Last Call For Rush (No Longer) In Roulette

Rush Limbaugh has signed on for another four years of his radio show, meaning he'll be polluting the airwaves through 2024, and apparently the person to break the news was...Donald Trump.

"The Rush Limbaugh Show" will continue well into the new decade. 

Limbaugh, whose contract was due to expire later this year, has renewed his deal, the syndication company Premiere Radio Networks confirmed to CNN Business. 

Premiere is a division of the radio giant iHeartMedia. A spokeswoman said Limbaugh renewed a "long-term agreement" and declined to comment on any specific terms, like the length of the new deal. 

But according to President Trump, it is a four-year deal. 

CNN Business inquired about Limbaugh's status after Trump blurted out the information at a rally in Miami on Friday. 

The president was there to launch an "Evangelicals for Trump" coalition. After lodging his usual complaints about news outlets that challenge him, he turned to praise some of his biggest radio and TV boosters. 

"We have great people," Trump said. "Rush just signed another four-year contract. He just wants four more years, okay. Rush, Sean Hannity, Laura -- a lot of great people -- Tucker's been great, 'Fox & Friends,' right?" 

Trump went on, listing off other supporters in the media. But the Limbaugh shout-out was curious because the host and the syndicator had not announced a new deal yet. Premiere's most recent acknowledgement about Limbaugh's contract was back in August 2016, when he re-upped. 

It turns out the president had some inside information -- perhaps from one of Limbaugh's visits to Trump's properties. 

Trump and the radio host were seen eating launch and chatting with others at Trump's West Palm Beach golf club a few days before Christmas. 

The two men have been allies for many years, pre-dating the president's run for office.

The cult of Trumpism continues to destroy America.  Hooray!

The Drums Of War, Con't

It's hard to overstate just how much Trump screwed up by assassinating Iran's Gen. Suleimani on Iraqi soil on Friday, but we're about to reap that whirlwind in an impressive way.

Lawmakers in Iraq heeded the demands of angry citizens and voted on Sunday to expel United States troops from the country, as hundreds of thousands of mourners poured into the streets of Iran to pay their respects to the slain leader of the elite Quds Force, Maj. General Qassim Suleimani.

The vote in Parliament on Sunday to oust the United States-led coalition is not final until Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi signs the draft bill. Earlier on Sunday, Mr. Mahdi indicated he would, having urged lawmakers to take action after President Trump ordered a fatal drone strike against General Suleimani in Baghdad.

The body of the general, the most powerful figure in Iran after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was brought back early Sunday from Iraq, where he was killed on Friday near the Baghdad airport. Among the others killed in the attack was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, which includes at least half a dozen pro-Iranian militias.

Members of Iraq’s Parliament were divided on the demands to expel American troops from the country. While factions that grew out of Shiite militia organizations have pushed hard for the expulsion, Sunni Muslim factions and the Kurds want the United States to stay.

The legal agreement between Baghdad and Washington states that American troops are in Iraq “at the invitation” of the Iraqi government. Presumably, if Baghdad withdrew that invitation, the United States would have to withdraw.

The killing of General Suleimani unleashed calls for vengeance in both Iraq and Iran, and reinforced a general solidarity among hard-liners and moderates in Iran against the United States. In Iraq, the attack was seen as a violation of the nation’s sovereignty. On Sunday, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the American ambassador in Baghdad.

In Iran, it was viewed as tantamount to an act of war. Hossein Dehghan, a military adviser to Mr. Khamenei, told CNN that Iran’s response would include an attack on “U.S. military targets.”

As the Middle East braced for Iranian retaliation, which analysts said was all but inevitable and American officials said they expected within weeks, Tehran and Washington ratcheted up the rhetoric.

We're getting kicked out of Iraq, the anti-ISIS coalition headed by the US is now all but over as troops scramble to defend themselves on the way out, and Trump has united Iran under the banner of hating his orange ass.  The miscalculations by the Trump regime on this go all the way down the line.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday defended the continued U.S. presence in Iraq even as the Iraqi parliament convened a special session to discuss expelling American troops after the U.S. killing of Iranian military commander Qasim Soleimani in Baghdad.

“The prime minister is the acting prime minister … he’s under enormous threats from the very Iranian leadership that we are pushing back against,” Pompeo said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding “we’re confident the Iraqi people want the United States to continue to be there.”

Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told the nation’s parliament on Sunday the Iraqi government must establish a timetable for the exit of all foreign troops "for the sake of our national sovereignty."

Asked by Fox’s Chris Wallace how the U.S. would respond if the Iraqi government calls for the expulsion of U.S. troops, Pompeo said “we’ll have to take a look at what we do when the Iraqi leadership and government makes a decision.”

Well, that decision was made, and it's "Yankee go home."

Or are we going to invade Iraq all over again?

At this point, who knows?  Trump's as likely to tweet that we're staying in Iraq as he is to claim getting us kicked out was his plan all along and that he's "the one who got our troops home out of Baghdad".

Trump had no plan beyond this.  That much is absolutely clear.

In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him — which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq — on the menu they presented to President Trump.

They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.

After initially rejecting the Suleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shia militia group instead, a few days later Mr. Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the American Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.

By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.

Here there be dragons. Once again, Trump started a war to derail his impeachment trial.  This cannot be repeated enough.  Nobody knows for sure what happens next.

Nobody.

Sunday Long Read: A Deeper Shade Of Gray Hat

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from Bloomberg Businessweek, the story of British/Israeli hacker Daniel "Spdrman" Kaye, a self-taught code jockey who ended up behind one of the biggest botnet attacks the world had seen, one he put together himself, for the highest bidder.

The attack against Liberia began in October 2016. More than a half-million security cameras around the world tried to connect to a handful of servers used by Lonestar Cell MTN, a local mobile phone operator, and Lonestar’s network was overwhelmed. Internet access for its 1.5 million customers slowed to a crawl, then stopped.

The technical term for this sort of assault is distributed denial of service, or DDoS. Crude but effective, a DDoS attack uses an army of commandeered machines, called a botnet, to simultaneously connect to a single point online. This botnet, though, was the biggest ever witnessed anywhere, let alone in Liberia, one of the poorest countries in Africa. The result was similar to what would happen if 500,000 extra cars joined the New Jersey Turnpike one morning at rush hour. While most DDoS attacks last only moments, the assault on Lonestar dragged on for days. And since Liberia has had virtually no landlines since the brutal civil war that ended in 2003, that meant half the country was cut off from bank transactions, farmers couldn’t check crop prices, and students couldn’t Google anything. In the capital of Monrovia, the largest hospital went offline for about a week. Infectious disease specialists dealing with the aftermath of a deadly Ebola outbreak lost contact with international health agencies.

Eugene Nagbe, Liberia’s minister for information, was in Paris on business when the crisis began. He struggled to marshal a response, unable to access his email or a reliable phone connection. Then his bank card stopped working. On Nov. 8, with hundreds of thousands of people still disconnected, Nagbe went on French radio to appeal for help. “The scale of the attack tells us that this is a matter of grave concern, not just to Liberia but to the global community that is connected to the internet,” he said. The onslaught continued. No one seemed to know why, but there was speculation that the hack was a test run for something bigger, perhaps even an act of war.

Then, on Nov. 27, Deutsche Telekom AG in Germany started getting tens of thousands of calls from its customers angry that their internet service was down. At a water treatment plant in Cologne, workers noticed the computer system was offline and had to send a technician to check each pump by hand. Deutsche Telekom discovered that a gigantic botnet, the same one targeting Liberia, was affecting its routers. The company devised and circulated a software fix within days, but the boldness and scale of the incident convinced at least one security researcher that Russia or China was to blame.

When the botnet took down the websites of two British banks, the U.K. National Crime Agency got involved, as did Germany’s BKA, with support from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. German police identified a username, which led to an email address, which led to a Skype account, which led to a Facebook page, which belonged to one Daniel Kaye, a lanky, pale, 29-year-old British citizen who’d been raised in Israel and described himself as a freelance security researcher. 

When Kaye checked in for a flight to Cyprus at London’s Luton Airport on the morning of Feb. 22, 2017, he triggered a silent alarm linked to a European arrest warrant in his name. He was in line at the gate when the cops arrived. “That’s him!” an officer said, and Kaye felt hands grab him roughly under the arms. He was taken to a secure room, where officers searched him and found $10,000 in a neat stack of $100 bills. Afterward they drove him to a nearby police station and locked him up. That was until Kaye, a severe diabetic, began nodding in and out of consciousness, then collapsed in his cell. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where two police officers stood guard outside his room just in case their prisoner managed to overcome his hypoglycemic coma and escape. 

But Kaye was no Kremlin spy or criminal mastermind, according to court filings, police reports, and interviews with law enforcement, government officials, Kaye’s associates, and Kaye himself. He was just a mercenary, and a frail one at that.

Kaye gets out of prison this year, and you can bet a whole lot of people will be watching where he goes.  Some will want him contained, some will want him hired, and some may want something far more sinister.  But these are the new rock stars of the decade: the gray hats, hackers who aren't playing good guy or bad guy, but whoever hires them gets their services.  Expect to see a lot more of them this decade.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

The dangerous Second Amendment movement popping up in Virginia is no joke as local officials there are openly calling for armed resistance against anticipated gun safety legislation.

A vigorous and reactionary movement has sprung up throughout Virginia to declare cities and counties “Second Amendment sanctuaries” that will not enforce gun-control laws that the Democratic-controlled General Assembly may pass.

Generating passion, hysteria and even personal threats, the ugly movement has driven throngs of people to show up at boards of supervisors meetings. Their numbers are remarkable — 400, 800, even 2,000 in attendance.

It has prompted Scott H. Jenkins, the sheriff of Culpeper County, to offer to “deputize” thousands of county residents as a ruse to avoid compliance with future gun restrictions. He said he could deputize 5,000 concealed-weapons permit-holders and perhaps 1,000 more. Tazewell County is considering forming a “militia” that would allow residents to skirt new regulations.

By mid-December, 93 cities and counties had passed some kind of resolution opposing new gun-control rules, according to Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, an ardent anti-gun-control organization. “It’s really very simple,” he told me. “If it affects any law-abiding person, then we oppose it.”

For years, the Republican legislature has spiked any gun-control legislation despite a slew of mass shootings, such as the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech and another at a Virginia Beach municipal office building on May 31.

That is about to change. Democrats seized the House of Delegates and the state Senate in November elections. Gov. Ralph Northam (D) has called for tighter rules. Among the possibilities are “red flag” laws that would require a person deemed dangerous to hand over his or her weapons, a ban on some types of assault rifles, mandatory background checks for people buying guns and restrictions such as limiting the number of rounds a magazine can have and devices that allow fast firing, such as bump stocks.

How you know this movement is about forming armed mobs in order to intimidate people with the blessing of local law enforcement and not protecting rights is the fact that this is now happening here in Kentucky, a state with zero chance of passing any new gun regulations.

Adorned in military-pattern camouflage from head to toe, David Johnson stood in front of a packed courthouse in Letcher County this week and proclaimed his support for a local resolution to designate Letcher County a “2nd Amendment Sanctuary.” 

The crowd roared in support as Johnson ended his speech, as it did for every other speaker who warned of a perceived impending threat: the federal and state governments’ incursion on gun rights. 

Letcher County is one of the latest Kentucky counties to pass such a resolution. It joined about half a dozen others, including Harlan, Leslie and Cumberland counties. Dozens of others have meetings or votes scheduled to consider making their counties Second Amendment “sanctuaries.” 

“Tonight, I feel that we the people of Letcher County, and not just Letcher County but the state of Kentucky, and not just the state of Kentucky but of these United States of America, can stand up as law abiding citizens and proclaim that we are constitutional to the bitter end,” Johnson said to the crowd.

And why are armed creeps in camouflage needed to descend upon county courthouses?  Because Kentucky Democrats want to get a red flag law passed that has no chance of making it to Gov. Beshear's desk.

So now, armed mobs are showing up to "remind" politicians of how they should vote.

This is just cosplay idiocy here in Kentucky, but in Virginia I foresee people getting hurt or killed because of these militia mobs.

Besides, if there were a dozen armed black folks carrying near a courthouse, they'd be kettled or shot within 30 minutes.  That's what really pisses me off.

Conflagration Nation, Con't

Australia is still burning like thermite, into its fifth straight month of deadly bushfires as PM Scott Morrison's support is dropping like a rock.

Strong winds that have changed direction are hampering efforts by firefighters to contain bushfires in Australia's south-east.

A southerly change with powerful gusts up to 80mph (128km/h) threatened to spread huge fires raging in New South Wales (NSW), officials said.

In the neighbouring state of Victoria, army helicopters have been deployed to evacuate people trapped by the flames.

Since September, fires in Australia have killed at least 23 people.

More than 1,200 homes have been destroyed and millions of hectares of land scorched. Although much attention has centred on worst-hit NSW, every state and territory has been affected.

On Saturday, NSW fire commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons warned of "volatile" conditions to come.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been harshly criticised for his handling of the emergency, has announced the deployment of 3,000 reserve troops to help the fire-fighting effort.

On Saturday he came under fire again for posting an advert on Twitter showing how the government was responding to the crisis, accompanied by an upbeat backing track.

Australia is about the same size as the mainland US.  Imagine wildfires burning on the West Coast, East Coast, Gulf Coast, the Texas border with Mexico, and the northern border with Canada all at the same time and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's going on in Oz right now.

The bigger issue is of course Morrison is a virulent climate-change denier like the rest of Australia's Liberal Party, and when Tasmanian bushfires rocked the state in 2016, a proposal to expand a national air tanker firefighting fleet was scrapped by Morrison's predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull.

The nation's aerial firefighting centre called four years ago for a "national large air-tanker" fleet to confront a growing bushfire threat but was turned down in a federal government ruling that the task was one for the states.

The National Aerial Firefighting Centre, which oversees a fleet of 145 aircraft, warned of hotter and more extended bushfire seasons in a call on governments in May 2016 to establish the major new capability.

The rejected proposal intensifies the debate over the response to bushfires that are spreading across all six states and have destroyed about 1500 homes and burnt more than 5 million hectares.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will convene the national security committee of federal cabinet in a phone hook-up on Saturday morning to consider the federal response to the crisis, including "options available to us to source other aircraft" to douse fires.

But the government has resisted the idea of a national water-bombing fleet for years in an argument over federal and state responsibilities and funding, raising questions over whether a bigger fleet could have slowed this summer's wildfires.

"Given suitable funding, there is an opportunity to develop, in future years, a sophisticated national large air-tanker capability for Australia," the centre told a Senate inquiry into Tasmanian bushfires.

"Firefighters are likely to face extended, hotter fire seasons in the future, with more days of extreme fire danger. Along with changing demographics and land use pattern, this is likely to increase demand for aerial firefighting resources.

"A shared, national large fixed-wing air-tanker capability is logical and is an attractive strategy."

The Senate inquiry backed the proposal but the government dismissed it in September 2017, saying it would continue its $15 million annual support for the National Aerial Firefighting Centre without expanding the national capability.

Suddenly, Morrison is really interested in funding this proposal now that there's been far more than the cost of funding done in damage this year, and there's zero end in sight to these fires.

But here's the killer.  Australia's wildfires may be the political trigger here for Republicans to use climate change as impetus for their white nationalist takeover, what Jon Katz writes about as the next stage of disaster capitalism: disaster fascism, demonstrated by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Congressman Gaetz is an obvious candidate to help lead the charge to the armed lifeboats. He represents a district in Florida where climate reality is undeniable. He is also an unabashed xenophobe, who rushed to Trump’s defense—and added to the racist pile-on—when the president called Haiti a “shithole.”

In 2019, Gaetz unveiled a climate change proposal he dubbed the “Green Real Deal.” It was an obvious trolling job, a sort of regulation-killing, tax-cutting parody of Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The resolution was filled with signaling language about “unilateral disarmament,” and the U.S. becoming the “world’s patsy” by taking on polluting industries at home. He focused on military adaptation and expansion into the Arctic.

(In a preview of Republican messaging to come, Gaetz also shifted blame away from the climate-denier-in-chief, Donald Trump. Instead he vaguely he cited “some in our government” as the source of denial and quipped nonsensically that the military does not have “the luxury of an academic debate about climate change”—as if academia is where that debate has been happening. As they did with the Iraq War, we can expect the right to shift blame for their decades of global destruction to liberals, and get much of the media to go along.)

Australia has a lot in common with the United States: a diverse, former British settler colony with a tradition of (white) individualism, corporate capitalism, and mass media owned by Rupert Murdoch, who was born in Melbourne. Its prime minister, Scott Morrison, is also a buffoonish climate denier, whose party’s fossil fuel cronyism is similarly papered over with clumsy appeals to white nationalism. Like Trump, he ran on a promise to bar the door to refugees. In office, he has threatened an authoritarian crackdown on protests and boycotts against companies that injure the environment.

Lurking behind them are deadlier forces. The white Australian who slaughtered 51 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared himself an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist,” bent on killing immigrants who he said “colonize other peoples lands.” The gunman who murdered 22 people, mostly Latinos, at an El Paso Walmart in August, framed his massacre in terms of environmental necessity: “The average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience … So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources.”

“Ecofascism” is a misnomer. This is old-school fascism. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler both feared the exhaustion of resources, and authorized violence in the name of garnering more productive “living space” (spazio vitale in Italian; Lebensraum in German). In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that “we have to face the fact that the general standard of living is rising more quickly than even the birth rate,” and that the “right of self-preservation” meant Germans could take the resources they needed by force.

Taking the resources one needs from the unwashed horde remains a staple of right-wing messaging. As the ultimate elite panicker, Tucker Carlson opined in November: “Isn't crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it a place you wouldn't want to live?”

And suddenly it all makes sense, doesn't it?  The xenophobia, Trump's screeches of "No more room!" in America, the projection that Democrats will use climate change as justification for government crackdowns, Stephen Miller's rush to deport as many brown faces as possible, the rage against the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, all of it.

The "good Christians" are shutting the doors of the American ark.

That's what this always has been about.  Looting the palatial ocean liner before it sinks and heading to the lifeboats, firing into the crowds to keep them away from the ropes.

Australia is where we're heading, and very soon, under a second Trump term.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

As I've been saying for two days now, Trump started a war with Iran to justify the dismissal of impeachment charges against him. This is absolutely coming, and over the next few days I guarantee you that we will have Republican in Congress saying that Democrats allowing any impeachment trial proceedings to happen is directly helping Iranian terrorists to murder Americans.

President Trump’s order to kill an Iranian commander responsible for hundreds of American deaths has scrambled the politics of impeachment, putting Democrats on the defensive in their bid to remove Trump during a possible escalation into war.

Multiple senior congressional Democratic officials predicted that the House in the coming days will transmit to the Senate a pair of charges accusing Trump of abusing his power and obstructing Congress, though Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office says no decision has been made. But some privately worry that the timing will trigger GOP accusations that they’re undercutting the commander in chief during a national security crisis.

After the House impeached Trump on Dec. 18, Pelosi (D-Calif.) opted to hold on to the articles of impeachment over the two-week holiday break, a move aimed at giving Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) more leverage in negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over witnesses in a Senate trial. However, McConnell has refused to budge — and now, the articles are likely to be carried across the Rotunda during a tense and potentially dangerous standoff in the Middle East.

Pelosi, however, has signaled that she has no intention of backing down. On Friday morning, just hours after the attack, she emailed impeachment talking points to Democrats, encouraging them to “call on McConnell to commit to a fair trial in the Senate,” then later issued a statement suggesting she would transmit the articles eventually, though the exact timing is unclear.

“Every Senator now faces a choice: to be loyal to the President or the Constitution,” she said.

Republicans, meanwhile, are relishing the optics. In an interview Friday, top Trump ally Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) argued that Democrats were “playing politics” with impeachment while Trump was “taking out a general who has American bloodstains on his hands.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) agreed, declaring that Trump was focused on defending the country amid Democratic “harassment.”
“Clearly for the president, he’s shown that he’s been able to stay focused on the main job, and that’s keeping Americans safe,” Scalise said. “But it seems like Pelosi is just fixed with the obsession of impeachment of the president. . . . She can’t let it go.”

Republicans have planned this out.  Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted just hours before the assassination of Suleimani that he would introduce a motion to dismiss the impeachment charges outright.  It was laughable kabuki at the time.  Now, the Senate GOP has the cover to dismiss. There was a reason that everyone but Democrats in Congress were informed of the strike before it happened.  In fact, all the evidence points to Trump choosing to start a war with Iran to derail his Senate impeachment trial.

They'll get away with it too.  Our media will return to the heady rah-rah days of 2003 when cable news cheerleaded Bush's way into Iraq after 18 months in Afghanistan, when questioning such a move destroyed careers in politics, journalism, and entertainment. It'll be the same for Iran, and with a war being a ratings bonanza, every piece of propaganda and manipulative "new development" fed to the media by the Trump regime will drown out reality.

Our media isn't up to the task, and neither frankly are the Democrats.  We're in dire trouble here of catastrophe, and it will move quickly.

Climate Of Disaster, Con't

The Trump regime is about to eliminate the need for climate change analysis from environmental impact studies from all future federal infrastructure projects, meaning the effects of massive infrastructure builds on the future literally won't matter to the government anymore.

Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken the nation’s benchmark environmental law.

The proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act could sharply reduce obstacles to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and other fossil fuel projects that have been stymied when courts ruled that the Trump administration did not properly consider climate change when analyzing the environmental effects of the projects.

According to one government official who has seen the proposed regulation but was not authorized to speak about it publicly, the administration will also narrow the range of projects that require environmental review. That could make it likely that more projects will sail through the approval process without having to disclose plans to do things like discharge waste, cut trees or increase air pollution.

The new rule would no longer require agencies to consider the “cumulative” consequences of new infrastructure. In recent years courts have interpreted that requirement as a mandate to study the effects of allowing more planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. It also has meant understanding the impacts of rising sea levels and other results of climate change on a given project.

The act requires the federal government to prepare detailed analyses of projects that could have significant environmental effects, including long-term impacts that courts have said include climate change. Since 1970, when the law was enacted, it has undergone only one major change. That was in 1983, when the White House Council on Environmental Quality limited the use of worst-case scenarios in project reviews.

But the Trump administration has been aggressive in its efforts to roll back environmental regulations. The 50 or so pages of revisions that the Council on Environmental Quality is expected to make public on Wednesday would not amend the act itself. Rather, they would revise the rules that guide the implementation of the law.

Once the proposed rules are filed in the federal register, the public will have 60 days to comment on them, the official said. A final regulation is expected before the presidential election in November.

Dan Schneider, spokesman for the Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement that the environmental law was overdue for an update. “The Trump administration is focused on improving the environmental review and permitting process while ensuring a safe, healthy, and productive environment for all Americans,” he said.

In other words, climate change impact on all projects and even environmental impact on a lot of projects would happen, and then simply be ignored by the Trump regime.  This will absolutely get tied up in the courts and make it to SCOTUS for sure.

We'll see what happens, but a second Trump term and its resulting SCOTUS picks would almost certainly spell the end of NEPA.

Oh, and severely damage humanity's survival on the planet.  No pressure.

Last Call For Impeachment Reached, Con't

Mitch McConnell isn't quite ready to bring up outright dismissal of impeachment charged against Donald Trump due to our unfortunate new war with Iran, but he's definitely sandbagging on witnesses and Pelosi is calling him out on it.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) bashed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) refusal to commit to Senate impeachment trial witnesses, with a statement Friday that stopped short of suggesting she’d withhold the impeachment articles until he did.

“The American people deserve the truth. Every Senator now faces a choice: to be loyal to the President or the Constitution,” Pelosi said in the statement. “The GOP Senate must immediately proceed in a manner worthy of the Constitution and in light of the gravity of the President’s unprecedented abuses.”
Since the House adopted impeachment articles alleging President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, the Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders have publicly feuded over whether the Senate should agree to call additional witness for its trial when it hashes out a preliminary deal for the other trial procedures.

McConnell, in floor remarks Friday, reiterated his position that the Senate should follow the model of the Clinton impeachment trial, during which the senators did not come to an agreement on witnesses until after the initial stages of the trial were completed.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) meanwhile has accused McConnell of pushing off the witness decision so Republicans could make an end-run around it, and the Democrat is seeking the testimony top administration aides that the White House refused to make available for the House impeachment proceedings.

The night of the House impeachment vote, Pelosi wouldn’t rule out withholding the transmission of the articles until McConnell agreed to a fair trial. She has since downplayed the possibility that she’d delay the articles’ transmission as leverage for securing procedural concessions from McConnell.

Nonetheless, McConnell whacked Pelosi Friday for even flirting with the idea of delaying the transmission, claiming in his floor remarks that the House had developed “cold feet” about its impeachment case after for weeks touting an urgency in the allegations that required the House to move quickly.

Pelosi shot back in her statement that McConnell had “made clear that he will feebly comply with President Trump’s cover-up of his abuses of power and be an accomplice to that cover-up.”

Missing from the blistering statement, however, was any hint that she would hold off on sending the impeachment case to the Senate until McConnell gave in to the Democrats’ demands.

Pelosi is still playing it cool, but I have to say, the Trump regime war propaganda machine is already in full swing with this load of crap from Mike Pence:

Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer place today because Soleimani is gone.

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) January 3, 2020

Precisely none of the statements in those two tweets are truthful, and the attack will be used to justify a whole host of things this year.

The Red Rout Resumes, Con't

If there's one thing that remains constant from 2019 into this year, it's the continued retirement of House Republicans leaving their sinking ship.

Tennessee Republican U.S. Rep. Phil Roe announced Friday that he will retire at the end of the 116th Congress.

Roe called representing East Tennesseans in Congress for the past 11 years “the honor of my life” and said he always intended to serve five or six terms because he didn’t want to make it a second career. He practiced medicine for more than 30 years before being elected.

Roe, who chairs the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he’s proud the panel has achieved the goals he set for it, including increasing access to care and bringing true accountability to the department.

“I’ll leave Congress at the end of the year knowing that our nation’s heroes are better served today because of our work,” he said. “I am still hopeful that, before the 116th Congress adjourns, we will pass important reforms that improve outreach to veterans in crisis to address the suicide epidemic.”

Roe is among more than two dozen Republicans who have decided not to seek reelection next year.

He said he ran for Congress hoping that his experience as a practicing physician could have a positive impact on health care policy.

“The Affordable Care Act was signed into law during my first term, and much of my time was spent trying to undo some of the harm that was done to the patient-centered health care model as a result,” he said.

Roe was swept into office in 2008, ruthlessly primarying out then freshman congressman Dave Davis and he's been running on getting rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion ever since.  But even Trump is too much for him and he knows the GOP isn't going to win back the House any time soon.  He has arguably the safest district in the country, Tennessee's 1st district on the eastern border of NC in the Appalachians hasn't elected a Democrat since Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

But he's leaving.

There's a lesson there for those who wish to learn.

The Drums Of War, Con't

As I said yesterday, the Trump regime 100% wants impeachment off the front page, and the best way to do that is to escalate the conflict with Iran.  Trump just may have gotten his way, and he just may have entered America into a dangerous conflict with Tehran.

An air strike has killed Iranian Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani and another senior Iranian-linked figure in Baghdad, Iraqi state television reported on Thursday.  

No one claimed immediately responsibility for the strike, which Iraqi television also said killed Abu Mehdi al-Muhandas, an Iraqi militia commander, near the Iraqi capital’s airport, but the death of Iran’s most revered military leader appeared likely to send tensions soaring between the United States and Iran. 

Soleimani, who has long been Iran’s most prominent military figure and is closely linked to the country’s foreign proxy groups, has taken on an enhanced role in Iraq as the country’s Shiite militia groups have gained new clout in recet years. 

Pentagon officials declined comment on the strike.

The strike comes amid already increased friction between Washington and Iran over what U.S. official say is a campaign of sustained agrees sin against the United States and its allies.

As Soleimani is the most powerful military person in Iran, second in power only to Supreme Leader Ali Khameni.  If this airstrike truly killed him, then Iran will almost certainly see it as an act of war, an assassination by the US, and they will respond in kind.  Iran arrested three people in October in connection to what they say was an Israeli plot to kill Soleimani.

Soleimani has been Iran's point man in Syria assisting the Assad regime, supporting the Syrian government with both military and paramilitary assistance. Having said that, Iran has other military leaders who can step in to run Qods Force, so it's not going to break Tehran's back, but if Iran wants to take Trump's bait here and lash out, this was the bait to use.

One thing to get straight however: this man was behind Iran's terrorist military and proxy operations for twenty years.

From the start of the Syrian civil war, General Suleimani was one of the chief leaders of an effort to protect President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — an important Iranian ally — that brought together disparate militias, national security forces and regional powers, including Russia in recent years.

But that was far from the only front he operated on. American officials accuse General Suleimani of causing the deaths of hundreds of soldiers during the Iraq war, when he provided Iraqi insurgents with advanced bomb-making equipment and training. They also say he has masterminded destabilizing Iranian activities that continue throughout the Middle East and are aimed at the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.” 

It did not elaborate on the specific intelligence that led them to carry out General Suleimani’s killing. The highly classified mission was set in motion after the American contractor’s death on Dec. 27 during a rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia, a senior American official said. 

In killing General Suleimani, Mr. Trump took an action that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it would lead to war between the United States and Iran. 

While many Republicans said that the president had been justified in the attack, Mr. Trump’s most significant use of military force to date, critics of his Iran policy called the strike a reckless unilateral escalation that could have drastic and unforeseen consequences that could ripple violently throughout the Middle East. 

“Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter, using an alternate spelling of the Iranian’s name. “The question is this - as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

We'll see what Iran's response will be.  This could get very ugly, very quickly. Will they risk a real shooting war over the assassination of their equivalent of DNI/Secretary of Defense?

Whoever talked Trump into giving this order may be counting on it.

But let's not forget.

Just two days into the new decade and an impeached president, facing a Senate impeachment trial for his crimes, has most likely started a bloody shooting war with Iran that will set back Middle East relations for years, endanger Americans all over the globe, and may end in direct military confrontation.  He did not inform Congress, nor did he seek approval of the assassination of a foreign target.  He just started a war with Iran in order to justify the Senate GOP dismissing his impeachment trial.

This is the crisis scenario we warned you was coming four years ago if Trump was elected.

Here there be dragons.  We're into the worst-case scenario section of the book now, and I don't know how this ends.  None of us do.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime plans to remove nearly all flavored e-cigarette vapor cartridges from the market by Memorial Day, with the exception of menthol, according to the FDA.
• Kentucky GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron is asking the FBI to open an investigation into former GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's "pay-for-play" pardons.
• Australian navy vessels are rushing to rescue wildfire victims stranded on the country's eastern coast as flames and record heat continue to ravage the continent.
• The Pentagon says it is ready to send thousands of more troops into Iraq to protect the US embassy in Baghdad and other "green zone" assets if Iranian-backed militias resume their siege of the area.
• Several major drug companies have hiked drug prices by 5-10%on dozens of drugs to open 2020 as Senate Republicans refuse to allow drug price legislation to get a floor vote.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

One of the big advantages to Nancy Pelosi's strategy to delay sending over Trump's impeachment to the Senate is that white Trump and McConnell are busy complaining and lying, vulnerable GOP senators are sweating while more information about Ukraine is coming out as investigations continue.

One of the GOP’s chief talking points in its impeachment defense of President Trump has been this: The U.S. military aid to Ukraine was withheld, yes, but it was released without any quid pro quo being satisfied. Ipso facto, nothing to see here.

That already-strained talking point suffered a significant blow on Thursday.

Just Security’s Kate Brannen was able to view unredacted emails in which the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department discussed the withholding of military aid. The big new takeaway is that there was significant concern within the Pentagon about the legality and sustainability of the hold. Despite that, according to one email from top OMB official Michael Duffey on Aug. 30, there was “clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

The even-bigger takeaway, though, may be how much this fact was obscured. The emails were previously released in redacted form, but many of the redaction choices are puzzling and even suspicious. The redactions include repeated references to legal problems with withholding the aid, basic questions about that subject, and warnings that waiting until too late in the fiscal year (which ended Sept. 30) might mean that some of the funds would never get to Ukraine.

That latter fact appears to have been doubly obscured — including in an official communication. OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Dec. 11 that suggested that the Defense Department hadn’t flagged such a risk.

“In fact, at no point during the pause in obligations did DOD [Office of General Counsel] indicate to OMB that, as a matter of law, the apportionments would prevent DOD from being able to obligate the funds before the end of the fiscal year,” Paoletta wrote. 

In fact, though, there are at least three concrete examples of a Defense Department official flagging something similar to OMB: 

On Aug. 12, with the hold being renewed, acting Defense Department comptroller Elaine McCusker offered proposed language for the hold to Duffey. It stated that “this additional pause in obligations may not preclude DOD’s timely execution of the final policy direction but that execution risk increases with continued delays.”

On Aug. 27, McCusker sent Duffey a draft letter that the Pentagon was preparing to send OMB. In the letter, the deputy defense secretary was to say, “As a result, we have repeatedly advised OMB officials that pauses beyond Aug. 19, 2019 jeopardize the Department’s ability to obligate USAI funding prudently and fully, consistent with the Impoundment Control Act.”

After Politico on Aug. 28 broke the story that the funds were being withheld, emails were exchanged establishing talking points, including one similar to the statement that eventually found its way into Paoletta’s letter: “No action has been taken by OMB that would preclude the obligation of these funds before the end of the fiscal year.” McCusker, though, explicitly told Duffey that wasn’t the case. “I don’t agree to the revised TPs — the last one is just not accurate from a financial execution standpoint, something we have been consistently conveying for a few weeks,” she said. 

All three of these were redacted from the initially released emails by the Justice Department, according to Just Security, and the proposed language from No. 1 wasn’t used by OMB for some reason. Another redaction came in an Aug. 26 email, in which McCusker told Duffey that Paoletta “appears to continue to consistently misunderstand the process and the timelines we have provided for funds execution.” McCusker also told Defense Department officials internally in an email that “OMB continues to ignore our repeated explanation regarding how the process works.”

The coverup of the Ukraine "favor" and Trump's withheld aid was impossible because it involved the White House, the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon.  There's too much paper trail there to bury, and it was only a matter of time before the documents the White House is trying to bury came to light like they did today.

And what these documents prove is that Trump ordered the Ukraine aid block personally.

It's going to get harder and harder for the Senate not to call witnesses, and it's pressure and leverage that Pelosi should continue to use until she gets them.  I don't believe it'll make a micron's difference in the guaranteed outcome of a Senate acquittal of Trump, but it'll sure be some nasty footage for campaign ads in 2020.

Another Hat Leaves The Ring

Former Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro is the latest to fold up his tent as 2020 opens and the Democratic primary arena becomes smaller.

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Castro, 45, a native of San Antonio who spent five years as its mayor, portrayed himself as an unapologetic liberal who was shaped by his humble beginnings and had been overlooked by the press. Though he created some memorable moments as he championed progressive policy and challenged his rivals on the campaign trail, Mr. Castro did not catch on with voters and was unable to break into the upper tier of a crowded primary field. His exit is the latest departure of a candidate of color from a field that began as the most racially diverse ever in a Democratic primary.

“I’ve determined that it simply isn’t our time,” Mr. Castro said in a nearly four-minute video message released by his campaign, which included a montage from his year on the trail, including visits to the border and a homeless encampment in Oakland. “Today it’s with a heavy heart, and profound gratitude, that I will suspend my campaign for president.”

“I’m not done fighting," Mr. Castro continued, though he gave no indication of his immediate plans. “I’ll keep working towards a nation where everyone counts, a nation where everyone can get a good job, good health care and a decent place to live.”

The video also features Mr. Castro listing the names of African Americans and Latinos who were killed by police or died in police custody in recent years, something he did often during debates and on the trail.

Mr. Castro’s departure shrinks the field of Democratic candidates to 14. He was viewed as a potential vice presidential pick by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and could be a valuable running mate this year, with Democrats eager to court Latino voters.

Castro and his twin brother Joaquin really do have a bright political future ahead of them, but the 2020 Oval Office isn't in the cards.  I'm hoping that the two of them will be a major force going forward in a Democratic cabinet and House in 2021. Joaquin Castro is currently in TX-20 representing the brothers' home turf of San Antonio, and I think both of them will go far.

For now though, as the NY Times article says, there's still 14 primary candidates in this little shindig.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The siege of the US embassy in Baghdad by Iranian-controlled militia militants is over, for now. But Tehran has made it clear that they can hurt the US if they want to, and they're giving Trump a chance to back off.  Trump of course won't take it.

The siege by supporters of an Iranian-backed militia at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad appeared to have ended Wednesday, after the militia ordered them to withdraw, bringing relief to the diplomats trapped inside and averting a potential showdown between the United States and Iran.

Supporters of the Kataib Hezbollah militia who had spent the night camped outside the embassy dismantled their tents and marched out of the area, saying they would instead continue to press for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in the nation’s parliament.

Their retreat signaled an end to a crisis that had seen thousands of angry militia supporters attempt to storm the embassy on Tuesday in protest at the deaths of 25 militia members in U.S. airstrikes on Sunday. The strikes were in turn conducted in retaliation for the death of a U.S. contractor in a rocket attack which the U.S. military blamed on Kataib Hezbollah.

The Pentagon dispatched additional troop reinforcements to the region as President Trump in a tweet blamed Iran for the assault on the embassy, raising fears of an escalating conflict.

The departure of the demonstrators was welcomed by the diplomats and embassy staffers who had been holed up in safe rooms for more than 24 hours.

“Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief,” said Maj. Charlie Dietz, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad. “A situation that could have easily escalated out of control was handled with tactical restraint and everyone was able to walk away.”

An embassy official said he most looked forward to the opportunity to catch up on sleep.

Kataib Hezbollah agreed to end the siege of the embassy after receiving guarantees from the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi that he would lend his support to efforts in parliament to pass a law calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, according to a senior official with the group.

Mohammed Mohyee, Kataib Hezbollah’s political spokesman, said that the prime minister, whose candidacy the militia had supported, had also threatened to vacate his post if the protest continued, deepening turmoil in the already chaotic country, which has been wracked by separate, anti-government protests for months.

Representatives of the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

So Abdul-Mahdi is facing ouster, Iran is essentially running things inside Baghdad, and the militias are waiting for their next offensive.  Meanwhile, Trump will almost certainly turn up the economic and military heat on Tehran this month, only making the situation worse with rising retaliatory pressure.

And yes, this is being done to get impeachment off the front page.  It could very easily turn into the collapse of Iraq's government or war with Iran or both, but hey, Trump's never miscalculated before, right?

StupidiNews!

We're back in business for the new year and here's to all of us.

• Marijuana is now legal in Illinois and 21 states are raising the minimum wage as multiple new laws take effect across the country this week. 
• Hundreds were arrested in Hong Kong as police cracked down on New Year's protesters during major pro-democracy rallies across the city.
• Pope Francis is apologizing for slapping the arm of a woman who held on to the pontiff, saying his actions were setting a bad example for Catholics.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is promising "shocking" new action in his annual new Year's speech as Pyongyang says it will no longer keep any moratorium on nuclear testing.
• Researchers in Mexico are using core samples taken from a 2,000-year-old Mayan village sinkhole to determine what extreme weather events like hurricanes affected Mesoamerican peoples.