Last Call For An Indefensible Decision

Donald Trump is more than happy to make America suffer as much as possible until he gets his border wall with Mexico, and if that means diverting billions in funding (illegally by the way) from existing Pentagon base repair, construction, refit and maintenance project to his silly wall, then so be it.

The Pentagon's announcement that it will divert $3.6 billion in military construction funds to help fund President Donald Trump's border wall has sparked bipartisan anger from lawmakers who learned Wednesday that their states will be impacted by the decision. 

Domestically, just under $1.8 billion is being shifted away from projects in 23 states and three US territories. 

Additionally, the Pentagon will defer more than $1.8 billion in military construction projects overseas to free up over $3.6 billion in funds for 11 wall projects on the southern border with Mexico, according to a complete list obtained by CNN Wednesday. 

In total, 127 domestic and overseas projects are being put on hold to help fund the wall that Trump initially promised would be paid for by Mexico. 

Among the sites affected are facilities used to store hazardous waste, repair Navy ships and conduct cyber operations, that had been identified as being in need of repair or additional construction. 

Puerto Rico was among the hardest hit of all US states and territories as it will see more than $400 million in funding for planned military construction projects diverted to the wall under the Pentagon's plan. 

Trump has consistently sparred with Puerto Rican officials while he's been in office following 2017's Hurricane Maria. 

"Most of the projects in Puerto Rico were a result of Hurricane Maria," a senior US defense official told CNN. 

"We've got a rebuild effort that we have ongoing here and I mentioned these projects aren't scheduled to award for more than a year. These are projects that we have on the list something we can use now and backfill, we've got time to do that." 

Overseas, $771 million in projects at various locations in Europe will be impacted. These projects, including airfield upgrades and staging areas in Eastern Europe, are meant to improve the defense of US allies from Russian threats. 

So we have two of Trump's favorite targets to harm: Puerto Rico and NATO.  We're coming up on two years since Hurricane Maria savaged Puerto Rico, and Trump is still doing everything in his power to cut them off.

Meanwhile, US bases in Eastern Europe are getting short changed just as Russia's ramping up nuclear weapon production as the IMF treaty between Washington and Moscow is dead.

Trump's pettiness is now the chief driver of both foreign and domestic policy.

The Blue Wave Returns, Con't

The rush of Texas Republicans heading for the exits is now a deluge.

Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) announced Wednesday that he will not seek reelection in 2020, making him the fifth Texas Republican to do so.

“Serving my country as the Representative of the hardworking Texas families in the 17th Congressional District has been an honor and one of the greatest privileges of my life,” he said in a statement. “When I originally announced that I was running for Congress in 2009, I was firm in my commitment that I would run for six or fewer terms. After much prayer over the past few days and following conversations with my wife, Gina, during that time, I have decided that my current term will be my last.” 

According to the Cook Political Report, Flores’ district, the 17th, leans Republican and voted for President Donald Trump with about 55 percent of the vote. 

Flores follows in the footsteps of his fellow Texans GOP Reps. Kenny Marchant, Will Hurd, Pete Olson and K. Michael Conaway.

This is now pants-wetting panic time for the Texas GOP.  Flores easily won in 2018 by 16 points.  There's no way his seat is in any real trouble.  Flores could have stayed as long as he wanted.  But he's gotten a taste now of the future, a House GOP with 269 pounds of ugly orange fat choking it, and increasingly a permanent position in the House minority.

If there are safe Texas GOP seats heading for the lifeboats, then 2020 is going to be a tsunami.

And everyone knows it.

The Gerrymandering Battle Rages On

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts may have removed federal courts from having any role in gerrymandering fights back in June, but all that means is that by leaving these battles to the states that the state courts can now play for keeps, as the NC GOP just found out the hard way.

North Carolina’s political maps for the state legislature are unconstitutional and must be redrawn before the 2020 elections, a court has decided. 

A panel of judges struck down the maps Tuesday, in a 357-page ruling that focused on the level of political partisanship used to draw them. The maps were drawn in 2017 to replace previous maps, drawn in 2011, that had also been ruled unconstitutional. Both sets of maps were drawn by North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature. 

The judges found that “The North Carolina Supreme Court has long and consistently held that ‘our government is founded on the will of the people,’ that ‘their will is expressed by the ballot.’” 

And that fact helped the judges conclude that the maps violated the state constitution because “it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly.” 

Tuesday’s decision may be the final word in this legal battle, since at least one top Republican lawmaker said he doesn’t plan to appeal the ruling. 

“This is a historic victory for the people of North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, one of the groups that sued to overturn the maps. “The court has made clear that partisan gerrymandering violates our state’s constitution and is unacceptable. Thanks to the court’s landmark decision, politicians in Raleigh will no longer be able to rig our elections through partisan gerrymandering.” 

The three-judge panel was unanimous in its ruling. The panel consisted of two Democrats — Paul Ridgeway of Wake County and Alma Hinton of Halifax County — and one Republican, Joseph Crosswhite of Iredell County. 

“The conclusions of this Court today reflect the unanimous and best efforts of the undersigned trial judges — each hailing from different geographic regions and each with differing ideological and political outlooks — to apply core constitutional principles to this complex and divisive topic,” they wrote.

Of course, the battle in NC is far from over, as Republicans overwhelmingly have control of the state House and Senate to redraw the maps, but thanks to the Roberts Court, NC Republicans can't cry foul.  The entire reason this ruling came about was that the GOP won in June, forcing the federal ruling against NC's gerrymandered districts to go back to state court. 

And hey, given that the federal and state judges found massively, overwhelming evidence of gerrymandering so egregious that it violated North Carolina's state constitution, it was a no-brainer (although not a given) that the state court this time would find the same thing.

Redrawing Pennsylvania's districts made a huge difference a few years ago.  Now it seems North Carolina will get a turn at fairness.

StupidiNews!

• Bahamian PM Hubert Minnis is calling the devastation from Hurricane Dorian's landfall this weekend "the greatest national crisis in our country's history" as the death toll rises.
• A UN human rights group report on the five-year civil war in Yemen finds evidence the UK, US, and France may be complicit in war crimes by assisting Saudi Arabia's massive bombing campaign.
• OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma says it will have no choice but to declare a "free-fall" bankruptcy if the company cannot come to settlement terms with several states over opioids before month's end.
• French President Emmanuel Macron says France will engage Iran and the US in last-ditch nuclear talks in order to try to salvage the international agreement scrapped last year by the Trump regime.
• Google's Project Zero team, dedicated to sniffing out tech exploits and stopping hackers, says 0-day exploits in iOS existed for nearly two years before Apple patched them last December.

Last Call For Mark Of The Millennials

It's pretty easy to slag on older Boomers and Silent Generation septuagenarians as being the ones wrecking the planet, but there's five Millennial men in particular who are very convincingly making a bid to be Earth's Legion of Doom for the next 40 or 50 years.  The Cut's Noreen Malone

So here we are, a generation munching on the last greens of its salad days, saddled with dull, decade-old complaints about our coddledness, our entitlement, our selfies, our political correctness — most blah-blah-blah of all, by the boring cliché of our avocado toast. In a more self-serving version of this narrative, we are the generation that disrupted salad days and made them Sweetgreen days. The generation of AOC and Rihanna and DeRay Mckesson and Glossier! Of hope and protest and changing norms!

No. The world’s five most powerful millennials now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, are Jared Kushner (b. 1981), Kim Jong-un (b. 1984), Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984), Stephen Miller (b. 1985), and Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985). The globe is their avocado — to be splayed and robbed of its core and smashed, then spread before them for the taking — and we’re toast.
As for whether these are truly the five most powerful, yes, there is enormous influence in being the most visible member of Congress, in using your platform as a historically great athlete to do good, or in being Beyoncé. But is it unchecked power, of the kind that can move markets and armies unilaterally, swiftly, and on what can amount to a whim? Three of these men are the de facto heads of nation-states, if you count Facebook as a nation-state. The other two, with their mysterious influence, have more power in the Trump administration than anyone, arguably including the president.

These are men who, barely having hit their stride, can tout such accomplishments as: the undermining of an American election, the erosion of privacy norms and attention spans, the desiccation of journalism, the destabilization of the Middle East, a genocide, the creation of modern American internment camps, the beheading of a journalist, the flooding of the world economy with huge investments in unsustainable tech start-ups that undercut smaller merchants, public mass executions, the threat of nuclear war, and whatever other assorted horrors might be happening behind the cloak of secrecy that surrounds North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration, and the inner sanctum of Facebook. I am probably leaving a few things out.

Okay, you might be thinking. These men are technically millennials but not in spirit or practice. They are too unusual, too geopolitically unique, to function as members of any generation. No. They are, in fact, textbook exemplars of theirs. Name me a so-called millennial characteristic and I can name a fuckboy-despot who possesses it.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with the five most nihilistically dangerous assholes on the planet are all five to ten years younger than I am.

Which means, we're fucked for decades.  If you think today's adults are going to save us, understand they're not.  Especially the white ones.

And oh yeah, they helped elect Trump.  Did we forget this somehow?

Boris Bad Enough Versus Moose And Squirrel

As I hinted at yesterday, UK Emergency Inflatable Prime Minister Boris Johnson isn't very good at his job, and completely unfathomable, totally unexpected things like "somebody called his stupid Brexit bluff" have happened.  Beeb Politics editor Laura Kuenssberg:

Conservative MP Phillip Lee has defected to the Liberal Democrats ahead of a showdown between Boris Johnson and Tory rebels over Brexit.

Dr Lee, the MP for Bracknell, took his seat on the opposition benches as the PM addressed the Commons.

His defection means Boris Johnson no longer has a working majority.

MPs hoping to pass legislation to block no deal have cleared the first hurdle after Speaker John Bercow granted them an emergency debate.

That debate could last up to three hours, followed by a vote. If the MPs win the vote - defeating the government - they will be able to take control of Commons business on Wednesday.

That will give them the chance to introduce a cross-party bill which would force the prime minister to ask for Brexit to be delayed until 31 January, unless MPs approve a new deal, or vote in favour of a no-deal exit, by 19 October.

It seems right now - although there is still some arm twisting going on behind the scenes - that the government is set to lose the vote.

We are finding ourselves in the middle of a full-throttle confrontation between a Parliament that does not want to allow the country to leave the EU without a deal and a prime minister who secured his place in power promising he would always keep that as an option.

Both of them cannot be the victors here.

And they are both determined to win.

This is essentially the US equivalent of Donald Trump saying "If any Republican in the House votes for this Obamacare slash expanded debt ceiling legislation I'll kick them out of the party" in order to allow the GOP to destroy America's credit rating and economy...

...but also the same week there's an upcoming vote for Speaker of the House, and that vote whip count finds Republican Kevin McCarthy would win by one vote and then less than 24 hours later...

...not only does that Obamacare vote happen, the Republican switches to the Dems and votes to make Nancy Pelosi speaker.

The Earth would crack open and swallow up Capitol Hill.

This basically happened in Parliament just now.

Enjoy!

Forty-Five Versus Three Or Four

With the first 2020 contests now just four months out, Team WIN THE MORNING sees the Democratic presidential field narrowed to just three and generously, four.

The bottom is falling out of the Democratic presidential primary. And the top-tier — no longer five candidates, but three — is becoming more insurmountable.

For more than a year, Democrats had approached their nominating contest with a widely-shared belief that — like Republicans in the earliest stages of their primary four years ago — they, too, might take turns rising and falling in an expansive field. That expectation sustained the campaigns of more than two dozen contenders this year.

But in recent weeks, the leading band of candidates has contracted unexpectedly early. Heading into the fall, only three contenders are polling above single digits: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg remain at the periphery, while lower-polling candidates have largely failed to muster sustained, upward movement in fundraising or polling.

According to interviews with about two dozen Democratic operatives and consultants, there is little reason to expect any of them will.

“It was legitimate to say ‘Top 5’ for a long time, but with the exception of Kamala Harris being at the outer perimeter of the top three … you’d have to have a strange confluence of events for someone outside those four to win,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton confidant. “It would require all four failing. Like, you would need all four of them to be in a plane crash or something.”
For every other candidate, Reines said, “It’s too late in the game to keep saying it’s too early.”

What's different now compared to four years ago and the GOP clown car?

By this point in the Republican primary in 2016, Jeb Bush was already cratering. Scott Walker had risen and fallen. Donald Trump was in first, still to fend off a surge from Ben Carson before running away from the field.

The 2020 Democratic primary, by contrast, has been defined by its relative stability, with two full fundraising periods and two sets of debates now done.

Anna Greenberg, a pollster who advised former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s since-aborted presidential bid, said there was no boom-and-bust for Democrats because the primary “started so early, before voters really started paying attention,” and because of “the sheer volume of candidates.”

“It’s a little bit surprising because compared to ‘16 on the Republican side, where it seemed like a number of people had their moment in the sun … there hasn’t really been anybody who’s taken a meteoric rise,” said Scott Brennan, an Iowa Democratic National Committee member and former state party chairman.

Brennan said he's spoken with several campaigns recently whose advisers “feel like they’re poised and ready, they’re poised and they're waiting for their moment.”

But “for whatever reason," he said, "they haven’t had that.”

The old saw is Democrats fall in love at primary time, whereas Republicans fall in line.  But if anything the reverse seems to be true.  Republicans have been falling back in love with Trump from 80% support to 95% for two years now, despite the 2018 drubbing in the House, whereas Democrats are increasingly falling in line behind "electability" and that's Biden, Sanders, and Warren, with Harris as the dark horse.

Everyone else is fooling themselves.

The problem is that for once, Politico's analysis isn't screamingly incorrect.  This is a three or four person race now, but settling this out will take a while.

We'll see who catches fire, I'm still edging towards Harris and Warren myself.  But there's still a good ten people that could and should drop out of this race tomorrow.

StupidiNews!

• Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said Monday that Hurricane Dorian was an "historic tragedy" as the northwestern islands were crushed by the Category 5 storm's 185 MPH winds.
• The death toll in last weekend's Midlands-Odessa Texas shooting attack has climbed to eight as law enforcement officials believe the suspect's firing from his trucking job may have set him off.
• At least 25 people are dead and nine more are missing after a pre-dawn fire aboard a dive boat sank the vessel off the coast of Santa Barbara, California early Monday.
• Democratic 2020 hopefuls are going after the Trump regime's latest plan to speed up federal executions after lifting a moratorium on federal death penalty earlier this summer.
• Forecast models show Hurricane Dorian will continue to rip north along hundreds of miles of Florida's eastern coast and could threaten Charleston, South Carolina by Thursday.

Last Call For Orange T And The Women

House Democrats are returning to Washington this week, and one of the first orders of business will be a House Judiciary investigation into Donald Trump's role as a co-conspirator in efforts to cover up his hush money payments over his affairs.

House Democrats plan to make President Trump’s alleged involvement in a 2016 scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with him a major investigative focus this fall, picking up where federal prosecutors left off in a case legal experts say could have led to additional indictments.

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold hearings and call witnesses involved in hush-money payments to ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels as soon as October, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

Democrats say they believe there is already enough evidence to name Trump as a co-conspirator in the episode that resulted in his former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to two campaign-finance charges.

Cohen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for those counts and other crimes, testified under oath that Trump directed the payments that helped land him behind bars. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan also described Trump’s alleged role in the scheme, referring to him in court papers as “Individual-1.” But they concluded their investigation this summer without bringing any additional charges.

The hush-money inquiry will open a new chapter in the House’s months-long consideration of whether to draft articles of impeachment against the president.

More than 130 House Democrats have called for an official impeachment inquiry to begin, although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has cautioned that trying to remove Trump would be divisive and politically risky without public support.

The new congressional inquiry will reopen questions about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the episode — and whether he would have been charged if not for Justice Department opinions that a sitting president cannot be indicted. 

That's great, but the answer to this, hearings or no hearings, is that the Justice Department will never lift a finger.  Trump's guilty as hell, but no prosecution will be forthcoming.  If Pelosi believes this is the best route towards impeachment, that's wonderful, but if we're going to spend another two months on this, the results need to be articles of impeachment.  If they don't happen by the end of the year, they never will.

A Different Kind Of Labour Day

Apparently the future of the United Kingdom as a going concern, as they say, comes down to a classic conundrum: who is the bigger idiot, Boris Johnson, or Jeremy Corbyn?

Boris Johnson is considering seeking an early general election if MPs wanting to block a no-deal Brexit defeat the government this week.
The BBC understands "live discussions" are going on in No 10 about asking Parliament to approve a snap poll.

Political editor Laura Kuenssberg said it could happen as soon as Wednesday but no final decision had been taken.

Mr Johnson is due to make a statement in Downing Street at about 1800 BST setting out the choices facing MPs.

Tory ex-ministers are joining forces with Labour to stop the UK leaving the EU on 31 October without a deal.

Amid mounting speculation about an election, Mr Johnson is due to hold an unscheduled cabinet meeting at 17.00 BST and will also speak to the wider Conservative parliamentary party later.

The prime minister has said the UK must leave the EU on 31 October, with or without a deal, prompting a number of MPs to unite across party lines to try to prevent the UK leaving without an agreement.

They are expected to put forward legislation on Tuesday to stop no deal under "SO24" or Standing Order 24 - the rule allowing MPs to ask for a debate on a "specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration".

Sources have told the BBC the bill would force the prime minister to seek a three-month extension until 31 January if no withdrawal deal has been passed by 19 October - the day after the next EU leaders' summit.

Tory rebels - who include former ministers and prominent backbenchers - have been warned that those who support the legislation face being expelled from the party and deselected.

But leading figures, including ex-Justice Secretary David Gauke, have insisted that despite the threat, they will press ahead and - in their words - put the "national interest" ahead of their own.

Fellow rebel and former Chancellor Philip Hammond has written to Mr Johnson to ask for details about the state of negotiations with the EU and what alternatives to the Irish backstop - the major sticking point in the talks - his government has put forward.

A No 10 spokesman said it was treating this week's Brexit votes as an issue of confidence - those traditionally trigger a general election if the government loses.

Now, there's no way a snap election can happen before the Halloween deadline for Brexit, Johnson knows this, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn knows this, British voters know this.  But by making everything about Corbyn, arguably the only person in British politics more hated than Boris Johnson right now, Johnson figures everyone will fall in line, including his own party.

It's a pretty classic move, make everyone focus on the "real enemy" so you can consolidate power among your allies.  Johnson is betting everyone in his party will fall in line now. Thing is, this is Boris Johnson trying this, and he's not that bright to begin with.  The problem is if Johnson's threats to expel any Tories who oppose him actually manages to alienate even one or two of his party and they test that bluff, his entire government collapses.

Now, best case scenario, Johnson's arrogance backfires spectacularly and forms a coalition government called "Boris Johnson Is A Stupid Wanker And We're Putting A Stop To This Brexit Thing Until We Can Get This All Ironed Out" and the UK works out a real government without the Damocles effect of Brexit hanging over everyone, and we get on with things.

Ideally, this new coalition government would form around a Labour party leader who isn't raging anti-Semite asshole Jeremy Corbyn, either, and then everybody wins because the next PM isn't Johnson and isn't Corbyn, and there's no Brexit.

On the other hand, Johnson could actually try to call for snap elections before the Brexit deadline and the whole thing blows up.

Enjoy!

Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency, Con't

Conspiring everything Donald Trump turns to flaming compost, last week he made the brilliant decision to yank all of FEMA's disaster funds to give to ICE as this week monstrous Category 5 Hurricane Dorian has arrived to wreck everyone's Labor Day, the strongest Atlantic Hurricane in 40 years.

If you think FEMA is going to be even close to ready, remember that our old friend Brock "The Asshole From My Hometown" Long was fired as FEMA head in February for taking trips on the company dime, and right now FEMA has an acting director because not even Republicans are willing to confirm Trump's latest disaster.

Hurricane Dorian is forecast to make landfall on the Atlantic coast without a Senate-confirmed FEMA administrator to oversee relief efforts — and President Donald Trump says he’s OK with that. 

“Acting gives you great flexibility that you don't have with permanent,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday before departing to Camp David, where he said he will be closely monitoring the storm. “When I like people, I make them permanent, but I can leave acting for a long period of time.” 

Deputy FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor is serving as acting administrator of the federal emergency agency after former head Brock Long resigned following a controversy over his personal use of government vehicles. Dorian would be the first hurricane Gaynor has overseen. 

Trump nominated Jeffrey Byard — who previously served in the Alabama Emergency Management Agency — to lead FEMA in February, but his nomination has stalled in the Senate. 

Gaynor is one of many acting officials in Trump’s administration. Other top posts without a Senate-confirmed head include U.N ambassador, Labor secretary and Homeland Security secretary, who also plays a major role in overseeing disaster relief efforts. 

The White House said Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Peter Brown will accompany the president on his trip to Camp David to provide regular updates on Dorian's path. 

Trump said he’ll be “coming back” to Washington on Sunday to monitor Dorian recovery efforts.

I mean Trump has to golf, after all.

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

CNN's Harry Enten points out the polling for Trump has never been as bad for an incumbent 14 months out, and for Trump, his numbers are absolutely dismal.

I went all the way back to World War II era in the Roper Center archive to see how presidents were polling at this point against their eventual challengers. I selected the worst poll for the incumbent if there was more than one poll taken in order to give Trump the most generous comparison. In years in which no polls were taken in August the year before the election (i.e. when the last poll for 2020 was conducted), I chose the poll taken closest to this point. 

What's clear is the vast majority of incumbents were ahead at this point in the campaign: nine of the 11 were ahead. And for the average incumbent, they led their eventual challenger by 12 points at this point. 

Again, Trump trails Biden by 10 points in the average August poll. Trump has not been ahead of Biden in a single national poll taken this entire cycle. 

Only two of 11 incumbents in past years, Jimmy Carter in 1979 and Barack Obama in 2011, were behind at this point. They were down by 4 points and 1 point respectively to their eventual challengers (Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney). Carter went to lose reelection. Obama went on to win with a small reelection margin -- and there were many polls at this point that had him ahead. (Remember, I'm looking at the worst poll for past incumbents.) 

Put another way, Trump's worst poll against any of the top five Democrats at this point is 5 points worse than the worst poll for any incumbent since World War II against his eventual challenger. It's 12 points worse against his most likely challenger, Biden. 

As I've already mentioned, we don't know if these polls will hold. What is notable, though, is that Trump is not punching above his approval rating right now. Trump's approval rating has been consistently below his disapproval rating, just like he has been consistently been polling behind Biden. That lines up with what occurred in the 2018 midterms: Republican House candidates got the same share of the votes as Trump's approval rating, 45%. 

Trump has time to turn his reelection ship in the right direction. But in the 10 months since the Republicans lost the House in 2018, he's in no better shape. You could even argue he's in a worse position. 

Now factor in the extremely high likelihood of an economic recession between now and November 2020.  Donald Trump is in peril.

Unfortunately, we've never been in a situation where the incumbent has been this lawless, and the opposition has been this unwilling to do anything to stop it.  In a fair election, Trump would be destroyed in 2020 along with the Senate GOP.

There's approximately zero chance the 2020 election will be fair.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Today being September 1 means that Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports go into effect, so expect major sticker shock this month as prices go up on just about everything you buy.

President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs on Chinese imports is likely to deliver a direct hit on many consumers, who were largely spared from higher prices in his previous rounds of import taxes.

Beginning Sunday, the U.S. government will begin collecting 15% tariffs on $112 billion in Chinese imports — items ranging from smartwatches and TVs to shoes, diapers, sporting goods and meat and dairy products. For the first time since Trump launched his trade war, American households face price increases because many U.S. companies say they’ll be forced to pass on to customers the higher prices they’ll pay on Chinese imports.

For more than a year, the world’s two largest economies have been locked in a high-stakes duel marked by Trump’s escalating import taxes on Chinese goods and Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs.

The two sides have held periodic talks that seem to have met little progress despite glimmers of potential breakthroughs. All the while, they’ve imposed tariffs on billions of each other’s products in a rift over what analysts say is Beijing’s predatory tactics in its drive to become the supreme high-tech superpower.

American consumers have so far been spared the worst of it: The Trump administration had left most everyday household items off its tariff list (valued at $250 billion in Chinese products so far) and instead targeted industrial goods.

That’s about to change. “They’re on. They’re on,” Trump said Friday about the new tariffs that are set to kick in at 12:01 a.m. Sunday. Under the new schedule, 69% of the consumer goods Americans buy from China will face his import taxes, up from 29% now.

That isn’t all. Higher tariffs are set to kick in for another batch of Chinese products — $160 billion’ worth — on Dec. 15. By then, roughly 99% of made-in-China consumer goods imported to the United States will be taxed, according to calculations by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Overall, Trump’s trade war will have raised the average tariff on Chinese imports from 3.1% in 2017, before the hostilities began, to 24.3%.

It's going to be a lousy Christmas for a lot of Americans this year, and it's going to cost American consumers tens of billions of dollars.  And Trump?  He's already blaming American companies.

Sunday Long Read: Judge, Jury, And Executioner

In Texas, county judges are in charge of the machinery of public defender cases. Texas Republicans will tell you that it's the most efficient way to handle people who can't afford their own lawyers and the Supreme Court's ruling that one has to be appointed for them. Judicial reform activists will tell you that the inherent conflict of interest means poor Texans are getting railroaded into prison so judges can get reelected for being tough on crime.  And yes, the man behind this mess was Texas's governor at the time George W. Bush.

Indigent defense in the U.S. is in crisis. More than twenty lawsuits filed in the past decade on behalf of poor plaintiffs—in California, Louisiana, Georgia, and other states—point to this predicament, which has been acknowledged at the highest levels: in 2013, in a speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright,then–U.S. attorney general Eric Holder bemoaned the number of unjust convictions and sentences borne by the poor. “This is unacceptable,” he declared, “and unworthy of a legal system that stands as an example to all the world.”

The main reason for this crisis is funding. Because the Supreme Court did not, in its 1963 ruling, specify how states should pay for counsel, local policymakers facing other costs—for schools, roads, law enforcement—consistently shortchange indigent defense. This is why public defender’s offices are chronically understaffed. It’s also why court-appointed private lawyers are overloaded: the fees they’re paid are often so low that they are forced to take on a multitude of cases just to make a living. Some overburdened lawyers, in turn, contribute to so-called plea mills, in which, critics say, they encourage defendants to plead guilty because they are either too swamped to investigate claims or incentivized not to (in Travis County, for instance, court-appointed lawyers are paid $600 for a felony case whether they secure a plea deal or get the charge dismissed).

The problem of funding is especially acute in Texas. Since 2001, when the state legislature passed the Fair Defense Act—a law that aimed to overhaul and standardize how the state’s poor received counsel—total spending on indigent defense has increased significantly, from some $91 million in 2001 to roughly $273 million in 2018. But Texas ranks among the states that spend the least per capita: its counties, which shoulder most of the costs, are some of the fastest growing in the country, and what little the Legislature chips in to help—some $30 million last year—does not match demand. This creates a woeful game of numbers on the ground. In 2017, for example, the average court-appointed lawyer in Texas made only $247 per misdemeanor case and $598 per felony.

However, the problem goes beyond money. In Texas, the crisis is exacerbated by a key structural flaw: indigent defense is largely overseen by judges. Contrary to the American Bar Association’s principles of public defense, which call for defense lawyers to be independent of the judiciary, judges in most Texas counties decide which lawyers get cases, how much they are paid, and whether their motions—say, to reduce bail or test DNA—have merit. (Counties do have fee schedules for lawyers, but judges set the schedules and retain discretion over payment.)

Given that judges are elected based, in part, on the efficiency of their courts, this is an inherent conflict of interest. “Whatever the judge wants to do, it’s probably not acquit your client,” said Charlie Gerstein, a lawyer for Civil Rights Corps, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that has spent the past several years challenging criminal justice abuses around the country. “The judge wants to move the docket. The judge wants to get reelected.” (Civil Rights Corps filed the class-action lawsuitagainst the bail system of Harris County in 2016.) Lawyers trying to work a case properly—by devoting more time or requesting an investigator—face a quandary: Why make the effort if a judge can retaliate by appointing them to fewer cases or cutting their pay?

In 1999 Houston Democrat and then–state senator Rodney Ellis introduced a bill that would, among other things, transfer oversight of indigent defense attorneys from judges to county officials. The Lege approved the measure, but judges, lawyers, and prosecutors resisted, writing more than three hundred letters to then-governor George W. Bush. (“The bill inappropriately takes appointment authority away from judges, who are better able to assess the quality of legal representation,” said Bush in his veto proclamation.) Two years later, Ellis helped muscle through the Fair Defense Act, which provided, for the first time, some funding and oversight by the state, in the form of an agency now known as the Texas Indigent Defense Commission. The TIDC was tasked with administering funds, enforcing standards, and responding to violations. But the law was also clear: “Only the judges . . . or the judges’ designee” was allowed “to appoint counsel for indigent defendants in the county.”

For a long time, the combined effect of this judicial control and lack of funding—heavy caseloads, underserved defendants—was hard to quantify. But a surprisingly trailblazing move by the Legislature in 2013 gave Texas something almost no other state that relies on private attorneys has: comprehensive data. That year, lawmakers ordered every county to start reporting to the TIDC the number of indigent cases, and fees, given to lawyers in every court. They also instructed the TIDC to conduct a study on appropriate caseloads, the first of its kind mandated by a state government.

In 2015 the study’s results were released: in any given year, researchers found, a Texas lawyer could reasonably handle 128 felonies or 226 misdemeanors, or a weighted combination of the two. This set a benchmark against which to understand the growing database, which showed lawyers juggling two, three, or even four times that load. Even the director of the TIDC at the time, Jim Bethke, said he hadn’t known “the magnitude of people who were getting run through the system on a super mass conveyor belt.”

Today, the TIDC database is staggering in its reach. With just a few clicks, anyone can look up lawyers by name and see how many indigent cases they took, and in what court, and for how much. Finding the highest-earning attorney, or the most overloaded, takes minutes. Consider just a few names: In Harris County, in fiscal 2017, James Barr earned more than $131,000 for work on 433 indigent felony cases, which all came from the court of Judge Jim Wallace. In the Panhandle, Artie Aguilar won a contract in fiscal 2018 to handle all indigent felony cases in Dawson, Gaines, Garza, and Lynn counties—a total of 322 cases, for a payment of $75,000. T. D. Hammons, who takes cases around Amarillo, was paid $99,450 in fiscal 2017 for work on 129 felonies and dozens of misdemeanors. He reported that these took up less than 60 percent of his time, meaning that the rest of his time was devoted to additional clients.

Astonishingly, few judges—or lawyers or lawmakers—seem to be aware of these figures. Those who are will sometimes argue that caseload limits are unrealistic; it’s too arbitrary, they say, to impose a number when situations vary from county to county, or when judges are faced with too many defendants and too few defense lawyers. But as Texas grows and funding continues to lag, these figures offer a place to start—and one thing they show is that judicial oversight of an indigent defendant’s right to a lawyer is becoming untenable.

The system is broken because it's designed that way.  Nobody wants to grow up and be a public defender in Texas with four times the caseload, working for chump change, when the system rewards speed and not accuracy.  And with Texas, we can see exactly how broken criminal justice in America is.

The Purge Continues

Paranoid Donald Trump continues to turn against his own people out of fear and suspicion, because betrayal is the only way that a relationship with a monster like Trump can ever end.

President Donald Trump’s longtime executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, abruptly resigned from the White House on Thursday, after coming under scrutiny for sharing intimate details about the president’s family with reporters, according to two sources familiar with the move. 

In the past six months, Westerhout had tried to expand the boundaries of her job to encompass a broader set of tasks and to include foreign travel, said one adviser close to the White House, who suggested Westerhout had tried to act like a de facto chief of staff.  

This irked several White House officials and Cabinet secretaries who thought she should stick to her primary task of serving as the president’s personal secretary with a desk just outside the Oval Office. 

Westerhout didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The New York Times first reported her departure. 

The White House was buzzing for most of the day on Thursday about her potential departure — especially after officials learned that she had attended an off-the-record dinner with reporters in Bedminster, N.J., where she was said to have shared overly personal details about the president’s life. 

The close White House adviser called this “the final straw” for someone who did not have many allies left in the building.

Everyone and everything Trump touches turns to bubbling, rancid shit.  Anyone who has a relationship with him eventually gets betrayed and disposed of.

Unfortunately thanks to politics, we all have a "relationship" with this monster, and he's in varying stages of screwing each and every one of us over in some way.