Last Call For State Of The Hawkeye State

Some 72 hours later, we still don't know who won Iowa for sure, and that's because the process has been a clown show from beginning to end.  If Democrats survive all this, the first thing that needs to go is the caucus process, period.

Results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses were delayed by “quality control checks” on Monday night. Days later, quality control issues have not been resolved.

The results released by the Iowa Democratic Party on Wednesday were riddled with inconsistencies and other flaws. According to a New York Times analysis, more than 100 precincts reported results that were internally inconsistent, that were missing data or that were not possible under the complex rules of the Iowa caucuses.

In some cases, vote tallies do not add up. In others, precincts are shown allotting the wrong number of delegates to certain candidates. And in at least a few cases, the Iowa Democratic Party’s reported results do not match those reported by the precincts.

Some of these inconsistencies may prove to be innocuous, and they do not indicate an intentional effort to compromise or rig the result. There is no apparent bias in favor of the leaders Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, meaning the overall effect on the winner’s margin may be small.

But not all of the errors are minor, and they raise questions about whether the public will ever get a completely precise account of the Iowa results. With Mr. Sanders closing to within 0.1 percentage points with 97 percent of 1,765 precincts reporting, the race could easily grow close enough for even the most minor errors to delay a final projection or raise doubts about a declared winner.

The errors suggest that many Iowa caucus leaders struggled to follow the rules of their party’s caucuses, or to adopt the additional reporting requirements introduced since 2016. They show that the Iowa Democratic Party, despite the long delays, failed to validate all of the results fully before releasing them to the public.

Mandy McClure, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Democratic Party (I.D.P.), said the party reported the data as provided to it by the precinct caucuses.

“The caucus math work sheet is the official report on caucus night to the I.D.P., and the I.D.P. reports the results as delivered by the precinct chair,” she said. “This form must be signed by the caucus chair, the caucus secretary and representatives from each campaign in the room who attest to its accuracy. Under the rules of the delegate selection process, delegates are awarded based off the record of results as provided by each precinct caucus chair.”

Just about every election night includes reporting errors. They can be difficult to identify, but can often be corrected during a recount or a postelection canvass. This year’s Iowa caucuses are the reverse: Errors are now easy to identify, and hard to correct.

The errors are detectable because of changes to the way the Iowa Democratic Party reports its results, put in place after the Sanders campaign criticized the caucus results in 2016. This cycle, and for the first time, the party released three sets of results corresponding to different steps in the caucus process. The rules are complex and thorough, and they create conditions in which the results can be obviously inaccurate or inconsistent within a precinct.
First, caucusgoers express their preference for a candidate upon arrival, and these votes are recorded in a “first alignment.” Then, candidates with limited support at a precinct, usually less than 15 percent, are deemed not viable; their supporters get a chance to realign to support a viable candidate. The preference at this point is recorded as well, and it’s called the final alignment.

Viable candidates can’t lose support on realignment, but there were more than 10 cases where a viable candidate lost vote share in the final alignment, even though that is precluded by the caucus rules.

This was a mess, plain and simple.  DNC Chair Tom Perez is demanding a recanvass and at this point doing so might make the situation worse for the reasons mentioned above.

What's not in any doubt though is that Joe Biden needs to hit the ground running in NH, NV, and especially in SC or Bernie Sanders will be the nominee.

Neither the disaster of the Iowa Democrats’ caucus app nor the reporting delays change the reality: The former vice president of the United States and the front-runner in nearly all the national and Iowa polls came in a distant fourth, behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Now he must struggle to reassert himself and hope for a magical underdog story (hey, Bill Clinton turned himself into the Comeback Kid after placing second in the 1992 New Hampshire primary). But forget about advertising and campaign staff: It’s now an open question whether Biden will have the cash to pay for his charter plane to fly him around the 14 Super Tuesday states that vote on March 3.

Running short on money is a big part of why he ended up here at all.

After a disastrous summer of fundraising, plans from the team in Iowa and other states would linger with national headquarters for weeks, then come back without approval for the spending being requested. Other candidates were quickly hiring staff—particularly Buttigieg, who in June had all of four staffers in the state but went into the caucuses with 170—while Biden’s team was under an almost complete hiring freeze. The campaign yanked its TV ads, leaving Biden dark for weeks and exponentially outspent in online advertising by Warren and Buttigieg, who soon had the rising poll numbers to show for it. At one point, aides realized, Biden was on track to spend less on TV in Iowa in this race than in his 2008 run, when he finished as an asterisk, with 1 percent of the vote.

Biden aides who were being honest with themselves knew for months that they were in trouble. Some didn’t want to believe it; some couldn’t. Others felt like they’d gotten into a taxi with a driver who was swerving all over the road, and they were just holding on and hoping they made it to the end.

They hoped that Democrats’ obsession with beating Donald Trump and voters’ sense of personal connection to Biden would pull them over the edge. Trump had blundered into his own impeachment out of fear that Biden was strong. Now they were hoping the impeachment trial would help make up for his weakness. “We might win this,” one person who worked on the campaign told me the week before the caucuses, “and it might come down to nothing we’ve done.”

When Biden held his final pre-caucus rally at a middle school in Des Moines on Sunday afternoon, 1,100 people came—his biggest crowd in Iowa of the whole campaign. Eight people introduced him; four retired senators were in the crowd. But by the time he began speaking, the Super Bowl had started, and people were dribbling out of the room. An hour earlier, a few miles away in a high-school gym, Buttigieg had drawn twice as many people.

Biden will make it through Super Tuesday, all the candidates will.  Most will stay in through Big Tuesday at the halfway point of March. But after that?  After that this might be a done deal for somebody other than Joe.

.

Retribution Execution

It took less than a few hours from his Senate acquittal for Trump to start in with his latest round of targeting Americans as his political enemies in order to make them suffer for slighting him.  First up on the list: Puerto Rico.

The White House issued a veto threat Wednesday over a $4.7 billion emergency aid package intended to help Puerto Rico recover from a series of damaging earthquakes.

The statement came ahead of a vote planned for Friday in the Democratic-controlled House to pass the aid package.

It’s the latest in a series of confrontations between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats over disaster assistance to Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory is still waiting on billions of dollars approved by Congress for recovery from Hurricane Maria more than two years ago, though the administration recently agreed to release some of the money subject to several conditions.

As part of that effort, Puerto Rico’s governor on Wednesday signed a grant agreement that is meant to allow the territory to access $8.3 billion in Department of Housing and Urban Development funding related to the hurricane.

Still rebuilding from the 2017 hurricane, Puerto Rico was hit by a series of earthquakes beginning in late December, including a 6.4-magnitude temblor on Jan. 7 that killed one person and caused widespread damage and power outages. Aftershocks have continued, with a 5-magnitude earthquake hitting just Tuesday.

The House Democrats’ $4.67 billion aid package would include $3.26 billion in community development block grants, $1.25 billion for repairs to roads, and tens of millions more for schools, energy and nutrition assistance.

The aid package was unlikely to pass the Senate in its current form.

In its veto message, the White House Office of Management and Budget called the House legislation “misguided.”

“Neither Puerto Ricans nor the American taxpayers benefit when emergency aid is misallocated, lost, or stolen through waste, fraud, and abuse,” the veto message said. “Multiple high-profile cases of corruption have marred distribution of aid already appropriated and have led to ongoing political instability on the island."

If "Trump is blocking aid because he says the government is corrupt but really he just wants to hurt people" seems a tad familiar to you, well, it's supposed to be, only Trump is doing it to an American territory and not, say, Ukraine.

And if you think that's bad, Trump is going directly after 2020 Democratic Candidate Michael Bloomberg, and all of New York for daring to defy him.

The acting secretary of Homeland Security announced on Wednesday that New York state residents can no longer participate in certain Trusted Traveler Programs, including Global Entry, due to provisions in the state's new "Green Light Law" supporting undocumented immigrants. 

The law, which went into effect in December, allows undocumented immigrants to apply for New York driver's licenses while protecting applicants' information from immigration enforcement agencies. 

"Today, we sent a letter to New York indicating, because they took these measures, that New York residents are no longer eligible to enroll in these Trusted Traveler Programs," acting Secretary Chad Wolf told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday. 

New York state residents cannot "enroll or re-enroll" in the programs "because we no longer have access to make sure that they meet those program requirements, so we need to do our job," Wolf added. 

The letter states that the Green Light Law will impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "objective of protecting the people of New York from menacing threats to national security and public safety," according to a copy obtained by Fox News and confirmed to CNN by a source familiar with the letter. 

Since the law "prevents DHS from accessing New York DMV records in order to determine whether a (Trusted Traveler Program) applicant or re-applicant meets program eligibility requirements, New York residents will no longer be eligible to enroll or re-enroll in CBP's Trusted Travel Programs," the letter adds. 

The letter lists four such programs that are managed by US Customs and Border Protection: Global Entry, which allows for faster clearance in customs for participants when they enter the US; NEXUS, which allows for quicker border crossing for qualified travelers between the US and Canada; Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI), another program that allows for quicker clearance for qualified travelers when they arrive in the US; and the Free And Secure Trade (FAST) program, which allows for quicker clearance for commercial shipments crossing the US border from Canada or Mexico. 

The letter does not mention the Transportation Security Administration's Precheck program, in a seemingly targeted effort to punish New York for the law while limiting problems at airports for TSA.

Trump sent Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf on Tucker Carlson's White Supremacist Power Hour to exclusively announce that the regime was punishing Bloomberg's state of New York, and my guess is this is only the first of many assaults on the Empire State as long as they keep defying Dear Leader (and as long as the State of New York continues its multiple cases against the Trump Organization.)

Again, this is happening mere hours after being acquitted on an abuse of power charge.

Meanwhile in the Department of "justice", Attorney General Bill Barr released new guidelines for investigating political candidates: any investigation of any presidential candidate or their top staff must now be approved by the AG and top officials first.

In the memo, Mr. Barr established a series of requirements governing whether investigators could open preliminary or full “politically sensitive” criminal and counterintelligence investigations into candidates or their donors.

No investigation into a presidential or vice-presidential candidate — or their senior campaign staff or advisers — can begin without written notification to the Justice Department and the written approval of Mr. Barr.
The F.B.I. must also notify and consult with the relevant leaders at the department — like the heads of the criminal division, the national security division or a United States attorney’s office — before investigating Senate or House candidates or their campaigns, or opening an inquiry related to “illegal contributions, donations or expenditures by foreign nationals to a presidential or congressional campaign.”

Past attorneys general have said that the department must take extra care with politically sensitive campaign-related investigations in an election year. But Mr. Barr is the first to require that the F.B.I. consult with the Justice Department before opening politically charged investigations.

Now everything has to go by Barr first before an investigation can even begin, meaning he can kill any probe into Trump, just in time for the election.  A policy of guaranteed interference by requiring interference in investigations sure seems like something you can trust this regime to do, right?

Oh, but it gets worse as Trump took his victory lap this afternoon from the White House East Room.

In an extended rant following his acquittal in the Senate, President Donald Trump on Thursday crowed over his firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

“Had I not fired James Comey, who was a disaster by the way, it’s possible I wouldn’t even be standing here right now,” Trump said.

He also complained about the investigations into him and his campaign.

“And we were treated unbelievably unfairly, and you have to understand we first went through Russia, Russia, Russia,” he said. “It was all bullshit.”

You can't make this up.  This has been just the last 24 hours.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The big takeaway from this week is that control of the Senate remains in play for the Democrats, at least according to the Cook Political Report team, but as I said yesterday, that means coming up with a pickup to offset Doug Jones's sacrifice.

Jones’s electoral prognosis was grim even before he announced today he will indeed vote to convict and remove President Trump in the Senate impeachment trial. That’s not a winning vote to take in a state Trump carried by 28 points four years ago, will easily win again this year and remains incredibly popular in. Our analysis that this race is moving away from Jones, no matter what he does, solely on the fundamentals would have been the same had he voted to acquit Trump.

Jones isn’t even among the most bipartisan senators. For the 115th Congress, the Lugar Center ranked Jones as the 36th in bipartisanship. FiveThirtyEight finds that Jones has voted with Trump 36.8% of the time, putting him behind other Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. And he was also ranked behind all four Democrats who lost in 2018 — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, Florida’s Bill Nelson and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly. Of that quartet of states, only North Dakota voted for Trump by a larger margin than Alabama.

On the other highest-profile vote of his career — the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh — Jones also voted with Democrats and against confirmation. The same is true for Jones as it is for the other most vulnerable Republican incumbents this cycle — there is ultimately little incentive for them to buck their party. A contradictory vote would likely do little anyway to woo a shrinking bloc of independent voters or even Republicans, and they all must rely on their base to win anyway. For Jones, he still needs Democrats for fundraising and support — and it’s been speculated a possible spot in a Democratic administration if he does lose re-election.

So for all those reasons, we are moving the Alabama Senate race from Toss-Up to the Lean Republican column, meaning it is the first to move into takeover territory for either party this cycle.
With this new calculus, Democrats now need a net gain of four Senate seats if they win the White House or five if they don’t. What this doesn’t change though is that the majority is still in play and that Democrats still have a path to getting there. It’s hard to see the Senate flipping if the White House doesn’t too, and there are still multiple paths to those four seats for Democrats. Three GOP incumbents remain in Toss Up — Arizona’s Martha McSally, Maine’s Susan Collins and Colorado’s Cory Gardner. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is teetering on the edge of being there too, and we’ll have analysis in this Friday’s newsletter of how the impeachment trial and acquittal votes affect those endangered Republicans. Last month we moved both the Kansas and Georgia Senate races in Democrats’ favor. So while this is good news for Republicans, overall, they still have a tough task in defending their majority.

We'll see.  If we can get rid of Trump and Mitch as Senate leader, oh lord yes.

StupidiNews!

• Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas has passed at age 103, the father of actor Michael Douglas, Kirk starred in "Spartacus", "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", and "Seven Days in May".
• Not content with his State of the Union address having some 30 million fewer viewers this year, Donald Trump plans to address the nation after his "impeachment victory" tonight.
• Former Democratic VP Joe Biden says he's "not going anywhere" after a fourth-place showing in Iowa's caucuses.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party is in revolt after local party officials in Thuringia state threw their support behind far-right neo-Nazi candidate.
• Microsoft's expansion of PC/XBox cloud gaming means the software giant now considers Google and Amazon as its chief gaming industry rivals.

Last Call For Getting Away With It

Now here is something I never thought I would type: "Donald Trump was acquitted of both articles of impeachment on Wednesday despite a bipartisan vote to convict him on the charge of abuse of power."

At a post-acquittal news conference, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was repeatedly asked about Romney’s political future given his vote to convict Trump on an abuse of power charge.

A number of influential GOP figures, including Donald Trump Jr., have pressed Senate Republicans to remove Romney from their party’s ranks in the chamber.

But McConnell was notably restrained in his criticism of his Utah colleague and declined to say whether he thinks Romney should be expelled.

“I was surprised and disappointed, but we have much work to do for the American people, and I think Senator Romney has been largely supportive of most everything we’ve tried to accomplish,” McConnell said.

He was far more scathing in his assessment of Democrats, casting their move to impeach the president as a grave misstep.

“Right now, this is a political loser for them,” McConnell said. “They initiated it. They thought this was a great idea. And at least for the short term, it has been a colossal political mistake.”

Yeah.  Mitt Romney finally found his spine.  Trump will have to destroy him, of course.

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown comes awfully close to naming and shaming the rest of the GOP. 

For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. They are afraid that Mr. Trump might give them a nickname like “Low Energy Jeb” and “Lyin’ Ted,” or that he might tweet about their disloyalty. Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary. They worry:

“Will the hosts on Fox attack me?”

“Will the mouthpieces on talk radio go after me?”

“Will the Twitter trolls turn their followers against me?”

My colleagues know they all just might. There’s an old Russian proverb: The tallest blade of grass is the first cut by the scythe. In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong. They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out.

So watching the mental contortions they perform to justify their votes is painful to behold: They claim that calling witnesses would have meant a never-ending trial. They tell us they’ve made up their minds, so why would we need new evidence? They say to convict this president now would lead to the impeachment of every future president — as if every president will try to sell our national security to the highest bidder.

I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.

They stop short of explicitly saying that they are afraid. We all want to think that we always stand up for right and fight against wrong. But history does not look kindly on politicians who cannot fathom a fate worse than losing an upcoming election. They might claim fealty to their cause — those tax cuts — but often it’s a simple attachment to power that keeps them captured.

As Senator Murray said on the Senate floor in 2002, “we can act out of fear” or “we can stick to our principles.” Unfortunately, in this Senate, fear has had its way. In November, the American people will have theirs.

Meanwhile, the retribution phase begins in earnest.

White House @PressSec Stephanie Grisham says of Rep. Adam Schiff after Trump's acquittal: "Will there be no retribution?" pic.twitter.com/ewW50O7EYn

— kadhim (＾ｰ^)ノ (@kadhim) February 5, 2020

And it will be a long twilight for America.

Breaking: from their press office -

“Good afternoon, Senators Grassley and Johnson today requested Hunter Biden’s official travel records from the U.S. Secret Service as a part of their ongoing probe into potential conflicts of interest.

A full news release is forthcoming”

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) February 5, 2020

From here on out, Trump goes for his enemies, and we'll see how long the Republic survives it.

An Actual Profile In Courage

Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones is voting to convict Donald Trump, despite the fact it will help cost Jones his seat in November.

“On the day I was sworn in as a United States Senator, I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. At the beginning of the impeachment trial, I took a second oath to do ‘impartial justice’ according to the same Constitution I swore to protect.

“These solemn oaths have been my guides during what has been a difficult time for our country, for my state, and for me personally. I did not run for Senate hoping to participate in the impeachment trial of a duly-elected President, but I cannot and will not shrink from my duty to defend the Constitution and to do impartial justice.

“In keeping with my oaths, I resolved that throughout this process I would keep an open mind and hear all of the evidence before making a final decision on the charges against the President. For months, I have been studying the facts of this case exhaustively. I have read thousands of pages of transcripts, watched videos of testimony, taken copious notes, reviewed history and precedents and discussed this case with colleagues, staff, and constituents, in addition to having participated in the Senate trial over the past two weeks. After many sleepless nights, I have reluctantly concluded that the evidence is sufficient to convict the President for both abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

“With the eyes of history upon us, I am acutely aware of the precedents this impeachment trial will set for future presidencies and Congresses. Unfortunately, I do not believe those precedents are good ones. I am particularly concerned that we have now set a precedent that a fair trial in the Senate does not include witnesses and documentary evidence, even when those witnesses have first-hand information and the evidence would provide the Senate and the American people with a more complete picture of the truth.
“I am also deeply troubled by the partisan nature of these proceedings from start to finish. Very early on I implored my colleagues in both houses of Congress to stay out of their partisan corners. Many did, but so many did not. The country deserves better. We must find a way to rise above the things that divide us and find the common good.

“Having done my best to see through the fog of partisanship, I am deeply troubled by the arguments put forth by the President’s lawyers in favor of virtually unchecked presidential power. In this case, the evidence clearly proves the President used the weight of his office and that of the United States government to seek to coerce a foreign government to interfere in our election for his personal political benefit. The President’s actions placed his personal interests well above the national interests and threatened the security of the United States, our allies in Europe, and our ally Ukraine. His actions were more than simply inappropriate. They were an abuse of power. With impeachment as the only check on such presidential wrongdoing, I felt I must vote to convict on the first charge of abuse of power.

“The second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, gave me even more pause. I have struggled to understand the House’s strategy in their pursuit of documents and witnesses and wished they had done more. However, after careful consideration of the evidence developed in the hearings, the public disclosures, the legal precedents, and the trial, I believe the President deliberately and unconstitutionally obstructed Congress by refusing to cooperate with the investigation in any way. While I am sensitive to protecting the privileges and immunities afforded to the President and his advisors, I believe it is critical to our constitutional structure that we protect Congress’ authorities also. In this matter it was clear from the outset that the President had no intention whatsoever of any accommodation with Congress when he blocked both witnesses and documents from being produced. In addition, he engaged in a course of conduct to threaten potential witnesses and smear the reputations of the civil servants who did come forward and provide testimony. The President’s actions demonstrate a belief that he is above the law, that Congress has no power whatsoever in questioning or examining his actions, and that all who do so, do so at their peril. That belief, unprecedented in the history of this country, simply must not be permitted to stand. To do otherwise risks guaranteeing that no future whistleblower or witness will ever come forward and no future President — Democrat or Republican — will be subject to Congressional oversight as mandated by the Constitution.

“Senators are elected to make tough choices. We are required to study the facts of each issue before us and exercise our independent judgment in keeping with the oaths we take. The gravity of this moment, the seriousness of the charges, and the implications for future presidencies and Congresses all contributed to the difficulty with which I have arrived at my decision.

“This has been a divisive time for our country, but I think it has nonetheless been an important constitutional process for us to follow. As this chapter of history draws to a close, one thing is clear: our country deserves better than this. We must find a way to come together, to set aside partisan differences, and to focus on what we have in common as Americans. We are facing great challenges both domestically and internationally, but it remains my firm belief that united, we can conquer them and remain the greatest hope for people around the world.”

Doug Jones will most likely lose by double digits now, and it's a shame because he's one of the bravest Democrats in the Senate.

It's easy to cast the hard votes from deep blue states. You risk nothing.

It's hard to stand up for what's right in the red ones.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

As the Senate GOP is expected to acquit Trump of both articles of impeachment today, the question becomes "What can Democrats do from here?"  Greg Sargent has an answer:

For starters: One of the House committees should immediately invite former national security adviser John Bolton to testify, and if he refuses, subpoena him.

Bolton’s forthcoming book will report that Trump privately linked nearly $400 million in frozen military aid to Ukraine directly to his demand for sham investigations validating lies about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election that absolve Russia of that crime and smearing potential 2020 foe Joe Biden.

Bolton’s book will also report that as early as last May, Trump instructed Bolton to press the Ukrainian president to work with personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani on the scheme to extort those announcements from Ukraine.

Learning more about both these episodes — which Senate Republicans refused to do — will further illuminate the scope, reach and inner workings of this whole scheme. Bolton can almost certainly detail other episodes implicated with it.

This matters because this scheme is still in operation today. Republicans have been running ads in Iowa that echo the fabricated narrative of Biden corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani has been meeting with former Ukrainian officials to further validate that narrative.

And Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, is still pursuing a “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation that appear designed to discredit that investigation — and its conclusion that Russia sabotaged the 2016 election to help Trump — just as Trump wants.

What this all means is that post-acquittal, Trump will simply keep up his smearing of Biden with disinformation, including with “evidence” fabricated by Giuliani with the help of foreign officials, as well as his ongoing whitewashing of Russia’s 2016 attack on our political system.

A maximal picture of Trump’s willingness to corrupt the government in service of this whole effort will better equip the American people to evaluate the disinformation and lies we’ll continue seeing on all these fronts. Testimony from Bolton about Trump’s orchestration of this scheme will focus public attention on it as it continues.

Sargent also advises a subpoena for Lev Parnas, and bring Attorney General Bill Barr before the House Judiciary, as he is expected to as the nation's "top cop".

If Democrats throw in the towel now, Trump will win.

In more ways than one.

StupidiNews!

• Melania Trump awarded the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh during the State of the Union address, a day after the right-wing radio host  revealed his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.
• The latest polling of Irish national elections scheduled Saturday in a post-Brexit UK finds Sinn Fein surging ahead among voters.
• The first recorded Wuhan coronavirus death occurred in Hong Kong Tuesday as China is cracking down on travel and casinos in Macau are being closed until further notice.
• Donald Trump says he is considering withdrawing America from the World Trade Organization completely, leaving the $1.7 trillion trade pact over what he terms "unfair" Chinese competition.
• Researchers are looking at photovoltaic cells that would generate electricity from infrared bandwidths, meaning they would work when the sun is down.

Last Call For The Long Shadow Of The Hawk(eye)

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Jon Chait here.  The one thing everyone needed from Iowa was a demonstration that our political process was solid and working at least on the Democratic party side and most of that was to stop the Bernie folks from seeding chaos.  We absolutely did not get that last night in Iowa.

One of the oddities of the 2016 presidential race is that, while the Republican Party was taken over by an outsider initially viewed as dangerous and unacceptable by its party elite, it was the Democratic Party that concluded its nominating process had failed. Supporters of Bernie Sanders repeatedly applied his trademark phrase — “rigged” — to explain a primary they clearly lost. Complaints about “rigging” began with an agonizingly narrow Sanders defeat to Clinton in the Iowa caucus four years before. They continued throughout the contest, with every routine snafu — in Nevada, New York, and the possibility that party superdelegates would provide Hillary Clinton the winning margin — held up as more evidence of the conspiracy.

Sanders himself has toggled between cooperating with the party and stoking the paranoia of his supporters. He never fully abandoned the claim that — despite losing by a double-digit margin — the party robbed him. “Some people say that maybe if the system wasn’t rigged against me, I would’ve won the nomination,” he insisted last year.

The party instituted a number of changes intended to inoculate itself against accusations of rigging. In Iowa, the Democratic caucus instituted new rules, “mandated by the DNC as part of a package of changes sought by Bernie Sanders” and “designed to make the caucus system more transparent.” The new rules required reporting several different sets of numbers from every precinct. This reflected a long-standing proclivity in left-of-center politics to meet every demand for fairness with new layers of complexity. Anybody who has witnessed or participated in a grassroots progressive organization has seen this intricate, rules-based method democracy in action. Monty Python lampooned the tendency in Holy Grail. (“We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune,” a peasant explains to the impatient King Arthur. “We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major …”)

Still, the caucus failure ultimately boiled down to a banal organizational failure. The party attempted to introduce a new app to report precinct results, which its older precinct captains largely failed to master, and its phone-reporting system buckled under the weight of the elevated confusion. There is no evidence voting results themselves have been compromised (at least not beyond the normal levels of confusion produced by the chaotic process).

What may turn a routine bureaucratic failure into a larger Democratic crisis, though, is the Bernie movement’s preexisting suspicion. Sanders is not alone in this — the Biden campaign shamefully issued a statement calling the results into doubt, in a transparent effort to discredit a vote it clearly lost. But the bulk of the suspicions came from Sanders supporters, who quickly reprised their 2016 rigging claims.

Trump has seized upon the Sanders supporters’ propensity toward grievance. Republicans began spreading the message in mid-January that impeachment was a plot by the party leadership to take Sanders off the campaign trail, a theory also echoed by some of Sanders’s nuttier fans, like Aaron Mate and Krystal Ball. In advance of the Iowa caucus, Republicans switched over to spreading the message that the voting process itself had been rigged. Republicans began circulating baseless claims of vote fraud in Iowa. When the first problems appeared in Iowa Monday night, Republicans like Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, Senator Lindsey Graham, and independent operators of the Trump-family blind trust, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, gleefully charged that it was all rigged to stop Bernie.

Yeah, Biden's camp messed up, but Sanders's camp has had it in for the DNC for four years.  There's no way the primary goes smoothly now.  It's going to be six months of chaos.  If Sanders doesn't win the nomination, he and his supporters will hand the country back to Trump and we'll all lose.

Here's what we should be doing:

Let's take some of the Iowa outrage and channel it into outrage about:

-Lack of automatic voter registration

-Voter suppression

-Fewer polling places in minority communities

-Gerrymandering

-"Voter fraud" disinformation

Every vote matters, not just when an app fails to work

— Chris Lu (@ChrisLu44) February 4, 2020

Sadly that won't happen.  All five major candidates declared victory last night without results. Six months of guaranteed outrage, Bernie folks screaming at every vote not counted for them as "rigged" and a convention that will devolve into street fighting.

Despite the Sanders folks going from "The DNC is evil and is rigging everything!" to "The DNC is too incompetent to hold a caucus!" and the absolutely laughability of their position, the sound bites will still hurt and Trump will egg on the resentment.

Here's the real tea though: there were reasons enough to abandon the entire idea of caucuses before Monday, and if there is anything remotely good that comes from this, it's the fact that Iowa will be under tremendous pressure to drop the caucus and hold a primary that doesn't disenfranchise thousands of Iowa voters, or lose their first-in-the-nation status.

I think we can all agree on that.

Press The Meat, Con't

An emboldened Trump regime is now fully committed to its war on non-FOX media outlets, regularly excluding them from press events and junkets, and unless the media starts boycotting the regime altogether, Trump is going to pick them off one by one. NPR is still being blacklisted over Mike Pompeo, and Bloomberg News was ejected from Trump's Iowa rally last night as the Trump regime has a standing blacklist order against them.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump’s campaign ejected Jennifer Jacobs, a reporter for Bloomberg News, out of a campaign event in Iowa.

The decision, according to the report, is in accordance with the campaign’s “pledge no longer to approve credentials for the news organization.”
Trump cracked down on credentials for the organization as its CEO, Michael Bloomberg, has mounted a campaign for president and blanketed the airwaves across the country with advertisements slamming the president.

The president’s relationship with the press has always been among the most hostile of any modern chief executive, with Trump repeatedly referring to reporters as “enemies of the people” and advocating that America should “open up libel laws” to allow politicians to retaliate against reporters who cover them. His White House previously drew controversy for revoking the press credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, a move that was blocked by a federal judge he had appointed. 

Now Trump is excluding CNN from its pre-SOTU lunch today.

President Donald Trump's targeting of CNN is moving to yet another arena: The annual presidential lunch with television network anchors. 

CNN anchors are being excluded from Tuesday's lunch, three sources said on Monday night. 

Trump, like presidents before him, typically invites anchors from all the major networks to dine with him at the White House in advance of his State of the Union address. The lunch conversation is considered off the record, but it gives the anchors a sense of the president's state of mind before they anchor SOTU coverage. "Despite Trump's persistent attacks on the news media, he's kept up such traditions," Politico pointed out last year. 

CNN's Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer attended last year's lunch. Blitzer has been attending these lunches longer than almost any other anchor — 20 years in a row. 

Journalists from other networks are still planning on attending Tuesday's session, according to sources at those networks. 

This is the first time in recent memory that a president has singled out one network and opted not invite any anchors from there. 

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham did not respond to a request for comment on Monday night.

This will keep up until non-FOX outlets are forced to come crawling individually to the White House to regain access, and the price will be to provide 100% favorable coverage to Trump. (and to attack Democrats all the time).

And Trump won't need them at all anymore should he win reelection.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

As senators take to the chamber well to explain to the American people why Donald Trump is allowed to be a despot today, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is leading the charge slow embarrassed shuffle towards a Senate censure measure, in an effort to try to shame his GOP colleagues into admitting Trump did something wrong.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a moderate who is friendly with the White House, on Monday asked his colleagues to consider censuring President Trump as the Senate moves toward votes on impeachment.

“I do believe a bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump for his action in this matter. Censure would allow this body to unite across party lines,” Manchin said in a speech on the Senate floor. “His behavior cannot go unchecked by the Senate and censure would allow a bipartisan statement condemning his unacceptable behavior in the strongest terms.”

It is an effort that could put pressure on some Republican senators as they mull whether to reprimand Trump in coming weeks, even if they vote Wednesday to acquit him on the House’s two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

But Manchin’s proposal will face obstacles as lawmakers in both parties resist the idea and hew to their leadership’s position on how to respond to Trump’s conduct.

Manchin has prepared a censure resolution for fellow senators to review in coming days, which would be a less severe rebuke than removal from office for Trump’s involvement in pressuring Ukraine to investigate a domestic political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.

“What the president did was wrong,” Manchin said in his speech.

The crux of the case against Trump is the allegation that he withheld military aid and a White House meeting to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter. Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, while his father was vice president.

The resolution was shared with The Washington Post by a person close to Manchin who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely.

Manchin is trying to provide a fig leaf, the question is for whom.  The measure will never get a Senate floor vote, Mitch McConnell will see to that.  If that's the point, to shame the GOP twice, then I guess it will have just as much effect as the first time, which is none at all.

But what I think may very well happen is Manchin will trade his acquittal vote and the vote of several Democratic senators for bringing the censure measure to the floor.  Trump badly wants "bipartisan" acquittal and Manchin doesn't want to go down as voting to convict in a state where Trump won by 24 points in 2016 and will win by a similar margin in November.

In other words, this is going to be cover for Democrats to vote to acquit.  And when Mitch sabotages the censure vote, Manchin and his friends will end up holding the bag.  At this point there's no reason to trust McConnell at all.

That might change next January with a smaller GOP margin or, the universe willing, a Democratic-led Senate.  But for now, McConnell no longer needs Manchin for anything.

Both of them know it.

StupidiNews!

Only one story this morning.

The Iowa Democratic Caucuses were a complete disaster last night.

More later today.

Well, make that two stories, Rush Limbaugh has advanced lung cancer.

Have a nice one.

Last Call For Orange Revenge

Trump is now fully unleashed and deep into grievance as his acquittal on Wednesday is certain now, but the first of many pounds of flesh Trump will exact will come from John Bolton's mustache.

With Senate Republicans on track to acquit Donald Trump on Wednesday, Washington is bracing for what an unshackled Trump does next. Republicans briefed on Trump’s thinking believe that the president is out for revenge against his adversaries. “It’s payback time,” a prominent Republican told me last week. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day,” another source said. Names that came up in my conversations with Republicans included Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Mitt Romney, and John Bolton. “Trump’s playbook is simple: go after people who crossed him during impeachment.”

Several sources said Bolton is at the top of the list. Trump’s relationship with Bolton was badly damaged by the time Bolton left the White House in September. Trump has since blamed his former national security adviser for leaking details of his forthcoming memoir that nearly derailed the impeachment trial by pressuring Republicans to call witnesses. In the book Bolton reportedly alleges Trump told him directly that Ukraine aid was tied to Ukraine announcing investigations into the Bidens (Bolton has denied being a source of the leak).

The campaign against Bolton has already begun. On January 23, the White House sent a cease and desist letter to Bolton’s lawyer demanding that Bolton’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, not release the book in March without removal of certain information. Trump intends to ratchet up the pressure, and some Republicans close to the White House fear how far Trump will take things after he’s gotten off for a second time (Trump famously made his July 25 call to Volodymyr Zelensky the day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress.) “Trump has been calling people and telling them to go after Bolton,” a source briefed on the private conversations said. The source added that Trump wants Bolton to be criminally investigated. A person familiar with Trump’s thinking said Trump believes Bolton might have mishandled classified information. According to a former official, the White House is planning to leak White House emails from Bolton that purportedly allege Bolton abused his position at the National Security Council. The official said that West Wing officials have discussed releasing emails “showing [Bolton] was doing pay-to-play,” the official said. A person close to Bolton dismissed the story. “John plays things straight,” the person said.

Indeed, Bolton is being systematically excommunicated and exiled from the GOP gravy train.

Several of President Donald Trump’s most loyal donors and supporters are telling other conservative financiers to shun former national security advisor John Bolton’s political action committee and super PAC as he prepares to publish a memoir that is reportedly critical of the administration.

The financiers are signaling to their networks not to give to his committees following a report in The New York Times about claims Bolton made in a draft of the book, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter who declined to be named in order to speak freely about Bolton.

The move by these donors to take on Bolton is the latest example of how Trump has command of those who fund the Republican Party.

“You’re on the president’s side or you’re not. It’s simple,” said Arthur Schwartz, a Republican consultant with close ties to the White House.

Trump will not settle for just Bolton's head, either.  He'll go after anyone who supports him, because Trump is the GOP, and the GOP is Trump now.  It's a mob operation from top to bottom, and capos who break the silence of Trumpmerta end up getting horse heads in their beds.

And yet more excerpts from Bolton's book are sure to drop over the next few weeks and months. We'll see if Trump decides to go after Bolton in a more...punitive...manner soon, but this is absolutely the kind of thing to expect from the autocratic despot from now on.

We're transitioning from Trump tossing out reporters and shouting "Lock them up!" at his hate rallies to actually having Bill Barr and the Senate GOP doing it.

The State Of Play Of The Hawkeye State

No matter who wins in Iowa tonight and how many delegates are assigned, the truth is Iowa, like Ohio and Indiana, won't be contested by Democrats in November and conceded to Trump. Tim Alberta:

Iowa’s place at the molten core of the political universe has, for much of the past half-century, owed to the marriage of its first-in-the-nation nominating contest with the state’s reputation as a quintessential general-election battleground. The swinging of Iowa’s electoral votes between the two parties, and the tight margins by which those contests have often been decided, guaranteed the state would be just as relevant in October as it was in January.

That won’t be the case this year. A new sentiment has echoed throughout recent conversations with Democratic strategists, activists and campaigns, a consensus that would have been unthinkable just eight years ago: Iowa is no longer a battleground. Not in 2020, anyway.

After decades spent at the center of both parties’ strategies for winning the Electoral College, Iowa is suddenly an afterthought. Its six electoral votes no longer seem essential, not when states like Texas and Arizona and Georgia — longtime GOP strongholds — all were decided by tighter margins in 2016, and all have demographic tailwinds that benefit the Democratic Party.
Few states received more time and attention from Barack Obama during his White House campaigns than Iowa. Part of that was due to its pride of place in his political ascent; Iowa, after all, was the state that vaulted him from long shot to Clinton slayer. But there also was as widespread view then that Iowa was up for grabs in November. Now, less than five years removed from his presidency, Democrats talk openly about not contesting the state at all.

“The trends here are much more red than purple. I could see that swinging back at some point, but probably not with Trump on the ballot,” says Ben Foecke, who served as executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party four years ago. “It became clear to us in 2016 that this was the path we were heading down, at least in the short term, so I'm not surprised when I hear these conversations or read these memos explaining that Iowa isn’t really a swing state in 2020."

At a glance, this fatalism might seem exaggerated. Democrats carried the state in six of the seven presidential contests before Trump came along, and the one exception — George W. Bush’s victory in 2004 — was decided by 1 percentage point. Even today, the RealClearPolitics average of general election polling shows Trump leading Joe Biden by just 3 points and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders by 6 points apiece —hardly the indicators of a blowout.

Moreover, there’s recent history to consider: Democrats flipped two Republican-held congressional seats in the 2018 midterms, giving the party control of three of the state’s four districts, and also won a number of bellwether legislative races in the suburban areas around Des Moines. These victories, on top of ousting the Republican state auditor, gave some Democrats confidence of being able to compete statewide with Trump’s apparatus in 2020.

And yet, embedded in those 2018 results were trend lines that demonstrate just how distinct Trump’s advantage in Iowa has become. Despite overall midterm turnout spiking by some 180,000 votes, Republicans were able to hold both chambers of the Legislature and several statewide offices, including the governorship, all while growing their advantage in active party registration. The reason: Even in a terrible environment for the GOP, driven by suburbanites fleeing the party, Republicans performed even better in rural areas than they did in the 2014 cycle, one of the best in modern history for the party.

“Joni Ernst ran up significant margins in rural Iowa in a great Republican year in 2014,” explains David Kochel, the longtime Iowa GOP strategist who led the senator’s campaign. “But the Trump effect put those margins on steroids to such an extent that [Gov.] Kim Reynolds won many counties in a bad Republican year at even higher margins than Ernst."

Short-term or not, as Midwestern states lose population to the coasts as younger voters move away from the farms and shuttered factories, these states are becoming more white and older, and they are voting Republican.  They are voting Trump.  That's not going to change anytime soon, maybe not even in my lifetime.

But I don't buy that Iowa is out of play.   Not after they came within 5 points of preventing Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2016. Not after Dems took 3 of 4 House seats in 2018.

It did happen with Kentucky and West Virginia.  Pennsylvania and Michigan are still battlegrounds for now, and Minnesota and Wisconsin are also in the mix more than Iowa.  The hope for Dems in the next decade is flipping Georgia and North Carolina and fighting for Florida, and the big prize: a blue Texas.  But Iowa and I think Kansas are coming around.

Stupor Bowl Post-Game

The Chiefs defeated the Niners last night, but the loser was the American taxpayer, who gave millions to King Trump so he could hold court at Mar-A-Lago for his big game party.

Taxpayers shelled out another $3.4 million to send President Donald Trump to Florida this weekend so he could host a Super Bowl party for paying guests at his for-profit golf course.

The president’s official schedule shows him spending two and a half hours Sunday evening at a “Super Bowl LIV watch party” at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Tickets sold for $75 each, but were only available to members of the club — the initiation fee for which reportedly runs about $450,000, with annual dues costing several thousands of dollars more.

“Well, obviously there are no TVs in the White House, so what alternative did he have?” quipped Robert Weissman, president of the liberal group Public Citizen. “He could have saved money by chartering a plane and flying club members to watch the game at the White House.”

In response to a query, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham defended Trump’s trip and attacked HuffPost: “The premise of your story is ridiculous and false, and just more left-wing media bias on display. The president never stops working, and that includes when he is at the Winter White House.”

Her phrase “Winter White House” refers to Mar-a-Lago, the for-profit resort in Palm Beach that is several miles east of the golf course and that doubled its initiation fee from $100,000 to $200,000 after Trump was elected in 2016. Trump frequently mingles with guests at social events there.

On Saturday, for example, Trump appeared at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago arranged by the “Trumpettes,” a group his female supporters. The dinner did not appear on the president’s publicly released schedule, and in any case was a campaign event, not an “official” one.

When a pool reporter asked the White House on Saturday what work Trump did over the weekend, the reply was that he had calls and “meetings with staff.” The president did not attend a rally on Saturday for Venezuelan leader Juan Guaido, whom the United States and other governments have recognized as the legitimate president of that country. That rally began while Trump was still at his golf course, and attending it could have made him late for the start of the Trumpettes’ dinner.

"He never stops working."

Except when he's at his Florida private club hosting football game parties at our expense.

It doesn't matter which state the winner is in.

Except that this Kansas City is in Missouri. pic.twitter.com/HzK2yC3p91

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) February 3, 2020

We are all subjects of King Donald The Orange now.