erdogan’s rhetoric — he called for resistance and vowed not to give in to threats — a solution requires either a gesture from the Trump administration allowing Erdogan to save face, or a humiliating reversal by the Turkish president. Neither looks likely.

Erdogan wants to allow as much damage as possible, to blame Trump for it, and to swoop in and claim even more power for himself.  He's done it before when his "failed coup" vaulted him from strongman to dictator two years ago. But let's keep in mind that the real reason Trump and Erdogan hate each other is that Turkey is Michael Flynn's former employer, and Ankara is neck-deep in the Mueller probe.

If you think Trump is going to lift a finger to save the Erdogan regime, you're nuts.  Erdogan is playing with thermite and nitroglycerine, and when it all blows up, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• A fire at a hospice in Taiwan has left nine dead and more than a dozen injured, officials believe the sprinkler system in the building may have malfunctioned.
• A magnitude 6.4 quake hit Alaska's North Slope early Sunday, centered near the village of Kaktovik, no damage to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline or to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was reported.
• The prosecution in the Paul Manafort fraud trial is expected to wrap up on Monday, the defense may not call witnesses and the trial could go to jury by mid-week.
• A massive plunge in the Turkish lira over the weekend was caused by as US sanctions on the Erdogan regime, the currency has lost more than a quarter of its value.
• Climate change is changing how communities prepare for more 100-year and 1000-year flooding as warmer temperatures bring more rain to the US Mountain West and Canadian prairie.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

It's safe to say that race in America right now is the dividing issue between the two parties.  One party is fine with Trump and his racism, the other party vehemently opposes him according to a new CBS/YouGov poll out this weekend.

Today, 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump's handling of race relations and racial issues, but these views – like many others on the president – are dramatically split by partisanship and by race.

Eighty-two percent of blacks disapprove and 73 percent of Hispanics disapprove. Whites are evenly split (49 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove) and views among them fall along party lines.

Americans are divided on how they read the president's intentions on matters of race. Forty-five percent of Americans feel the president tries to treat whites and racial minorities the same, including eight in 10 Republicans who describe his intentions that way. But 51 percent of Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites over racial minorities – including more than eight in 10 Democrats who feel this way.

Understand that a majority of Americans believe Trump champions white nationalism, and that this is the intent of his policies and actions.  White voters are split on this of course.

Seventy-three percent of African-Americans feel the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities, and 58 percent of Hispanics feel the president tries to put whites ahead of minority groups.

Americans who think the president tries to put the interests of whites ahead of minorities overwhelmingly say they disapprove of this.

Views on how the president handles race are connected to overall views of him, particularly for his political opponents. Six in 10 Democrats say the way that the way the president handles race relations matters a lot in their overall opinion of him, and they give him low marks overall. Republicans report little connection: only 18 percent of Republicans say the way that the president handles race relations matters a lot to how they evaluate him.

And this is really the key.  Fewer than one in five Republicans think Trump's handling of race matters.  They are okay with it.

 

Trump Cards, Con't

If you hire nothing but opportunistic liars and dispose of them when their usefulness to you ends, you automatically have plausible deniability when they inevitably turn on you.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway responded to allegations that President Donald Trump is a racist, saying "none of us would be" at the White House if that were true.

Conway also told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl on "This Week" that in the two years she has worked for Trump, she has “never a single time heard him use a racial slur about anyone.”

Conway was responding to a new book by former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman who describes Trump as a racist and that she has heard him use racial slurs.

“I think that Omarosa unfortunately has undercut her own credibility,” Conway told Karl. “This is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of 'The Apprentice,' the candidate, and indeed the president of the United States. She told your own network, Jon, ABC News, the day after she was fired from the White House that she had resigned … She said she never heard him use the N-word.”

Conway is lying of course about never hearing Trump use a racial slur, but she's actually correct about Omarosa Manigault Newman having no credibility and being a liar as well. "You can't believe the liars calling me a liar now, who lied for me previously when they were working for me, because we all know they are liars" has been Trump's defense for decades, and he knows exactly how to play that game.

It's the same defense Trump's people are using in the Manafort trial this week.

Rick Gates, former associate and protege of Paul Manafort, is testifying in the latter’s trial. Gates has already pleaded guilty to felony charges and is cooperating with the government. Under questioning by the prosecution he admitted committing multiple financial crimes with Manafort, as well as stealing from Manafort himself. On cross examination the defense hammered Gates, forcing him to further admit to his own many frauds and deceptions, including an extramarital affair.

Gates is a liar and a fraud. He’s testifying to help himself out in his own case. He carries a lot of baggage to that witness stand.

And he’s the government’s star witness.

Although that may seem bizarre, it’s a common occurrence in complex criminal cases. Often the best way — and sometimes the only way — for the government to learn what happened is to persuade someone who was on the inside to plead guilty and cooperate. Participants in an illegal enterprise may provide the crucial details necessary to convict others involved — typically those a few rungs higher up the criminal ladder. But such witnesses are subject to withering attacks on their own credibility and present real challenges for the government.

No matter where Mueller goes from here, whatever evidence presented against Trump that is obtained from Manafort or Gates or Michael Flynn for example, Trump and his supporters will scream LIARS and FAKE NEWS and ignore it.

Whether or not our media actually cuts through that noise, I have no idea.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

For my generation, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11 are the defining events of our lives, all the way back to the first Gulf War when I was in high school.  We've always been at war in Baghdad and Kabul it seems, I've known dozens of friends over the years who have served in those wars and some who never came back.  Our Sunday Long Read this week is C.J. Chivers's piece in the NY Times Magazine on the War Eternal, and in 2018, we're still in Afghanistan, still fighting, and we'll never, ever leave.

In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began.

More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.

As the costs have grown — whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost or blood shed — the wars’ architects and the commentators supporting them have often been ready with optimistic or airbrushed predictions, each pitched to the latest project or newly appointed general’s plan. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns abroad would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, keep violence away from Western soil, spread democracy, foster development, prevent sectarian war, protect populations, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists.

Aside from displacing tyrants and leading to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, none of this turned out as pitched. Prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old thugs fell. Corruption and lawlessness remain endemic. An uncountable tally of civilians — many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 — were killed. Others were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action and then by violent social forces American action helped unleash.

The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington’s enemies. Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.

Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed, large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.

Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it.

Now a second generation enters the war they have known every day since they were born.  It's no way to run a country, I figure, it's a far greater tragedy than Vietnam or Korea ever was for my parents and grandparents, but here we are, still fighting, and there's zero chance we'll ever stop.

Last Call For (Red) Meat The Press, Con't

The print media finally unites against the fascism of Trump regime, but at this point when journalism is considered to be as disgusting a profession as possible by Americans, and a plurality of Republicans want Trump to have the power to eliminate news organizations that criticize him, does it even matter anymore?

"The dirty war on the free press must end."

That's the idea behind an unusual editorial-writing initiative that has enlisted scores of newspapers across America.

The Boston Globe has been contacting newspaper editorial boards and proposing a "coordinated response" to President Trump's escalating "enemy of the people" rhetoric.

"We propose to publish an editorial on August 16 on the dangers of the administration's assault on the press and ask others to commit to publishing their own editorials on the same date," The Globe said in its pitch to fellow papers.

The effort began just a few days ago.

As of Saturday, "we have more than 100 publications signed up, and I expect that number to grow in the coming days," Marjorie Pritchard, the Globe's deputy editorial page editor, told CNN.

The American Society of News Editors, the New England Newspaper and Press Association and other groups have helped her spread the word.

"The response has been overwhelming," Pritchard said. "We have some big newspapers, but the majority are from smaller markets, all enthusiastic about standing up to Trump's assault on journalism."

Instead of printing the exact same message, each publication will write its own editorial, Pritchard said.

That was a key part of her pitch: "The impact of Trump's assault on journalism looks different in Boise than it does in Boston," she wrote. "Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming."

Sadly, this is an idea that would have been a hundred times more effective on August 16, 2016, rather than August 16, 2018.  But Trump has everything he needs from the media now, and they will remain a convenient enemy for him to terrorize until they either submit to him, or go out of business.

What the news media needs to do is starve Trump of attention, to cut him off and stop covering him, then across the board, start supporting local Democrats.  They won't, and as long as they refuse to do so, Trump will continue to use them, more journalists will be hurt or possibly killed, and Trump will use them to serve his purposes.

America has a choice in November, but so do the media.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

This is where the party of Trump is in 2018: Republicans, scrambling to save indicted Rep. Chris Collins's seat in NY-27, are fighting to take his name off the ballot in order to construct a Rube Goldberg write-in machine to keep the seat in GOP hands.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who was charged this week as part of an insider trading scheme, is suspending his re-election campaign and will attempt to remove his name from the ballot.

The third-term congressman announced the decision Saturday morning on Twitter, just days after he vowed to clear his name and remain on the ballot.

Collins is facing multiple counts of securities fraud, as well as charges of wire fraud and lying to investigators. His son and another associate were charged in the scheme as well.

Federal prosecutors allege Collins — who sits on the board of an Australian pharmaceutical company — shared non-public details about the failure of a multiple sclerosis drug in clinical trials. Using that information, Collins’ family members were able to sell off shares and avoid more than $760,000 in losses, prosecutors say.

Collins, the first member of congress to endorse President Donald Trump in 2016, pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Under New York law, Collins’ name can be supplanted on the ballot at this stage of the cycle only if he dies, moves out of state or is nominated for another office — like a local judgeship. According to Erie County GOP Chairman Nick Langworthy, the exact mechanisms are still being worked out, but he noted Collins owns houses in Florida and Washington, D.C.

“At this point, he has decided it’s a distraction focusing on his legal situation,” Langworthy said. "It was a distraction for us trying to retain the seat as conservative and Republican leadership. So, I think it was the best decision given the circumstances, and I wish him and his family the best.”

Republican leaders from each of the eight counties in the 27th District — which covers rural areas as well as suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester — will meet to select a replacement candidate, Langworthy said. There are more than 40,000 active Republicans than Democrats in the district, which went for Donald Trump by 24 points in 2016.

So we'll see if Republicans will vote for the party that's cheated Upstate New Yorkers out of everything over the last two years, or if sanity will prevail and Democrats will get their chance here.

Last Call For Taking A Knee

It's August, and that means preseason NFL action got underway Thursday.  But all eyes are on the players before the ball is even snapped, and the resistance to Trump is picking up right where it left off last season.

Player demonstrations took place during the national anthem at several early NFL preseason games Thursday night.

In Philadelphia, Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and cornerback De’Vante Bausby raised their fists during the anthem, and defensive end Chris Long placed his arm around Jenkins’ shoulder. Jenkins had stopped his demonstration last December.

Defensive end Michael Bennett walked out of the tunnel during the anthem and walked toward the bench while it played. It appeared all the Steelers stood.

“Everybody is waiting for what the league is going to do,” Jenkins said. “We won’t let it stop what we stand for. I was very encouraged last year with the direction and that obviously took a different turn.

“I think it’s important to utilize the platform as we can because for whatever reason, we have framed this demonstration in a negative light, and often players have to defend why we feel the need to fight for everyday Americans, and in actuality we’re doing the right thing.”

At Miami, Dolphins receivers Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson and defensive end Robert Quinn protested during the anthem. Stills and Wilson kneeled behind teammates lined up standing along the sideline. Quinn stood and raised his right fist. There were no apparent protests by the Buccaneers.

“As a black man in this world, I’ve got an obligation to raise awareness,” Quinn said. “If no one wants to live in unity, that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in.”

Stills kneeled during the anthem during the 2016-17 seasons and has been vocal discussing social injustice issues that inspired the protest movement by NFL players.

Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a leader of the movement, tweeted support for Stills and Wilson.

“My brother @kstills continued his protest of systemic oppression tonight by taking a knee,” the tweet said. “Albert Wilson joined him in protest. Stay strong brothers!”

And in Seattle, three Seahawks players ran into the team’s locker room prior to the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Defensive linemen Branden Jackson and Quinton Jefferson, and offensive lineman Duane Brown left the field following team introductions and before the start of the anthem. They returned to the sideline immediately after it concluded. All three were among a group of Seattle players that sat during the anthem last season.

Needless to say, Tang the Conqueror isn't a happy camper.

Trump is openly delivering ultimatums for the players at this point, he will not be defied except by, well, the player defying him.  Expect the NFL owners to cave very quickly here, and the players to take a knee anyway.

Losing The Racist Battle, Winning The Racist War

As the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Virginia arrives this weekend, Adam Serwer argues that in that year the forces of racism certainly suffered setbacks, but with their greatest champion being Donald Trump himself, they're winning the war.

From the looks of it, the Nazis lost the battle of Charlottesville. After all, Donald Trump’s handling of the aftermath of the rally, in which he said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest, drew bipartisan condemnation. The attempted rebranding of white nationalism as the genteel and technologically savvy alt-right failed, the marketing campaign faltering after the murder of the counter-protester Heather Heyer and the attempted murder of several others revealed to the nation the logical conclusion of alt-right beliefs and arguments. The bloody outcome of that day foiled the white nationalists’ attempt to garner sympathy from the mainstream right, and in doing so, make themselves respectable.

But the alt-right and its fellow travelers were never going to be able to assemble a mass movement. Despite the controversy over the rally and its bloody aftermath, the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda. As long as that agenda finds a home in one of the two major American political parties, a significant portion of the country will fervently support it. And as an ideological vanguard, the alt-right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.

A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tellshis audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.”

American history is replete with tragedies that are epic in scale, but few are comparable to what has happened to the party of Lincoln, who struck perhaps the most decisive victory against the principle that America is a white man’s country with the proposal and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. There is no reason that this new generation of immigrants cannot become loyal Republican voters, much as a previous generation of despised foreign newcomers did. The obstacle is the conservative movement’s growing embrace of a definition of American citizenship that is inherently racial. Where prior conservative champions like George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan might have seen a new generation of Republicans, today many conservatives see only an invasion.

While few sitting Republican legislators echo these sentiments publicly, Republican audiences are now being fed white-nationalist philosophy through mainstream conservative figures with national followings. Unless something changes, conservative constituencies will eventually begin to demand that their representatives adopt those views as well.

White nationalists win by activating white panic, by frightening a sufficient number of white people into believing that their safety and livelihoods can only be protected by defining American citizenship in racial terms, and by convincing them that American politics is a zero-sum game in which white people only win when people of color lose. While this dynamic has always been present in American politics, it has been decades since the White House has been occupied by a president who so visibly delights in exploiting it, aided by a right-wing media infrastructure that has come to see it as a ratings strategy. It is not just the white nationalists who win when racialized fears surrounding crime, immigration, and terrorism shape the political behavior of white voters. Donald Trump also wins. And both the Trump White House and the men who rallied in Charlottesville for the cause of white power know it.

We're at a critical juncture here.  I'm convinced that findings from the Mueller probe, plus a Democratic takeover of the House will galvanize white nationalism within the Republican party and make it the primary policy of the GOP.  "Getting rid of the enemies of America" will become the singular motivation, and those enemies will be the black, the brown, and the non-Christian.

Sometime in 2019 the Republicans will fully embrace white supremacy as the central tenet of the party.  The rest won't matter.  You'll see 2020 primary candidates openly advocate for mass deportations, detention camps for Muslims, police action to "cleanse" black and brown neighborhoods and "protecting the white way of life".  And these candidates will start winning.  Corey Stewart will not be the outlier that drags the party down in 2018, but the winning norm in 2020.

The pretenses will be dropped in 2019.  The Republican party will fully become the party of American white supremacy.  History fully informs us where the country goes after that, and things get very ugly from there.

Is It Time For New Blood?

A new poll finds that among Democrats, it's a dead even split as to whether Rep. Nancy Pelosi should remain the Democratic leader in the House in 2019.  As for Republicans and independents, well, they are heavily against her.

Only 27 percent of people surveyed in a new poll think Democrats should keep Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as their leader in the House, with nearly half of Democrats surveyed saying the caucus should pick a new chief.

The new American Barometer poll released Thursday by Hill.TV and HarrisX found that just 51 percent of Democrats surveyed think that House Democrats should keep Pelosi as their leader. Forty-nine percent said the caucus should pick a new leader.

Seventy-nine percent of independents said that Pelosi should be replaced, while 91 percent of Republicans said House Democrats should pick a new leader.

The dismal figures come as a number of Democratic candidates and incumbent members of the House refuse to say they will support Pelosi in a vote for the House Speakership.

In June, Politico reported that more than 20 Democratic House candidates have said they would not vote to elect Pelosi to be their party’s leader.

The declarations have raised real questions about whether Pelosi could secure the 218 votes needed on the House floor to become Speaker.

I don't buy that last part, but we also have a number of Democratic House candidates who have said that they will not vote for Pelosi as Leader or as Speaker next year.   It was 20 in June.  It's 50 now.

As Democrats battle to retake control of Congress in November, their leader — Nancy Pelosi — could also be facing a coming fight of her own.

Fifty Democrats running for the House say they won't support the California lawmaker for speaker, according to an NBC News survey of candidates and their public statements.

At least 41 of the party's nominees for House seats have declared they will not back Pelosi and nine incumbent Democratic lawmakers are on the record opposing her.

The most recent voice to the chorus came Thursday, when Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib, who is on track to become the first Muslim woman in Congress, said she would "probably not" support Pelosi because "she doesn't speak about the issues that are important to the families of the 13th congressional district, and they are a priority for me."

An additional 34 Democratic nominees are neither for nor against Pelosi, who has led her party in Congress since 2003.

The significant opposition is a sign of the movement for a generational change in Democratic leadership on the Hill — some believe that Pelosi should step aside so younger members of the party can move up in its ranks. The majority are Democrats running in Republican voting areas, where the minority leader is despised by the GOP. And some of it stems from the ascendant progressive movement, which wants to promote different policies and take a more aggressive approach in Congress to the Republicans and to President Donald Trump.

Frankly, Nancy Pelosi is the one Democrat over the last fifteen years who demonstrably has been good at her job, but if she can't get the 218 votes in January, then Democrats need to figure out who can and fast.  I suspect she has things under control and will throw her support behind a candidate for leadership, but the village can't resist DEMS IN DISARRAY stories.

We'll see.

Last Call For Counting Coup

Our old friend Kris Kobach is in a razor-thin primary fight for Governor of Kansas with current Governor Jeff Colyer, and with fewer than 100 votes now separating him from his opponent, keep in mind that Kobach has not recused himself as Secretary of State yet, meaning he's technically overseeing his own vote counting and an inevitable recount.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s lead over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary has shrunk to only 91 votes after election officials discovered a mistake in the listing for one county’s results in the state’s tally of votes.

The lead is minuscule when compared with the 311,000 votes cast.

The final, unofficial results posted on the secretary of state’s website show Kobach winning Thomas County in northwest Kansas, with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422. But the tally posted by the Thomas County clerk’s office shows Colyer with 522 votes, or 100 votes more, a number the clerk confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.

Bryan Caskey, state elections director, said county officials pointed out the discrepancy Thursday following a routine request for a post-election check of the numbers to counties by the secretary of state’s office.

County election officials have yet to finish counting late-arriving mail-in ballots or provisional ballots provided to voters at the polls when their eligibility wasn’t clear.

“This is a routine part of the process,” Caskey said. “This is why we emphasize that election-night results are unofficial.”

Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms said it’s possible that her handwriting on the tally sheet faxed to the secretary of state’s office was bad enough in the rush of primary-night business that the number for Colyer wasn’t clear.

“They just misread it,” she told The Associated Press.

Colyer’s campaign said Thursday that it had set up a “voting integrity” telephone hotline after it had received “countless” reports of voters experiencing issues at the polls.

Kobach is the state’s chief elections officers and told reporters Wednesday that he knew of no reports of irregularities outside of a long delay in the reporting of results from Johnson County, the state’s most populous county, because of issues with its new machines.

“We’ll certainly be going through the results county by county,” Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said.

No matter how you look at it, for the most vocal critic of voting procedures in the US, a man who screamed about "massive widespread voting fraud" for years and did everything he could to remove as many Democrats as possible from the voter rolls to be in charge of his own vote count is insane.

But that's the GOP for you.  Anything that actually would be even remotely humbling like this, they could not give less of a crap about.

When Colyer manages to lose, I wonder what he'll do?

I know what Kansas should do, and that's vote for the Democrat in the race, Laura Kelly.

The Mask Slips Once Again, Con't

The mask slips, and a Republican accidentally tells the truth.

Hard-line conservative Republicans in the House recently hit a roadblock in their effort to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein when Speaker Paul Ryan opposed the move. But one of those conservatives, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., gave a different explanation to donors recently when asked why the impeachment effort had stalled.

He said it's because an impeachment would delay the Senate's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, made the statement in an audio recording surreptitiously made by a member of a progressive group who attended a Republican fundraiser on July 30 in Spokane, Washington. The recording was obtained by The Rachel Maddow Show and was played on MSNBC on Wednesday night.

Asked about the the impeachment plans, Nunes told a questioner that "it's a bit complicated" because "we only have so many months left."

"So if we actually vote to impeach, OK, what that does is that triggers the Senate then has to take it up," he said on the recording. "Well, and you have to decide what you want right now because the Senate only has so much time.”

He continued: "Do you want them to drop everything and not confirm the Supreme Court justice, the new Supreme Court justice?"

"The Senate would have to drop everything they're doing ... and start with impeachment on Rosenstein. And then take the risk of not getting Kavanaugh confirmed," Nunes said. "So it's not a matter that any of us like Rosenstein. It's a matter of, it's a matter of timing."

Conservative lawmakers have accused Rosenstein of trying to stymie congressional oversight of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of alleged interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The audio of the Spokane fundraiser was obtained by the Maddow show from a member of the "Fuse Washington" progressive group who paid the $250 entry fee to attend the dinner. The event was a fundraiser for Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers. A spokesperson for her campaign had no comment on the recording and Nunes' office didn't return calls for comment.

This is the real reason why Rosenstein was never going to be impeached.  The clock is ticking and confirming Kavanaugh has to be done before Mueller drops the hammer on Trump and company, if only to make sure Trump has five SCOTUS votes to dodge uncomfortable questions, the answers to which could very well implicate other Republicans like Nunes. 

No, as I told you weeks ago, impeaching Rosenstein was at best, fundraising fodder for House Freedom Caucus leaders like Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, and at worst, cover for Trump to fire him.  The clock is ticking fast and Republicans are increasingly looking like the bill for their massive corruption is coming due.

The entire Trump era has been a festering pit of barely disguised ongoing corruption. But the whole sordid era has not had a 24-hour period quite like the orgy of criminality which we have just experienced. The events of the last day alone include:

(1) The trial of Paul Manafort, which has featured the accusation that President Trump’s campaign manager had embezzled funds, failed to report income, and falsified documents. His partner and fellow Trump campaign aide, Rick Gates, confessed to participating in all these crimes, as well as to stealing from Manafort.

(2) Yesterday, Forbes reported that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen $120 million from his partners and customers. Meanwhile Ross has maintained foreign holdings in his investment portfolio that present a major conflict of interest with his public office. (The “Don’t worry, Wilbur Ross would never do anything unethical just to pad his bottom line” defense is likely to be, uh, unconvincing to the many people filing suit against Ross for allegedly doing exactly that.)

(3) Also yesterday, ProPublica reported that the Department of Veterans Affairs is being effectively run by three Trump cronies, none of whom have any official government title or public accountability. The three, reports the story, have “used their influence in ways that could benefit their private interests.”

(4) And then, this morning, Representative Chris Collins was arrested for insider trading. Collins had been known to openly boast about making millions of dollars for his colleagues with his insider knowledge. He is charged with learning of an adverse FDA trial, and immediately calling his son — from the White House! — urging him to sell his holdings.

It has been, in sum, quite a day.

A lot of people are going to jail, and they are going to need Trump around to pardon them.  For that to happen, the GOP needs Kavanaugh confirmed as quickly as possible.  Every route the GOP sees out of the Mueller investigation goes through Kavanaugh being the fifth vote immunizing Trump from anything and everything short of actual impeachment.

Keep that in the back of your mind.

StupidiNews!

• One of the several California wildfires currently causing mass evacuations was deliberately set according to CalFire officials, a suspect has been arrested in connection with the Holy Fire.
• The Trump regime is finally admitting that Russia was behind the nerve agent attack earlier this year in the UK, new US sanctions will be imposed that go into effect August 22.
• The Red Cross is saying that air strikes by the Saudi-led Arab coalition in Yemen killed dozens of civilians, including children, as a bus was hit in the Saada region, at least 63 were wounded.
• The Trump regime pushed Energy Department scientists to play up the benefits of coal power in a government report on last January's "bomb cyclone" blizzard deep freeze.
• NYC becomes the first city to impose a cap on the number of ride-sharing cars as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new City Council ordinance restricting Uber and Lyft on Wednesday.

Last Call For The GOP Race To The Bottom, Con't

When I say the Republican party is the party of racism and bigotry and treason, I mean that quite literally they nominate people for federal office who praised the Confederacy and intimate that we need a Second American Revolution today in order to bring those policies back.

Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee for a US Senate seat for Virginia, praised in a speech last year Virginia's decision in 1861 to secede from the Union, putting it on par with rebellions during the American Revolution and today. 

The Virginia Republican made the comments in April 2017 at an event in South Boston, Virginia, hosted by an unapologetic secessionist. A video of his remarks, given during his failed 2017 gubernatorial run, was posted on his Facebook account. 

He is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a strong favorite to keep his seat, and national Republicans are worried that Stewart's candidacy will turn off some GOP voters, potentially hurting Republican's ballot races. 

"When you say you're from Virginia, when you travel outside of this state and somebody asks where you're from, you say with pride, 'I am from Virginia. I'm very, very proud of it,'" Stewart said. "You're very, very proud of it. And why is it? It's because of our history, folks. It's because of our history. This is the state of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and James Monroe. It's a state of the founders. It's the state of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 

"But it's also the state of Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart. Because, at the base of it, Virginians, we think for ourselves," he continued. "And if the established order is wrong, we rebel. We did that in the Revolution, we did it in the Civil War, and we're doing it today. We're doing it today because they're trying to rob us of everything that we hold dear: our history, our heritage, our culture."

Hey guys?  The Confederacy was actual treason, there was no "heritage" there other than slavery and misery and states and people so entirely dedicated to the idea of keeping black people as slaves that they went to actual war over it, and a significant percentage of the people in this country died as a result.

This is what "history" Corey Stewart sees himself as carrying on.  If you're defending this as heritage or history, if you're proud of this like Stewart, you need to take a good long look at your heart, and a history book.  It's not okay.  It's not romantic.  It's not misunderstood or misinterpreted.  It's human slavery, guys, point blank.

Stewart, whose defense of Confederate symbols became a staple of his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, defined the established order earlier in the speech as the mainstream media, liberals, Democrats and establishment Republicans "trying to convince us that there's something wrong with our heritage in Virginia." 

In response to a comment request from CNN, Stewart released the following statement: "Unlike Wimpy Tim Kaine, Virginians have a warrior spirit and a rebel heart." 

Stewart has continually tried to downplay his past ties and praise of white nationalist figures like Jason Kessler, an organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and Paul Nehlen, the anti-Semitic Republican congressional candidate who took on Paul Ryan in 2016. 

According to records from Virginia's Department of Elections, the event in which he praised secession was paid for by avowed secessionist George Randall. Stewart was introduced by Randall's wife, Donna, who also promoted the event on Facebook. 

Randall is an unapologetic secessionist, telling The New York Times, "I'm a secessionist because the federal government is anti-Christian and we're different culturally."

And yes, these traitors are actually still very much with us, and we have the Republican party happily running candidates for Senate -- and currently in the White House, I might add -- who are okay with this because it means they get political benefit from it.  And next week, these same white supremacists are going to be in Virginia, in Charlottesville for the one-year anniversary of their little cross-burning party.  And Corey Stewart?  He'll be supporting these guys.

So let me make this plain, folks.

The. Republican. Party. Is. The. Party. Of. White Supremacists.