Last Call For (Non)Sense Of The Senate GOP

As Charles Sykes points out, Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse is now fully a Trump bootlicker, and the last shred of human decency left in the Senate GOP has been set on fire, stomped on, pissed on, dug up, and its ashes shot into the sun.

After Trump proposed his ban on Muslim immigration in 2015, Sasse gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he denounced “demagoguing leaders" and "a megalomaniac strongman ... screaming about travel bans and deportation."

In interviews, he compared Trump to former KKK leader David Duke and described Trump’s rise as a personal breaking point. “This is the party of Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “This is not the party of David Duke, Donald Trump.”

Consistently, he cast the issue as one of fundamental constitutional principles rather than personality. Fundamentally, he said, “this party needs to return to its principles of believing in equality under the law and believing in the greatness of the potential of the American people.” As he said in February of 2016:  

The problem is, at the end of the day, most people really want a choice that is about a constitutional recovery. They want to rebuild what's broken in America, not tear it down. And when you listen to Donald Trump, all you really hear is more Donald Trump, more tear it down, and a lot of praise of foreign dictators. I don't think the American people, and I don't think most Republicans really want a strongman.

Even after Trump had secured the nomination, Sasse refused to fall in line. When asked if he would be attending the GOP convention, his office said that the senator would” instead take his kids to watch some dumpster fires across the state, all of which enjoy more popularity than the current front-runners.”

Sasse’s outspokenness continued through the first years of Trump’s presidency. A Politico profile in July 2018 noted that even as the ranks of never-Trumpers in the Republican Party “dwindles to a lonely few, the Nebraska senator has shown little interest in backing down.” Sasse seemed anxious to polish his conservative intellectual credentials by publishing a book just three weeks before the midterm election titled, “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal,” a decidedly non-Trumpian view of culture, politics and the future.

There was even speculation that Sasse might mount an independent challenge to Trump. In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” a year ago this month, he told host Jake Tapper that he thought about leaving the GOP “every morning” and said that he thought of himself as “an independent conservative who caucuses with the Republicans.”

When Trump lashed out at the Department of Justice in September of 2018 for indicting two Republican congressmen, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, Sasse delivered a stinging rebuke: “The United States is not some banana republic with a two-tiered system of justice — one for the majority party and one for the minority party,” Sasse said. “These two men have been charged with crimes because of evidence, not because of who the president was when the investigations began.”

Sasse’s apparent independence continued into 2019. In February, declaring himself a “constitutional conservative,” he urged Trump not to declare a national emergency on the border, warning that it would set a dangerous precedent. “If we get used to presidents just declaring an emergency any time they can’t get what they want from Congress, it will be almost impossible to go back to a Constitutional system of checks and balances,” he said. “Over the past decades, the legislative branch has given away too much power and the executive branch has taken too much power.”

But the next month, he stunned observers when he voted to uphold Trump’s order even though 12 other GOP senators broke with Trump on the issue. It was a breathtaking reversal. In many ways, it was no different than the Faustian bargain made by so many of his colleagues and a reflection of the transformation of Republican politics.

Sasse would have been primaried out and destroyed like Justin Amash was and he knows it, but instead he toed the line and got his Trump tweet endorsement earlier this month.  He figures he's got an easy path in 2020 to re-election, and he'll worry about the country in 2026.  After all, Trump will be long gone by then, one way or another.

Right?

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

I'm as shocked as you are, but the normally roller-skates-on-the-moon useless think tank Third Way actually compiled a list of the 99 House Democratic districts where we need to run up the score the most in order to win the White House and the Senate back in order to start cleaning up the Trump disaster, districts like Rob Kind's in Wisconsin, Rashida Tlaib's in Michigan and G.K. Butterfield's in NC.

Third Way, created in the “New Democrat” mold of Bill Clinton’s presidency, often clashes with more liberal activists over party ideology, but in this report the group has tried to illustrate the range of political geography Democrats need to focus their energy on to ensure a broad victory.

So, in this regard, Third Way places double the value on Tlaib, whose staunchly liberal positions would be out of place with the group’s moderate policy prescriptions. But her seat could prove critical to building turnout for the presidential race and to reelect Sen. Gary Peters (Mich.), one of the few incumbent Democrats that Republicans want to target in a year the GOP will mostly be on defense.

Here’s why: In 2016, Tlaib’s district gave Hillary Clinton a margin of victory of almost 61 percentage points, which might seem staggering. But four years earlier, that district gave Obama a nearly 71-point margin.

Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes, making that small drop in Detroit critical to Clinton’s defeat statewide.

Down in North Carolina, Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D) has easily won for 15 years, but the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus has a district that might be key to tipping the state’s 15 electoral votes to Democrats.

Perhaps more importantly, Butterfield could help the Democratic nominee for the Senate race against Sen. Thom Tillis (R), a contest that could serve as a tipping point for control of the Senate.

Without a comprehensive effort, Democrats fear a new president would be stymied if Republicans still control the Senate, where the GOP could block or water down the Democratic agenda, similar to Obama’s second term.

“It determines whether Democrats can accomplish anything in 2021,” said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president and a policy expert.

Some obviously important Democratic seats are even more critical when looking up and down the ballot in their respective states. These are what [report author David] de la Fuente calls “five point races”: freshman Democrats who narrowly won a GOP-held seat in 2018, running for reelection in districts that Trump won two years before, whose states will also be battlegrounds in the presidential and Senate contests.

There are eight “five-point” Democrats: Reps. Abby Finkenauer (Iowa), Cindy Axne (Iowa), Angie Craig (Minn.), Jared Golden (Maine), Elaine Luria (Va.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), Abigail Spanberger (Va.), and Haley Stevens (Mich.). 

Golden carries even more value because Maine allocates some of its electoral votes based on performance within congressional districts, allowing Trump to claim an extra vote for winning the northern Maine district despite losing narrowly statewide.

If Golden, a Marine veteran from Iraq and Afghanistan, can win next year by a sizable margin, he could secure the state for the Democratic nominee and also help knock off Sen. Susan Collins (R) in another critical race.

The full report is here, ranking the districts by how many of those five points it checks off, but the eight listed above are the holy grail.  The four-pointers are Tom O'Halleran and Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Colin Peterson in Minnesota, and Chris Pappas in NH, and 20 districts are worth 3 of the 5 points, with another 40 worth 2 points.

If Dems win big in those districts, they keep the House, they win the Senate back, and they send Trump home.  Take a look at the list, and if you're in at least a one-point district, keep that in mind.  Turnout in these districts will help the Democrats the most.

If you're like me in a red district, well, you can help too.  This report doesn't take into account the red districts that Dems are gunning for, like Will Hurd's TX-23 border district and winnable Texas suburban districts (TX-10,21,22,24 and 31) and national race districts like MI-6, PA-1 and PA-10, and FL-15.

There's a lot of work to be done. Trump won 31 House districts in 2016 that Democrats currently represent, 23 of those 31 currently have House Democratic freshmen who won in 2018.  Democrats are going to be playing a lot of defense and they're just not going to keep all those districts.

But this report is a good start to know where to go.

 

Sunday Long Read: Just Plane Nonsense

Maureen Tkacik at The New Republic lands our Sunday Long Read this week as we nosedive into Boeing's 737 MAX disaster, a tale of design-by-committee failure and blockheaded corporate culture that killed hundreds of people in airline crashes and may very well finish off America's largest aerospace employer.

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.”
 

Sorscher, a physicist who’d worked at Boeing more than two decades and had led negotiations there for the engineers’ union, had become obsessed with management culture. He said he didn’t previously imagine Boeing’s brave new managerial caste creating a problem as dumb and glaringly obvious as MCAS (or the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, as a handful of software wizards had dubbed it). Mostly he worried about shriveling market share driving sales and head count into the ground, the things that keep post-industrial American labor leaders up at night. On some level, though, he saw it all coming; he even demonstrated how the costs of a grounded plane would dwarf the short-term savings achieved from the latest outsourcing binge in one of his reports that no one read back in 2002.*

Sorscher had spent the early aughts campaigning to preserve the company’s estimable engineering legacy. He had mountains of evidence to support his position, mostly acquired via Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctionalfirm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers. In 2000, Boeing’s engineers staged a 40-day strike over the McDonnell deal’s fallout; while they won major material concessions from management, they lost the culture war. They also inherited a notoriously dysfunctional product line from the corner-cutting market gurus at McDonnell.


And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:


“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”
 

And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.


And so the guys who designed a system that they said literally couldn't crash because the plane would automatically correct the stupid, fallible human pilots who were clearly the most unreliable part of the airline industry discovered they had created a computerized flying deathtrap that on occasion didn't know up from down and would override the pilots like some made-for-TV sci-fi flick and very efficiently murder everyone inside it.

This is not the best part.

The best part is that then they charged people extra to fix the code that was responsible for the unfortunate murdery stuff.

And if that, dear reader, isn't the perfect encapsulation of late-stage American capitalism, I don't know what is.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Never Trump Republican Tom Nichols says if the Ukraine scandal story is true, if Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky eight times in one phone call to investigate Joe Biden, then Trump has to be impeached and removed from office.

Let us try, as we always find ourselves doing in the age of Trump, to think about how Americans might react if this happened in any other administration. Imagine, for example, if Bill Clinton had called his friend, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, and asked him to investigate Bob Dole. Or if George W. Bush had called, say, President Vicente Fox of Mexico in 2004 and asked him—indeed, asked him eight times, according to The Wall Street Journal—to open a case against John Kerry. Clinton, of course, was eventually impeached for far less than that. Is there any doubt that either man would have been put on trial in the Senate, and likely chased from office? 

The Republicans, predictably, have decided to choose their party over their country, and the damage control and lying have begun. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for one, has already floated the reliable “deep-state attack” nonsense that will play well on Fox and other conservative outlets. And while Giuliani did Trump no favors with his incoherent ranting on CNN, he did manage to hammer away at the idea that Biden, and not Trump, tried to shake down the Ukrainians while he was vice president.

The problem for Giuliani, the Republicans, and the president himself, however, is that Biden and his actions are now irrelevant to the offenses committed by Trump. The accusations against Joe Biden are false, as we know from multiple fact checks and from the Ukrainians themselves (which is why I won’t deign to repeat them here). But even to argue over this fable about Biden is to miss the point, because it changes nothing about Trump’s attempts to enmesh Biden in a foreign investigation for Trump’s own purposes.

There is no spin, no deflection, no alternative theory of the case that can get around the central fact that President Trump reportedly attempted to use his office for his own gain, and that he put the foreign policy and the national security of the United States at risk while doing so. He ignored his duty as the commander in chief by intentionally trying to place an American citizen in jeopardy with a foreign government. He abandoned his obligations to the Constitution by elevating his own interests over the national interest. By comparison, Watergate was a complicated judgment call.

In a better time and in a better country, Republicans would now join with Democrats and press for Trump’s impeachment. This won’t happen, of course; even many of Biden’s competitors for the presidency seem to be keeping their distance from this mess, perhaps in the hope that Biden and Trump will engage in a kind of mutually assured political destruction. (Elizabeth Warren, for one, renewed her call for impeachment—but without mentioning Biden.) This is to their shame. The Democratic candidates should now unite around a call for an impeachment investigation, not for Biden’s sake, but to protect the sanctity of our elections from a predatory president who has made it clear he will stop at nothing to stay in the White House. 

I am speaking only for myself as an American citizen. I believe in our Constitution, and therefore I must accept that Donald Trump is the president and the commander in chief until the Congress or the people of the United States say otherwise. But if this kind of dangerous, unhinged hijacking of the powers of the presidency is not enough for either the citizens or their elected leaders to demand Trump’s removal, then we no longer have an accountable executive branch, and we might as well just admit that we have chosen to elect a monarch and be done with the illusion of constitutional order in the United States.

For all of Nichols's lofty rhetoric, it's already too late though.  The goalposts were moved to Mars in just the last 24 hours because the Democrats, with the exclusion of Liz Warren, said nothing.  Democrats are already walking back their attacks because reportedly, Trump didn't actually mention a quid pro quo on the call itself.

As Nichols points out, that's irrelevant.  The pressure itself should be enough for impeachment if it happened, but that ship has already sailed.

It took 24 hours for news outlets to ‘both sides’ a president committing treason. pic.twitter.com/o91dHAyYUG

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 21, 2019

We can't know for sure without the call itself, but Trump will simply claim executive privilege and this will become Hillary's emails all over again, as I predicted Friday.

Can't wait until Monday's news cycle begins, which will herald approximately 13 minutes of "Trump admits to extortion of Ukraine leader in order to help his 2020 campaign" but 14 months of "But Joe Biden's emails!"

— The Full Zandar Report (@ZandarVTS) September 20, 2019

Democrats should be howling at the moon over this.  Republicans should be pissed off over this.  But as always, the GOP has figured out that as long as they cover for Trump, America will refuse to make them pay any sort of price.  But if they rat Trump out, they will be exterminated like Justin Amash, in a matter of days, if not hours.

That's how mobsters work.

We live under a mob crime family and Eliott Ness is nowhere to be found.

Spies Like Us, Con't

The Trump regime Ukraine scandal is only getting worse for the Tangerine Tyrant, but it wouldn't be our media if it wasn't an opportunity to use the completely fabricated nonsense against Joe Biden as "both sides do it!"

Despite the outrage that greeted reports of the president’s actions, Biden’s immediate response was no simple matter. His son Hunter Biden’s lucrative contracts with Ukraine — at the same time the vice president was in charge of U.S. policy toward the country raised — raised the prospect of fueling a narrative with downside political risk for Biden. 

“This puts him on the ropes over having to talk about this,” said Patrick Murray, a pollster with Monmouth University. “He certainly doesn’t want to talk about this, his family.” 

Murray suggested the ethical dimensions of the controversy — and the implications of Trump’s actions for impeachment, which Biden at present does not support — made any extended discussion of the story potentially perilous for Biden. 

“At the primary level, I don’t think Democrats would believe these charges [concerning Biden] because of how polarized the debate is right now, but then they could start worrying that this could hurt him if he is the nominee,” Murray said. “It’s ‘can Biden fight back? Will this hurt his ability to take Trump on fully?’ And will it undermine that electability argument that he’s been making?” 

The only way this becomes an issue for Biden is if the media makes this about Biden by writing stories about how this issue is really about Biden.  If this all seems familiar, I have some Hillary Clinton e-mails that would like a word with you.

The Village would love nothing more than for both Biden's Democratic primary rivals and Trump regime Republicans to attack him over this nonsense that I remind you was debunked back in May, and that was after the previous Ukraine government decided to close an investigation into Paul Manafort in exchange for military aid.  It all stinks.

Again, the Biden story appeared in May and was debunked a few weeks later, and let's not forget that the Ukrainina co-author of that bullshit NY Times story on Biden is now Volodymyr Zelensky's spokesman.The Biden story is disinformation, guys.  Pure and simple.

This is all complete nonsense.  Do not let these assholes do to Joe Biden what they did to Hillary and give us another four years of goddamn Donald Trump.

Hizzoner Hits The Showers

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is out of the 2020 presidential race, and with his poll numbers somewhere within the margin of error of zero, it's no wonder.  But it turns out he's probably going to have political problems long after his quixotic quest, as the Trump regime doesn't forgive or forget a foe.

Mayor Bill de Blasio's presidential campaign is over, but concerns over his fundraising practices linger on. 

An official with the Federal Election Commission sent a letter to the mayor's presidential campaign, which ended Friday, highlighting a problem that has been the subject of multiple POLITICO reports and two formal complaints from watchdog groups.

In a July public filing, the de Blasio camp noted a $52,852 debt owed to the NY Fairness PAC, a state political action committee controlled by the mayor. The campaign had argued that this was a permissible loan from one organization to another. But the FEC's senior campaign finance analyst, Robin Kelly, wrote this week that the practice is not allowed by campaign finance rules. 

Such transfers are capped at $5,000 per election cycle, Kelly's letter said, meaning the campaign took more than ten times the permissible amount from the state PAC and spent it on travel and advertising. Kelly mandated that the campaign refile an amended report by late October that corrects the transfer, and noted that an audit of the campaign may follow. 

The campaign repaid the loan Thursday, the day it received the FEC’s letter, spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said. 

Last year, de Blasio created a federal political action committee called Fairness PAC — ostensibly to fund his trips around the country advocating for progressive causes and to offer financial support to other left-leaning Democrats. However, the mayor also quietly created a state committee called NY Fairness PAC and used both to fund exploratory efforts for his own presidential campaign. 

Last month, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC illustrating why it found this practice problematic. Essentially, donors who had already given the max to de Blasio's presidential campaign were also donating to both of his PACs. And PAC money was being shifted back into the presidential warchest. 

“[The campaign] appears to have concocted a shell game to arrange for a small number of wealthy donors to support de Blasio’s presidential run above and beyond legal contribution limits,” the group's complaint said. 

Mayor de Blasio's semi-shady shell game aside, did anyone not expect the Trump regime to make ongoing trouble for somebody Trump has had an ongoing feud with for years?  FEC harassment is only the beginning, I suspect.  Trump's enemies' list is as long as his ridiculous ties, after all.

Still, de Blasio's cavalier attitude and pointless presidential run brought this retribution upon himself.  It doesn't look like he's going to pull a Bloomberg and try to get a third term or anything, there's no way City Council would play ball.  As to who will replace him, well he still has another two years to go on that, but the primary fights aren't that far off.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The deal for mass deportations of migrants and asylum seekers (and eventually undocumented and undesirable political enemies already in the country) the Trump regime pressured both Mexico and Guatemala to take may yet go to an eager El Salvador instead.

The United States planned to sign an agreement on Friday to help make one of Central America’s most violent countries, El Salvador, a haven for migrants seeking asylum, according to a senior Trump administration official. 

The official said acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan would sign a “cooperative asylum agreement.” 

Two other officials described the agreement as a first step measure in the governments’ working together on asylum. Details of the broad agreement will be hammered out in the weeks and months ahead, they said. The officials weren’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. 

The agreement could lead to migrants from third countries obtaining refuge in El Salvador even though many Salvadorans are fleeing their nation and seeking asylum in the United States. A Salvadoran delegation has been in the U.S. this week discussing the matter. 

It’s the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to force asylum-seekers in Central America to seek refuge outside the United States. Immigration officials also are forcing more than 42,000 people to remain in Mexico as their cases play out and have changed policy to deny asylum to anyone who transited through a third country en route to the southern border of the U.S. 

The senior administration official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. 

The agreement would be another step by the Trump administration aimed at stopping the flow of migrants coming into the United States. McAleenan also signed a so-called “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, but officials in that country are still working out how it would be implemented. 

The arrangement with El Salvador was not described as a “safe third country” agreement, under which nations agree that their respective countries are safe enough and have robust enough asylum systems, so that if migrants transit through one of the countries they must remain there instead of moving on to another country. 

The U.S. officially has only one such agreement in place, with Canada, but has been working toward others in Honduras and agreed to the one in Guatemala that has not yet been implemented.

The courts have made it clear that without a safe third country agreement, the Trump regime can't begin mass deportations of millions out of the US.  Canada is big enough to not get pushed around by the US too, and besides, it's pretty easy to check to see if people came in through the southern US border or the northern one.

Honduras is the next country in line if Guatemala and El Salvador don't work out.  But the Trump regime can't begin the deportations without somewhere to actually send them, and the for-profit concentration camps on the US border will start becoming an albatross on Trump's neck for 2020 unless he proves he can empty them out.

Besides, his base will demand the deportations sooner rather than later.

Last Call For Wag The Dog, Con't

The effort to get Donald Trump's pressuring of Ukraine's government to go after Joe Biden off the front page of the news happened with a quickness, didn't it?

Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced Friday that U.S. air defense forces will be sent to Saudi Arabia. 

“The president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature,” Esper said at the Pentagon. 

The announcement is a response to last Saturday’s attack on two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, which has been blamed on Iran. Saudi officials have said the strike was conducted with explosive drones and cruise missiles, and U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo described it as an “act of war.” 

Esper said the weapons were “Iranian produced and were not launched from Yemen,” where Iranian-backed militants had originally taken responsibility for it. “All indications are, Iran was responsible for the attack.”

Iran has denied launching the attack. 

President Trump was presented with military options earlier Friday. He has been under pressure from some hawkish Republicans to aggressively respond to Iran, but he has been reluctant to pursue military action. 

“The easiest thing I can do, like I could do it right in here, would say: Go ahead, folks, go do it,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday. “And that would be a very bad day for Iran.” 

He added, “It’s all set to go, but I’m not looking to do that if I can.” 

Friday’s announcement comes days before Trump attends the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

If this all seems like 2003 again, that's because it is.  We'll be in a shooting war with Iran well before the elections.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Gun manufacturer Colt has been around for centuries, the iconic Connecticut-based maker of the AR-15 rifle says it will suspend, at least for now, civilian sales of its rifles because Americans have too many of the damn things, and sales are off.

Gun-maker Colt is suspending its production of rifles for the civilian market including the popular AR-15, the company said Thursday in a shift it attributed to changes in consumer demand and a market already saturated with similar weapons.

The company said it will focus instead on fulfilling contracts with military and police customers for rifles.

“The fact of the matter is that over the last few years, the market for modern sporting rifles has experienced significant excess manufacturing capacity,” Colt’s chief executive officer, Dennis Veilleux, said in a written statement. “Given this level of manufacturing capacity, we believe there is adequate supply for modern sporting rifles for the foreseeable future.”

Veilleux said the company, which emerged from bankruptcy in 2016, remains committed to the Second Amendment. He said the company is expanding its lines of pistols and revolvers.
Despite a national debate on gun control, Colt’s decision seems driven by business considerations rather than politics, said Adam Winkler, a gun policy expert at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

FBI statistics show more than 2.3 million people applied for background checks to purchase guns in August, up from just over 1.8 million in July. Those applications, the best available statistic from tracking gun sales, has have been rising steadily, with a slight decline after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, something call the “Trump slump.”

Gun sales usually go up when guy buyers feel their access to such weapons are being threatened, Winkler said.

“Given these sales and the history of Colt being a completely disorganized, dysfunctional company that goes into bankruptcy and can’t keep anything going properly, my assumption is that this is a business decision that is being driven by their own business problems,” he said.

Still, Winkler said the company’s decision risks alienating and angering its remaining customer base.

“We’ve seen in the past that when gun manufacturers are viewed to have given in to gun-safety advocates, gun owners will boycott them and really hurt their business,” he said. “If they think a company like Colt is disrespecting their identity or giving in to the other side, Colt’s likely going to see serious damage to its other firearms brands too.”

Colt is getting out of the rifle business because there's too much competition, and also hey, these things are expensive when the economy is getting worse.  Whether anyone will believe the problem is the "law-abiding firearms owner" who needs that seventh AR-15 in pink for their 12-year-old daughter, well, that's a different story.

On the other hand, imagine being one of the oldest, most legendary gunsmiths in America in the 2010's when tens of millions of firearms were bought because of a scary black man as president and being so bad at it that you still go bankrupt once and possibly now twice.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Yesterday I offered up five possible foreign leaders that could have been the subject of Donald Trump's whistleblower-triggering "promise" that's dominated the news for the last cycle or so.  Now the Washington Post is confirming that it was indeed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who was the winning contestant, and yes, this all goes back to Trump threatening to cut off military aid to the country unless they offered up "evidence" on Joe Biden's son Hunter.

A whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch.

The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a “promise” that Trump made, which was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said.

Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.

That call is already under investigation by House Democrats who are examining whether Trump and his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump’s reelection campaign. Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

The Democrats’ investigation was launched earlier this month, before revelations that an intelligence official had lodged a complaint with the inspector general. The Washington Post first reported on Wednesday that the complaint had to do with a “promise” that Trump made when communicating with a foreign leader. 

On Thursday, the inspector general testified behind closed doors to members of the House Intelligence Committee about the whistleblower’s complaint.

Over the course of three hours, Michael Atkinson repeatedly declined to discuss with members the content of the complaint, saying he was not authorized to do so.

He and the members spent much of their time discussing the process Atkinson followed, the statute governing his investigation of the complaint and the nature of an “urgent concern” that he believed it represented, according to a person familiar with the briefing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Now we don't know for sure this all involves Rudy's adventures in Kiev, but the timeframe is certainly right, and well, this is Trump we're talking about here. We go back a couple weeks to when the Ukraine pressure story broke.

The strong-arming of Mr. Zelensky was openly reported to the New York Times last month by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said he had met in Madrid with a close associate of the Ukrainian leader and urged that the new government restart an investigation of Mr. Biden and his son. Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, while Joe Biden, as vice president, urged the dismissal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who investigated the firm.

Mr. Giuliani also wants a probe of claims that revelations of payments by a Ukrainian political party to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, were part of a plot to wreck Mr. Trump’s candidacy. In other words, Trump associates want the Ukrainian government to prove that Ukraine improperly acted against Mr. Trump in the 2016 election; but they also want it to meddle in his favor for 2020.

Mr. Zelensky is incapable of delivering on either demand. The revelations about Mr. Manafort came from a Ukrainian legislator who was fighting for domestic reform, not Hillary Clinton. And the Biden case, which has already been investigated by Ukrainian authorities, is bogus on its face. The former vice president was one of a host of senior Western officials who pressed for the dismissal of the prosecutor, who was accused of blocking anti-corruption measures.

So again, the "Biden scandal" is nothing, completely made up, and Trump sent Rudy to lean on Ukraine's newbie president in order to get him to come up with "the goods".  Whatever Trump said to Zelensky was so shocking that again, somebody filed a whistleblower complaint knowing full well the House Judiciary would see it.

Something like "If you help me bury Joe Biden, I'll give you X, if you don't I promise you'll regret it."  Hell, who knows what Trump promised.  Probably super illegal though. Probably involving Putin, who you know, illegally annexed the Crimea region of Ukraine a few years back.

Stay tuned, this one's not going away anytime soon.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge has blocked California's law requiring presidential candidates to submit their current tax returns in order to qualify for the presidential election, a full ruling is expected by October 1.
• Towns in Australia's northern state of Queensland are preparing for "Day Zero", the day in six months where water runs out and rationing may have to begin unless weather patterns change.
• Saudi coalition forces have launched a military operation in northern Yemen targeting Houthi rebels in retaliation of last weekend's drone attacks on Saudi oilfields.
• Amnesty International is accusing Hong Kong police of beating and torturing protesters as tensions are again flaring ahead of another round of planned weekend demonstrations.
• Amazon will order and roll out 100,000 electric delivery trucks over the next several years as the company announced plans for zero carbon emissions in 20 years.

Last Call For Separation Of Church And State Department

Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, like many large universities, get grants from the federal government to develop skills employers want, in this case, language skills necessary to help the State Department and intel community's insatiable need for countries and cultures of the Middle East.  No surprise here, this has been going on since 9/11.

What's new is that the Trump regime has decided that these NC schools aren't sufficiently portraying Islam as a threat to white Christian America enough, and that teaching people about Farsi or Arabic that also actually includes sufficient cultural context of Islam in the Islamic world is a problem, so much so to the racist, Islamophobic Trump regime that they are demanding this thorough and objective portrayal of 2 billion people as "not savages" be stopped immediately or all federal funding will be cut.

The Trump administration is threatening to cut funding for a Middle East studies program run by the University of North Carolina and Duke University, arguing that it’s misusing a federal grant to advance “ideological priorities” and unfairly promote “the positive aspects of Islam” but not Christianity or Judaism. 

An Aug. 29 letter from the U.S. Education Department orders the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies to revise its offerings by Sept. 22 or risk losing future funding from a federal grant that’s awarded to dozens of universities to support foreign language instruction. The consortium received $235,000 from the grant last year, according to Education Department data. 

A statement from the UNC-Chapel Hill says the consortium “deeply values its partnership with the Department of Education” and is “committed to working with the department to provide more information about its programs.” Officials at Duke declined to comment. The Education Department declined to say if it’s examining similar programs at other schools. 

Academic freedom advocates say the government could be setting a dangerous precedent if it injects politics into funding decisions. Some said they had never heard of the Education Department asserting control over such minute details of a program’s offerings. 

“Is the government now going to judge funding programs based on the opinions of instructors or the approach of each course?” said Henry Reichman, chairman of a committee on academic freedom for the American Association of University Professors. “The odor of right wing political correctness that comes through this definitely could have a chilling effect.” 

More than a dozen universities receive National Resource Center grants for their Middle East programs, including Columbia, Georgetown, Yale and the University of Texas. The Duke-UNC consortium was founded in 2005 and first received the grant nearly a decade ago. 

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ordered an investigation into the program in June after North Carolina Rep. George Holding, a Republican, complained that it hosted a taxpayer-funded conference with “severe anti-Israeli bias and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” The conference, titled “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities,” included a rapper who performed a “brazenly anti-Semitic song,” Holding said in an April 15 letter.

In a response , DeVos said she was “troubled” by Holding’s letter and would take a closer look at the consortium.

The inquiry joins a broader Education Department effort to root out anti-Semitism at U.S. universities. Speaking at a summit on the topic in July, DeVos attacked a movement to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians, calling it a “pernicious threat” on college campuses.

Betsy DeVos deciding that insufficient Islamophobia equals anti-Semitic teachings should concern everybody, regardless of religion.  But it's very interesting that Antisemitism here is described solely as "being critical of Israel". 

As I keep saying, we live in dark times.

Tidal Wave Of Trickery

With Donald Trump once again tweeting a red bullseye on Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar's head with his latest vile lie, Greg Sargent asks if Dems are ready for the coming flood of fecal foolery that will be the 2020 Trump campaign.

On Wednesday, President Trump used his Twitter feed to share a video that falsely depicted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) partying on the anniversary of 9/11. Yes, the president of the United States cheerfully trafficked in disinformation. 

This fact didn’t concern Trump in the slightest, since it afforded him the opportunity to thrill his followers with a disgusting display of anti-Muslim bigotry — or so he seemed to believe, anyway, which doesn’t speak too highly of Trump’s view of his supporters. 

You can find the whole backstory here. Trump retweeted a tweet from one of his favorite conspiracy theorists — one whose work he has amplified before — that had pirated a video of Omar dancing on another occasion from another tweet. Trump declared: “The new face of the Democrat Party!” 

Which raises a question: Are Democrats prepared for the tsunami of shamelessly propagandistic media manipulation and rank disinformation tactics that Trump and his network will unleash during the coming election?

One, Trump's stochastic terrorism is absolutely going to get at least one Democratic politician hurt or killed before the end of the 2020 campaign, that's a near-guarantee.   I truly hope Capitol Police are taking steps to protect Rep. Omar from, well, Donald Trump.

Two, the Democrats are completely unprepared for the ballistic barrage of bullshit coming.

One way to combat this problem that Democrats have discussed concerns adopting a kind of official party doctrine about the scourge of disinformation. Politico recently reported that Democratic state chairs are urging the Democratic National Committee to adopt a pledge in which the party and its committees and all leading candidates would forswear the use of such tactics, as well as vow not to utilize information obtained through hacks and other illicit means. 

The basic idea here is that the party should stand for the principle that all this amounts to an extremely serious state of affairs for liberal democracy. It’s a component of a much larger international trend in rising illiberal authoritarianism, and the broader goal is to undermine confidence in shared facts, information gathered in good faith and institutional sources of empirical inquiry as the basis for democratic deliberation.
Joe Biden has spoken about the problem in these sorts of terms. Yet it’s not clear the DNC is willing to adopt a pledge like this. 

Another approach has been to pressure social media companies. Beto O’Rourke’s campaign recently took this tack after a conspiracy theory falsely connected O’Rourke to the gunman who carried out recent mass murders in Texas. 

The claim was amplified by a couple of shadowy but prominent allies of Trump — which makes this a preview of what we’re likely to see directed at the Democratic nominee. 

In response, the O’Rourke campaign sent letters to top executives at Twitter, Facebook and Google, pointing out that these platforms are “being used every day to proliferate misinformation,” and “if they don’t do better in 2020, we may lose our democracy forever.” 

One move here might be to continue raising a big fuss in demanding more action by tech companies, though it’s not clear how much it will help. 

Still another idea, suggested by Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, is for many elements of the party to try to come together to forge a grand strategy for proactively combating disinformation. 

This might involve multiple party committees investing real money in people and technology designed to track and “out” disinformation, officials from party committees and leading campaigns agreeing to work together against the problem, and possibly even enlisting armies of outside supporters to swarm social media to snuff out disinformation before it gains traction. 

And, of course, another question is whether the news media is prepared for all of these possibilities.

A combination of all three responses would be most effective, as they address three different areas of the same problem, stopping Democrats from using misinformation, stopping the spread through social media, and proactively countering it are all needed.

But it's that lst observation, whether the media is ready, that's actually more important.

They're not.  Trump will string them along like puppets.  We've already seen them dance to his lies and repeat them constantly and uncritically.  Cutting Trump off from his supply of media glory would hurt him the most, but that will never happen.  Our media would never dare.

And so they will be part of the problem more than the solution.

Spies Like Us, Con't

Again, ever since the Barr Justice Department made it clear they were seeking a grand jury indictment against forme FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the leaks from the intel community against the Trump regime have stepped up considerably.

As part of that fight, last week House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff issued a subpoena to the office Director of National Intelligence over a formal whistleblower complaint that Schiff says was never acted upon.  The DNI's office refused to give the complaint to Schiff and things are getting very tense.  Greg Sargent:

The latest development: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has informed Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee, that he will not forward a whistleblower’s complaint to the committee, as required by law.

Yet the legal rationale for refusing to do this appears specious — and raises further questions as to why this is happening at all.

This all started when Schiff announced that the Inspector General at the ODNI had alerted him to a whistleblower’s complaint that had been submitted to him. Schiff noted that the IG assessed the complaint as “credible.”

But as Schiff noted, the acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has not forwarded the complaint to the Intelligence Committee.
There is a process for whistleblowers in such situations, one that has been established by federal law. A whistleblower must first submit a complaint to the IG, who determines whether it’s an “urgent concern” and “credible.” If so, the DNI “shall” forward the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees.

The idea here is that this process allows a member of the intelligence community to raise concerns about potential lawbreaking or other abuses with Congress, so it can exercise oversight over those abuses, while ensuring that classified information remains protected. This is done via the independent inspector general at first, insulating the whistleblower against agency-head retaliation, which is also provided for in the statute.

In this case, Schiff announced, the inspector general notified the committee that this whistleblower’s complaint did constitute an urgent concern and is credible — yet Maguire still hadn’t forwarded the complaint and relevant associated materials to the committee.

So Schiff called on the DNI to forward the materials, and if he failed to do that, to appear before Congress on Thursday.

Now Maguire has sent a new letter to Schiff once again refusing to forward the complaint.

But late last night the stakes on the mysterious complaint became huge.

The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. 

Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.

And now things become clear.  The DNI's office was almost certainly instructed by Bill Barr to ignore the law on the complaint because it directly involved Donald Trump doing something wildly inappropriate and quite possibly illegal to boot.

So the question is, who is the foreign leader, and what promise was made?  Off the top of my head, I can think of five leaders who would fit the bill of getting a wild Trump promise:

• Russia's Vladimir Putin
• Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan
• Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky
• UK's Boris Johnson
• Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu

There's also our strongman in Venezuela, Juan Guaido as a possibility, but he's not leader of the country.  Not yet, anyway, and not without, say, a promise of US military intervention.  Still, a long shot.

At this level of the game, the whistleblower would definitely earn every bit of Trump's seething vengeance against those he sees as disloyal to him.  It's also somebody who would have had access to Trump's conversations with foreign leaders, which means they have serious clearance and responsibilities.  Finally, it's somebody who came forward to burn Trump on this, the promise being so outlandish that the person felt the need to essentially end their career and to risk facing almost certain Justice Department harassment and possible prosecution.

It's a mystery to be sure, but I bet we're going to get answers, and soon.  Bonus exit question: is this the reason why former DNI Dan Coats resigned, because he was told by Barr to spike this whistleblower request, knowing full well what it was?

Leaks can be deadly, you know.  Trump pissed off the wrong people.

StupidiNews!

• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is apologizing for a 2001 incident in which he dressed up in blackface while a working as a teacher at a Vancouver school.
• Furious pushback from conservative groups and the NRA have all but scuttled Wednesday's White House proposal to support a bipartisan Senate firearms background check bill.
• Donald Trump is seeking options to deal with Iran short of military action including new sanctions as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Saudi Arabia.
• After the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter-point on Wednesday, Donald Trump  blasted Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on Twitter.
• A new study finds half of US homes will still not have access to fiber broadband by 2025, and it would take $70 billion to upgrade infrastructure to get that number to 90% by then.