Last Call For Paulie Walnuts' Bad Day

Paul Manafort's day was worse than yours.  It went from a truly bad day...

Paul Manafort was sentenced to 73 months in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday following his conviction on charges of unregistered foreign lobbying and witness tampering.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the former Trump campaign manager to 60 months on the first count, running concurrently to 30 months of the 47-month sentence imposed in his Virginia case last week.

She also sentenced him to 13 months on the witness tampering count to be served consecutively with the count one sentence and his Virginia sentence.

That would mean an additional 43 months overall, bringing the total time he faces behind bars, including the nine months that he has already served in Virginia, to 81 months.

Put another way, the combined sentences of 90 months amount to seven-and-a-half years.

The judge also ordered Manafort to pay one-time restitution of $6.16 million to the Internal Revenue Service, the same amount he was sentenced to pay in the Virginia case.
As he left the courthouse, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing told ABC News that he was "disappointed" in the sentence. He called Judge Jackson "hostile towards Mr. Manafort," with a level of "callousness" he said he hasn't seen in his many years of white-collar prosecution.

...to exponentially worse as soon as his sentence was announced.

President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted Wednesday by a state grand jury in New York on charges of residential mortgage fraud — the announcement coming just minutes after Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Washington to more than seven years in prison.

The charges filed against Manafort may stand as a kind of prosecutorial insurance policy against a possible presidential pardon — a scenario that Trump has refused to discuss as Manafort’s case worked its way through the federal court system. The president has called Manafort brave for fighting his case against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Under the Constitution, presidents have wide authority to pardon, but that power applies only to federal convictions, not state cases.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James has urged the legislature to fix what Democrats call a “double-jeopardy loophole” in state law that could negate New York’s ability to prosecute anyone pardoned by the president.

State law protects people from repeat prosecutions for the same alleged crimes, and does not make an exception for instances where a pardon has been granted by the president.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market.”

To recap, even if Trump pardons Manafort tomorrow, he's stil;l facing state charges that Trump can do nothing about, and he's most likely going away for a very long time.

Bye, Paulie.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The US 6th Circuit just ruled to allow the end of state funding for Planned Parenthood in Ohio, and that most likely means an end to abortion services in both Cincinnati and Dayton.

A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected Planned Parenthood’s constitutional challenge to an Ohio law depriving the organization of state funding because it performs abortions, handing a victory to anti-abortion advocates.

In an 11-6 vote, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati overturned a ruling last year by a three-judge panel of the court that the funding ban violated the due process rights of Planned Parenthood affiliates.

“The affiliates are correct that the Ohio law imposes a condition on the continued receipt of state funds,” Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote for the majority. “But that condition does not violate the Constitution because the affiliates do not have a due process right to perform abortions.”

Sutton also found no proof the ban posed an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion, a right he said belonged to women, not to Planned Parenthood.

Tuesday’s decision voided a lower court injunction against enforcing the 2016 law, which had been signed by then-Republican Governor John Kasich. The appeals court upheld the injunction last April 18.

Planned Parenthood said the law strips funding that helps it test for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, conduct cancer screenings, and offer programs to reduce infant mortality and address domestic violence.

“It is unconscionable that politicians continue seeking to restrict people from accessing essential health care - which is a human right,” Chief Executive Leana Wen said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood did not say whether it might appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The reason why the ruling happened is very simple, 4 of the 11 judges on the court that voted to end funding were Trump appointees.  If they had been Clinton appointees instead, it almost certainly would have gone the other way.

You can thank white women voters in Ohio for that.  56% of them voted for Trump.  And no, I don't think Planned Parenthood will appeal to the US Supreme Court, because that case will be the 5-4 decision (the five being all men) that will allow all 50 states to end funding for abortion providers, meaning probably two dozen states will be without any abortion providers within a few years.

Roe v Wade becomes irrelevant.

And you can thank Donald Trump and the white women who voted for him for that too.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

There are now four major investigations into Donald Trump (the Mueller probe, House Democrats, Southern District of NY Federal, and NY State AG) and while we've heard a lot of recent action on the first three, it's the fourth one that should have Trump up sweating off his orange bronzer at night.

The New York attorney general’s office late on Monday issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records relating to the financing of four major Trump Organization projects and a failed effort to buy the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League in 2014, according to a person briefed on the subpoenas.

The inquiry opens a new front in the scrutiny of Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders willing to do business with Donald J. Trump in recent years. The bank is already the subject of two congressional investigations and was examined last year by New York banking regulators, who took no action.

The new inquiry, by the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, was prompted by the congressional testimony last month of Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, the person briefed on the subpoenas said. Mr. Cohen testified under oath that Mr. Trump had inflated his assets in financial statements, and Mr. Cohen provided copies of statements he said had been submitted to Deutsche Bank.

The inquiry by Ms. James’s office is a civil investigation, not a criminal one, although its focus and scope were unclear. The attorney general has broad authority under state law to investigate fraud and can fine — or in extreme cases, go to court to try to dissolve — a business that is found to have engaged in repeated illegality.

The request to Deutsche Bank sought loan applications, mortgages, lines of credit and other financing transactions in connection with the Trump International Hotel in Washington; the Trump National Doral outside Miami; and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the person said.

Investigators also requested records connected to an unsuccessful effort to buy the Bills, the person said. Mr. Trump gave Deutsche Bank bare-bones personal financial statements in 2014 when he planned to make a bid for the team, The New York Times has reported. The deal fell through when the team was sold to a rival bidder for $1.4 billion.

Mr. Trump worked with a small United States-based unit of Deutsche Bank that serves ultra-wealthy people. The unit lent Mr. Trump more than $100 million in 2012 to pay for the Doral golf resort and $170 million in 2015 to transform the Old Post Office Building in Washington into a luxury hotel.

New Jersey-based Investors Bank was subpoenaed for records relating to Trump Park Avenue, a project it had backed.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday that it had received the subpoena.

Investors Bank declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Now again, this is a civil case so far.  But if it turns up criminal activity, and it most certainly will given Trump's deep history of money laundering and fraud, all bets are off.

The other issue is what Mueller is up to on the counterintelligence front, and as former US Attorney Nelson Cunningham explains, that report can't be buried.

The most public and familiar one is as a criminal investigator under the special counsel regulations. But Mueller has also carried a second charge, as a counterintelligence expert, with a much broader charge to determine and report the scope of any interference and any links to the Trump campaign—what Trump himself might refer to as “collusion.”

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that the Russia investigation was commenced “as part of our counterintelligence mission . . . also includ[ing] an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017 order appointing Mueller special counsel specifically and carefully incorporated this announced scope and mission.

From the start, then, Mueller has been conducting a counterintelligence investigation, while “also” assessing whether any crimes were committed. Not the other way around.

Comey and Rosenstein knew what they were doing. It is the mission of a criminal investigation to produce indictments and trials, which tell stories and render conclusions only imperfectly. Thanks to the special counsel regulations, there is also “a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions.” But what will go into this report and what the Congress and public may ultimately see is highly proscribed.

It is the central mission of a counterintelligence investigation, however, to produce . . . well, a report. These findings and conclusions are shared with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and relevant agencies of the 17-member intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.). The report may be honed into a formal IC “assessment” reflecting the consensus view of the 17 agencies. It was just such a report, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” that on Jan. 7, 2017 was shared with incoming President Trump. Its disclosure brought into public view the Intelligence Community’s bombshell conclusion that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered an effort to discredit Hillary Clinton and to “help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”

Significantly, unlike a final criminal report, a Mueller counterintelligence report cannot be bottled up. By statute it must be shared with Congress. The House and Senate intelligence committees are legally entitled to be given reports, in writing, of significant intelligence and counterintelligence activities or failures. Mueller’s findings will certainly qualify.

Where matters are too delicate to share with all the members of the intelligence committees, statute and established practice provide that disclosure may be made to a smaller circle known as the “Gang of Eight:” the chair and ranking member of each intelligence committee, and the Democratic and Republican leaders of each chamber.

Already, these obligations have generated significant disclosures to Congress of Russia’s activities. In August 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed members of the Gang of Eight on the then-new signs of Russian interference and hacking. The explosive disclosure in the January 2017 IC assessment that Putin had ordered interference specifically to assist then-candidate Trump was also thanks to these provisions. And in May 2017, then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe informed the Gang of Eight that in the wake of Comey’s firing, the FBI had focused its counter-intelligence investigation on the president himself.

Mueller inherited this investigation just days later, and he inherited this reporting framework as well. Twenty-two months of relentless investigation have followed since.

Bottom line: the investigations into Donald Trump's criminality will continue for some time, because there's decades of filth to dig through.

 

StupidiNews!

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom will issue an executive order placing a moratorium on use of the death penalty, the state's 737 Death Row inmates will remain in prison.
• Former Vatican treasurer Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years in Australian prison after being convicted earlier this month for sexually assaulting two boys in the 1990s.
• UK PM Theresa May's revised Brexit deal went down in flames in Parliament on Tuesday, leaving no clear path forward with less than three weeks before a scheduled Brexit deadline. 
• Boeing stock is down more than ten percent as multiple countries have grounded its 737 MAX jet after Sunday's fatal crash in Ethiopia killed almost 160.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk's lawyers are calling the SEC's move to hold him in contempt for violating his agreement not to tweet about the company's numbers an "unconstitutional power grab".

Last Call For (Crashing) Helicopter Parents

The Justice Department dropped the hammer Tuesday on a massive Ivy League college admissions bribery scandal dating back to 2011, unloading indictments against dozens of college officials, athletic coaches, and the wealthy elite who could afford the millions in payoffs.

Among those charged are actresses Felicity Huffman, best known for her role on the television show “Desperate Housewives,” and Lori Loughlin, who appeared on “Full House,” according to court documents.

Authorities said the crimes date back to 2011, and the defendants used “bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children’s admission” to numerous college and universities, including Georgetown, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of California Los Angleles, among others.

Some of the 32 defendants are accused of bribing administrators to facilitate cheating on college-entrance exams — by having a smarter student take the test, providing students with answers to exams or correcting their answers after they had completed the exams, according to the criminal complaint filed in federal court.

Others allegedly bribed university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as “purported athletic recruits — regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport they were purportedly recruited to play — thereby facilitating their admission to universities in place of more qualified applicants,” the complaint charges.

Huffman is accused of paying $15,000 — disguised as a charitable donation — to the Key Worldwide Foundation so her oldest daughter could participate in the scam. A confidential informant told investigators that he told Huffman he could arrange for a third party to correct her daughter’s answers on the SAT after she took it. She ended up scoring a 1420 — 400 points higher than she had gotten on a PSAT taken a year earlier, according to court documents.

Huffman also contemplated running a similar scam to help her younger daughter, but ultimately did not pursue it, the complaint alleges.

I mean I can understand parents willing to go to any lengths to get their kids into college, but this is ridiculous (also illegal as hell).  Besides, if you have that much money, just donate a science wing building or something, that's the legal way to do it, right?

The Drums Of War, Con't

You know the shooting part of any US regime change plan is going to start very soon when the State Department bugs out of the local embassy.

The U.S. said late Monday that it is pulling its last remaining diplomats from Venezuela, saying their continued presence at the country’s embassy in Caracas had become a “constraint” on U.S. policy as the Trump administration aggressively looks to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro.

The announcement came from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a tweet shortly before midnight comes as Venezuela struggles to restore electricity following four days of blackouts around the country.

The U.S. has led an international effort to replace Maduro with opposition leader Juan Guaido, who vows to hold a new presidential election. Guaido is backed by some 50 countries, while Maduro maintains support from countries such as China, Russia and Cuba.

Maduro ordered all U.S. diplomats to leave Venezuela in late January because of its support for Guaido, but he later retreated and allowed them to stay. The U.S. still withdrew the bulk of embassy personnel, leaving a skeletal staff led by career foreign service officer James Story.

Pompeo said the remaining diplomats would be out of Venezuela by the end of the week but gave no indication of future policy steps despite past warnings that “all options” — including the use of military force — are on the table for removing Maduro.

The move came after another day of chaos as power outages that began Thursday evening continued to cause problems for Venezuelans, leaving them with little power, water and communications.

Don't be surprised if in the process of getting diplomats out, we get a few special ops teams in.  No better cover for a stealth mission than a nationwide blackout to go bag up the local dictator so that we can get our dictator in place.

Nothing good is going to follow this, especially when the Secretary of State flat out says that the presence of any remaining US embassy personnel could basically become hostages in case, I dunno, we decide to invade the joint.

It's Panama 1989 all over again.

Austerity Hysteria, 2019 Edition

Donald Trump's budget proposal was far, far worse than even I imagined even after it became clear that the GOP tax scam was going to rocket up deficits in order to give the super rich massive tax cuts.  Now the other half of the shoe is dropping, with Trump proposing hundreds of billions in new military spending, draconian cuts across the board elsewhere and taking an atomic chainsaw to Social Security and Medicare.

President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion budget plan Monday that stands as a sharp challenge to Congress and the Democrats trying to unseat him, the first act in a multi-front struggle over the role of government that threatens to consume Washington for the next 18 months.

The budget proposal dramatically raises the possibility of another government shutdown in October, with the inclusion of an additional $8.6 billion to build sections of a wall along the U. S.-Mexico border. Trump’s ask for yet more wall money — beyond the spending he is already seeking under a “national emergency” declaration at the border — infuriated Democrats.

The budget also calls for a significant increase in military spending, causing problems with some Republicans who are uneasy about how it is allocated. If lawmakers and Trump don’t reach a spending agreement by the end of September, many government operations will grind to a halt.

Trump’s “Budget for a Better America” also includes dozens of spending cuts and policy overhauls that frame the early stages of the debate for the 2020 election. For example, Trump calls for a series of changes that would reduce total spending on the program by roughly $845 billion over 10 years for Medicare, the popular health care program for the elderly that in the past he had largely said he would protect.

His budget would also propose a major overhaul of Medicaid, the health care program for low-income Americans run jointly with states, by turning more power over to states. This would cut spending by $241 billion over 10 years.
Other agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department, Transportation Department, Education Department and Interior Department, would see their budgets severely reduced. The Commerce Department budget would increase in preparation for the 2020 Census — but Democrats said the Census money was insufficient.

“President Trump has somehow managed to produce a budget request even more untethered from reality than his past two,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.). “With such misguided priorities, the Trump budget has no chance of garnering the necessary bipartisan support to become law.”

Trump’s GOP allies received the budget plan with a lukewarm embrace.

“The president’s annual budget proposal is the first step in the federal budget process and will allow us to consider how his priorities align with the priorities of Congress,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). “I look forward to working with my colleagues and the president to curb federal overspending and help bring our deficits and debt under control."

Republicans are probably close to panicking at this point.  Having to sign on to a trillion dollars in Medicare and Medicaid cuts will get them flayed alive by voters in 2020 and they know it.  And the best part is Trump is freely admitting that we're looking at trillion-dollar yearly deficits as far as the eye can see...even with the massive cuts.

You couldn't ask for a more visible contrast with what the Democratic party is offering compared to Trump and the GOP.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime says it will limit intelligence sharing with Germany and other allies that use Chinese 5G wireless network equipment from tech giant Huawei, citing national security reasons.
• Apple is expected to announce its streaming TV and movie service at an event on March 25, the service will be competing with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Disney's expected service.
• US air safety officials say that they will order upgrades to Boeing 737 MAX fleet in light of two fatal crashes in six months, but insist the planes are still safe to fly.
• UK PM Theresa May is bringing a revised EU Brexit deal to Parliament, but the legislation's future is uncertain as lawmakers say they will need time to study the changes.
• US researchers have discovered a "small-molecule" drug that blocks a wide variety of flu strains from entering cells in mice, Johnson & Johnson is awaiting FDA approval for further trials.

Last Call For The First Flight To Milwaukee

Tom Perez and the DNC will be holding the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in 2020, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that.

Democrats picked Milwaukee on Monday to host their 2020 national convention, setting up the party's standard-bearer to accept the presidential nomination in the heart of the old industrial belt that delivered Donald Trump to the White House.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez chose Milwaukee over Houston and Miami after deliberations lingered longer than party leaders or officials from the three finalist cities had expected.

"This choice is a statement of our values," Perez said in a statement. "The Democratic Party is the party of working people, and Milwaukee is a city of working people."

The convention is scheduled for July 13-16, 2020.

It will be the first time in over a century that Democrats will be in a Midwest city other than Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate. Instead, the political spotlight will shine for a week on a metro area of about 1.6 million people. Once dubbed as "The Machine Shop of the World," the famously working-class city also is known for its long love affair with beer and as the birthplace of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

On one hand, Democrats need the upper Midwest to beat Trump in 2020.  I understand the message this sends, that Democrats are serious about winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania back and making a serious try at Ohio.

On the other hand, there's no denying that Milwaukee is the most segregated large city in America.

Milwaukee is the most racially segregated metro area in the United States, a new Brookings Institution study found.

The report, which the nonprofit think tank based on an analysis of U.S. census data, also found that black-white neighborhood segregation nationally "has declined only modestly since the beginning of the century."

"Most white residents of large metropolitan areas live in neighborhoods that remain overwhelmingly white, and while black neighborhoods have become more diverse, this is largely due to an increase in Hispanic rather than white residents," wrote William H. Frey, the study's author.

Milwaukee has for years been considered to be one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. And it's frequently been at or near the top of the list of highly segregated areas in past Brookings studies.

Brookings found most of the areas with the highest levels of segregation are in northern parts of the country, with Milwaukee, New York, Chicago and Detroit leading the list.

"At least three in four black residents in Milwaukee, New York, and Chicago would need to relocate in order to live in fully integrated neighborhoods with whites," Frey wrote. "In another four areas — Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and St. Louis — seven in ten blacks would have to relocate to live in a completely integrated neighborhood with whites."

NYC, Detroit, and Chicago are doing things about their decades of redlining and racial segregation.  Milwaukee is pointedly not lifting a finger.  And to me, the choice of Milwaukee means Democrats are trying to win back white Trump voters, and frankly I don't want anyone who voted for Trump in this party at all.  They were okay with Trump's racism.  It wasn't a dealbreaker for them.

Why would we want them back?

 

The Question Of Impeachment

House Democrats are still extremely leery of bringing articles of impeachment against Donald Trump and are still waiting on the Mueller report before they make their move.

For House Democrats, impeaching President Donald Trump is both inevitable and impossible.

Democrats anticipate they will gather plenty of evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors on the president’s part, but they’re torn over what to do with it — fearful that their efforts will backfire and end up helping Trump.

“You don’t want to divide the country, so you have to think you have such a case that once the case is finished being presented, enough people understand you had to do it,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose committee has the power to launch impeachment proceedings, said in an interview.

While Nadler cautioned that his standard for impeachment “doesn’t mean you have to have Republican votes,” he said Democrats need to win over at least some voters who backed Trump in the 2016 election — a difficult feat for Democrats as Republicans have remained loyal to the president and have largely backed his criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and other probes ensnaring the president and his associates.

“[Mueller], plus the hearings we have, might produce enough information where some people will open their minds — but right now, a can opener couldn’t get ‘em open,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a senior member of the Judiciary panel, said of Republicans.
That reality underscores Democrats’ conundrum as they interview witnesses and demand documents as part of the sprawling oversight arsenal they’ve set into motion. Interviews with more than a dozen key Democratic lawmakers revealed deep divisions within the caucus about whether their efforts could end up helping Trump win a second term in office.

They’ve set the bar for impeachment so high that lawmakers are skeptical that removing Trump from office with bipartisan support would be achievable, leaving many Democrats pondering their endgame.

For that reason, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and committee chairs have broached the impeachment topic cautiously, arguing it should be considered only after the various federal and congressional investigations of the president are complete. A notable exception is Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee and has said there is already enough evidence to impeach Trump.

But even as senior Democrats resist the prospect of impeachment, demands from the caucus’ progressive wing and liberal grassroots groups to remove Trump from office are only rising. Pelosi will come under enormous pressure if the committees uncover sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

But Democrats are torn over whether they should rely on Republicans and risk an uproar from their left flank, or impeach Trump in the House and risk the political backlash.

The choice will be made for Democrats soon, I would think.  Ideally they would want a Mueller Report so damning that bipartisan impeachment is a done deal.  If there was any other Republican senator other than Mitch McConnell leading the GOP, I would even say there's a mathematical possibility that could work.

This country will burn when it happens though.  It will be 1973-4 all over again.

Race To The Bottom, Con't

Three-quarters of Republicans say white Americans are openly discriminated against, but they are far from alone...

A majority of Independents, 55 percent, sided with Republicans and said white Americans are discriminated against. Meanwhile, only 38 percent Democrats agreed, and sixty-two percent of Democrats said that white Americans face little or no discrimination at all.  

However, the poll did find some agreement among the different political spectrums. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans, 82 percent of Independents and 95 percent of Democrats said that African-Americans are discriminated against. And, in total, 81 percent of the registered voters polled said Hispanics also face discrimination.  

Interestingly, only 19 percent of white respondents said they personally faced racial discrimination, proving the point that the fear tactics of Fox News and other conservative media who sell the myth of “reverse racism” are working.

In other words, white Republicans believe they are just as much victims of discrimination as black and Hispanic people are, because that's how Republican logic works. They know they hate people of color, so they assume we hate white people back and do things like refuse to hire them and don't give them loans and spit in their food when preparing it and won't let them join the NAACP, because it's what they do to us.

But if you're still wondering how Donald Trump won, selling "white discrimination" still works with an overwhelming majority of Republicans, a solid majority of Independents, and almost 40% of Democrats.

StupidiNews!

• US Olympic silver-medal cyclist Kelly Catlin has died at age 23, She placed second in the 2016 Rio games in women's team pursuit.
• An Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Nairobi crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board, it's the second fatal Boeing 737 MAX crash in six months.
• A nationwide blackout in Venezuela has entered its fifth day as the country remains largely without power for clear water, refrigeration, and communications.
• The White House is expected to release its budget blueprint Monday, calling for massive cuts to most federal agencies as House Democrats are expected to reject the plan.
• An email marketing agency has exposed hundreds of millions of email addresses online, which could lead to major identity theft breaches.

The Late Local Edition

The local newspaper is dying in America, and with it, the local news, informing people of what's going on with local government, crime, and business.

Five minutes late, Darrell Todd Maurina sweeps into a meeting room and plugs in his laptop computer. He places a Wi-Fi hotspot on the table and turns on a digital recorder. The earplug in his left ear is attached to a police scanner in his pants pocket.

He wears a tie; Maurina insists upon professionalism.

He is the press — in its entirety.

Maurina, who posts his work to Facebook, is the only person who has come to the Pulaski County courthouse to tell residents what their commissioners are up to, the only one who will report on their deliberations — specifically, their discussions about how to satisfy the Federal Emergency Management Agency so it will pay to repair a road inundated during a 2013 flood.

Last September, Waynesville became a statistic. With the shutdown of its newspaper, the Daily Guide, this town of 5,200 people in central Missouri’s Ozark hills joined more than 1,400 other cities and towns across the U.S. to lose a newspaper over the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press analysis of data compiled by the University of North Carolina.

Blame revenue siphoned by online competition, cost-cutting ownership, a death spiral in quality, sheer disinterest among readers or reasons peculiar to given locales for that development. While national outlets worry about a president who calls the press an enemy of the people, many Americans no longer have someone watching the city council for them, chronicling the soccer exploits of their children or reporting on the kindly neighbor who died of cancer.

Local journalism is dying in plain sight.

In another ten years, I figure there won't be a local newspaper for any American city of fewer than 100,000 people.  If you're close enough to a larger city, you might get a few blurbs daily about the suburb you're in, but nobody will be covering the place unless the Mayor drives a tank through city hall or something.

But increasingly, Americans don't care.  Most of us can't even name the Mayor of where we live, and just vote for them because they've been in office for a couple decades. And the city council or county commission?  Forget it.

Who's going to keep your local politicians in line and accountable?

The Drums Of War, Con't

Now that former Reagan/Bush-era war criminal Elliott Abrams has settled into his role as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela, the march towards US military action in Caracas can begin in earnest.  For now, the talk is of economic sanctions and negotiated solutions, which won't last too much longer. 

There are no signs that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is open to negotiations to end the political impasse with opposition leader Juan Guaido, Washington’s envoy for Venezuela said.

Elliott Abrams, who served in the administrations of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, said any negotiated solution would need to be reached among Venezuelans, and that the United States could help by lifting or easing U.S. sanctions and travel restrictions once Maduro agreed to go.

Abrams, however, played down any possibility that the Venezuelan president was ready to talk about his exit. “From everything we have seen, Maduro’s tactic is to stay put,” Abrams said in an interview on Friday.

Some 56 countries have recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s interim head of state, but Maduro retains the backing of Russia and China as well as control of state institutions including the military.

Abrams has met with Russian representatives to the United States about Moscow’s support for Maduro. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this month, after a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that Moscow was ready to take part in bilateral talks on Venezuela.

“The Russians are not happy with Maduro for all the obvious reasons,” Abrams said. “In a couple of conversations I have been told they have given advice to Maduro and he doesn’t take it.”

“They continue to support him and there is no indication that I have seen that they are telling him it’s time to bring this to an end,” he said, adding: “There could come a point where the Russians reach a conclusion that the regime is really unsalvageable.”

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The reality is that Maduro owes the Russians more than $17 billion and they want that money back, or they will leave him to the tender graces of their pet American thug.  The wild card here is the Chinese however.  They are backing Maduro for now, for their own reasons...but mostly they invested in Venezuelan oil under Chavez and want their payoff too.

Even as Venezuela’s political crisis entered its latest stage last month, a combination of calculations continued to drive China’s reluctance to join calls for political change — or even to openly acknowledge that the China-Venezuela relationship is in troubled waters. China’s official response to U.S. and other international recognition of Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader has emphasized China’s long-standing noninterference foreign policy principle.

And it’s likely that China continues to hope its financial and diplomatic support for Venezuela ultimately will pave the way for future oil-based trade and investment opportunities. By sitting on the fence as the United States and Russia trade barbs over the future of Venezuela’s political leadership, China may be hoping that its efforts to appear a pragmatic partner to Caracas will pay off with greater future access to Venezuela’s oil reserves. For China to portray its long financial and political support for Chávez and Maduro as purely practical rather than also ideological will probably be easier said than done in a country as polarized as Venezuela.

Should Beijing's pragmatism mean that Maduro needs to be out of the picture, I'm betting China will look the other way too, especially if it means the US does all the heavy lifting to put Guaido in place.

Meanwhile the NY Times finally noticed that the Trump regime's claim that Maduro forces burned a humanitarian aid convoy was complete bullshit.

The narrative seemed to fit Venezuela’s authoritarian rule: Security forces, on the order of President Nicolás Maduro, had torched a convoy of humanitarian aid as millions in his country were suffering from illness and hunger.

Vice President Mike Pence wrote that “the tyrant in Caracas danced”as his henchmen “burned food & medicine.” The State Department released a video saying Mr. Maduro had ordered the trucks burned. And Venezuela’s opposition held up the images of the burning aid, reproduced on dozens of news sites and television screens throughout Latin America, as evidence of Mr. Maduro’s cruelty.

But there is a problem: The opposition itself, not Mr. Maduro’s men, appears to have set the cargo alight accidentally.

Unpublished footage obtained by The New York Times and previously released tapes — including footage released by the Colombian government, which has blamed Mr. Maduro for the fire — allowed for a reconstruction of the incident. It suggests that a Molotov cocktail thrown by an antigovernment protester was the most likely trigger for the blaze.

At one point, a homemade bomb made from a bottle is hurled toward the police, who were blocking a bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela to prevent the aid trucks from getting through.

But the rag used to light the Molotov cocktail separates from the bottle, flying toward the aid truck instead.

Half a minute later, that truck is in flames.

The same protester can be seen 20 minutes earlier, in a different video, hitting another truck with a Molotov cocktail, without setting it on fire.

Ask yourselves why the Trump regime wants regime change in Caracas so badly, and why they are trying to do everything in their power to have a ready-made excuse to send in US troops to do it.

Sunday Long Read: Crimes Of Taste

While you're recovering today from Daylight Savings Time, our Sunday Long Read this week from food critic John Birdsall will help you deal with your favorite guilty comfort food pleasure, the one that nobody else would touch with a ten foot pole.  Turns out it's okay, and that America has a real problem with "taste shaming" because hey, foodies are class snobs and a lot of us grew up eating porkchops and applesauce because it was what we could afford.

It’s Tuesday, loyalty card double-stamp night at my neighborhood sushi place in Oakland. It’s the kind of spot where the sweaty owner in a headband and his kid assistant slur “irasshaimase!”—welcome!—in tandem when you push open the chime-tinkling door, no matter how harried they look. It’s a place that gives customers what they want: inside-out dragon rolls, seven-dollar glasses of Chardonnay poured nearly to the rim, the NBA on a TV cantilevered high in the corner, and pale, shaggy-battered shrimp tempura as meaty as a kitten’s flexed hind legs.

At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles filled with primary colors (cool in the ’90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him with another woman, I guess, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.

Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as the friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears soaked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. She chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just done something heinous, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime against taste.

Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, of course, but they are clear offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw salmon in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of a kind of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and the mineral richness of fat). Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salt and heat? (And for sure, in a modest sushi place like this, there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in her pea-green paste—only tinted mustard-seed powder. It’s cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, an even deadlier poison for ruining flavor.)

But who can say what’s “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a realm of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can be as hard as piercing an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.

Some days my Instagram serves up a scroll of atrocities: cake-topped #freakshakes, Bloody Marys bristling with bacon swizzles and sliders on skewers, Luther Burgers with glazed doughnuts stunting for the bun, brownie-batter “hummus,” glitter-scurfed pink-and-blue unicorn Frappuccinos, and activated charcoal soft-serve so black and glossy it resembles roof-patch polymer. Social media is a major enabler of crimes against taste (their visual representations anyway; see the new popularity of “dark cuisine,” or hei an liao li—fantastical, thrillingly transgressive dishes trending on Chinese social media), but it is, after all, only food porn.

Let’s pause to consider the definition of “crime,” or at least to say what it is not. There are plenty of dishes that appear brutal, bizarre, or disgusting through the lens of culture. My introduction to Filipino food was the murky bowl of dinuguan (a stew of mixed pork innards in a sauce of vinegar and blood) my future mother-in-law served me for breakfast one morning nearly 30 years ago. As I slurped politely, I gazed longingly at the box of Cheerios on top of the fridge. If I’d stopped there, rejected a cuisine I didn’t understand and that seemed intent on assault (especially so early in the morning), my brush with the food of the Philippines might have gone down in dinner-party stories as a tale of staring down evil in a bowl and living to talk about it, or at least of shuddering in the face of grossness. Thanks to love for my husband-to-be, I suppose, I persisted. I came to see beauty in a bowl of blood and offal stew—the way a handful of economical cuts from a butcher’s market stall can transcend utility, honor an animal gone to slaughter by elevating its twistiest parts, and express an immigrant’s longing for a place on the other side of the world. A dish that looks, smells, and tastes like a crime can merely be misunderstood, evidence of an accusing prosecutor’s failure at grasping meaning or context.

There's no accounting for taste, which is why I always chuckle at people who say ketchup should be reserved solely for kids who haven't reached driving age yet, or that grits are trash food for trash people.

What did food ever do to you that made you hate other people eating it?