The Green New Deal Goes Blue On Blue

Vox climate reporter David Roberts does an outstanding job of explaining the Green New Deal to folks in this piece and frankly it's ambitious, necessary, if not vital to put America back together again after Donald Trump.

But it'll never happen, mainly because Green New Deal proponents are too worried about making conservative purple and red state Dems extinct rather than removing the real impediment to fixing climate, the GOP, dooming the Dems to permanent minority party status, particularly in the US Senate.

Earlier this month, a revealing spat broke out on Twitter. David Sirota, a left-leaning journalist who once worked for Bernie Sanders, announcedthat he had uncovered something while mining campaign-finance data: “Beto O’Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and a former domestic-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, pushed back. “Oh look,” she tweeted, “A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous.”

The dispute escalated three days later when The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig wrote a column declaring that she “can’t get excited about Beto O’Rourke” as a presidential candidate, because, among other things, he lacks a “well-attested antipathy toward Wall Street, oil and gas.” To which Tanden replied, “Bruenig’s piece in the Post on Beto is just the latest attack by a supporter of Senator Sanders.” Then, on December 10, the journal Sludge, which investigates money in politics, defended Sirota’s charge and noted that the Center for American Progress itself “has in the past accepted donations from multiple fossil fuel companies.”

On one level, the fight over O’Rourke is a fight over the legacy of Obama. The Obama veterans championing O’Rourke compare his “inspiration, aspiration, and authenticity” (in the words of Obama’s former campaign manager Jim Messina) to the 44th president’s. In a recent essay titled “The Case for Beto O’Rourke,” the former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer declared that “the whole conversation around Beto has been eerily familiar to me, because these are the exact arguments people made to me when I told them I was considering working for Barack Obama 10 years ago.”

O’Rourke’s critics turn the analogy on its head. “Beto is a lot like Obama, true,” Bruenig acknowledges, but “it’s perhaps time for left-leaning Democrats to realize that may not be a good thing.” A recent Jacobin article called O’Rourke “Obama redux: an attractive, progressive-sounding, comforting figure” before declaring that Obama redux “would be disastrous,” given the former president’s policies on immigration, Wall Street, and war.

But the argument is about more than Obama. The people criticizing O’Rourke for taking fossil-fuel money don’t want to just prevent the Democratic Party from modeling its next presidential candidate on its last president. They want to overturn a model that has long dominated the party. Since the mid-20th century, Democrats have generally treated corporations as legitimate participants in the political process. Today, for the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a powerful faction within the party wants to treat them as ideological adversaries instead.

In other words, we're having the same exact party-splitting argument that we had in 2016, one that gave us Donald Trump due to enough third-party rodent coitus to allow him to win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

Worse, we're once again seeing a party-wide purity test that would not only eliminate 95% of 2020 candidates for President, but eliminate the vast majority of sitting Democrats in Congress.

I don't know where we're headed, but so far any positive outcome from the Green New Deal has already been hijacked by the Purity Police and is already being used against Democrats.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

In a move that shouldn't surprise anyone at this point, Trump regime Attorney General pick William Barr basically auditioned for the job last summer with a secret 20-page memo justifying the firing of Robert Mueller.

William Barr, President Trump’s choice for attorney general, sent an unsolicited memo earlier this year to the Justice Department that excoriated special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into potential obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, saying it is based on a “fatally misconceived” theory that would cause lasting damage to the presidency and the executive branch.

The 20-page document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides the first in-depth look at Mr. Barr’s views on the special counsel’s Russia investigation, which he would likely oversee if confirmed.

In the memo, Mr. Barr wrote he sent it as a “former official” who hoped his “views may be useful.” He wrote he was concerned about the part of Mr. Mueller’s probe that, according to news reports in the Journal and elsewhere, has explored whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in asking then-FBI director James Comey to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russia, and by later firing Mr. Comey.

Mr. Barr’s memo, dated June 8 and sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, argues that, based on the facts as he understands them, the president was acting well within his executive-branch authority.

In other words, the nominee for Attorney General is on the record as saying that firing Comey was not obstruction of justice.  It gets worse though.

Mr. Barr argued in the memo that a president can be accused of obstructing justice under the relevant legal provision if he knowingly destroyed evidence or encouraged a witness to lie. But Mr. Trump was lawfully exercising his authority in firing Mr. Comey, he wrote. If prosecutors pursue Mr. Trump over his comments to Mr. Comey about Mr. Flynn, according to the memo, it opens the door for every decision that is alleged to be improperly motivated to be investigated as “potential criminal obstruction.”

“I know you will agree that, if a DOJ investigation is going to take down a democratically-elected President, it is imperative to the health of our system and to our national cohesion that any claim of wrongdoing is solidly based on evidence of a real crime—not a debatable one,” Mr. Barr wrote in the memo. “It is time to travel well-worn paths; not to veer into novel, unsettled or contested areas of the law; and not to indulge the fancies by overly-zealous prosecutors.”

There's no doubt anymore that Barr would not only not recuse himself from oversight of the Mueller probe, but that he would choose to interfere with and limit its scope from day one on the job.

He cannot be confirmed without an ironclad promise to recuse, and that will never happen.

StupidiNews!

• The US government faces a partial shutdown tonight if Republicans and Donald Trump cannot get legislation passed to keep the lights on by midnight.
• British police and even military troops were called in to London's Gatwick Airport after several unmanned commercial drones appeared over runways, canceling hundreds of flights.
• Donald Trump is expected to announce the withdrawal of about half of the remaining 14,000 US troops in Afghanistan, just one day after a complete withdrawal from Syria was announced.
• A US appeals court has reversed a lower court decision barring the Trump regime from deporting Iraqis from the Detroit area, the ACLU is considering what further steps to take.
• Nine months after a lethal crash, ride-share giant Uber is once again testing autonomous drivers in the US, but the test program will be significantly scaled back.

Last Call For (Mad) Dog Gone, Jim

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is out in February, with Trump's surprise move to turn Syria over to Putin and Assad the last straw for the general.

Jim Mattis, the four-star Marine general turned defense secretary, resigned on Thursday in protest of President Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria, where they have been fighting the Islamic State.

Mr. Trump announced the resignation in two tweets Thursday evening, and said Mr. Mattis will leave at the end of February.

Officials said Mr. Mattis went to the White House on Thursday afternoon in a last attempt to convince Mr. Trump to keep American troops in Syria. He was rebuffed, and told the president that he was resigning as a result.

Hours later, the Pentagon released Mr. Mattis’ resignation letter, in which he implicitly criticized his commander in chief. Mr. Mattis said in the letter that he believes that the president deserves a defense secretary who is more in tune with his worldview.

“One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships,” Mr. Mattis wrote.

“Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,” he wrote.

[Read Mr. Mattis’ resignation letter here.]

His departure leaves the Trump administration without one of the few officials viewed as standing between a mercurial president and global tumult. The president said he would name Mr. Mattis’ replacement shortly.

Mattis's letter makes it clear that he believes Trump has no idea and no business being Commander-in-Chief, the old warhorse understands better than most that diplomacy and alliances are the key to America's place in the world, not tanks and bombers.

Mattis will tender his resignation on February 28, meaning at this point nearly all the major Cabinet players in the Trump regime's first two years are effectively gone in various swirling clouds of failure and scandal: Rex Tillerson at State,  Jeff Sessions at Justice, Ryan Zinke at Interior, David Shulkin at Veterans Affairs,  Tom Price at Health and Human Services, Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador, Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, both Mike Flynn and K.T. McFarland as National Security Advisers, and both Reince Priebus and John Kelly as White House Chiefs of Staff.

Wilbur Ross at Commerce and Kirstjen Nielsen at Homeland Security are hanging on by threads due to growing scandals of their own, and after the performance of the stock markets in the last three weeks, don't be surprised if Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin's head is on the block too.

Still, by my count, that leaves zero adults in the room to keep an eye on Trump now, and the rats can't leave the sinking ship of state quickly enough.

Mattis was livid over Syria withdrawal, potential Afghanistan withdrawal & being kept out of decisions by John Bolton. He saw POTUS overruling him on joint chiefs of staff chair as humiliation. He disliked Trump's friendliness w/Putin, among other things. https://t.co/t4hqFtRYPz

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) December 21, 2018

At this point, we're off the map.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

A big story from BuzzFeed News today involving Russian meddling in the 2016 election, not only did the Russians want to help Trump win, they wanted to find dirt on Clinton and her supporters so that they lost.

US Treasury Department officials used a Gmail back channel with the Russian government as the Kremlin sought sensitive financial information on its enemies in America and across the globe, according to documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

The extraordinary unofficial line of communication arose in the final year of the Obama administration — in the midst of what multiple US intelligence agencies have said was a secret campaign by the Kremlin to interfere in the US election. Russian agents ostensibly trying to track ISIS instead pressed their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens.

Most startlingly, Russia requested sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin. That request was made weeks before a Russian lawyer showed up at Trump Tower offering top campaign aides “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — including her supposed connection to the Ziff brothers.

Russia’s financial crimes agency, whose second-in-command is a former KGB officer and schoolmate of President Vladimir Putin, also asked the Americans for documents on executives from two prominent Jewish groups, the Anti-Defamation League and the National Council of Jewish Women, as well as Kremlin opponents living abroad in London and Kiev.

In an astonishing departure from protocol, documents show that at the same time the requests were being made, Treasury officials were using their government email accounts to send messages back and forth with a network of private Hotmail and Gmail accounts set up by the Russians, rather than communicating through the secure network usually used to exchange information with other countries.

Analysts at an elite agency within Treasury first warned supervisors in 2016 that the Russians were “manipulating the system” to conduct “fishing expeditions.” And they raised fears that the Treasury’s internal systems could be compromised by viruses contained in emails from the unofficial Russian accounts. But staff continued using the Gmail back channel into 2017, despite repeated internal warnings that Russia could be trawling for sensitive financial records — including Social Security and bank account numbers — to spy on, endanger, or recruit targets in the West.
The Treasury Department refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents in response. Nor would officials answer any other specific questions about the matter.

In a statement, a spokesperson said: “Treasury does not discuss or comment on confidential communications with foreign governments, including to confirm whether or not they have occurred. We have notified our Office of the Inspector General of these allegations."

The details in the story are pretty shocking, multiple whistleblowers who were ignored, evidence that the Treasury Department's international money-laundering watchdog group was completely compromised by the Kremlin's counterpart agency, and that they were using open Gmail channels to send information that Russia wanted on US citizens.

The fact is the Russians had the Treasury Department infiltrated for years and they wanted financial dirt on both Russia and Trump's enemies.

Hell of a thing.

Ol' Saint Barack Is Back

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the nation's capital.

Watch out, Santa: Former president Barack Obama is coming for your sleigh.

With a fluffy red cap and a bulging bag slung over his shoulder, Obama delivered presents (and more than a few gasps) to the young patients at Children’s National hospital in Northwest Washington on Wednesday.

First on Obama’s list was a group of patients 4 and up who were making snowflakes in one of the hospital’s playrooms. After the excitement died down, the former president handed out jigsaw puzzles (which were his grandmother’s favorite, he told the crowd), Hot Wheels sets, remote-control cars, and glittery nail polish, among other goodies collected by Obama and his staffers. Hey, the guy knows his audience.

“I know they will be talking about it for years to come,” said Kurt Newman, chief executive and president of Children’s National Health System. “At such a busy time of year, when no one wants to be in the hospital, his natural warmth lifted the spirits of those kids, their parents and of each staff member he met along the way.”

Obama Claus also dropped by individual patient rooms for one-on-one visits with children and their parents. He gifted one 12-year-old patient who was nervous about heading to high school next year a piece of advice: “Even the cool kids don’t have it all figured out.”

Before leaving, Obama thanked the staff for working during the holidays and recorded a video message to be played on the hospital’s internal TV system for those he wasn’t able to visit during the trip.

Only a handful of the Children’s National staff knew that the president was coming to town, but word spread quickly during the 90-minute visit. By the time he was headed for the door, a crowd had gathered at a nearby nursing station. The group of doctors, residents and nurses cheered for Obama before busting into an impromptu rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

Meanwhile, the guy who we decided should succeed this man is busy on a 16-day golf vacation in Florida where the walls are closing in around him and his criminal family.

That's America for you.

StupidiNews!

• Three Kansas state women lawmakers have now announced that they are switching parties from the GOP to the Democrats in 2019 as Republicans have scrapped a planned bipartisan education bill.
• Major League Baseball has signed an agreement with Cuba so that players can sign with MLB teams without defecting to the US or Canada.
• After pausing drug price hikes ahead of the 2018 election, dozens of pharmaceutical companies say they will resume sharp price hikes in 2019 despite pressure from the Trump regime.
• The Federal Reserve has raised key interest rates for a fourth time in 2018, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell is suggesting rate hikes could slow in 2019.
• The District of Columbia is the latest jurisdiction to sue Facebook over Cambridge Analytica data breaches and failure to protect consumer's private information.

Last Call For Bibi In Big Trouble, Con't

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu takes another step closer to resignation and prison as state prosecutors are recommending bribery and breach of trust charges.

A team of attorneys working on behalf of the State Prosecutor's Office recommended on Wednesday to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for bribery charges in two corruption cases, known as Cases 2000 and 4000.

The state prosecutor is likely to charge Netanyahu for breach of trust in his third corruption probe, dubbed Case 1000.

Earlier Wednesday, State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan said the team working on the cases completed its assessment, and that deliberations at the attorney general's office would commence in the coming days.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of offering the publisher of the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth Arnon Mozes advantageous government media policy in return for favorable news coverage.

Case 4000 involves suspicions that Netanyahu, in his capacity as communications minister from 2014 to 2017, intervened with regulators to help telecom tycoon Bezeq with a deal worth some 1 billion shekels to its owner, Shaul Elovitch.

In exchange, Elovitch, a long-time friend of Netanyahu’s, allegedly ordered the Bezeq-owned news site Walla to provide favorable coverage of the prime minister and his wife, Sara.

Case 1000 alleges Netanyahu and his wife received lavish gifts from Israeli Hollywood entertainment magnate Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer as bribes for beneficial legislation and personal favors.

According to Nitzan, the attorney general will discuss "the complex ethical and legal issues that arise from these cases based on the opinions he will hear in order to make a decision."

Nitzan also said that the opinion drafted by the prosecutor's office is 800 pages long. Despite the fact that police published its recommendations on Case 4000 only two weeks ago, the preparation of the opinion on this case started earlier.

Again, the final decision to indict will be up to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, but Bibi's office is screaming that these "leaks" from the state prosecutors amount to undue pressure for him to resign.  For his part, Mandelblit continues to support the police and state prosecutors publicly, so we'll see.  If Netanyahu is indicted, he's done politically and everyone knows it.

Stay tuned.

 

A Syria's Withdrawal

Well, we know what smokescreen Trump is using to deflect from the atrocious legal news heading into the holidays: Donald Trump is declaring "victory" in Syria and planning an immediate and full withdrawal of all US forces there as a present to his buddy Vlad Putin.

The Trump administration is planning to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, a defense official said on Wednesday, as President Trump declared victory against the Islamic State.

The president, in a message on Twitter, said the United States had "defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency."

His statement came shortly after news organizations reported that the White House had made a decision on Tuesday to abruptly remove the entire U.S. force of more than 2,000 troops from Syria and end the extended American ground campaign against the Islamic State.

Trump has long promised to conclude the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and has questioned the value of costly and dangerous military missions overseas. But U.S. troops, working alongside Syrian partner forces, have struggled to eradicate remaining pockets of militants in central Syria. An abrupt American withdrawal would raise questions about whether the militants would be more easily able to regain strength.

The decision is the latest twist in American leaders' unsuccessful quest to craft a solution for Syria's long civil conflict, which has drawn in U.S. allies and adversaries including Turkey, Russia and Iran.

Both the Trump and Obama administrations have resisted becoming more involved in Syria's larger civil war but many senior officials - including at the State Department and Pentagon - have supported an ongoing troop presence in Syria until security conditions improve and a political solution can be reached.

Defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a decision that has not yet been announced, said the withdrawal was expected to occur as quickly as possible and would affect the entire force of more than 2,000 U.S. service members. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Wednesday that U.S. troops would be removed from northeast Syria.

That's the cover story, all US troops will be out by the end of March 2019 because we "won".  The reality is that Donald Trump is handing Syria over to the Assad regime, Iran, and Vladimir Putin, who will now establish permanent military bases there to contain NATO forces in neighboring Turkey.  Combined with Russian influence in Cyprus off the Syrian coast, it's a major military foothold in the region.

And of course, ISIS isn't going anywhere.  It's a gift-wrapping by Trump to two of his fellow autocrats.  Merry Christmas Vlad, the last two years could not have gone better for neo-Soviet empire-building.  Turkey will have free rein to bomb Syrian Kurds on the border, Assad can finish off the rebels at his leisure (and with Russian help) and Iranian-backed ISIS can surround Iraq.  It'll get very bloody, very quickly, and a whole lot of people are going to die as a result.

2019 is going to be brutal for Syria if this happens, and the blowback will haunt us for decades.

Welcome To Washington, Rookie

Newly-elected Queens Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first order of business is to get punked by the Village press as Politico says her first act is to primary Brooklyn Dem Rep. Hakeem Jeffries out of his seat.

Ocasio-Cortez, who ousted House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley earlier this year in a shocking primary victory, put colleagues on notice for future primaries just days after the November election, telling a livestream audience that she and an allied group, Justice Democrats, would keep working together to boost anti-incumbent challengers — though she didn’t name names. But a person who has discussed the project with Ocasio-Cortez and her team said the congresswoman-elect has recruited an African-American woman to challenge Jeffries, who was just elected to replace Crowley as caucus chairman — the No. 5 House Democratic leadership position.

The person who spoke with Ocasio-Cortez and her team, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation, called Jeffries the “highest priority” primary target of Ocasio-Cortez.

A second person with direct knowledge of Justice Democrats’ primary plans said the group is “looking” at Jeffries’ seat. Since Justice Democrats put out a call for potential targets, the group's supporters have singled out Jeffries as a member they would be “excited” to oppose. “We’re not going to shy away from New York,” the second person said.

What's so awful about Hakeem Jeffries then, that he deserves to be drummed out of Congress?

Jeffries has sparked the ire of Justice Democrats for several reasons. The group feels Jeffries takes too much money from corporate interests, a key litmus test, and is overly friendly with banking and pro-charter school interests. But Ocasio-Cortez is also unhappy that a campaign donation to her from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was allegedly used in a whisper campaign against Lee before her narrow loss to Jeffries in the recent race for Democratic caucus chair.

“It’s personal for Ocasio,” said the person who spoke with Ocasio-Cortez and her staff. "And she’s going to go all out to take him out.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director denied that she had already recruited an anti-Jeffries candidate.

“We’re not looking at recruiting people to run campaigns, we’re looking at building a congressional staff," said Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent.

But when asked whether the congresswoman-elect is looking at Jeffries' seat, Trent said Ocasio-Cortez and her allies were "disappointed" with Jeffries after the caucus chair race.

“We’re disappointed in the way that the leadership elections went down, specifically that leadership election," said Trent. "We would have liked to have seen that be a more fair fight with less pressure."

Now, we should probably take this with an entire salt mine because it's TEAM WIN THE MORNING here saying this and the lesson here is Ocasio-Cortez is definitely calling bullcrap on this story.

One disappointment about DC is the gossip that masquerades as “reporting.”

This story has:
- Not a SINGLE named or verifiable source
- Only ONE on-the-record comment, which is a denial.

My dad had a name for junk articles like this:
“Birdcage lining.”
https://t.co/kIBMM2eiWb

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 18, 2018

Considering Politico's track record in starting "Dems in disarray!" fights, I'm going to have to say "Do better, Politico."  The bad guys here aren't the Democrats.  And good for AOC to fight back on this.

StupidiNews!

• Actress and director Penny Marshall of "Laverne & Shirley", "Big", and "A League Of Their Own" fame has passed at the age of 75 due to complications from diabetes.
• The Trump regime on Tuesday indicated it would ban "bump stocks" and giving owners 90 days to turn in or destroy the devices that use to recoil of a rifle to increase its rate of fire.
• The government of UK PM Thersa May is beginning preparations for a "no-deal" Brexit, telling businesses and citizens to expect leaving the European Union without an exit agreement.
• Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin says US/China trade talks will be scheduled for the new year, ahead of a Trump regime March 1 deadline to implement tariffs on all Chinese imports.
• Autonomous vehicle startup Nuvo is now testing fully driverless deliveries of groceries using vehicles on city streets in Scottsdale, Arizona, the vehicles can reach speeds of 25 mph.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan, Con't

Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin clearly doesn't understand the concept of taking the loss.  After the Kentucky Supreme Court buried his pension "reform" bill that shredded salaries, benefits, and pensions for current and retired state workers (but of course not lawmakers) Bevin called a surprise special session of the state legislature last night and demanded that the General Assembly and State Senate again pass his unconstitutional legislation.

Kentucky lawmakers rushed to Frankfort Monday evening for a special legislative session that started at 8 p.m., just four hours after Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin made a surprise announcement that he would convene them to deal with Kentucky’s struggling pension system.

“I am going to use the powers that have been granted to me to call the legislature into special session that will be effective tonight at eight o’clock,” Bevin said in a brief statement. “They will be coming in.”

Shortly after 11 p.m., two pension overhaul bills were introduced, both sponsored by Rep. Jerry Miller, R-Louisville, the chairman of the House State Government Committee. The committee will hold a hearing on the bills Tuesday at 1 p.m. Miller said there will be no vote taken Tuesday on the bills.

House Bill 1 is similar to Senate Bill 151 — the pension overhaul bill lawmakers approved in April that the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down earlier this month — but with some provisions removed. Gone is a requirement that the legislature switch to a funding method known as level-dollar funding, which requires larger pension payments in the next few years.

House Bill 2 is similar to House Bill 362, the bill that capped pension increases for local governments, school districts and regional universities, but includes a plan that would reduce a 3 percent benefit increase teachers receive when they’ve worked for 30 years to 2.5 percent in 2024.

Miller said the House was treating the bills as a proposal from the governor and that he expected lawmakers to make changes, including removing the benefit reduction for teachers and adding a requirement for level-dollar funding.

As lawmakers arrived at the Capitol in waves, many of them still hadn’t seen the proposed legislation Republicans hoped to pass in short order. The House immediately recessed to give more members time to arrive while the Senate held open its roll call until a quorum of members had arrived by about 8:30 p.m.

Republicans then went behind closed doors to discuss their strategy. The full House resumed briefly at 9:35 p.m. to take roll, then immediately went into another recess.

The confusion bred talk of compromise about a possible abrupt ending to the session among some House Republicans and their Democratic counterparts. House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins, D-Sandy Hook, and former House Speaker Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown, said they planned to team up to file a motion to immediately adjourn the special session, a move that would be a stern rebuttal to a governor who has made addressing the pension crisis a core tenet of his political platform.

“This is typical Matt Bevin, he acts like a spoiled middle school kid who did not get his way,” Hoover said.

Bevin cramming this through the legislature as part of a sewer bill is why the law was struck down.  Yet here he goes again, trying to pass the same bill again.  No wonder Bevin's one of the least popular governors in the country.

Independent polling firm Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy found 38 percent of Kentuckians approved of their governor's performance while 53 percent disapproved. Mason-Dixon, based in Jacksonville and Washington, D.C., interviewed 625 registered Kentucky voters Dec. 12-Dec. 15. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Bevin fared only a little better in the conservative bastion of Northern Kentucky, where 40 percent of people surveyed approved and 51 percent disapproved.

A year ago, more Kentuckians approved of Bevin, 45 percent, compared to 41 percent who disapprove, according to Mason-Dixon.

This is not good news for Bevin as he faces re-election in 2019.

The two Democratic candidates running for governor next year, Attorney General Andy Beshear and Kentucky House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins both led Bevin in Mason-Dixon's polling. Beshear led by 8 percentage points, 48 percent to 40 percent while Adkins led by only 1 percentage point, 42 percent to 41 percent.

Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a prominent Democrat who is mulling a gubernatorial run but hasn't announced, trailed Bevin by 1 percentage point, 46 percent to 47 percent.

The poll pointed out Kentucky Republicans often trail in the early stages of elections, including Bevin in 2015 when he first won election for governor, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"Given this recent history, it is far from over for Bevin," the pollsters wrote in the study. "However, Beshear is a formidable opponent who won four years ago in a GOP-friendly state election."

Bevin's doing even worse than Trump is in the polls, and November is fast approaching.  Now he's trying this stupid stunt again to harm Kentucky teachers and cops and firefighters?

We may get Andy Beshear as governor after all.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Things really, really did not go well for convicted Trump regime co-conspirator and foreign agent Michael Flynn at today's sentencing hearing as the former National Security Adviser suddenly remembered that he had a lot more cooperation to give to federal investigators in order to save himself from decades in prison.

A judge tore into Michael Flynn Tuesday ahead of imposing a sentence on President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and prominent campaign supporter for lying to the FBI.

Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, was an early supporter of the Trump campaign, and infamously called for the incarceration of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

He came under scrutiny for a variety of potential criminal activities, and reached a plea deal in December 2017 with the special counsel team led by Robert Mueller. As part of the deal, he agreed to cooperate and admitted making fraudulent statements in an interview with FBI agents at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017. Flynn stepped down as national security adviser in mid-February 2017, less than a month into the Trump presidency, because the White House says he misled officials there about his contacts with the Russians.

“I’m not hiding my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense,” U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington told Flynn ahead of the sentencing.

Sullivan also walked through a number of procedural steps to make sure that Flynn was pleading guilty because he was guilty and not for any other reason. He seemed frustrated with many of the arguments from Flynn’s team that he suggested took away from Flynn’s supposed acceptance of responsibility for his crime.

Sullivan had Flynn admit, once again, that he had lied to the FBI and was pleading guilty because he was guilty. He gave Flynn ample opportunity to back out of his guilty plea, discussed with the prosecution the variety of other crimes Flynn could have faced, and said Flynn’s criminal exposure would have been “significant” had be been charged with the other offenses.

“This crime is very serious,” Sullivan said, noting that Flynn lied “In the White House! In the West Wing!” Flynn shouldn’t “minimize” his “very serious” offense, Sullivan said.

“Arguably, you sold your country out,” Sullivan told Flynn. He then asked the government whether undermining U.S. sanctions against Russia for their interference in the 2016 election could be considered treason, a suggestion the government didn’t want to weigh in on. (Soon after, the judge said he did not mean to suggest Flynn committed treason.)

Eventually an extremely terrified Flynn agreed to an offer by the prosecution to delay sentencing until March, pending more cooperation with investigators in the upcoming Virginia state case that was unsealed Monday against Flynn's former Turkish lobbying business partners, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin.

Oh but that's not the worst news for Trump today either, that would be the news that the New York state fraud and money laundering case against Trump's charity is so rock-solid that Trump himself has agreed to end of the Trump Foundation.

President Trump has agreed to shut down his embattled personal charity and to give away its remaining money amid allegations that he used the foundation for his personal and political benefit, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced Tuesday.

Underwood said that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is dissolving as her office pursues its lawsuit against the charity, Trump and his three eldest children.

The suit, filed in June, alleged “persistently illegal conduct” at the foundation and sought to have it shut down. Underwood is continuing to seek more than $2.8 million in restitution and has asked a judge to ban the Trumps temporarily from serving on the boards of other New York nonprofit organizations.

Underwood said Tuesday that her investigation found “a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.”

“This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,” she added in a statement.

The shuttering comes after The Washington Post documented apparent lapses at the foundation. Trump used the charity’s money to pay legal settlements for his private business, to purchase art for one of his clubs and to make a prohibited political donation.

Trump denied that the organization had done anything wrong. In late 2016, he said he wanted to close the foundation, but the New York attorney general blocked that move while it investigated.

The settlement with Underwood’s office represents a concession by Trump to a state investigation he decried as a partisan attack. The case is one of numerous legal investigations of Trump organizations that have proliferated during his presidency.

The nonsense that Trump was trying to shut the Foundation down but was prevented from doing so because of the investigation is a bit like a bank robber complaining that he's unable to access his account while the feds are looking for the stolen money.

Trump didn't have a choice in the matter, and it's only the first brick in the crumbling wall of his mobbed-up empire of crime.

It's already a miserable week for Trump, and it's only Tuesday.

GOP Dust Woman, Or Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Suburbs

Republican women in Congress (the few of them left at least) are finding out the hard way just how little they mean to the party of rich old white guys, and they're shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that increasing the number of GOP women isn't exactly a priority with the boys club.

Republicans lost the House in November as droves of female voters spurned the party, a reflection of the gaping gender gap. The election devastated the GOP’s already meager group of congresswomen. Almost none of the political survivors will hold positions of power in Congress next year.

Republican women recognize this is a serious problem. It’s unclear whether GOP men agree.

“It’s very painful,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), who championed female candidates for a decade as the only woman in Republican leadership. “We need to make sure that we are growing our ranks.”

The stark contrast between the parties on gender will be evident when the new Congress is sworn in Jan. 3.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is poised to reclaim the speaker’s gavel as 36 women join her caucus. But House Republicans, who have already elected men to their top two posts, will see their group of women reduced by almost half to just 13, with West Virginia’s Carol Miller the lone GOP woman in the freshman class.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said the number of Republican women in the House has fallen to “crisis level.”

“Women are a majority of voters in our country, and the GOP must do more to ensure our conference represents their views,” said Stefanik, who announced plans this month to help Republican women in their primaries in 2020.

The GOP’s poor performance with women this election cycle has exposed sensitive fault lines within the party over identity politics and how to win elections.

Republican leaders often hedge on whether recruiting female candidates should be a top priority, saying they want who­ever is most qualified. The need for more female lawmakers to better reflect the country — or at least to win votes from more women — has not been a given for all party members.

You mean Republicans really don't give a damn about women as long as they shut up and do what they're told?  Who knew?

Oh wait, Democratic party candidates knew, and they told America as much.  I have little sympathy for the sheep who voted for the wolves, except their votes hurt everyone by enabling the GOP.

Here's hoping everyone figures out what's at stake.

StupidiNews!

• The Merriam-Webster Dictionary's 2018 Word of the Year is "justice" as the publishing company called the concept "the center of many of our national debates" in 2018.
• The First Step Act criminal justice reform bill is finally headed for a Senate floor vote this week, but its fate is uncertain as Republicans critics warn violent criminals will be released as a result.
• CBS has fired CEO Leslie Moonves and has determined he will get none of his $120 million severance as a result of breach of contract and termination for cause.
• Stock markets are down nearly ten percent since Thanksgiving as blue chips are headed for their worst December since 1931.
• The FCC has nixed California's plan to fund rural broadband with taxes on text message plans, ruling that texts aren't telecommunications but information, limiting the state's ability to charge fees.