Last Call For Out Of Con Text

The big story in Cincinnati politics this week is the hammer that Hamilton County judge Robert Ruhlman dropped on Cincinnati's City Council on Thursday.  Five City Council members pled to violations of the state's open meetings law by discussing the fate of City Manager Harry Black via text messages last year, and in the hearing today to have those pleas heard, Judge Ruhlman called on all five to immediately resign from City Council instead.

A Hamilton County judge gave a tongue-lashing Thursday to five Cincinnati City Council members who broke the law by secretly conducting public business via text messages.

Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman told the five they violated the trust of voters and should immediately resign from office.

"You essentially lied to the people of this city," Ruehlman said. "The trust is gone. It's going to take a long time to get that trust back."

The five council members – Wendell Young, P.G. Sittenfeld, Chris Seelbach, Tamaya Dennard and Greg Landsman – all admitted as part of a settlement agreement that they broke Ohio open meetings law by secretly discussing public business in a string of group text messages.

The spectacle of five council members appearing before a judge to acknowledge wrongdoing is unprecedented in modern Cincinnati politics and threatens to unleash more chaos at City Hall, where personal and professional rivalries have interfered with council’s work for more than a year.

None of the five council members spoke in court Thursday, but the judge did plenty of talking. He said their actions betrayed the ideals of those who created a city government that's supposed to serve the public, not elected officials.

"I really believe the five City Council members should resign," Ruehlman said. "No city voter should ever vote for them again."

Outside the courtroom after the hearing, Landsman said he has no plans to step down. "You have to take responsibility for your actions," he said, referring to the texts. "I've said they were a mistake from the beginning."

Sittenfeld said in a statement the group text messages were "an honest mistake" that won't be repeated. But he complained the error has been blown out of proportion by political opponents, including the law firm and the conservative, anti-tax group that have led the charge against the five Democratic council members.

"The important business of the city has been hijacked by politically motivated actions of a local right-wing group and their affiliated law firm, whose goals, put simply, are to cause chaos and enrich themselves," Sittenfeld said.

Seelbach attacked Ruehlman, a Republican, on Twitter, referring to appeals court decisions that went against the judge and describing him as the "most overturned judge in southwest Ohio."

Mark Miller, who filed the lawsuit that brought the text messages to light, said Ruehlman was right to criticize the five council members. "This is very real," Miller said. "How are we going to trust these guys after they purposely did business out of public view?"

One of the five, Young, will be back in court in a few weeks to face a possible contempt of court charge for deleting some of the texts at issue in the case.

Young's lawyer told Ruehlman on Thursday he believes his client deleted the texts before the judge ordered the council members to preserve all of their messages. If that's true, it may shield Young from a contempt of court violation.

And all of this comes from a series of really bad decisions the City Council has made involving Mayor John Cranley.  Cranley and the Council have been banging heads for years now, and both of them have made increasingly bad decisions over protecting their turf from the other, including both sides using former City Manager Harry Black as a pawn.

It's getting ridiculous now, and I'm hoping this will finally be the end of this clown show.

Meat The Press, Con't

Keep in mind that Donald Trump's designation of critical press being "enemies of the people" extends to foreign press and journalists as well who dare to criticize him.

Jessikka Aro, a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.

“It created a shitstorm of getting her unceremoniously kicked off the list,” said one U.S. diplomatic source familiar with the internal deliberations. “I think it was absolutely the wrong decision on so many levels,” the source said. The decision “had nothing to do with her work.”

The State Department spokesperson said in an email that Aro was “incorrectly notified” that she had been chosen for the award and that it was a mistake that resulted from “a lack of coordination in communications with candidates and our embassies.”

“We regret this error. We admire Ms. Aro’s achievements as a journalist, which were the basis of U.S. Embassy Helsinki’s nomination,” the spokesperson said.

Aro received a formal invitation to the award ceremony not from the embassy but from the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol on Feb. 12.

There is no indication that the decision to revoke the award came from the secretary of state or the White House. Officials who spoke to FP have suggested the decision came from lower-level State Department officials wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. The department spokesperson did not respond to questions on who made the decision or why.

To U.S. officials who spoke to FP, the incident underscores how skittish some officials—career and political alike—have become over government dealings with vocal critics of a notoriously thin-skinned president. The Trump administration has barred the hiring of prominent Republican foreign-policy experts who publicly denounced the president during the 2016 election season, including some who have since walked back their criticisms. As another example, Trump himself last year revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, who regularly castigates the president on Twitter, and threatened to follow suit with other former national security officials who did the same.

And that's where we are in America right now.  Our government apparatus is terrified of doing anything that might remotely appear to be critical of Trump, for fear they will be hunted down and destroyed by state media brownshirts.

This is not how a free country works, guys.

Trump Cards, Con't

Who knew that one of the most vindictive, nasty, greedy people on earth, one entirely motivated by petty vengeance, one who constantly and consistently referred to critics, journalists, activists, and political opposition as "enemies of the people" has an enemies list that he directed the government to watch?

Documents obtained by NBC 7 Investigates show the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.
At the end of 2018, roughly 5,000 immigrants from Central America made their way north through Mexico to the United States southern border. The story made international headlines.

As the migrant caravan reached the San Ysidro Port of Entry in south San Diego County, so did journalists, attorneys, and advocates who were there to work and witness the events unfolding.

But in the months that followed, journalists who covered the caravan, as well as those who offered assistance to caravan members, said they felt they had become targets of intense inspections and scrutiny by border officials.

One photojournalist said she was pulled into secondary inspections three times and asked questions about who she saw and photographed in Tijuana shelters. Another photojournalist said she spent 13 hours detained by Mexican authorities when she tried to cross the border into Mexico City. Eventually, she was denied entry into Mexico and sent back to the U.S.

These American photojournalists and attorneys said they suspected the U.S. government was monitoring them closely but until now, they couldn’t prove it.

Now, documents leaked to NBC 7 Investigates show their fears weren’t baseless. In fact, their own government had listed their names in a secret database of targets, where agents collected information on them. Some had alerts placed on their passports, keeping at least three photojournalists and an attorney from entering Mexico to work.

The documents were provided to NBC 7 by a Homeland Security source on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitive nature of what they were divulging.

The source said the documents or screenshots show a SharePoint application that was used by agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations and some agents from the San Diego sector of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

The intelligence gathering efforts were done under the umbrella of “Operation Secure Line,” the operation designated to monitor the migrant caravan, according to the source.

The documents list people who officials think should be targeted for screening at the border.

The individuals listed include ten journalists, seven of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, and 47 people from the U.S. and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles “unknown.” The target list includes advocates from organizations like Border Angels and Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

So, Trump's political critics were targeted by intelligence services and harassed by immigration services.

That is exactly how autocrats do things.

StupidiNews!

• Jeopardy host Alex Trebek has announced that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, the legendary emcee say he plans to beat the disease despite his low odds.
• Arizona GOP Sen. Martha McSally says she was sexually assaulted by a superior officer while serving as the US Air Force's first female combat pilot.
• Chinese tech giant Huawei has filed a countersuit against the Justice Department over accusations the company has stolen US corporate secrets for Beijing.
• Indian PM Narendra Modi is under heavy scrutiny as political opposition lawmakers are demanding proof that last week's raid against Pakistan actually killed 300 terrorists as he claimed.
• Democratic leaders have introduced legislation to restore the FCC's removal of net neutrality regulations from 2017, the bill is expected to pass the House but faces an uncertain Senate vote.

Last Call For Emergent Stupidity

Donald Trump is using his favorite minion, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, to let Republicans senators voting against his emergency declaration know that Trump will do everything in his power to destroy them.

President Donald Trump said Senate Republicans considering opposition to his emergency declaration on the border are "playing with fire," according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who met with the president on Tuesday morning.

The South Carolina Republican said his meeting with the president focused mostly on the border and the number of illegal crossings as Trump faces certain bipartisan defeat on his emergency declaration in the Senate later this month.

Four Republican senators have said they will join 47 Senate Democrats in voting to block the national emergency declaration, though Trump will veto it and Congress likely won't be able to muster the votes to override it. And though Trump is not waging a massive campaign to convert Republicans to his side, he's acutely aware of the politics of the issue.

"He says he thinks Republicans are playing with fire here because most Republicans, anyway, most people I hope, will see that the border is in a state of crisis," Graham said, adding that Trump believes GOP senators that defy him are likely to face a political backlash. "That's his observation, but he's not out there calling people out or anything."

Not yet, at least.  He saves his racist, childish nicknames for Democrats so far.  Looks like that is about to change.  Sarah Sanders made it a bit more clear what to expect.

“My message to that group is to do your job,” she said during an appearance on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.” “If you had done what you were elected to do on the front end, the president wouldn’t have to fix this problem on his own through a national emergency.”

Also, Trump wants to know where that infrastructure bill is, apparently.  So would I, especially since Mitch McConnell has no intention of bringing anything up for a vote.

Even though Trump will simply veto the measure however, it represents the first real crack in the GOP foundation, depending on how badly Trump loses this vote.  If it's only Rand Paul and a handful of "mavericks" like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, then it's not really notable.  But if it gets more than 55 votes or so, it'll be something.

Not much, certainly after three years, but something.

Another Hat Does NOT Land In The Ring

Notable this week: the number of people saying they will not enter the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination.  First up not running: former Obama AG Eric Holder.

Holder, who was President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, said he will instead continue his work to end gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing legislative districts for a political advantage.

“Though I will not run for president in 2020, I will continue to fight for the future of our country through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and its affiliates,” Holder said in an op-ed published Monday in The Washington Post.

“Our fight to end gerrymandering is about electing leaders who actually work for the interests of the people they are supposed to represent. I will do everything I can to ensure that the next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by members from gerrymandered districts,” Holder said.

Good for Holder.  He knows he'll be far more effective fighting GOP voter suppression in the courts than running for 2020, and I applaud his choice.  We'll never get the Voting Rights Act fixed that the Roberts Court gutted a few years ago without winning the Senate and keeping the House, and that means both fixing gerrymandering and keeping Democratic senators in the Senate, bringing us to our next non-contender, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.

In his announcement, Merkley said: "Over the last year I've weighed whether I can contribute more to the battle by running for Senate, or by running for president."

"I've reached the conclusion that the biggest impact I can have is here in the Senate."

The Oregon senator, who is considered a progressive, is a main proponent of banking regulation and has been one of the main forces behind the Wall Street reform bill.

Again, this is the right choice for Merkley.  He didn't have a shot at the White House, but he's been a bedrock-solid liberal senator where he's been needed.

We also need to get the 2020 field straightened out as soon as we can and get to work, and that means Hillary Clinton is making it clear that she will not run in 2020.  And yes, Clinton has said no several times before.

The pool of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates keeps expanding. But one name that won’t be in the mix is 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton.

The former secretary of state and US senator ruled out a 2020 White House bid in an interview with the local New York City television station News 12 on Monday.

“I’m not running,” she said, “but I’m going to keep working on and speaking and standing up for what I believe.”

Now watch, Clinton will say anything at all after this and it will be "Could Hillary be preparing a 2020 run?"

But finally, it means we have to put a stop to the dangerous, ego-driven third party nonsense of America's billionaires, and thankfully that now means Michael Bloomberg is out too as he laid out the case for why he won't run on Monday.

I know what it takes to run a winning campaign, and every day when I read the news, I grow more frustrated by the incompetence in the Oval Office. I know we can do better as a country. And I believe I would defeat Donald Trump in a general election. But I am clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.
There is another factor that has weighed heavily on my mind: the likelihood that our biggest national problems will worsen over the next two years. With a leader in the White House who refuses to bring the parties together, it will be nearly impossible for Congress to address the major challenges we face, including climate change, gun violence, the opioid crisis, failing public schools, and college affordability. All are likely to grow more severe, and many of the president’s executive actions will only compound matters.

I love our country too much to sit back and hope for the best as national problems get worse. But I also recognize that until 2021, and possibly longer, our only real hope for progress lies outside of Washington. And unlike most who are running or thinking of it, I’m fortunate enough to be in a position to devote the resources needed to bring people together and make a big difference.

That just leaves one big question mark as to entering the race..and his name is Joe Biden.

We need to hear from him ASAP...

No Vaccination For Stupidity

In the process of Kentucky's Republican senators causing arguably the most damage to the country from any single state between Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, let's not forget that Rand Paul is an anti-vaxxer dimwit on top of everything else.

During a Senate Health Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) criticized the idea that parents should be required to vaccinate their children and perpetuated the notion that vaccines themselves could cause harm.

The speech, which came during the opening moments of the hearing, was framed as an argument in favor of personal liberty, a posture that Paul routinely adopts. But in offering his thoughts, the Kentucky Republican furthered the argument that it is socially reasonable not to vaccinate your kids—a mindset that the scientific community says is already worsening communal health crises.

“As we contemplate forcing parents to choose this or that vaccine, I think it’s important to remember that force is not consistent with the American story, nor is force consistent with the liberty our forefathers sought when they came to America,” said Paul, reading off a paper. “I don't think you have to have one or the other, though. I'm not here to say don’t vaccinate your kids. If this hearing is for persuasion I’m all for the persuasion. I’ve vaccinated myself and I’ve vaccinated my kids. For myself and my children I believe that the benefits of vaccines greatly outweighing the risks, but I still don’t favor giving up on liberty for a false sense of security.”

Paul didn’t just make the case that vaccines should be voluntary, however. He used his platform at the hearing to affirmatively push the perception that they are potentially problematic.

“It is wrong to say that there are no risks to vaccines,” said Paul. “Even the government admits that children are sometimes injured by vaccines.”

To recap, Paul thinks the government compelling people to vaccinate children (something he himself has done for his own children because he understands the benefits to it both personally and for society as a whole) is worse than not vaccinating your kids.  He believes it is akin to martial law.

Paul told Alex Jones’s InfoWars that vaccines for illnesses such as swine flu have long histories of perilous side effects. “The first sort of thing you see with martial law is mandates, and they’re talking about making it mandatory,” Paul said. “I worry because the first flu vaccine we had in the 1970s, more people died from the vaccine than died from the swine flu.” (Paul is wrong: 450 people out of 45 million developed paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome.) “The whole problem is not necessarily good versus bad on vaccines; it’s whether it should be mandatory or the individual makes the decision. And sometimes you want to not be the first one to get a new procedure; you want to see if it works well before you choose.”

As I keep telling people, growing up I had to apologize to people for my senator at the time, NC's Jesse Helms.  Now I have to do it again for Rand and Mitch.

I'm tired of it.

 

StupidiNews!

• Just days after the Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam, North Korea is apparently rebuilding a closed long-range missile facility in violation of UN sanctions.
• FDA head Scott Gottlieb is resigning after two years, the departure calls into question the agency's stance against teen use of e-cigarettes and on speeding up generic drug approvals.
• The Cook Islands in the South Pacific wants to drop the country's colonial name in favor of a traditional Maori one, and it has gotten dozens of ideas from residents.
• After years in limbo, Japanese toy company Sanrio is licensing the movie rights to its popular Hello Kitty franchise to New Line Cinema and Warner Bros for a planned global feature film.
• Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to know why T-Mobile executives have spent nearly $200,000 at Trump Hotels since lobbying for approval of an announced merger with Sprint.

Last Call For No Time For A Garbage Pie, Con't

Kentucky is home to two major fast-food restaurant giants, Yum Brands, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell among others, and Papa John's Pizza.  Papa John's founder John Schnatter was booted as CEO last year after he got caught making racist remarks in public, the remarks also costing the company millions as they lost NFL sponsorship in the process.  For that, Schnatter was given the heave-ho and finally it looks like Schnatter will be settling with the company to exit the board as well.

The company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday it would co-operate with Schnatter to find a mutually acceptable independent director, who would not be affiliated with Schnatter or hedge fund investor Starboard Value LP, which owns a nearly 10 percent stake.

Schnatter, who owns about 30 percent of the company’s shares, would resign from the board if the independent director is appointed before the annual stockholder meeting slated in May, Papa John’s said.

The deal comes after the founder stepped down as chairman last summer, following reports he had used a racial slur on a media training conference call.

Schnatter has filed several lawsuits against the company in a bid to regain control. In January, he claimed a victory when a court ordered the board to give him some internal documents, including text messages related to his firing, which Papa John’s had until then refused to share.

As part of the agreement, Papa John’s has agreed to share with Schnatter all of the company’s records, giving him the option to sue if those documents revealed wrongdoing by the company, Schnatter said in a statement.

Schnatter, in return, has agreed to dismiss two lawsuits.

“(I am) thankful that I’ve been able to resolve these important issues, and that we can all focus on the Company’s business without the need for additional litigation,” Schnatter said.

The company also said it would remove an “acting in concert” provision of a “poison pill” adopted by the board to thwart previous takeover attempts by Schnatter, suggesting that the founder could engage with bidders that had expressed interest in speaking with him.

Still, the bad press has taken a toll on the pizza chain, which said last week North America same-restaurant sales fell 7.3 percent in 2018 and that sales would lag into the first half of 2019. 

They will continue to fall, would be my guess.  The damage to the brand has been done. Oh yeah, and the pizza is still garbage, I used to make it out of college.

Nothing Gets Done Because Of Mitch

Columbia law professor Tim Wu explains at the NY Times that in our society, things that vast super-majorities of Americans want will never become law because of lobbyists.

About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leaveattracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.

The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.

Some might counter that the thwarting of the popular will is not necessarily worrisome. For Congress to enact a proposal just because it is supported by a large majority, the argument goes, would amount to populism. The public, according to this way of thinking, is generally too ill informed to have its economic policy preferences taken seriously.

It is true that policymaking requires expertise. But I don’t think members of the public are demonstrating ignorance when they claim that drug prices are too high, taxes could be fairer, privacy laws are too weak and monopolies are too coddled.

Others remind us that the United States is a democratic republic, not a direct democracy, and that the Constitution was designed to modulate the extremes of majority rule. Majorities sometimes want things — like bans on books, or crackdowns on minorities — that they should not be given.

This is true. It is also true that a thoughtful process of democratic deliberation and compromise can yield better policy outcomes than merely following the majority’s will. But these considerations hardly describe our current situation. The invocation of constitutional principle has become an increasingly lame and embarrassing excuse. The framers of the Constitution, having experienced a popular revolution, were hardly recommending that the will of the majority be ignored. The Constitution sought to fine-tune majoritarian democracy, not to silence it.

No one single person has done more to silence that then my state's senior senator, Mitch McConnell.  He has personally made sure that legislation -- bipartisan legislation, mind you -- on all of these issues and more, have never passed the Senate and will never pass the Senate as long as he remains GOP leader.

I hope to help defeat him in 2020.

 

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Despite a massive conflict of interest and publicly saying multiple times that the Mueller investigation should be immediately shut down, Attorney General Bill Barr refuses to recuse himself from overseeing the Special Counsel's probe into Donald Trump.

Attorney General William Barr said he won’t recuse himself from being in charge of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, a major development affecting the fate of the politically charged probe into President Donald Trump.

“Following General Barr’s confirmation, senior career ethics officials advised that General Barr should not recuse himself from the special counsel’s investigation. Consistent with that advice, General Barr has decided not to recuse,” Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman.

Kupec confirmed that the office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who intends to leave the department in the coming weeks, continues to be the primary liaison between the special counsel and Barr.

The question of whether Barr, who was confirmed as attorney general last month, should oversee Mueller has become a political flashpoint.

Under Justice Department regulations, the attorney general has sole authority over Mueller and has the power to decide how much of Mueller’s final report is provided to Congress and made public. With Mueller believed to be close to completing his work, Democrats in Congress are vowing to force the release of his report and the evidence underlying it.

The president repeatedly attacked and ridiculed his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself based on his role in Trump’s campaign. Trump removed Sessions in November and named Matthew Whitaker acting attorney general.

And speaking of Matt Whitaker...

Whitaker, who had criticized Mueller’s investigation before joining the Justice Department, decided not to recuse himself from overseeing the investigation in December, even though a senior department ethics official said a formal review would likely recommend a recusal.

Whitaker never asked for a formal ethics recommendation. He and a small group of advisers decided there was no precedent for him to recuse under these circumstances. Whitaker left the Justice Department on March 2.

Wait, what?

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker left his position at the Justice Department on Saturday, a department spokeswoman said.

Whitaker had been serving as a senior counselor at the Justice Department since Attorney General William Barr was sworn in last month.

His next career move is unknown, but Whitaker has told friends that he will remain in Washington because there are "many opportunities here," according to sources who have spoken with him in recent days.

Nothing about either of these moves smells right.

StupidiNews!

• British doctors have used stem cell treatments to cure a patient of HIV, the second known such successful treatment case in the last ten years.
• Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul says as many as ten Senate Republicans could vote against Donald Trump's emergency declaration from last month, but the bill would still face a Trump veto.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau faces a growing revolt as a second cabinet minister has resigned over his reported pressure on his former Attorney General to drop charges against a construction company.
• Donald Trump reportedly plans to start trade wars with India and Turkey and wants to remove preferential trade treatment on more than $7 billion in combined imports from both countries.
• After Netflix film Roma won multiple Oscars on Sunday, an effort led by Steven Spielberg to disqualify streaming films from Academy Award contention is picking up steam.

Last Call For Both Sides Against The Lady

Everyone is coming down hard on Rep. Ilhan Omar, who pretty much gets accused of being anti-Semitic if she gets up in the morning.  Apparently House Democrats, or the powers that be around them, are sick of her and Nancy Pelosi is giving her a stern warning.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats will take floor action Wednesday in response to controversial remarks by Rep. Ilhan Omar about Israel, the second such rebuke of the freshman Democrat from party leaders in recent weeks.

Pelosi and other senior Democrats have drafted a resolution to address the controversy, which ballooned over the weekend following a public clash between Omar and senior Jewish lawmakers.

The resolution, which began circulating to members Monday night, comes after a backlash from top Democrats who accused Omar of anti-Semitism for referring to pro-Israel advocates’ “allegiance to a foreign country.”
The draft measure is four pages that largely details the history and recent rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S. but does not specifically name Omar, which had been an internal dispute among Democrats.

Instead, it condemns the "myth of dual loyalty," using the same language as top Democrats, like House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey, who have condemned Omar in recent days.

If the House moves ahead with the vote on Wednesday as planned, it would be an unprecedented public rebuke of Omar, who was sworn into office just over 60 days ago. Omar's office declined to comment about the Democratic resolution on Monday.

Yet these efforts by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders won't be enough for Republicans, who want a more serious punishment for Omar.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other senior Republicans are considering offering a censure motion against Omar, according to GOP sources. Republicans may also formally demand that Democrats strip Omar of her seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, a move that Pelosi and other senior Democrats won't take at this point.

It's the "at this point" that gives the game away.   House Republicans saw Steve King stripped of his committee assignments six weeks ago for his decades-long white supremacist views, since Omar is a Muslim woman Democrat who wears a hijab, she gets about 1% of that time before she becomes the trade-off that Democrats have to accept for Steve King, and for doing far less.

The Washington Post of course immediately yells BOTH SIDES DO IT not just once from Henry Olsen...

Omar is right that it is entirely legitimate to criticize U.S. policy towards Israel, but that’s not the issue here. The issue is her repeated suggestion that support for the current policy toward Israel is the product of Jewish money buying support and/or Jews who are more loyal to Israel’s interests than they are to those of the United States. Those claims are false and bigoted.

Republicans learned the hard way with King that where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. His repeatedly bigoted statements about immigrants were condemned but otherwise ignored by House Republican leadership. Clearly, they hoped that they were aberrations, or that the congressman would come to his senses and keep whatever bigotry he harbored in his heart to himself.

But that approach proved too lenient. Earlier this year, King finally made indisputably clear what many had long suspected during an interview with the New York Times, in which he said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” He had finally crossed the line, and Republicans — who could not expel him from their caucus under party rules — removed him from all committee assignments. (King has argued that the quote was mischaracterized.)

Democrats need to do the same thing with Omar. They might hope that she will straighten up, but as the GOP learned with King, bigotry can be a deep-rooted plant.

...but twice, with Dana "Dick Whisperer" Milbank.

What does Rep. Ilhan Omar have in common with President Trump? Sadly, more than you would think.

The Democratic freshman from Minnesota is perhaps the most prominent victim of the anti-Muslim hatred that Trump spews. The president appeared to be referring to Omar, a Somali American, when he told a conservative audience Saturday that certain members of Congress “hate our country.” She has also been the target of regular death threats and vile displays such as a poster at a GOP-sponsored event in the West Virginia Capitol on Friday linking her to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Yet Omar herself is doing something akin to what her disgusting opponents are doing to her: She has suggested that Americans who support Israel — by implication, Jews — are disloyal to the United States. At an event in Washington last week, Omar said, in the context of the pro-Israel lobby, that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The NY Times on the other hand asks the correct question, which is the exact point which has been lost in the screaming racist Islamophobia here: AIPAC does have a lot of influence in Congress in a way that almost no other lobbying organization has.

But the swirling debate not only around Ms. Omar but also around broader currents buffeting the Middle East has forced an uncomfortable re-examination of the questions that she has raised: Has Aipac — founded more than 50 years ago to “strengthen, protect and promote the U.S.-Israel relationship” — become too powerful? And with that power, has Aipac warped the policy debate over Israel so drastically that dissenting voices are not even allowed to be heard?

Those questions have grown louder with the controversy around Ms. Omar and will grow louder still in the run-up to this month’s annual Aipac policy conference — a three-day Washington confab that is expected to draw more than 18,000 people, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and leaders of both parties in Congress. To critics, Ms. Omar had a point, even if it was expressed with unfortunate glibness. Aipac’s money does have an outsize influence.

And let's not forget that Israeli PM Netanyahu has been indicted on criminal charges and is currently facing his own massive scandal involving bribery and corruption back home.

Omar is being made an example of, and it pisses me off that the Democratic leadership is playing along.

Another Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

Former two-term Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper announced his candidacy for the 2020 race this morning, to a resounding chorus of "huh?"

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Monday announced he is running for president, launching a 2020 campaign in which he will lean on his Western roots and decades of executive experience. 

He made the announcement in a video titled "Standing Tall," which tracks Hickenlooper's life from laid-off geologist, to owner of a brew pub, to mayor of Denver and to governor, and touts the Democrat's experience in a variety of fields as a key reason he should be the person to take on President Donald Trump in 2020. 

Hickenlooper casts the President as a "bully" in the more than two-minute video. 

"I'm running for president because we're facing a crisis that threatens everything we stand for," Hickenlooper says in the video as images of Trump play. "As a skinny kid with coke bottle glasses and a funny last name, I've stood up to my fair share of bullies." 

He adds: "I'm running for president because we need dreamers in Washington but we also need to get things done. I've proven again and again I can bring people together to produce the progressive change Washington has failed to deliver." 

Hickenlooper is the second governor to enter the crowded 2020 race after Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee announced a run last week. The field of Democrats is now at 14 candidates, including six senators. 

Hickenlooper will follow up the video with an appearance on Good Morning America on Monday. 

He will then headline a "hometown send-off" in Denver on Thursday at the city's Civic Center Park. Hickenlooper will be joined at the event by Colorado leaders throughout his time in the state, as well as Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, a band based in Denver. 

Hickenlooper will then make his first post-announcement trip to Iowa on March 8 and March 9. He will then cap his announcement week with an appearance at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. 

Hickenlooper has been teasing a 2020 run for months, telling CNN in January that he would bet on the fact that he was going to run for President. 

"I've been known to play a little cards," Hickenlooper said during the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. "Given that there is still uncertainty in the future, I probably would take the bet that I would run for President." 

Hickenlooper is pretty popular in Colorado, but outside Four Corners states, he's pretty much nobody. On top of that, we're waaaaaay past portraying Trump as a "bully" and not, you know, as an immediate threat to American democracy.

I mean I guess he's as welcome as any other Dem to make his case, but I don't see many of these recent entries even making it to 2020.

Catapulting The Propaganda

A bit of a Monday Long Read for you this morning, but it's a vital piece. New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer takes a hard look at FOX News and its parasitic relationship with the Trump regime as the network has shed any pretense of objectivity and comfortably settles into its role as state media.

The death of former FOX News head Roger Ailes and the White House hiring of Ailes's right-hand man, Bill Shine, as Communications Director has completed the network's transformation into the Trump Network, the kind of organ that you find in any autocrat's airwaves. The two have fed off each other to the point where they are inseparable.

In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”

Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead. All day long, Trump retweets claims made on the network; his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, has largely stopped holding press conferences, but she has made some thirty appearances on such shows as “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.” Trump, Hemmer says, has “almost become a programmer.”

Fox’s defenders view such criticism as unfounded and politically biased. Ken LaCorte, who was in senior management at Fox News for nearly twenty years, until 2016, and recently started his own news service, told me, “The people at Fox said the same thing about the press and Obama.” Fox’s public-relations department offers numerous examples of its reporters and talk-show hosts challenging the Administration. Chris Wallace, a tough-minded and ecumenical interviewer, recently grilled Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, on the need for a border wall, given that virtually all drugs seized at the border are discovered at checkpoints. Trump is not the first President to have a favorite media organization; James Madison and Andrew Jackson were each boosted by partisan newspapers. But many people who have watched and worked with Fox over the years, including some leading conservatives, regard Fox’s deepening Trump orthodoxy with alarm. Bill Kristol, who was a paid contributor to Fox News until 2012 and is a prominent Never Trumper, said of the network, “It’s changed a lot. Before, it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Joe Peyronnin, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., was an early president of Fox News, in the mid-nineties. “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says of Fox. “It’s as if the President had his own press organization. It’s not healthy.”

It's not healthy, but it's what FOX News was always destined to become in the post-Obama era.  I have no doubt that Trump would have his own nightly hour show on FOX News if Clinton had won, denouncing the same investigation as a witch hunt.  All of Manafort's campaign wrongdoing would still be sending him to jail, along with Roger Cohen and Roger Stone's dirty tricks, and Trump would be screaming for his followers to all but start shooting liberals.

It's what Trump expected after he lost.  He didn't, and the monster and the creator have become one.