Last Call For Amash-ed Potato

I said before that Donald Trump's reaction to GOP Rep. Justin Amash's call for his impeachment would tell the tale, and that if Trump ignored Amash, it was all for show.  Turns out Trump is not only refusing to ignore Amash, but he's made the Michigan congressman's primary defeat the centerpiece of his Michigan 2020 campaign.

Donald Trump and his top allies are moving to make Justin Amash pay for becoming the sole Republican congressman to call for the president’s impeachment.

Trump and his top advisers have discussed the prospect of backing a primary challenge to the Michigan lawmaker — a highly unusual move for a president against a member of his own party that would effectively amount to a warning shot to other Republicans thinking of crossing him. The conversations come as the billionaire DeVos family, which has deep ties to the administration and remains one of Michigan’s most powerful families, has announced it will cut off the congressman. That move could send a signal to other conservative donors deciding whether to invest in Amash.

Trump has raised the primary challenge idea with Vice President Mike Pence and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a close Trump ally who co-founded the conservative House Freedom Caucus with Amash. Trump has also addressed the subject with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a former Michigan GOP leader who remains influential in the state.

Those who’ve spoken with the president say he’s made no firm decision about taking on Amash, who’s accused the president of engaging in “impeachable conduct” and left the door open to a third-party campaign for president. Trump, they point out, is mostly focused on his own reelection and often cools down after he has time to process a slight. There are also potential risks: Trying to unseat Amash could elevate him or turn him into a martyr.

Others in the president’s inner circle are skeptical that Amash, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, will even seek reelection.

Yet in some of the conversations, the president has been adamant that the White House take a forceful stand against the congressman. The deliberations underscore Trump’s penchant for exacting political retribution against those who’ve wronged him — something he executed with devastating precision against former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford.

White House spokespersons declined to comment, as did spokespersons for Pence and Meadows. McDaniel, who under party rules is prohibited from supporting primary candidates, declined to address her conversations with Trump but said in a statement that it’s “sad to see Congressman Amash parroting the Democrats’ talking points on Russia.”

“The only people still fixated on the Russia collusion hoax are political foes of President Trump hoping to defeat him in 2020 by any desperate means possible,” she said. “Voters in Amash’s district strongly support this president and would rather their congressman work to support the president's policies that have brought jobs, increased wages and made life better for Americans."

Trump has no choice but to crucify Amash, potential martyrdom or otherwise.  And I doubt Amash will be a martyr, he'll just have his political career utterly exterminated.  Like it or not, without fundraising support, he'll be buried.  The larger point is without being utterly obliterated, Trump will face more Republicans turning on him.  Amash has to be staked out for the vultures or the next Republican to decide to bail on the Trump train will take a lot more with them.

No, it has to end here.  Expect to see more Republicans close ranks around Dear Leader this month.

Amash's Democratic opponent is who we need to be cheering on.

Reaching A Con Census

Caught red-handed last month as the GOP lied to federal courts about plans using citizenship status on the US Census to harm Democratic strongholds, the Trump regime is now taking its ball and running for the hills.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday moved to block Congress’ access to documents about how a citizenship question was added to the 2020 census.

Trump claimed executive privilege over subpoenaed documents at the urging of the Justice Department, as the House Oversight and Reform Committee was beginning proceedings Wednesday morning to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the panel’s subpoenas, which the committee issued in April.

“These documents are protected from disclosure by the deliberative process, attorney-client communications, or attorney work product components of executive privilege,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in a letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.).

“Regrettably, you have made these assertions necessary by your insistence upon scheduling a premature contempt vote,” Boyd added.

Boyd’s letter came just minutes before the committee convened to vote on civil and criminal contempt citations for Barr and Ross. Talks between the Justice Department and the committee broke down late Tuesday night after both sides exchanged last-minute offers that would have staved off the contempt votes.

“This begs the question: what is being hidden?” Cummings said. “This does not appear to be an effort to engage in good faith negotiations or accommodations. Instead, it appears to be another example of the administration’s blanket defiance of Congress’s constitutionally mandated responsibilities.”

Cummings offered to postpone Wednesday’s votes if the Justice and Commerce departments agreed to turn over a small batch of specific documents. But a spokeswoman for Cummings said the Trump administration did not accept that offer, adding: “Despite more than two months since we issued the subpoenas and more than a week since we told the agencies we were moving to contempt, the agencies have made no commitment or counter-offer regarding any of the critical documents in our subpoenas.”

Add this to the piles of evidence of obstruction of justice, but again, Trump wins this if he's able to tie up all these subpoenas from House Democrats in court until after the election, and all indications are that's the plan.

Whether or not Democrats can force this in the court of public opinion remains to be seen, but it's increasingly looking like it may be their only hope.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Let's call what the Trump regime is doing to migrant children by its proper name: internment camps.

The Trump Administration has opted to use an Army base in Oklahoma to hold growing numbers of immigrant children in its custody after running out of room at government shelters.

Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The agency said Fort Sill will be used “as a temporary emergency influx shelter” to help ease the burden on the government as it prepares to house a record number of minors even though it already operates about 168 facilities and programs in 23 states.

Health and Human Services said in a statement that it has taken about 40,900 children into custody through April 30. That’s a 57% increase from last year, which is a rate on-pace to surpass the record figures in 2016, when 59,171 minors were taken into custody. The agency had assessed two other military bases before selecting Fort Sill.

The children would be held inside facilities that are separate from the general on-base population. HHS personnel, not American troops, will oversee them.

Using military bases in this way is not new. In 2014, the Obama Administration placed around 7,700 migrant children on bases in Texas, California and Oklahoma, including Fort Sill. The temporary shelters were shuttered after four months. Last year, the government evaluated several military bases to shelter migrants, but ultimately decided not to use the facilities.

However, it appears unavoidable this year. Apprehensions of children at the border are already nearing record numbers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection released data last week that showed the figures had skyrocketed to 56,278 at the end of May, a 74% increase over last year. The influx of migrants, mainly from Central America, is straining an already exhausted system, U.S. officials say. Several children have died while in U.S. custody since last year.

The difference from 2014 being that the Obama administration actually returned and resettled these kids with relatives and family, and yes it was temporary.  The Trump regime doesn't plan to give these kids back at all and in fact is creating a humanitarian crisis in order to generate enough outrage to authorize mass deportations.

It was bad when Obama did it, yes.  It's infinitely worse when Trump is doing it now.

StupidiNews!

• Protesters in Hong Kong are on their fourth day of demonstrations against an extradition bill to China, calling on city Chief Executive Carrie Lam to withdraw the bill or resign.
• Donald Trump dared Democrats wanting to impeach him to "bring it on" as Republicans are circling the wagons around an increasingly isolated Trump regime.
• In a 229-191 party line vote, House Democrats have approved authority to sue Trump regime advisers who ignore subpoenas, paving the way for lawsuits against potentially dozens.
• Puerto Rico plans to move its presidential primary contests up to March in order to "be heard" in 2020 politics on Hurricane Maria, debt restructuring, and more.
• A new Energy Department study finds geothermal power could be a major player in US renewable energy even in states outside California and Alaska.

Last Call For That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

The latest Qunnipiac poll has various Democrats beating Trump by significant margins in head-to-head matchups right now.

In a first look at head-to-head 2020 presidential matchups nationwide, several Democratic challengers lead President Donald Trump, with former Vice President Joseph Biden ahead 53 - 40 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.

In other matchups, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University National Poll finds:

• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over President Trump 51 - 42 percent;
• California Sen. Kamala Harris ahead of Trump 49 - 41 percent;
• Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tops Trump 49 - 42 percent;
• South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg edges Trump 47 - 42 percent;
• New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker by a nose over Trump 47 - 42 percent.

In the Trump-Biden matchup, women back Biden 60 - 34 percent, as men are divided with 47 percent for Biden and 46 percent for Trump. White voters are divided with 47 percent for Trump and 46 percent for Biden. The Democrat leads 85 - 12 percent among black voters and 58 - 33 percent among Hispanic voters.

Republicans go to Trump 91 - 6 percent. Biden leads 95 - 3 percent among Democrats and 58 - 28 percent among independent voters.

"The head-to-head matchups give this heads up to President Donald Trump's team: Former Vice President Joseph Biden and other Democratic contenders would beat the president if the election were held today. Leads range from Biden's 13 percentage points to thin five-point leads by Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

"It's a long 17 months to Election Day, but Joe Biden is ahead by landslide proportions."

"That said, the Trump bump to 42 percent job approval is nothing to sniff at. It's one point shy of the best Quinnipiac University survey number ever for President Trump," Malloy added.

A total of 70 percent of American voters say the nation's economy is "excellent" or "good," but only 41 percent of voters say Trump deserves credit for an excellent or good economy. Another 27 percent say Trump does not deserve credit and 28 percent say the economy is "not so good" or "poor." 

In other words, the one thing keeping Trump in the race, he's no longer getting credit for.  That's far more important than any of the head-to-head matchups, which at this point are about as predictive as me guessing the outcome of the 2020 World Series in June 2019.

Buckle up regardless.  If Trump's losing steam on the economy then it's all bets are off time.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As Jon Chait notes, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee want to drop the Russia investigation and move forward to "protect the country from future attacks".  Except of course that Senate Majority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell won't allow a vote on any measures to do just that.

The New York Times reported a few days ago that McConnell is refusing to bring to a vote any bill to safeguard the elections from foreign attack. There’s a Democratic bill to provide election funding to state and local governments. There’s a bipartisan Senate bill to “codify cyberinformation-sharing initiatives between federal intelligence services and state election officials, speed up the granting of security clearances to state officials, and provide federal incentives for states to adopt paper ballots.” McConnell won’t allow any of them to come to a vote.
The threat from Russian election interference is actually quite severe. Russian intelligence breached at least one Florida county computer system and planted malware in a manufacturer of vote-tabulating machines, according to the Mueller report. While the probability that Russian hackers could actually change the outcome of the next election is low, the consequences would be extraordinarily high — especially if they do so by actual vote-rigging rather than mere information warfare.

Exactly why McConnell is so blasé about this threat is impossible to say, but the next time McConnell takes some action that sacrifices his partisan interests for the greater good will be the first.

Of course, Collins’s whole notion that guarding against the next Russian political operation requires halting all investigation of the last one is obviously disingenuous in the first place. The Mueller report shows in detail that Trump and almost everybody working for him welcomed Russian help, legal or otherwise. The reason the government isn’t doing more to protect our democracy from the next attack is that the people who cooperated with the last attack don’t want to.

We could ask why that is, but that's obvious by now.  Mitch McConnell wants the Russians to throw the elections for Republicans in 2020 and give the GOP total control of the government back.  There can be no other conclusion at this point.

Mitch McConnell is a traitor.

It's Above Your Pay Grade

Not even House Democrats are blockheaded enough to try to pass a congressional pay raise right now, which is I guess good news considering they actually did try it and the response was exactly what you would expect to an organization polling slightly below drug-resistant gonorrhea.

House Democratic leaders are postponing consideration of a bill that would include a pay raise for members of Congress, after facing a major backlash from the party's most vulnerable members.

Top Democrats agreed in a closed-door meeting Monday night to pull a key section of this week’s massive funding bill to avoid escalating a clash within their caucus over whether to hike salaries for lawmakers and staff for the first time in a decade, multiple lawmakers confirmed.
At least 15 Democrats — mostly freshmen in competitive districts — had pushed to freeze pay after some Democratic and Republican leaders quietly agreed to the slight pay increase earlier this month.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) confirmed to POLITICO after the meeting that he "thinks" they would pull the bill so that Democrats can resolve the issue of congressional pay raises.

The issue flared up in the Democratic leadership meeting on Monday, where there was an intense discussions of whether to force members to go on the record about a pay raise, which some battleground Democrats believed would create a target on their back in 2020.

"Nobody wants to vote to give themselves a raise. There's nothing good about that," said Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.), who attended Monday's meeting.

But Hill said she also believed the issue deserved more discussion to ensure that stagnant pay wasn't deterring average Americans from running for office — particularly if they already live in districts with high costs of living. 

The potential vote set off Democratic political consultants who warned that if members were on the record supporting a pay raise for themselves it could be seen as tone deaf. One strategist called it “political suicide” for freshman Democrats in swing districts if they were made to take the vote. 

Stagnant pay in the House isn't deterring average Americans from running for office, you dolt.  It's the millions of dollars necessary to run for office that's doing that, and thanks to Citizens United, that will be the case for the foreseeable future.  If you don't have the money to play, you get buried by the guy who does 99% of the time.

I really shouldn't have to explain this to House Democrats, but here we are.

StupidiNews!

• A helicopter crash in NYC killed the pilot as the vehicle landed badly on the rooftop of the 787 Seventh Ave. building's helipad and started a fire.
• The assassinated half-brother of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un was reportedly a CIA informant, Kim Jong Nam was killed at a Malaysian airport in 2017 by two women with a nerve agent.
• The head of the UN's atomic watchdog agency says Iran has followed through on threats to enrich uranium, but still may be below the stockpile limits in Tehran's deal with the UN.
• Several GOP senators are siding with Senate Democrats to rebuke Donald Trump's planned arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but it's unclear what, if anything, the Senate can do at this point.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments later this year on a lawsuit by an African-American owned cable network against cable giant Comcast over discrimination in refusing to carry it.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Last week we discovered that Ken Cuccinelli has no chance of being confirmed as Trump's immigration head because of all the Republican senators he's pissed off over the years, so on Monday, Trump simply named him as acting head and will leave him there indefinitely because nobody's going to tell him no.

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) on Monday began his new job as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a controversial appointment that could set up a showdown between the White House and Senate Republicans.

President Trump tapped Cuccinelli to lead the agency, which is tasked with administering the nation’s legal immigration system, at a time when he is seeking to crack down on illegal migration and make it tougher for immigrants to obtain benefits.

“Our nation has the most generous legal immigration system in the world and we must zealously safeguard its promise for those who lawfully come here,” Cuccinelli said in a statement distributed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “I look forward to working with the men and women of USCIS to ensure our legal immigration system operates effectively and efficiently while deterring fraud and protecting the American people.”

Cuccinelli’s appointment was weeks in the making, with Trump eyeing the fellow immigration hardliner for a top role at DHS.

He will replace L. Francis Cissna, who was forced out as USCIS chief late last month amid a rolling shakeup at the department.

Just like any other "Senate Republicans are against this" situation, they will fall in line and do what Trump tells them to do. And Cuccinelli is there for a reason.

As Virginia’s top law enforcement official and in his years serving in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli laid a long track of aggressive anti-immigrant policies intended to restrict access to public services, employment, and even citizenship from migrants and their families. That record, combined with his vociferous defense of President Donald Trump on cable news and in conservative media outlets, puts Cuccinelli firmly in line with an administration that has made combating undocumented immigration its top domestic policy goal.

In his new role at Homeland Security, Cuccinelli will be one of the Trump administration’s top bosses on immigration-related matters, a portfolio that has felled other senior administration officials in recent months as the president has grown dissatisfied with stubbornly high rates of illegal entry into the United States.

If his record on immigration issues is any indication, Cuccinelli will embrace that role with relish. While his support for President Donald Trump may be relatively newfound, his championing of hardline Trump-style immigration policies is more than a decade in the making.

Although Cuccinelli first drew national attention during his time as Virginia’s attorney general for his attempts to keep laws against oral sex on the books, he also became a staunch advocate on behalf of aggressive immigration policies in other states. In 2010, Cuccinelli filed an amicus brief in support of S.B. 1070, an Arizona law that allowed police officers to investigate the immigration status of any person arrested or detained by law enforcement based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally. That same year, he released a legal opinion expanding a similar policy to include any suspected undocumented immigrant stopped by law enforcement for any reason.

“Virginia law enforcement officers have the authority to make the same inquiries as those contemplated by the new Arizona law,” Cuccinelli wrote in the opinion. “So long as the officers have the requisite level of suspicion to believe that a violation of the law has occurred, the officers may detain and briefly question a person they suspect has committed a federal crime.”

Cuccinelli told reporters at the time that any police officer had the authority to question potential undocumented immigrants “so long as they don’t extend the duration of a stop by any significant degree.”

Those stances on illegal immigration appear tame compared to other proposals that Cuccinelli had backed before becoming attorney general. During his eight years in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli was the chief patron—the body’s version of primary sponsor—of a rash of bills targeting undocumented immigrants in the commonwealth.

One proposed law would have allowed employers to fire employees who didn’t speak English in their workplace, and stipulated that any employee so fired would be “disqualified from receiving unemployment compensation benefits.” Another bill would have allowed businesses to sue competitors that they believed to be employing undocumented immigrants for economic damages, plus $500 “for each such illegal alien employed by the defendant.”

In one case, Cuccinelli championed one of Trump’s most aggressive immigration policies before Trump himself did. In a 2008 bill, Cuccinelli urged Congress to call a constitutional convention to amend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “to clarify specifically that a person born to a parent who is a U. S. citizen is also a citizen of the United States,” to the exclusion of the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States.

And this clown is now Trump's chief immigration law enforcement officer.  Illegally, I might add.  But who cares?  Nothing is illegal anymore when Trump does it.

The Turtle, His Wife, And The Road To Corruption

When the GOP Senate Majority Leader is married to the Trump regime's Transportation Secretary, she helps him deliver those road projects here in Bevinstan that other states don't get, just in time to kick off his 2020 reelection campaign.

The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.

Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell — including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.

Beginning in April 2017, Inman and Chao met annually with a delegation from Owensboro, Ky., a river port with long connections to McConnell, including a plaza named in his honor. At the meetings, according to participants, the secretary and the local officials discussed two projects of special importance to the river city of 59,809 people — a plan to upgrade road connections to a commercial riverport and a proposal to expedite reclassifying a local parkway as an Interstate spur, a move that could persuade private businesses to locate in Owensboro.

Inman, himself a longtime Owensboro resident and onetime mayoral candidate who is now Chao’s chief of staff, followed up the 2017 meeting by emailing the riverport authority on how to improve its application. He also discussed the project by phone with Al Mattingly, the chief executive of Daviess County, which includes Owensboro, who suggested Inman was instrumental in the process.

Todd probably smoothed the way, I mean, you know, used his influence,” Mattingly said in a POLITICO interview. “Everybody says that projects stand on their own merit, right? So if I’ve got 10 projects, and they’re all equal, where do you go to break the tie?”

“Well, let’s put it this way: I only have her ear an hour when I go to visit her once a year,” he added of Chao and Inman, a longtime Bluegrass State operative who had worked as McConnell’s advance man. “With a local guy, he has her ear 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You tell me.”

The circumstances surrounding the Owensboro grant and another, more lucrative grant to Boone County, highlight the ethical conflicts in having a powerful Cabinet secretary married to the Senate’s leader and in a position to help him politically. McConnell has long touted his ability to bring federal resources to his state, which his wife is now in a position to assist.

Chao’s designation of Inman as a special intermediary for Kentucky — a privilege other states did not enjoy — gave a special advantage to projects favored by her husband, which could in turn benefit his political interests. In such situations, ethicists say, each member of a couple benefits personally from the success of the other.

“Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American. … I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied political influence in federal grant-making.
In fact, days after launching his 2020 reelection campaign McConnell asked Owensboro’s mayor to set up a luncheon with business and political leaders at which the senator claimed credit for delivering the grant.

“How about that $11 million BUILD grant?” McConnell asked the crowd rhetorically, according to the Owensboro Times. He then recalled his role in securing earlier grants to the city, adding, “It’s done a lot to transform Owensboro, and I was really happy to have played a role in that.”

I mean the grants are helping the people of my state, even my county with that INFRA grant announced last year. I has suspected that Chao has something to do with it, but this is pretty much proof, with Chao designating someone to Kentucky to be in charge of the pork projects to keep Mitch's voters happy.

It's helpful and the interstate improvements are going to make a big difference.

It's also corrupt as hell. Mitch isn't buying my vote with a couple of interchanges. 

Chao should resign over this.  It won''t happen, it'll be forgotten in a week.  Ask Alex Acosta.

A Supreme Storm Warning

If it's a Monday in June, it means it's time for the Supreme Court, and we start off with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all but promising that the major cases yet to be resolved this term, including the Roberts Court's major decisions on gerrymandering and citizenship questions on the US Census, will be decided by a 5-4 vote.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hinted that sharp divisions will mark the final weeks of a Supreme Court term that will include major rulings on the census and partisan gerrymandering.

Speaking before the annual conference of federal judges in New York, Ginsburg suggested that more than a quarter of the court’s remaining 27 rulings will be decided by a single vote. Of the 43 argued cases settled so far, 11 were by a vote of either 5-4 or 5-3, she said.

“Given the number of most-watched cases still unannounced, I cannot predict that the relatively low sharp divisions ratio will hold,” the 86-year-old justice said, according to a copy of her remarks provided by the court on Friday.

The justices are scheduled to finish their nine-month term at the end of this month. It’s the first session since Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court and strengthened its conservative majority.

Ginsburg has made an annual practice of summarizing the high court’s term at the June conference, often offering what seem to be tantalizing hints about the outcome of the court’s biggest disputes.

She touched on both the census and gerrymandering cases in her remarks Friday. She linked the census case, which will determine whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross can include a question about citizenship in the 2020 survey, to the court’s decision last year upholding President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

The travel ban ruling “granted great deference to the executive,” Ginsburg said. Opponents of the citizenship question “have argued that a ruling in Secretary Ross’s favor would stretch deference beyond the breaking point.”

We'll see what decisions are announced today.

StupidiNews!

• At least one person is dead and six injured after a crane fell on a Dallas apartment building, rescue dogs are searching for further casualties in the collapsed parts of the complex and parking garage.
• Several US Embassies around Asia are all flying the Pride flag in defiance of the US State Department, June is Pride month and the Trump regime has denied Embassies permission to fly it.
• A massive civil disobedience campaign has left the streets of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, empty as the ruling transitional junta continues to clash with protesters demanding human rights.
• UK Foreign Minister and favorite to succeed Theresa May, Boris Johnson, is upping Brexit rhetoric as all sides are gearing up for the campaign to be the UK's next leader.
• Analysis shows that Google's big outage on June 2nd also blocked access to the tools needed to most efficiently resolve the problem as the tech giant reviews its disaster recovery procedures.

Last Call For Hong Kong, Kablooey

At least 500,000 protesters took to the streets this weekend in Hong Kong to march against a proposed extradition law that would allow suspects of crimes to be tried and jailed in mainland China, with city Chief Executive Carrie Lam's job very much up in the air.

Hong Kong was plunged into a fresh political crisis on Sunday night after more than half a million people took to the streets to thwart a proposed extradition law that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial.

Organizers said the turnout outstripped a demonstration in 2003 when 500,000 hit the streets to challenge government plans for tighter national security laws.

Those laws were later shelved and a key government official forced to resign. Sunday’s outpouring was already raising the pressure on the administration of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and her official backers in Beijing.

“She has to withdraw the bill and resign,” veteran Democratic Party lawmaker James To told crowds outside the city’s parliament and government headquarters on Sunday night.

“The whole of Hong Kong is against her.”
After To spoke, thousands were still arriving, having started the march five hours earlier, filling four lanes of a major thoroughfare. Some sat in a nearby park singing “Hallelujah” while police increased their numbers around the area.

Lam had yet to comment on the rally. The demonstration capped weeks of growing outrage in the business, diplomatic and legal communities, which fear corrosion of Hong Kong’s legal autonomy and the difficulty of ensuring basic judicial protections in mainland China.

The protest descended into violence in the early hours of Monday as several hundred protesters clashed with a similar number of police outside the city’s parliament.

Protesters charged police lines to try to force their way into the Legislative Council building, and police charged back, using pepper spray, after warning the protesters. The standoff ended in the early hours of Monday.

U.S. and European officials have issued formal warnings - concern matched by international business and human rights lobbies that fear the changes would dent Hong Kong’s rule of law. The former British colony was handed back to Chinese rule in 1997 amid guarantees of autonomy and various freedoms including a separate legal system, which many diplomats and business leaders believe is the city’s strongest remaining asset.

 This would be the equivalent of a half million people taking to the streets of New York City. People are going to pay attention, and we'll see if Lam survives.

Sunday Long Read: Laugh Through The Pain

Stephen Colbert is doing tremendously well on CBS's The Late Show in the Era of Trumpian Excess, and this week's Sunday Long Read is the comic and late night host's interview with NY Times writer David Marchese.

Even though it has been a few years since Stephen Colbert stepped out of the blowhard conservative-pundit role that he played for nearly a decade on “The Colbert Report” and into the role of, well, himself, as host of “The Late Show” on CBS, the 55-year-old’s popularity only continues to grow. His show, already No. 1 in late night, took over the top spot among viewers ages 18 to 49 earlier this year, a demographic that had long been owned by Jimmy Fallon and “The Tonight Show.” As it turns out, what Colbert and his show offer — an “explicative deconstruction of the day’s news,” as he puts it — is exactly what many people want. “It’s so confusing today,” said Colbert, who is also an executive producer on Showtime’s animated comedy “Our Cartoon President.” “And that confusion leads to anxiety, and the anxiety makes the audience want the jokes.” Which, Colbert added, is “the same reason we want to do them.”

“The Late Show” is doing very well, and there are obvious explanations you could point to: You’ve had a few years to learn how to do the job. You’re benefiting from a Trump bump. But what’s your own hunch about why the show is resonating? 

By the spring of 2016, we had figured out how I want to do a monologue: We never do setup, punch, setup, punch. Instead, it’s always, I’m going to tell back to you what happened today. When the presidential campaign came around in 2016, that helped focus us on the things that we most enjoyed, which is the news of the day. But you say “doing very well,” and I know you mean numerically.1 This is a long preamble to the real answer to your question: It’s almost as if the president is trying to cast a spell to confuse people so they cannot know the true nature of reality, and what we do is pick apart the way in which the [expletive] was sold to you. I think that’s why it’s going well. Our job is to identify the [expletive], and there’s never been more.

I remember Jon Stewart2 saying, when he was on “The Late Show,” that he was glad he wasn’t digging in the turd mines anymore. Is it ever dispiriting to spend so much time engaging with bad news? 

The metaphor that I use is that there’s this pool of radioactive sludge, which is the daily news. My job is to be lowered like carbon rods into that radioactive sludge and absorb the radiation of the insanity that happened today. Then they take me out and put me in front of the camera, and I irradiate it back at the audience at a much lower, nonlethal rad level. That’s kind of the job. It’s a transformation of the poison into something entertaining. Do I feel poisoned by doing that? Yeah, a little bit. But I get to go do the jokes. I need the audience as much as some of them say they need the show. If the show really works and it feels organic, then the poison’s drained out of me.

The suggestion there is that comedy or satire can relieve people’s tension or anxiety about the world. But as far as I can tell, no one is feeling any less tense or anxious. Do you really think the show actually performs a stress-relieving function? 

Momentarily. You know, my doctor has informed me that if I could drink less during the week, that would be good. Because that would be one of the things I would want to do when I go home: have myself an old-fashioned that could stun a buffalo. It’s relaxing at first, but your blood pressure actually goes up again the next day because you drank four ounces of Maker’s Mark the night before.

If we take that as a metaphor, where do you fit in it? 

I’m the alcohol. I might be the alcohol. I don’t know what the next day is like for anybody. If the show goes well, maybe the audience sleeps a bit better. And maybe that’s all the show should be. I have said this before, but I know that when you’re laughing, you’re not afraid.

Is that true, though? Isn’t nervous laughter a laughter that comes from fear? 

Nervous laughter is not the same thing as laughing, in my opinion. I would say nervous laughter is evidence that I’m right, because that is your body autonomically trying to relieve tension. If someone can do that for you from the outside, it relieves that tension and fear, and you are momentarily not afraid. If you’re not afraid, you can think, and we have to think our way out of this one.

It's good stuff, and yeah, Colbert is just as indispensable as he was a decade or fifteen years ago now.

Deportation Nation, Con't

To the surprise of no one, the actions Mexico agreed to take "this week" to stop the flow of asylum seekers to the US from Central America were actually agreed upon earlier this year, but Trump decided he was going to nearly break the deal in order to create news to get the Democrats (and the bad jobs report) off the front page.

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s deal was an expansion of a program to allow asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal cases proceed. But that arrangement was reached in December in a pair of painstakingly negotiated diplomatic notes that the two countries exchanged. Ms. Nielsen announced the Migrant Protection Protocols during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee five days before Christmas.

And over the past week, negotiators failed to persuade Mexico to accept a “safe third country” treaty that would have given the United States the legal ability to reject asylum seekers if they had not sought refuge in Mexico first.

Mr. Trump hailed the agreement anyway on Saturday, writing on Twitter: “Everyone very excited about the new deal with Mexico!” He thanked the president of Mexico for “working so long and hard” on a plan to reduce the surge of migration into the United States.

It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico, which he began threatening less than two weeks ago.

Having threatened Mexico with an escalating series of tariffs — starting at 5 percent and growing to 25 percent — the president faced enormous criticism from global leaders, business executives, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and members of his own staff that he risked disrupting a critical marketplace.

After nine days of uncertainty, Mr. Trump backed down and accepted Mexico’s promises.

Officials involved with talks said they began in earnest last Sunday, when Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, met over dinner with Mexico’s foreign minister. One senior government official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the closed-door negotiations that took place over several days, insisted that the Mexicans agreed to move faster and more aggressively to deter migrants than they ever have before.
Their promise to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops was larger than their previous pledge. And the Mexican agreement to accelerate the Migrant Protection Protocols could help reduce what Mr. Trump calls “catch and release” of migrants in the United States by giving the country a greater ability to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico.

Once again, I smell Stephen Miller's spoor all over this mess.  This looks like a concerted effort to bury Kirstjen Nielsen's involvement and success in these negotiations completely while buying Trump several news cycles as a bonus.

Mission accomplished there, I guess.  But the real problem is now Mexico has given in to the bully's demands, and in the immortal words of Darth Vader in Empire...

Last Call For The Bad Sons

The Trump crime family doesn't pay their bills.  Dear old Dad doesn't, so why does anyone think Eric and Don Junior would ever pick up the tab?

THEY ENJOYED a warm welcome during their tour around the pubs of Doonbeg, but Eric and Donald Trump Jr may have forgotten one important detail from their epic bar crawl – the bill.

Donald Trump’s sons poses for pictures and pulled pints during a memorable night for the Co Clare town that left more than a few with sore heads the next day.

Caroline Kennedy, the owner of Igoe bar and restaurant, was full of praise of Eric and Donald Jr.

She told the Irish Mirror: "They were so lovely and down to earth and gave a great hello to everyone. I said, ‘Come on lads you have to come in and pull a drink’ so they did."

"They were so nice, they came into the restaurant and the local priest Fr Haugh presented them with a picture of the two castles of Doonbeg.

"They thanked everyone for their support and for coming out to meet them and said there was a drink for everyone in the house and it was their small gesture."

Unfortunately, when it came time to footing the bill, things hit a slight snag with neither of the brothers carrying any cash. 

Kennedy isn’t worried though, having been assured the hefty bar bill would be paid for.

"I don’t think we’ve to worry about getting paid for that," she said.

"I don’t think they carry cash. We were told it’d be all sorted later so there’s no problem.

Sure they will.

If this isn't a perfect metaphor for the Trump crime family so far, I don't know what is.

Deportation Nation, Con't

It seems that Mexico's offer to put federal troops on its southern border area with Guatemala was enough to get Trump to fold on tariffs for now.

President Donald Trump said Friday he will not put tariffs on Mexico after all, saying it has agreed to take new measures to stop the illegal flow of migrants into the United States.

"The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended," the president tweeted.

He added: "Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border."

Mexico Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard in a tweet confirmed the agreement. In a separate tweet, he thanked all who supported Mexico through its negotiations with the United States.

Mexican Ambassador Martha Bárcena also wrote in a tweet translated into English: After several days of negotiations and 12 hours today in the State Department, we reached an agreement with the United States to address the humanitarian crisis stemming from the recent migratory flows that have affected our two countries.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement said the joint obligations that the U.S. and Mexico negotiated will benefit both countries.

"The United States looks forward to working alongside Mexico to fulfill these commitments so that we can stem the tide of illegal migration across our southern border and to make our border strong and secure," Pompeo said.

But as I said earlier, once you give in to the bully...

Both countries agreed to "take further actions" if the measures adopted do not result in limiting migrants seeking asylum. It is unclear at the moment what the new actions might be. It is also unclear how the U.S. and Mexico will measure results.

Want to know what really happened on Friday to make Trump fold?

Job creation decelerated strongly in May, with nonfarm payrolls up by just 75,000 even as the unemployment rate remained at a 50-year low, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The decline was the second in four months that payrolls increased by less than 100,000 as the labor market continues to show signs of weakening. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 180,000.

In addition to the weak total for May, the previous two months’ reports saw substantial downward revisions. March’s count fell from 189,000 to 153,000 and the April total was taken down to 224,000 from 263,000, for a total reduction of 75,000 jobs.

Stock futures fell and bond yields dropped in reaction to the report. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures turned negativebefore reversing course and turning positive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to its lowest level since September 2017.

With the downward revisions, zero net jobs were created in May.

Zero.

Even Trump can count that high.  So he declared victory and ran.  Mexican tariffs will cost the US millions of jobs and he knows it. He's used up all his economic cushion losing to China.  He doesn't have anything left to hide job losses of a Mexican trade war.  The one thing keeping him in office is the economy he inherited, and he's coming close to breaking it now.

He'll try again of course, but it sure took that awful jobs number off the front page, didn't it?

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Last night we reached new depths of FOX News being Trump State Media, in a performance from Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity that would have Goebbels applauding for hours. Greg Sargent details the atrocities:

In his interview with Ingraham, Trump ripped into Pelosi for privately saying she wants to see Trump “in prison.” He blasted Pelosi as a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person” and claimed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report was a “disaster” that produced “nothing” (an incalculable absurdity, given its incredibly damning revelations). 

Trump also insisted that Mueller produced a letter to “straighten out” his recent public remarks, which were “wrong” (as Steve Benen shows, Mueller in no way backed off his devastating core assertions). And Trump called the investigation a “phony witch hunt,” absurdly suggesting the Russian attack on our political system, which Mueller extensively documented, was a big nothing never worth investigating.

“I think they’re in big trouble,” Trump said of Pelosi and Democrats, “when you look at the kind of crimes that were committed.”

This echoed Trump’s long-running argument that the only corruption that occurred was the Russia investigation itself, perpetrated by law enforcement and Democrats, an absurd rewriting of basic history that has generated one buffoonish pratfall after another.

Naturally, Hannity picked up this baton, tearing into Pelosi for wanting “a political opponent locked up in prison,” which “happens in banana republics".

Hannity also claimed it’s an “irrefutable fact that there was no collusion.” This is a severe distortion: Mueller said “collusion” isn’t a legally meaningful term and documented extensive efforts by Trump World to encourage, profit off, and, yes, conspire with the Russian attack. Hannity suggested Democrats “don’t state” what they believe Trump has done wrong — a ridiculous lie, since this is amply laid out in Democratic documents.

It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty — some level of artifice is an inevitable feature of politics — but rather is something much more insidious. What’s notable is the sheer comprehensiveness of the effort to create an alternate set of realities whose departure from the known facts seemingly aims to be absolute and unbridgeable.

As many have noted, it’s richly absurd that Hannity is claiming Pelosi is engaging in “banana republic” stuff, given that Trump has called for investigations into his political opponents for years. Indeed, in the Ingraham interview, Trump blasted Pelosi over this, then immediately segued into suggesting that Democrats will soon be held accountable for imagined crimes.

But this absurd duality should be understood as a feature of this kind of Trumpian disinformation. It won’t do to note its self-contradictory nature. The whole point is to wield this kind of absurdity as an instrument of power. It’s to use an alternate reality to supplant and extinguish good faith efforts to discern actual reality — to blot out the possibility of shared agreement on facts that are in front of all our noses through the sheer insistence that the alternate reality is supreme. The alt-reality doesn’t have to be proved as the true one; just established as the dominant one.

And this method is how Trump is going to start throwing his political enemies in jail in mass quantities.  The narrative is whatever Trump says it is, he has people to tell America this, and they listen.

And they obey.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Americans want Roe v Wade to remain the law of the land in a new NPR poll, but they also are overwhelmingly okay with restrictions on availability of abortion, and the group most likely to support restrictions is, surprise, Republican women.

The poll comes as several states have pushed to limit abortions in hopes of getting the Supreme Court to reconsider the issue. Abortion-rights opponents hope the newly conservative court will either overturn Roe or effectively gut it by upholding severe restrictions. The survey finds that while most Americans favor limiting abortion, they don't want it to be illegal and don't want to go as far as states like Alabama, for example, which would ban it completely except if the woman's life is endangered or health is at risk.

A total of 77% say the Supreme Court should uphold Roe, but within that there's a lot of nuance — 26% say they would like to see it remain in place, but with more restrictions added; 21% want to see Roe expanded to establish the right to abortion under any circumstance; 16% want to keep it the way it is; and 14% want to see some of the restrictions allowed under Roe reduced. Just 13% overall say it should be overturned.

Even though Americans are solidly against overturning Roe, a majority would also like to see abortion restricted in various ways. In a separate question, respondents were asked which of six choices comes closest to their view of abortion policy.

In all, 61% said they were in favor of a combination of limitations that included allowing abortion in just the first three months of a pregnancy (23%); only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman (29%); or only to save the life of the woman (9%).

And again, the biggest driving factor against abortion in 2019 are Republican women, even more so than Republican men.

The most acute divide among Americans on the issue of abortion, arguably, is not a gender divide but between the parties — and of women of different parties.

For example, 54% of men identified as "pro-choice," compared with 60% of women. For women of the different parties, 77% of Democratic women identified as "pro-choice," while 68% of Republican women identified as "pro-life." (A lower percentage of Republican men, 59%, considered themselves "pro-life.")

Throughout the poll, the divide was stark. On Roe, for example, 62% of Republican women said overturn it or add restrictions; 73% of Democratic women said keep it the way it is, expand it to allow abortions under any circumstance or reduce some of the restrictions.
Eighty-four percent of Democratic women said they are more likely to support state laws that decriminalize abortion and make laws less strict; 62% of Republican women said they are more likely to support laws that criminalize abortion or make laws stricter.

On requiring insurance companies to cover abortion procedures, 75% of Democratic women support that, while 78% of Republican women oppose it, higher than the 63% of Republican men who said the same.

Republican women also stand out for the 62% of them who said they oppose laws that allow abortion at any time during pregnancy in cases of rape or incest. They are the only group to voice majority opposition to that. Fifty-nine percent of Republican men, for example, said they would support such a law.

And Republican women are the only group to say overwhelmingly that life begins at conception. About three-quarters said so, compared with less than half of Republican men and a third of Democratic women.

It's a reminder that Republican women, in many ways, are the backbone of the movement opposing abortion rights.

As long as women are happily signing away their own bodies to men in order to force other women to do so, we remain on the road to Gilead.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Mexico is actually making a serious effort to stave off Trump's tariffs, but the Obrador government just doesn't understand that once you pay the bully, he always ups the toll. 

U.S. and Mexican officials are discussing the outlines of a deal that would dramatically increase Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts and give the United States far more latitude to deport Central Americans seeking asylum, according to a U.S. official and a Mexican official who cautioned that the accord is not final and that President Trump might not accept it. 

Faced with Trump’s threat to impose steadily rising tariffs on goods imported from Mexico beginning Monday, Mexican officials have pledged to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops to the area of the country’s border with Guatemala, a show of force they say will make immediate reductions in the number of Central Americans heading north toward the U.S. border.

The Mexican official and the U.S. official said the countries are negotiating a sweeping plan to overhaul asylum rules across the region, a move that would require Central Americans to seek refuge in the first country in which they arrive after leaving their homeland. 

Under such a plan, the United States would swiftly deport to Mexico any Guatemalan asylum seekers who set foot on U.S. soil. And the United States would send Honduran and Salvadoran asylum applicants to Guatemala, whose government held talks last week with acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan. Central American migrants who express a fear of death or torture if they are repatriated would be interviewed by U.S. asylum officers to determine whether the chances of such harm were more likely than not — a screening standard with a greater likelihood of rejection than current procedures. 

Mexico has repeatedly said it will not accept the kind of “Safe Third Country” agreement that the United States has with Canada, a pact that requires asylum seekers to apply for refuge in whichever country they first arrive in, as each is considered safe. But the Mexican official said the government is willing to make asylum changes for the sake of a coordinated regional approach.

Mexican negotiators also have made clear that they will withdraw their offers if Trump imposes the tariffs, telling their U.S. counterparts that the economic damage would undermine Mexico’s ability to afford tougher immigration enforcement.

The problem with reasonable, good faith efforts like Mexico's here in response to belligerent bully tactics is the bully always smashes you in the face again while yelling "What else ya got?"

The correct response for Mexico is hardball, not appeasement.  Closing the Nuevo Laredo crossing for "repairs" for instance for all southbound traffic for a week might get the attention of some big corporate donor types, for example.

But this plan?  It's already dead on arrival, hombre.

President Trump is planning to declare a new national emergency in order to implement sweeping tariffs on Mexico over the flow of Central American migrants to the U.S., according to a draft document of the declaration reviewed by The Hill. 

According to the document, the new emergency is necessary due to “the failure of the Government of Mexico to take effective action to reduce the mass migration of aliens illegally crossing into the United States through Mexico.” 

The new emergency declaration would follow a February emergency declaration, which Trump used to justify sending National Guard troops to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the southern border. 

The draft document signals that the White House believes that imposing the tariffs under the February emergency declaration might not pass legal muster. But it remains unclear if a final decision has been made to invoke another emergency. The White House did not answer questions about the document. 

Officials from the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department floated the idea of a new declaration this week during a closed-door meeting with Republican senators. 

The White House has said it plans to impose the tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to take unilateral action to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat” in times of national emergency. 

But a new national emergency is likely to spark widespread opposition on Capitol Hill from Republicans and Democrats who say Trump is overstepping his tariff authority and also could draw fresh legal challenges.

So all those Republican Senators worried about how tariffs would affect constituents in 2020 folded in just a couple of days as they were told what Trump was going to do, and that they were going along with it.

And don't expect a Roberts Court that sided with Trump on his Muslim ban to lift a finger here.

Like I said, give in to the bully once...