Last Call For Rats Fleeing The Ship

It's clear that Republicans definitely don't like being in the minority in the House, and we're already seeing outright resignations as GOP lawmakers start securing private sector jobs.  First out the door after just being re-elected: Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino.

Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, announced Thursday he'll resign from Congress to pursue a private sector job, after just starting his fifth term in Congress. 

"As of January 23, 2019, I am officially stepping down from Congress," Marino said in a statement. "Having spent over two decades serving the public, I have chosen to take a position in the private sector where I can use both my legal and business experience to create jobs around the nation." 

Marino thanked his constituents, saying serving in Congress was "one of the greatest honors of my life" and was "confident that the area will continue to thrive." 

Marino won 66% of the vote in November and his district covers a wide swath of northern and central Pennsylvania. 

He was an early Trump supporter among congressional Republicans. He was nominated to be the president's Drug Czar but withdrew after a joint CBS "60 Minutes" and Washington Post report revealed he took nearly $100,000 from pharmaceutical lobbyists.

I guarantee you that Marino will land on his feet with a big pharma lobbyist job somewhere...and nobody will bat an eyelash.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Facebook has finally gotten around to taking down pages and accounts linked to Russian "news agency" Sputnik International, itself a front for Russian propaganda for years, even though the accounts happily bought more than $100,000 in ads over the years as a cost of doing propaganda business, and Facebook was more than happy to take their money.

Facebook announced early Thursday morning that it had removed hundreds of troll pages and accounts posing as eastern European news outlets that were actually linked to staff of the Russian state news agency, Sputnik.

The batch of removed content included 289 pages and 75 Facebook accounts that pumped out anti-NATO sentiment alongside posts on anti-corruption and promoting protests. Nearly 800,000 users followed the accounts, which targeted people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The pages and accounts spent $135,000 on Facebook ads between October 2013 and this month, and created roughly 190 events. Facebook could not confirm whether or not any gatherings actually occurred.
Facebook said it has been in contact with US law enforcement, the US Congress, other technology companies, and policymakers in impacted countries about the accounts.

The accounts often acted as an amplifier for Sputnik’s content as well as content from its parent organization Rossiya Segodnya, while never mentioning any tie to the media outlets, according to an analysis by the Atlantic Council, based on information Facebook provided ahead of its Thursday announcement.

“The pages represented a systematic, covert attempt to improve Rossiya Segodnya’s online audience across more than a dozen countries. Some had little impact, but others racked up tens of thousands of followers. Sputnik was the main beneficiary, as it was often the only source the Facebook pages amplified,” The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab concluded.

The company also revealed on Thursday that, as the result of a tip from American law enforcement, it had deleted a separate batch of 107 Facebook troll pages, groups, and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram troll accounts, all with Russian origins, but operated in Ukraine.

Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, noted in a postthat the accounts exhibited “behavior that shared characteristics with previous Internet Research Agency activity.” (The IRA is a Russian government online disinformation bureau.)

The over 400 pages and accounts removed on Thursday are the first set of accounts originating from Russia Facebook has deleted since 2017. The company announced in September 2017 that it had discovered accounts linked to the IRA that aimed to influence discourse about American social issues and politics around the time of the 2016 presidential election.

It took them nearly 18 months to remove the Russian propaganda accounts after discovering them, so don't tell me the problem is just Russia and not the greed of Facebook.

The Un-State of the Disunion

Apparently in the era of Trump, the traditional invitation by the Speaker of the House to the President to give the State of the Union address is no longer a sure thing.

House Democrats on Wednesday were making plans to undermine President Trump at his Jan. 29 State of the Union address. Just past 8:30 a.m., the leadership’s communications arm sent an email to lawmakers urging them to bring furloughed federal workers or other “message-related” guests to the nationally televised event.

Unknown to most of her caucus, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had decided on a more confrontational approach.

Addressing a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, the speaker read a letter she had just sent to Trump asking him to either postpone the speech until the federal government reopens or deliver the text in writing, citing security concerns.

Surprised Democratic lawmakers cheered their leader’s rationale: If the government stays shut down, Pelosi would deprive Trump of the spotlight he craves. To a president especially sensitive to acts of disrespect — and one with a hearty appetite for pomp and circumstance — the so-called unvitation was not merely a ­power play. It was a calculated personal slight.

In the two weeks since she reclaimed the speaker’s gavel, Pelosi has moved aggressively to leverage her decades of congressional experience to needle, belittle and undercut Trump with swipes at his competence and even his masculinity.

The two leaders are locked in a standoff over a partial government shutdown instigated by Trump’s demand that U.S. taxpayers fund a portion of his promised border wall. Both Trump and Pelosi are gambling that the other will bear the brunt of the blame as the economic impact worsens, with the shutdown now dragging on for nearly a month.

But Pelosi’s challenge to Trump also comes with a degree of risk, for her and for Democrats. The more she becomes the face of Trump’s opposition, the more Republicans will probably use her unpopularity nationally to label vulnerable House Democrats as Pelosi clones — a potentially potent line of attack against sitting lawmakers who cast votes in lock-step with party leaders.

Still, with a self-declared mandate to provide a check on the president’s power, Pelosi is helping to keep Democrats largely united while energizing liberals who have yearned for a leader to challenge Trump directly. 

This is what America elected Democrats to be a check on, and Nancy Pelosi is not shy at all about using the powers granted to her by the US Constitution to act as that check and that balance on Trump.  Good for her.

Besides, I have no intention of watching any Trump State of the Union, or any Trump speech, unless he's resigning.   Still, no doubt that Trump will be furious, and that's exactly what he deserves.

StupidiNews!

• A Georgia man was arrested in connection with a planned attack on the White House using an anti-tank launcher and explosives, federl agents arrested the man after being tipped off by a neighbor.
• Donald Trump says he's considering new auto tariffs on European autos sold in the US, in an effort to get EU negotiators to the table for a new trade deal.
• UK Prime Minister Theresa May has survived a no-confidence vote, 326-306 in Parliament, but there still doesn't appear to be any way forward on Brexit.
• A top North Korean official will meet with Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday, ahead of a possible new summit announcement between Pyongyang and Washington.
• As the rift between China and the US grows, the Department of Justice is considering indicting Chinese tech giant Huawei for theft of trade secrets.

Last Call For Shaving The World, One Guy At A Time

Gillette, the grooming company we all grew up with and their tagline, "The Best A Man Can Get", reexamined what that phrase really means in the Trump Era with this commercial.

Needless to say, the #NotAllMen folks went absolutely insane with rage over it this week.

Today, the battle for men’s souls reached an extraordinary new frontier: men’s shaving brands. On Tuesday, Gillette released an ad that takes stock of a handful of cultural issues that have always lingered just beneath the surface but became full-blown talking points over the past year: sexual harassment, bullying, and a blanket excusal of this behavior because “boys will be boys.”

Most shaving ads feature gravelly voiced men booming out phrases like Mach 3 or titanium razors, while the camera zooms in on blades gliding over lathered faces. Gillette’s new ad asks viewers to think a little bit harder about its tagline A Best a Man Can Get. Really, what it asks for isn’t much: basic human decency. The ad states explicitly, “We believe in the best in men.” There are clips of Terry Crews, a sexual assault survivor, testifying in front of Congress that men need to hold other men accountable. The commercial shows men doing just that: holding off a pack of bullies, and stopping another guy from harassing a woman.

But it's 2019, so here’s an incredibly exhausting sentence to write: the commercial sparked a wave of anger among conservatives and men’s rights activists that crested with a tweet from British TV personality and professional blowhard Piers Morgan that reads, “Let's be clear: @gillette now wants every man to take one of their razors & cut off his testicles.” (Gillette: need a new tagline?)

Morgan is the most public face of a widespread backlash. On Youtube, the commerical’s already been downvoted almost 330,000 times, versus a relatively meager 74,000 upvotes. A Voice for Men, a "male supremacy" organization that’s classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, urged its supporters to boycott the grooming brand. Another shaving product purveyor attempted to step into the void by declaring it “understand[s] how men work and don’t try to change them into women.” Again, not exactly an accurate reading of the commercial.

“We expected debate,” Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette’s North America brand director, told CNN, although, we’re not sure that boycotts from hate groups is exactly what Bhalla had in mind. Bhalla specifically says that “the ad is not about toxic masculinity. It is about men taking more action every day to set the best example for the next generation."

Frankly, men need to do better, so that the boys of today will be better men tomorrow.  What a horrific concept, right?  And yet the other side's argument is that "Men will continue to be terrible until women give them the respect and deference they deserve just for being men" and that can no longer fly in 2019, guys.

It never could.  "We need to celebrate masculine values like strength, honor, duty, and self-reliance but let's only practice that when it's convenient."

It's sad.  Be the best a man can get, eh?

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller certainly didn't take the holidays off, he's been hard at work and new court filings this week show that former Trump Campaign chair Paul Manafort and his Russian NRA contact Konstatin Kilimnik are definitely the keys to the kingdom.

Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III have intensively scrutinized Paul Manafort’s activities after President Trump’s election — including after Manafort was criminally charged — and indicated they have extensive details not yet made public about Manafort’s interactions with former Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik and others, a Tuesday court filing showed.

Although heavily redacted, the documents state that Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, claimed he was trying to get people appointed in the new presidential administration. The filing also states that in another Justice Department investigation, Manafort provided information that appears related to an event while he was with the campaign in August 2016.

Prosecutors also showed keen interest in a $125,000 payment made in June 2017 that Manafort characterized in three ways that were contradicted, the filing says, by his tax filings and exchanges with his tax preparer.

Prosecutors filed a 31-page affidavit from an FBI agent, plus another 406 nearly fully blacked-out exhibits, after a federal judge last week ordered them to lay out the “factual and evidentiary basis” for their claims that Manafort lied repeatedly after his plea deal and has breached his cooperation agreement.

The filing in federal court in Washington asserts that Manafort shifted answers to questions posed by the FBI and Mueller probe investigators, prompting his lawyers to pull him aside on several occasions to review statements.

In one interview with investigators and prosecutors in October 2018, the filing states, Manafort’s attorneys requested a break to speak with Manafort after he contradicted his prior statement — even after his lawyers had shown him a typewritten summary of it.

The statement came in a separate criminal investigation by a U.S. attorney outside the District and described events around an incident that Manafort said occurred before he left the Trump campaign on Aug. 19, 2016, according to information in the new filing.

Manafort’s attorneys have previously said that any misstatements on his part after his plea agreement were unintentional.

Manafort, 69, pleaded guilty in September in federal court in Washington to charges that he conspired to cheat the Internal Revenue Service, violate foreign-lobbying laws and tamper with witnesses. Separately, a jury in federal court in Virginia convicted Manafort in August of bank and tax fraud.

To recap, Mueller knows everything.  Manafort lied and continued to lie about most of it, and Mueller knew he was lying to the point where the plea deal fell apart and Manafort most likely will never breathe air as a free man again.

Meanwhile Manafort's relationship with Russian fixer Kilimnik, who was working with convicted spy Maria Butina on using the NRA as a Russian slush fund to fund the GOP, has been painstakingly detailed by Mueller and the evidence presented to a grand jury and a federal judge.

The signals are unmistakable at this point.  The Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents during and after the 2016 campaign.  Mueller knows it all.  And when it drops, America will never be the same.

A Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

This time it's Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who announced her candidacy last night on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, an outspoken advocate for women’s causes and electing more women to office, is herself entering the 2020 race for the White House, becoming the latest candidate to join what is expected to be a crowded Democratic primary to take on President Trump.

In an appearance Tuesday on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Ms. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said she was forming an exploratory committee to raise money and travel the country for her run. She is scheduled to start campaigning within days, with plans to spend the weekend in Iowa.

“I’m going to run for president of the United States because as a young mom I am going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own,’’ she said.

Ms. Gillibrand, 52, has emerged as one of the most forceful critics of the Trump administration in the last two years. She has voted against nearly every significant nominee Mr. Trump has put forward, and rallied opposition to his congressional agenda. In the last two months, as she publicly considered a campaign, she has spoken repeatedly about the need to restore the “moral compass” of the nation.

But Ms. Gillibrand, a former corporate lawyer, has been criticized by opponents as a politician without a firm ideological bearing of her own, having transformed from a pro-gun, conservative upstate congresswoman with deep ties to Wall Street financiers to a crusading liberal who rails against guns and refuses corporate political action committee money.

Ms. Gillibrand’s 2020 announcement was widely expected after weeks of presidential buildup, in which she secured office space for a headquarters in Troy, N.Y., and expanded her political staff.

Gillibrand is already being tarred with the same exact brush Clinton was in 2016: a New York senator who was "too close" to Wall Street.  It'll be very interesting to see if New Jersey's Cory Booker gets that same treatment, or if that's only reserved for Empire State women.

We've seen Gillibrand's platform change as well, from an upstate NY Blue Dog with a solid rating from the NRA to where she is now on firearms, a complete 180, once she became Senator.  She's going to have to explain that constantly and people are going to attack her for it.

Again, any Democrat who wins the primaries I will vote for to depose Trump.  I am moderately okay with Gillibrand in the mix, we'll see what she has to bring.

StupidiNews!

• The Des Moines Register is one of several voices in Iowa calling for the resignation of GOP Rep. Steve King after his racist comments over the weekend.
• Trump Attorney General nominee WIlliam Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearings Tuesday that he believes reporters can be jailed for "hurting the country".
• Accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman reportedly paid former Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto a $100 million bribe, according to testimony in Guzman's trial.
• Donald Trump is ordering tens of thousands of federal employees to report to work with no pay as government employee unions sue the White House for back pay and lost benefits.
• Streaming giant Netflix is raising prices for new users in 2019 at the company continues an aggressive content spending plan to compete with new services from Disney and AT&T.

Last Call For May Or May Not, Con't

The government of UK Prime Minister Theresa May was just handed a crippling loss on Brexit, and at this point the writing is on the wall for how long May stays in office.

Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal has been rejected by 230 votes - the largest defeat for a sitting government in history.

MPs voted by 432 votes to 202 to reject the deal, which sets out the terms of Britain's exit from the EU on 29 March.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has now tabled a vote of no confidence in the government, which could trigger a general election.

The confidence vote is expected to be held at about 1900 GMT on Wednesday.

The defeat is a huge blow for Mrs May, who has spent more than two years hammering out a deal with the EU.

The plan was aimed at bringing about an orderly departure from the EU on 29 March, and setting up a 21-month transition period to negotiate a free trade deal.

The vote was originally due to take place in December, but Mrs May delayed it to try and win the support of more MPs.

The UK is still on course to leave on 29 March but the defeat throws the manner of that departure - and the timing of it - into further doubt.

MPs who want either a further referendum, a softer version of the Brexit proposed by Mrs May, to stop Brexit altogether or to leave without a deal, will ramp up their efforts to get what they want, as a weakened PM offered to listen to their arguments.

At this point I don't see how May survives the next couple of weeks, let alone the year.  Corbyn's no-confidence vote may very well pass, and then it all goes into the scrap heap.  It's chaos on both sides of the pond right now, and it doesn't look like a solution is coming anytime soon.

Coming To A Con Census

The Trump regime's goal is long-term structural damage to the Obama coalition, and part of that is robbing traditionally large-population blue states of political power.  One method the Trump White House was counting on is by attaching a citizenship question on the 2020 Census for two reasons, one, giving knowingly false information on a census form is a crime, and two, to cause a chilling response by undocumented immigrants and their families, who under current law are still counted by the Census, but would reveal their status to the Trump regime for almost certain targeting by ICE.

The legal fight over this was always headed for the Supreme Court, but along the way we were going to see whether or not the Trump regime would be blocked by lower federal courts in the the meantime as they prepared the 2020 Census questionnaire.  Today we got the first real answer to that question, and it was a resounding yes.

A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

In the first major ruling on the controversial question, Judge Jesse M. Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey “without curing the legal defects” identified in his opinion.
Plaintiffs hailed the decision. “This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU, which was a plaintiff in the case.

The Trump administration had tried several times to stop the case from going forward, including requests to the Supreme Court; the adminstration is likely to appeal Furman’s decision in the high court.

Plaintiffs in the trial include 18 states and several cities and jurisdictions, along with civil rights groups. The trial addressed two of seven lawsuits that arose from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s March decision to add the question. Two more trials over the questions are underway or about to begin.

Opponents of the question say it will reduce response rates in immigrant communities and make the constitutionally mandated decennial survey more costly and less accurate. The government had said the question was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act.

Justice Department spokesperson Kelly Laco, said, “We are disappointed and are still reviewing the ruling,” and added that the government is “legally entitled to include the question on the census.”

A key question in the leadup to the trial was where the request for the question had originated. Ross testified before Congress that it came from the Justice Department, but documents released in the case indicated that he had asked the Justice Department to make the request after consulting with White House adviser Steve Bannon and others.

Census experts applauded Furman’s ruling. “The Administration decided to play fast and loose with the census and received a strong, direct rebuke from the federal courts,” said Thomas Wolf, counsel with the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. “Today’s ruling puts the wind at the backs of the challengers, not just in this case, but in all of the cases challenging the citizenship question around the country.”

Those include a trial currently underway in California and another due to begin next Tuesday in Maryland, both of which the administration has sought, unsuccessfully, to stop.

So we'll see where this goes.  Again, this was always headed for the Roberts Court and sooner rather than later, given the import, but it's good to see that the case appears to be headed in the right direction for now.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King's overt white supremacy is becoming too much for the rest of the Republican party to pretend to not be the party of, so plenty of kabuki theater happened on Monday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell became the highest-ranking Republican to speak out against Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) following his racially charged comments, saying that there is ‘no place in the Republican Party, the Congress or the country for an ideology of racial supremacy of any kind.”

McConnell made his statement Monday as three House Democrats, including the No. 3 Democratic leader, announced plans to try to sanction King for his statements.

“I have no tolerance for such positions and those who espouse these views are not supporters of American ideals and freedoms,” McConnell said in a written statement to The Washington Post. “Rep. King’s statements are unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position. If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work.”

Three House Democrats said they would introduce measures disapproving of King, an escalation in the response to King’s frequent controversies.

Reps. Bobby L. Rush (Ill.) and Tim Ryan (Ohio) said the House should censure King and separately filed resolutions to do so. Censure is a rarely invoked punishment for conduct bringing dishonor on the House, the most serious punishment that can be levied on one of its members short of expulsion.

And House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) said he would introduce a measure less serious than censure but one that would strongly reproach King.

Clyburn said he was moved to act in part by Tuesday’s 90th anniversary of the birth of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I call this a tale of two Kings,” he said, adding, “We’ve got to break our silence on these kinds of things.”

It's hysterical to see King get treated the way Donald Trump never would be, when Trump has on repeated occasions said and done far worse, but that's how this game is played.  Donald Trump can be as racist as he wants to because he's Donald Trump.  Everyone else in the GOP is supposed to be covering for him, and if Steve King lets the cat out of the bag that the whole party is racist like this, the plan falls apart.

Besides, I'm pretty sure nobody in the GOP actually likes Steve King anyway, he's kind of an asshole.

House Republican leaders removed Representative Steve King of Iowa from the Judiciary and Agriculture Committees on Monday night as the party officials scrambled to appear tough on racism and contain damage from comments Mr. King made to The New York Times questioning why white supremacy is considered offensive.

The punishment came on a day when Mr. King’s own party leadership moved against him, with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, suggesting Mr. King find “another line of work” and Senator Mitt Romney saying he should quit. In an attempt to be proactive, the House Republicans stripped him of his committee seats in the face of multiple Democratic resolutions to censure Mr. King that are being introduced this week.

Those measures will force Republicans to take a stand on whether to go along with the House Democratic majority’s attempt to publicly reprimand one of their own.

Speaking to reporters on Monday night after the congressional Republicans acted, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the party leader in the House, said he was not ruling out supporting a censure or reprimand resolution against Mr. King. He said the Republicans are not removing Mr. King from the G.O.P. House conference itself so he can still attend its party meetings.

“I think voters have that decision to make. But I think we spoke loud and clear that we will not tolerate this in the Republican Party,” said Mr. McCarthy, who conferred privately with Mr. King for an hour on Monday afternoon.

Wait until they find out Donald Trump is a racist, man.

StupidiNews!

• Pawel Adamowicz, the Mayor of Gdansk, Poland, died Monday after being stabbed on Sunday while on stage at a charity event, the assailant is in custody.
• A second federal judge has ruled against the Trump regime's rule to allow employers to opt out of Obamacare-era contraception coverage, this second ruling is a nationwide injunction.
• The Pentagon says the US military will remain in a support role along the US-Mexico border until at least September 30, currently about 2300 troops are assigned to the border area.
• The FDA says it will restart high-risk food inspections as early as today, FDA inspectors continue to work without pay or benefits as the government remains shut down.
• A new German study finds that the "Mona Lisa effect", a painting's eyes seemingly following the viewer, does exist in the art world, just not in the Mona Lisa itself.

Last Call For Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

The longest partial government shutdown in American history continues, and Trump has now irrevocably lost the fight.

By a wide margin, more Americans blame President Trump and Republicans in Congress than congressional Democrats for the now record-breaking government shutdown, and most reject the president’s assertion that there is an illegal-immigration crisis on the southern border, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Support for building a wall on the border, which is the principal sticking point in the stalemate between the president and Democrats, has increased over the past year. Today, 42 percent say they support a wall, up from 34 percent last January. A slight majority of Americans (54 percent) oppose the idea, down from 63 percent a year ago.

The increase in support is sharpest among Republicans, whose backing for Trump’s long-standing campaign promise jumped 16 points in the past year, from 71 percent to 87 percent. Not only has GOP support increased, it has also hardened. Today, 70 percent of Republicans say they strongly support the wall, an increase of 12 points since January 2018.

Concerning the allocation of blame, 53 percent say Trump and the Republicans are mainly at fault, and 29 percent blame the Democrats in Congress. Thirteen percent say both sides bear equal responsibility for the shutdown. That is identical to the end of the 16-day shutdown in 2013, when 29 percent blamed then-President Barack Obama and 53 percent put the responsibility on congressional Republicans.

A predictable partisan divide shapes the blame game, with 85 percent of Democrats citing Trump and Republicans as the cause and 68 percent of Republicans pointing the finger at congressional Democrats. Independents fix the blame squarely on the president and his party rather than on the Democrats, by 53 percent to 23 percent. Women blame Trump and Republicans by a margin of 35 points, and men blame the president and the GOP by 13 points.

More Republicans want that wall, yes, but more of them are willing to say it isn't worth it to shut down the government, and definitely more of them are blaming Trump.  But the biggest problem for Trump is this:

Trump has threatened repeatedly to declare a national emergency to break the stalemate and to order the start of construction of a wall, although on Friday, he retreated from his previously aggressive rhetoric by noting that he is not ready to take such a step now.

The president faces sizable opposition from the public were he to do so. By more than 2-1 (66 percent to 31 percent), Americans say they oppose invoking an emergency to build a border wall. The poll finds 51 percent say they strongly oppose such a declaration. However, two-thirds of Republicans would support the president’s decision to use those powers.

Yeah, again, Republicans are okay with a dictator as long as he's their man, but a third of Republicans aren't okay with that, and everyone else absolutely hates it.

But let's not forget that Republicans are perfectly fine with a long shutdown.

An unnamed “senior official in the Trump administration” wrote in an anonymous Daily Caller op-ed Monday that the record-breaking 24-day partial government shutdown “is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.”

While it’s unclear how “senior” this administration official is — many senior Trump officials are still being paid, while the author claims to be “one of the senior officials working without a paycheck” — the op-ed could offer a window into another goal of this shutdown, in addition to using federal workers’ paychecks as leverage in an attempt to extract border wall funds from Congress: starving the government.

The op-ed’s author wrote that “many federal agencies are now operating more effectively from the top down on a fraction of their workforce” and that “we do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them.”

Roughly 800,000 federal employees are currently going without pay, and millions of Americans who rely on the agencies those employees usually run — everything from the Food and Drug Administration to the Department of the Interior to the Department of Homeland Security — are going without services, except for those provided by workers deemed essential to national security or public safety.

“Now that we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda,” the official wrote, adding in conclusion: “Wasteful government agencies are fighting for relevance but they will lose. Now is the time to deliver historic change by cutting them down forever.”

The cruelty is the point.

The problem is, some of the people suffering are Trump voters, and they're finally starting to notice.  But keep in mind that shutting the government down and then never restarting it was the goal all along.

The Death Of Incrementalism

Ed Luce at the Financial Times argues that Democrats should be grateful to Trump, because he's given the Left the green light for radical, generational change in 2020.

Listen carefully and you can hear the retreat of the Democratic establishment. Incrementalism served its purpose: it made Democrats electable again and safe for Wall Street. But it has had its day. The generation of Democrats that downplayed concerns about inequality and embraced global markets is being replaced by a far bolder political voice. No matter who takes the Democratic nomination in 2020, they will speak for a radicalised party in quest of the new New Deal. 

They owe a debt of gratitude to Donald Trump. However much resurgent liberals detest America’s 45th president, they can thank him for sweeping away the mindset of systematic caution that has mesmerised Democratic leaders for a generation. 

It began with Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in the late 1980s. It ended in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Mr Trump. In between it spanned Al Gore, the losing 2000 nominee, John Kerry, who lost in 2004, and Barack Obama, whose eight-year legacy is now being destroyed by Mr Trump. 

Mr Trump has served both as a call to arms and as an example of how establishments can be defeated. On the first, Mr Trump has demolished whatever case remained for the idea that Democrats must forever ready themselves for a promised land of bipartisan amity. In practice, many thought that stance had already been discredited by Newt Gingrich, the take-no-prisoners Republican Speaker of the House during the Clinton years. Others thought the wrecking ball the Tea Party took to Mr Obama’s fiscal plans had finally settled the argument. 

No matter how much Democrats tacked to the centre, the rewards for this virtue never came. Republicans simply moved further to the right. Democratic presidents, such as Mr Clinton, created budget surpluses. Republicans, such as George W Bush, duly spent them on tax cuts. Inequality is far worse today than in 1992, even though Democrats held the White House for more than half that time. 

Median incomes, meanwhile, have barely shifted. The initial anger over the 2008 financial crash was captured by the Tea Party. It is nevertheless hard to believe the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders would have nearly defeated Mrs Clinton had she not developed such close financial ties to Wall Street. 

But it was Mr Trump who changed the weather. He showed that you could bamboozle a hostile establishment and still win an election. Then he switched horses and pursued an aggressive Republican agenda. From tax cuts and deregulation to gun rights and anti-abortion judges, Mr Trump now has Republican lawmakers eating out of his hand. Those who still believed it would be possible to work across the aisle — and who pined for the days of Rockefeller Republicans — were robbed of any remaining force. Mr Trump has done a service for the American left. 

Reality has also lent it a helping hand. Regardless of your ideology, today’s numbers paint a stark picture. Ten years into the US recovery, median household incomes are, in real terms, still much what they were they were in 1999. The top one per cent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent. America’s average life expectancy has started to decline. 

Mr Trump has made inequality worse. But he is not its author. The numbers were almost as bleak at the end of Mr Obama’s two terms. So tinkering no longer holds much appeal. 

Much of the focus is on who should be the Democratic nominee to challenge Mr Trump. That obviously matters. But the significant point is that the party’s centre of gravity has shifted. Whoever the challenger turns out to be, whether Joe Biden, the former vice-president, Elizabeth Warren, the economic populist, Beto O’Rourke, the sunny optimist, or Mr Sanders, their platform will have to reflect that shift. Stances such as “Medicare for all”, a “Green New Deal”, and public election financing will have to be part of the package. So too will higher taxes.

Now I'd be a lot more receptive to this particular argument if people like Luce weren't making it before Trump was elected, and making that argument to the point where they were actively telling us that it would be better for all of us if Clinton lost in 2016, and then worked to help make that happen.

It's people who look like me who get sacrificed on this altar, despite being the among the most loyal Democratic voters.  We're told that a radical new paradigm is needed and that it's coming, but first a lot of "dead wood" has to be burned away, and that always seems to include those of us who are the most vulnerable.

I'm not in a very forgiving mood for folks with Luce's viewpoint.  The reality is that Clinton lost and Trump won, but it doesn't make it right in hindsight, and pretending that this was the plan all along only makes my blood boil further.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

And right out of the gate this morning we have Betsy Woodruff at The Daily Beast with the story that Russian spy Maria Butina's adventures with the NRA were indeed approved by the Kremlin.

The Kremlin has long denied that it had anything to do with the infiltration of the NRA and the broader American conservative movement. A U.S. intelligence report reviewed by The Daily Beast tells a different story.

Alexander Torshin, the Russian central bank official who spent years aggressively courting NRA leaders, briefed the Kremlin on his efforts and recommended they participate, according to the report. Its existence and contents have not previously been reported.

While there has been speculation that Torshin and his protegée, Maria Butina, had the Kremlin’s blessing to woo the NRA—and federal prosecutors have vaguely asserted that she acted “on behalf of the Russian federation”—no one in the White House or the U.S. intelligence community has publicly stated as much. Senior Russian government officials, for their part, have strenuously distanced themselves from Butina’s courtship of the NRA, which she did at Torshin’s direction.

The report, on the other hand, notes that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was fine with Torshin’s courtship of the NRA because the relationships would be valuable if a Republican won the White House in 2016.

“This reporting indicates that Alexander Torshin was working with the blessing of the Kremlin, at a minimum,” one European intelligence official told The Daily Beast. The official added that this reporting is consistent with his group’s understanding of how the Kremlin operates.

“The NRA is quite powerful, so when you look to influence U.S. politics, you should consider them as a convenient target,” the official added.

The report, published last year, is based on conversations that happened in 2015, before NRA leaders visited Moscow on a trip arranged by Torshin and Butina. The document does not specifically name the NRA or the Republican Party, but its context makes clear it is discussing those two American organizations. (American intelligence reports generally do not name U.S. persons or organizations for privacy and legal reasons.)

According to the report, Torshin suggested that Russian officials use the NRA to reach out to politically active Americans. Torshin, then a deputy governor at Russia’s central bank, noted the gun rights group’s influence in U.S. politics. He told the Kremlin about his contacts in the NRA, including conversations and meetings in the United States, and suggested that Kremlin officials scrutinize how some people affiliated with the group viewed relations between the U.S. and Russia.

The report notes that Russian officials discussed having their embassy in Washington participate in the work of courting the NRA. Kremlin officials also discussed preparations for NRA members’ upcoming trip to Moscow. Torshin recommended that someone from President Vladimir Putin’s executive office, meaning the group of people who support his day-to-day activities, meet with the group.

“My assessment of what was happening with Torshin and Butina and the NRA was that the Russians decided, a good period of time before 2016, to run an influence operation here in the U.S. with a couple of different goals,” said Steve Hall, who spent 30 years in the CIA and oversaw its Russia operations. “The obvious goal was the one the intelligence community assessed back in 2016, which was to help Donald Trump win and increase the likelihood that Hillary Clinton would lose. In addition, they wanted to create as much chaos in our democracy as possible.”

And guess what?  It worked.

It worked better than anyone in the Kremlin could have possibly dreamed.  Moscow wants the US drowning in chaos so that Putin can make his moves internationally, and right now America is six feet under and sinking.

Putin couldn't be happier.  And If Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein is right, then the Mueller report details all of this and more.

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein has said that he’s been told that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report will show how President Donald Trump helped Russia “destabilize the United States.”

Bernstein, who is renowned for his coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of former President Richard Nixon, appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday to discuss two bombshell reports released this weekend, one from The New York Times and one from The Washington Post, which revealed new details about whether or not Trump and his aides have colluded with Russia.

The Post reported that Trump has gone to “extraordinary lengths” to conceal direct conversations he has had with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Times article revealed that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Trump after he fired former bureau director James Comey in 2017, suspecting the president could be working on behalf of Russia. Trump has angrily denied allegations that he worked with Russia and has regularly attacked the media for reporting on the investigation. But Bernstein slammed Trump’s dismissal of the probe.

“This is about the most serious counterintelligence people we have in the U.S. government saying, ‘Oh, my God, the president’s words and actions lead us to conclude that somehow he has become a witting, unwitting, or half-witting pawn, certainly in some regards, to Vladimir Putin,'” Bernstein explained during his appearance on Reliable Sources .

“From a point of view of strength… rather, he has done what appears to be Putin’s goals. He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election, no matter whether it was purposeful or not,” the journalist added. He then explained that he knew from his own high-level sources that Mueller’s report would discuss this assessment.

“And that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report, I’m told, is to be about,” he said. “We know there has been collusion by [former national security adviser Michael] Flynn. We know there has been collusion of some sort by [Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul] Manafort. The question is, yes, what did the president know and when did he know it?”

Stay tuned, folks.  This is where things now become the stuff of American historical legend. Trump knows he has lost the endgame, now the only question is how much damage he does to America and the world before he goes out.