Last Call For Housing Of Pain, Con't

California's housing crisis of a decade ago has become its homelessness crisis of today as the the state refuses to take measures to create affordable housing in fear of collapsing another housing bubble.

Many blame mental illness and drug addiction for the soaring numbers, but experts say that is only part of the puzzle. The state’s severe housing shortage, which has forced rents to increase at twice the rate of the national average and put the median price of a single family home at $615,000, has also contributed to the crisis.

John Maceri, CEO of the Los Angeles-based social services provider The People Concern, said social safety nets, like affordable housing and job training, are all but gone, leaving already vulnerable people to fend for themselves.

“You reap what you sow,” Maceri said recently.

He was one of 300 volunteers who gathered in Santa Monica last week for an annual homeless count, part of a larger effort in Los Angeles County that spanned three days and covered thousands of square miles. Similar counts took place in San Francisco, San Diego and other parts of the country.

The federally mandated survey stretches to every nook and cul-de-sac. Its mission is simple: using U.S. census tracts, count every person who appears to be experiencing homelessness and report those numbers to the county. The county tallies them up using statistical analysis and sends them to the state, which sends a report to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Similar to the census, the federal government doles out resources based on these findings. Cities and counties with the most need typically get the most money.

In Santa Monica, an idyllic coastal oasis in Southern California, the count took on the air of a community fair. Parking attendants ushered hundreds people into St. Monica Catholic Church on a Wednesday night, offering warm drinks and snacks to volunteers who greeted one another. The crowd filled with local residents and city officials was thick with anticipation.

Around 11 p.m., hundreds of volunteers, lawmakers and law enforcement officers embarked on what has become routine for the affluent community. The city was an early adopter of the count, said former mayor and current state Assemblyman Richard Bloom, a Democrat.

Bloom served three terms as Santa Monica’s mayor when homelessness still felt like a local problem. The city, with its soft beaches and year-round sunshine, had always been a magnet for homeless people. Residents and outsiders sang a familiar refrain: People experiencing homelessness were drawn to Santa Monica’s comfortable environment and abundant social services.

“Homelessness has been here for decades,” Bloom said. “But for many of those decades, we really didn’t see it as much as we do today.”

Nobody wants to build affordable housing, nobody wants to run affordable housing, and nobody wants to raise taxes to provide services to the homeless.  New York City at least got that part right, but LA and San Francisco and other large cities in California have absolutely failed on this regard.

Yes, the Trump regime has done everything in its power to make the situation worse, but California's had this issue long before Trump was ever in the White House.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump can taste his twisted "acquittal" this week as he rage-tweeted threats against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff all morning.

President Donald Trump on Sunday suggested House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., will pay a "price" for his role in the impeachment saga.

"Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man," Trump tweeted. "He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!"

The president posted those comments after writing earlier Sunday that his impeachment "is a massive election interference the likes of which has never been seen before."

Speaking with NBC's "Meet the Press," Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager, said he thought Trump's tweet is "intended to be" a threat to him. Trump responded later Sunday by calling Schiff a "conman."

On CNN's "State of the Union," Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., called the tweet "really unfortunate."

"The president has a tendency to say things that seem threatening to people," Lofgren, who is also an impeachment manager, said. She added that Trump "really ought to get a grip and be a little more presidential."

Also on "State of the Union," Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said he did not think Trump's tweet was "a death threat."

"I don't think he's encouraging a death threat," Lankford said, adding, "I think what he's saying is [Schiff] will be held to a price" politically. 

I remind you that this is happening during Trump's impeachment trial, and the jurors in that trial are openly defending, normalizing, and downplaying his open public threats during that trial against the lead prosecutor.

Meanwhile, those same jurors are arguing whether or not there will be witnesses in the trial at all.  It's such a mockery of justice that it would give Kafka a headache.

Schiff, for his part, believes Trump's tweet was an open threat.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who has taken a leading role in the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, said Sunday that a tweet from the president is "intended to be" a threat.

"I don't think it was personal to refer to the CBS story. What may be personal, though, and I think I have to be very candid about this, is I made the argument that it's going to require moral courage to stand up to this president," Schiff said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Schiff, the lead House impeachment manager in the Senate trial, added that Trump is a "vindictive" president.

"I don't think there's any doubt about it, and if you think there is, look at the president's tweets about me today saying that I should 'pay a price,'" Schiff said.

Do you take that as a threat?" NBC's Chuck Todd asked.

"I think it's intended to be," Schiff responded.

Again, Trump turning to open threats at this stage clearly means he thinks he has already won.  As I've been saying for quite some time now, Trump is driven by vengeance, and once Mitch McConnell solves his little impeachment problem, Trump will go full out to hurt the people he sees as having wronged him.

Sunday Long Read: Frackin' Cancer

A 20-month investigation into the fracking industry in Ohio by Rolling Stone's Justin Nobel has uncovered evidence that the waste fluid from fracking is far more dangerous than anyone will admit, because it turns out on top of being toxic to humans and animals, it's radioactive to boot.

In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long — he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.”

In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas. He hauls a salty substance called “brine,” a naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1 trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost shin-high, every single day. At most wells, far more brine is produced than oil or gas, as much as 10 times more. It collects in tanks, and like an oil-and-gas garbage man, Peter picks it up and hauls it off to treatment plants or injection wells, where it’s disposed of by being shot back into the earth.
One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his truck with a hand-held radiation detector, he says, and told him he was carrying one of the “hottest loads” he’d ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any mention of the brine being radioactive.

The Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive elements that concentrate deep underground in oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried largely in the brine.

In the popular imagination, radioactivity conjures images of nuclear meltdowns, but radiation is emitted from many common natural substances, usually presenting a fairly minor risk. Many industry representatives like to say the radioactivity in brine is so insignificant as to be on par with what would be found in a banana or a granite countertop, so when Peter demanded his supervisor tell him what he was being exposed to, his concerns were brushed off; the liquid in his truck was no more radioactive than “any room of your home,” he was told. But Peter wasn’t so sure.

“A lot of guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that take months to heal,” he says. Peter experiences regular headaches and nausea, numbness in his fingertips and face, and “joint pain like fire.”

He says he wasn’t given any safety instructions on radioactivity, and while he is required to wear steel-toe boots, safety glasses, a hard hat, and clothes with a flash-resistant coating, he isn’t required to wear a respirator or a dosimeter to measure his radioactivity exposure — and the rest of the uniform hardly offers protection from brine. “It’s all over your hands, and inside your boots, and on the cuticles of your toes, and any cuts you have — you’re soaked,” he says.

So Peter started quietly taking samples of the brine he hauled, filling up old antifreeze containers or soda bottles. Eventually, he packed a shed in his backyard with more than 40 samples. He worried about further contamination but says, for him, “the damage is already done.” He wanted answers. “I cover my ass,” he says. “Ten or 15 years down the road, if I get sick, I want to be able to prove this.”

Through a grassroots network of Ohio activists, Peter was able to transfer 11 samples of brine to the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, which had them tested in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh. The results were striking.

Radium, typically the most abundant radionuclide in brine, is often measured in picocuries per liter of substance and is so dangerous it’s subject to tight restrictions even at hazardous-waste sites. The most common isotopes are radium-226 and radium-228, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires industrial discharges to remain below 60 for each. Four of Peter’s samples registered combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than 8,500.

“It’s ridiculous that these drivers are not being told what’s in their trucks,” says John Stolz, Duquesne’s environmental-center director. “And this stuff is on every corner — it is in neighborhoods. Truckers don’t know they’re being exposed to radioactive waste, nor are they being provided with protective clothing.

“Breathing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure,” Stolz continues. “You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out.” The radioactive particles fired off by radium can be blocked by the skin, but radium readily attaches to dust, making it easy to accidentally inhale or ingest. Once inside the body, its insidious effects accumulate with each exposure. It is known as a “bone seeker” because it can be incorporated into the skeleton and cause bone cancers called sarcomas. It also decays into a series of other radioactive elements, called “daughters.” The first one for radium-226 is radon, a radioactive gas and the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. Radon has also been linked to chronic lymphocytic leukemia. “Every exposure results in an increased risk,” says Ian Fairlie, a British radiation biologist. “Think of it like these guys have been given negative lottery tickets, and somewhere down the line their number will come up and they will die.”

Peter’s samples are just a drop in the bucket. Oil fields across the country — from the Bakken in North Dakota to the Permian in Texas — have been found to produce brine that is highly radioactive. “All oil-field workers,” says Fairlie, “are radiation workers.” But they don’t necessarily know it.

One trillion barrels of toxic fluid being created and pumped into the ground every year, and much of it is radioactive.  The people transporting it have no idea.  The injuries from the industry are going to be catastrophic, even if it wasn't directly involved in making the planet hotter.

Just another log for the inferno.

Checking The Endorsements, Endorsing The Checks

The Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper, has endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president.

No wonder Iowa Democrats are unsettled.

Each of the remaining candidates campaigning across Iowa ahead of the caucuses could make a fine president. Each would be more inclusive and thoughtful than the current occupant of the White House. Each would treat truth as something that matters. Each would conduct foreign policy by coalition building rather than by whim and tweet.

The outstanding caliber of Democratic candidates makes it difficult to choose just one.

But ultimately Iowa caucusgoers need to do that. Who would make the best president at this point in the country’s history? At a time when the economic deck has become so stacked against working Americans that the gap between rich and poor is the highest in more than 50 years? At a time when a generation of war has stressed military families and sapped the treasury?

The Des Moines Register editorial board endorses Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Iowa Democratic caucuses as the best leader for these times.

The senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts is not the radical some perceive her to be. She was a registered Republican until 1996. She is a capitalist. “I love what markets can do,” she said. “They are what make us rich, they are what create opportunity.”

But she wants fair markets, with rules and accountability. She wants a government that works for people, not one corrupted by cash.

A former Harvard professor and expert in bankruptcy law, she helped set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The agency was specifically designed to prevent a repeat of the banking crisis and look out for little guys swindled by lenders and credit card companies.

She believes government should actively work to prevent and respond to abusive practices that jeopardize individuals and the country’s economy.
Warren doesn’t measure the health of the economy by looking at the stock market or an unemployment rate that doesn’t count the longtime jobless or chronically underemployed. She measures it by how working families are doing. Many are not doing well, and Warren seeks major reforms to help them.

A qualification: Some of her ideas for “big, structural change” go too far. This board could not endorse the wholesale overhaul of corporate governance or cumulative levels of taxation she proposes. While the board has long supported single-payer health insurance, it believes a gradual transition is the more realistic approach. But Warren is pushing in the right direction.

It's a good case for Warren, and good argument for her, as well as taking note of the caveat.

Meanwhile, the Sioux City Journal not only endorses Biden but endorses a straight-up Biden/Klobuchar ticket.

In choosing a nominee for president this year, Democrats should pick the individual they believe stands the best chance of producing the support - not only within their party, but among independents and disgruntled Republicans - necessary to win the general election and deny Donald Trump a second term (yes, we anticipate the Senate will acquit him in the impeachment trial).

Because he is, in our view, the candidate best positioned to give Americans a competitive head-to-head matchup with President Trump (we remain open-minded about the November presidential election), members of The Journal editorial board today endorse the candidacy of Joe Biden, the former U.S. senator and vice president, in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Feb. 3 Democratic Party caucuses.

Why do we believe Biden represents the best shot Democrats have within this field to get the ultimate prize they want? Three primary reasons:

* He possesses a greater breadth and depth of knowledge on issues domestic and foreign - experience forged over more than 40 years of elected office in Washington, D.C. - than his rivals.

* He articulates moderate positions on issues more in line with the nation as a whole. Unlike some candidates in this race, he doesn't guarantee a world he can't deliver and most Americans don't want. On health care, for example, he proposes to build upon the Affordable Care Act with inclusion of a public option instead of a government-run, single-payer health care system with a pricetag in the trillions and trillions of dollars at a time when the nation’s debt is more than $20 trillion. We believe many more Americans would consider the former approach than would consider the latter

* He combines respect from both sides of the aisle and the political and personal skills necessary to unite conflicting positions behind common-ground solutions to complex issues facing our country. We view Biden as a pragmatist - and we believe his pragmatism is an attribute. We refuse to believe middle-of-the-road compromise should be or is a relic of the past. This nation is too diverse for any one side to insist on everything and employ an all-or-nothing approach. We believe leaders who embrace the greater good remain important, if not essential to our national dialogue today. If the Democratic nominee emerges as the winner in November, he or she will need to work with others to meet America's challenges at home and abroad.

For some of these same reasons, we view the candidacy of Sen. Amy Klobuchar positively, as well. In fact, if Biden is the nominee, we urge him to consider Klobuchar as a running mate. We believe the two of them together would be a formidable team.

Klobuchar is the first pick however of New Hampshire's largest daily, the Union Leader.

If you are an independent or Democrat, however, yours may be one of the most consequential votes ever cast in a New Hampshire Primary. If there is to be any realistic challenge to Trump in November, the Democratic nominee needs to have a proven and substantial record of accomplishment across party lines, an ability to unite rather than divide, and the strength and stamina to go toe-to-toe with the Tweeter-in-Chief.

That would be U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. She is sharp and witty, with a commanding understanding of both history and the inner workings of Capitol Hill.

Trump doesn’t want to face her. He is hoping for Bernie, Biden, Buttigieg or Warren. Each has weaknesses, whether of age, inexperience or a far-left agenda that thrills some liberals but is ripe for exploitation in a mainstream general election.

Sen. Klobuchar has none of those weaknesses and the incumbent needs to be presented a challenger who is not easily dismissed. Her work in Washington has led to the passage of an impressive number of substantive bills, even as the partisan divide has deepened. In 2018 she won reelection, taking back dozens of conservative-leaning counties that had gone for Trump two years earlier, when Hillary Clinton barely beat him in Minnesota. In fact, Sen. Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, has never lost an election.

But can a woman be elected President? We say of course, the right woman can and should be. By choosing Amy Klobuchar, New Hampshire primary voters can go a long way to proving it.

Ultimately, I still think Biden wins the primary for the three reasons the Journal lists.  The Register doesn't exactly have a stellar track record of picking Democratic winners in Iowa or the Democratic nominee overall, having picked Paul Simon in 1988, Bill Bradley in 2000, John Edwards in 2004, and Hillary Clinton in 2008, all people who didn't win Iowa and didn't win the Democratic nomination.

They at least got Clinton right in 2016, but that was like guessing the sun was hot. If you're interested in why the other Democratic candidates didn't get the endorsement, well the Register has you covered there too.

I'm going to come out and say though that a Biden/Kamala Harris ticket is far more likely than Biden/Klobuchar.

Oh, and I notice nobody in endorsement land is talking about Sanders.  The thing is though, he's ahead now in Iowa and well ahead in New Hampshire.  That may be his peak, but it's the right time for it.  February will be hotly contested and then we go into Super Tuesday on March 3.

Make sure you're ready to vote in your state's primary and general.  Double-check your voter registrations, folks.

Space Farce:The Next Degeneration

I hate everything.

Trump just announced the new logo for the Space Force. The other is Star Trek Starfleet Command. pic.twitter.com/S7NeYdjR4C

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 24, 2020

I hate this so much it physically hurts.

Getting Sick Of It All

The Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread across mainland China with cases popping up all over the world, and the State Department is pulling all diplomatic personnel from the city of 11 million as the consulate there is closed and staff are being evacuated.

The US government is arranging a charter flight to evacuate diplomats from the Chinese city that has become ground zero for a new deadly strain of coronavirus, a US official with knowledge of the matter told CNN Saturday. 

The United States has a contract with a transporter to evacuate diplomats from the US consulate in Wuhan, China. The consulate is closed and all US diplomats are "under ordered departure," the official said. 

Details of the flight plan are still being finalized and the source said "a lot depends on what the Chinese authorities will allow us to do," adding that Beijing has been "very cooperative." 

The State Department and White House have not yet responded to CNN's request for comment on the matter. 

The Wall Street Journal first reported the planned evacuation. 

According to the Journal, the US consulate in Wuhan is reaching out to the Americans it is aware of in the country to offer them a spot on the flight. 

The flight, which seats about 230 people, will include diplomats from the US consulate in Wuhan, as well as Americans and their families, the Journal reported. The person told the newspaper that any available seats might be offered to non-US citizens and diplomats of other nations. 

The flight will have medical personnel aboard to treat anyone with the virus and make sure it is contained, according to the Journal. 

Passengers will be asked to foot the bill for the flight, which is expected to cost much more than a commercial flight from China to the US, the Journal reported. 

The newspaper reported that the United States also plans to temporarily close its consulate in Wuhan. 

It is unknown where the plane plans to fly to in the US, the Journal noted.
Roughly 1,000 American citizens are believed to be in Wuhan, according to the Journal.

Evacuating a consulate is not a sign that this coronavirus is under control.  Evacuating several hundred potentially infected individuals to the US is an even worse response to it.  State is completely pulling out of Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, and is advising Americans to avoid the province entirely.

That more than anything else makes me think this virus is far worse than originally thought.  Modern outbreak theory suggests this is closing the burning barn door after the horses are long gone anyway.

World's been overdue for a pandemic anyway.  SARS was the distant relative of this current virus, 18 years ago it killed hundreds.with a nearly 10% fatality rate.  If this thing is as bad or worse and it escapes containment, it's going to be bad.

Having said that, yearly flu seasons regularly kill tens of thousands worldwide.  Get that flu vaccine.

Last Call For Press The Meat, Con't

The Trump regime continues to treat the (non-FOX News, non Breitbart state-run) media as mortal foes, and Village just scratches its head, shrugs, and declares it an act for the benefit of Trump's base, because gosh they know that Trump's people are really nice once you get to know them.  Surely Trump doesn't mean he'd have the government go after me, they say.  

And then NPR All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly gets called into Mike Pompeo's office like he's the Vice-Principal and screams and curses at her.

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got into it with an NPR host over her questions about Ukraine.

On Saturday, he issued a statement responding to the flap that exemplifies gaslighting.

To recap what happened Friday: NPR reported that after an interview on Iran that ended with questions about Ukraine — at which point Pompeo grew testy — the secretary unleashed a lengthy, vulgar tirade against the journalist who interviewed him, “All Things Considered” host Mary Louise Kelly.

Kelly, remarkably, said that Pompeo asked her after the interview, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” and asked her to find the country on a blank map, apparently suggesting she didn’t even know. She said she did, and Pompeo concluded the scene by saying, “People will hear about this.”
In Saturday morning’s statement, Pompeo claimed Kelly had told him they were off the record at the time, which NPR denies.

“It is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency,” Pompeo said. “This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this administration. It is no wonder that the American people distrust many in the media when they so consistently demonstrate their agenda and their absence of integrity.”

The most remarkable portion of Pompeo’s statement, though, came at the end.

“It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine," Pompeo said in it.

The implication is unmistakable: Kelly couldn’t correctly identify the location of Ukraine on the map, and she instead pointed to Bangladesh.

Here’s why there is absolutely no way that happened.

First, Bangladesh is more than 3,000 miles away from Ukraine. It is east of India. Ukraine is in Eastern Europe; Bangladesh is in South Asia. Ukraine is in a border war with Russia; Bangladesh does not border Russia and isn’t even close to it. Ukraine is a large country; Bangladesh is comparatively small. It’s difficult to believe basically any journalist who was asked to locate Ukraine would point to Bangladesh, no matter how inexperienced.

And second, even if there was one, there is no way it would be Kelly. Kelly isn’t just a host of “All Things Considered,” she is also a former national security reporter who has traveled overseas extensively in her reporting. She also literally has a master’s degree — in European studies — from Cambridge University in England, which is one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Mary Louise Kelly is as close to an honest-to-God expert on European foreign policy as the Village has.  To think she would confuse Bangladesh with Ukraine is laughable, and yet this is Pompeo gaslighting a woman journalist in front of the world.

And the reason Pompeo did this is extremely simple: he's testing the Village to see how far they are willing to go to protect one of their own when the consequences of doing so will be an even further reduction in access to the White House, while at the same time turning to Trump's base and saying "Geez, look at how stupid these reporters are.  They're all dumb liars, and I'm the Secretary of State. Who are you going to believe?

Indeed, the response from the right-wing noise machine is that Kelly broke an agreement to be off the record with Pompeo's tirade, and that the long-time NPR host should immediately be fired.

NPR is fully defending Kelly as they should, but the damage has already been done.  The only news conservative Republicans trust are literally Rush and Hannity on AM radio, and FOX and Breitbart.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

As House Democrats concluded their three days of opening statements Friday night,  Republicans will get their turn starting on Saturday morning and then again on Monday.  Trump wants the trial over as soon as possible, but he also doesn't want to look like there's no defense in his corner, either.

Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham gave away the rest of the game on TV.

Lindsey Graham vehemently opposes calling in the Bidens as witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial — but he’s signaling to the president and conservatives that there are other ways to probe Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Over the past day, the South Carolina Republican has stepped up his calls for an outside investigator to examine Hunter Biden’s role on the board at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. And in turn, he’s made clear he does not believe the Senate should open the door on witnesses, a messy debate that could extend the Senate trial for weeks and call in everyone from the Bidens to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.

“To my Democratic friends, I stood with you when you called for an outside entity to look into President Trump. I’m asking you to allow somebody outside of politics to look at what happened with the Bidens,” Graham said Friday in a break of the impeachment proceedings. “The best thing to do is end this trial with no witnesses and have Congress do oversight regarding what happened in the Ukraine in a professional way, and I would prefer outside counsel.”

Trump has repeatedly mused about wanting more witnesses in his trial, including this week — talk that Graham is seeking to tamp down. Graham has repeatedly said he will not support subpoenas for Hunter or Joe Biden in the Senate trial.

What Graham is proposing would essentially mimic what Trump asked Ukraine to do, only on domestic soil: Announce an investigation into Joe Biden as he runs for the nomination to defeat the president. Graham said the reason he didn’t want to look into the Bidens before the heat of the election because he “hadn’t really been following it” in previous year.

“I like Joe Biden. No I don’t think he’s corrupt. But I think he has to answer for how he allowed his son and the country to get in this spot,” Graham said. “I love Joe Biden. I don’t want to do this.”

It’s a clear indication to the president and his allies that he empathizes with them over targeting the Bidens for what he calls a “clear conflict of interest” when former Vice President Joe Biden presided over anti-corruption efforts while his son was on the board of Burisma.

Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine’s president to investigate the Bidens is at the heart of the impeachment case against the president. The two articles of impeachment — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — directly relate to Trump’s alleged attempt to press for a probe into his political rivals in exchange for millions in withheld military aid and a coveted White House visit for Ukrainian officials.

There is no evidence that Joe Biden did anything improper to get his son on the board. Biden urged Ukraine to fire its lead anti-corruption prosecutor, but at the time probes into Burisma had stalled.

Nonetheless, Graham is undeterred.

“I supported [Robert] Mueller looking into all things Trump because I think the country needed someone outside politics to resolve the allegations against the president,” Graham told reporters on Friday afternoon. “Nobody has done an investigation anywhere near the Mueller investigation against the Bidens. And I think they should. And when this is over, the Congress will do it if we can’t have an outside entity. I think it’s very important to find out what happened.”

A special counsel investigation of Joe Biden announced say, just after Trump is acquitted by the Senate GOP late next week in order to sink Biden in Iowa just days later is certainly an option, and it's got to be a tempting one.

I don't know if they have the balls to do it, but then again James Comey destroyed the Clinton campaign eight weeks before the election with But Her Emails™ so why wouldn't they sandbag Biden like this?  After all, we know they've been setting this up for months now.

A Trump acquittal and it's open season on Joe and everyone knows it.

Meanwhile, the plan for the trial itself is to have it over by January 31, I've been saying that for a while now, and the reason is so Trump can take victory laps next month, during his State of he Union speech and during his Super Bowl pregame interview with Sean Hannity.

In fact, that entire week will be Trump basking in the brimstone glow of his "acquittal" and then the long-awaited vengeance against the Democrats begins.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

So it turns out that the head honcho for America's Trump-era neo-Nazi terrorist group The Base is operating out of...you guessed it...Russia!

Rinaldo Nazzaro, 46, who uses the aliases "Norman Spear" and "Roman Wolf", left New York for St Petersburg less than two years ago.

The Base is a major counter terrorism focus for the FBI.

Seven alleged members were charged this month with various offences, including conspiracy to commit murder.

Court documents prepared by the FBI describe The Base as a "racially motivated violent extremist group" that "seeks to accelerate the downfall of the United States government, incite a race war, and establish a white ethno-state".

The group - founded around July 2018 - gains followers online, communicates using encrypted messaging applications, and encourages members to engage in paramilitary training.

The leader's real identity had long been a mystery.

However, multiple images and videos of Nazzaro - taken over several years in both the USA and Russia - show the man known to be The Base founder, who goes by the two aliases.

He has previously used photographs of himself when promoting the group online

Last year Nazzaro was listed as a guest at a Russian government security exhibition in Moscow, which "focused on the demonstration of the results of state policy and achievements".
A video posted online in March 2019 shows Nazzaro in Russia wearing a t-shirt bearing an image of President Vladimir Putin along with the words "Russia, absolute power".

We traced Nazzaro and his Russian wife to an upmarket property in central St Petersburg purchased in her name in July 2018 - the same month to which the FBI dates the creation of The Base.

Of course the number one white supremacist terrorist who wants to start a bloody race war that kills millions is a Putin fan and is operating safely out of St. Petersburg.

The BBC found him, no problem.  The FBI has known where he is for some time now, I guarantee.  And they know there's now way the Russians will hand him over, even if Trump himself wouldn't stop the FBI from pursuing that avenue.

To recap, Russia is openly harboring a white supremacist terrorist leader.  Trump's complete failure to act upon this is proof enough about where he stands and who his real boss is.

The plans were as sweeping as they were chilling: “Derail some trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies.”

It was the blunt, bloody prescription for sparking a race war by a member of the Base, a white supremacist group that has come under intense scrutiny amid a series of stunning recent arrests.

Federal agents, who had secretly recorded those remarks in a bugged apartment during a domestic terrorism investigation, pounced on seven members of the group last week in advance of a rally on Monday by gun rights advocates in Richmond, Va. Three members of one cell in Maryland affiliated with the group plotted attacks at the rally, hoping to ignite wider violence that would lead to the creation of a white ethno-state, law enforcement officials said.

The “defendants did more than talk,” Robert K. Hur, the United States attorney for Maryland, said after a detention hearing on Wednesday in federal court in Greenbelt, Md. “They took steps to act and act violently on their racist views.”

The details that emerged in court and in documents from active cases in three other states — Georgia, Wisconsin and New Jersey — unveiled a disturbing new face of white supremacy.

The Base illustrates what law enforcement officials and extremism experts describe as an expanding threat, particularly from adherents who cluster in small cells organized under the auspices of a larger group that spreads violent ideology.

“We have a significant increase in racially motivated violent extremism in the United States and, I think, a growing increase in white nationalism and white supremacy extremist movements,” Jay Tabb, the head of national security for the F.B.I., said at an event in Washington last week.

Experts who have studied the Base say it seems to have followed the model of Al Qaeda and other violent Islamic groups in working to radicalize independent cells or even lone wolves who would be inspired to plot their own attacks.
They describe the Base as an “accelerationist” organization, seeking to speed the collapse of the country and give rise to a state of its own in the Pacific Northwest by killing minorities, particularly African-Americans and Jews.

Experts estimate that the Base, which was formed around July 2018, has dozens of hard-core members and tries to recruit many more online, although its approach is evolving.

No,  if anything,Trump needs Nazzaro and The Base, and Putin is happy to lend a base for The Base.  This guy, not anything Iran is up to, is the real threat to the US.

And they love Donald Trump because he's openly supporting them.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Earlier this month when the news broke that Giuliani associate Lev Parnas had tapes of his conversations with Trump regime folks about helping Rudy get rid of then US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich, I figured he had tapes of Rudy blabbing, because Rudy Giuliani is incapable of shutting the hell up when the topic comes to himself.

Oh, oh no...he almost certainly has tapes of his conversations with Rudy, but that's not the story. The story is Parnas's partner-in-crime Igor Fruman has tapes of his conversations with Donald Trump.  And Donald Trump is the one who ordered Parnas and his sidekick Fruman to "take her out".

A recording reviewed by ABC News appears to capture President Donald Trump telling associates he wanted the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired while speaking at a small gathering that included Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman -- two former business associates of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani who have since been indicted in New York.

The recording appears to contradict statements by President Trump and support the narrative that has been offered by Parnas during broadcast interviews in recent days. Sources familiar with the recording said the recording was made during an intimate April 30, 2018, dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Trump has said repeatedly he does not know Parnas, a Soviet-born American who has emerged as a wild card in Trump’s impeachment trial, especially in the days since Trump was impeached.

"Get rid of her!" is what the voice that appears to be President Trump’s is heard saying. "Get her out tomorrow. I don't care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it."

Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Do it.

Like the mob boss he is.

On the recording, it appears the two Giuliani associates are telling President Trump that the U.S. ambassador has been bad-mouthing him, which leads directly to the apparent remarks by the President. The recording was made by Fruman, according to sources familiar with the tape. The White House did not respond to an ABC News request for comment.

During the conversation, several of the participants can be heard laughing with the president. At another point, the recording appears to capture Trump praising his new choice of secretary of state, saying emphatically: “[Mike] Pompeo is the best.” But the most striking moment comes when Parnas and the president discuss the dismissal of his ambassador to Ukraine.

Parnas appears to say: "The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She's still left over from the Clinton administration," Parnas can be heard telling Trump. "She's basically walking around telling everybody 'Wait, he's gonna get impeached, just wait." (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)
It was not until a year later that Yovanovitch was recalled from her position -- in April 2019. She said the decision was based on “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives” that she was disloyal to Trump.

And remember:

CBS News reports that GOP Senators have been warned by Trump team: "Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike." How is this acceptable? pic.twitter.com/19TKOn4kSq

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) January 24, 2020

This was always a mob operation.  Well, a really bad one, anyway.

Remember, Trump could have fired her at any time, according to his GOP supporters.  He didn't fire her until a year later.  No, he wanted Parnas and Fruman to "take her out".

Impeachment Reached, Con't

Democrats will need four GOP senators to side with them in order to win any vote on witnesses, so if there's going to be a fourth who breaks ranks in Trump's impeachment trial besides Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney, the smart money is on that Republican being Tennessee's Lamar Alexandar.

Three GOP senators have expressed some level of support for calling witnesses, and if they joined all Democrats, it would result in a 50-50 tie and likely be defeated. Unless Chief Justice John Roberts shocked Washington by wading in with a tie-break, Democrats need one more Republican to break ranks and upend GOP plans for a swift Trump acquittal.

That’s got both parties eagerly eyeing Alexander. He's a retiring defender of the Senate as an institution who's occasionally bucked his party, but he also counts Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a longtime ally. He's more hesitant to criticize Trump than are some other Republicans, but he also has said it was "inappropriate" for Trump to ask foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. 

A former presidential candidate, governor, Education secretary and current three-term senator and committee chairman, Alexander was a key advocate of McConnell’s proposal to wait to hold a vote on new evidence until the initial stages of the trial are done. But unlike Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, who are open to hearing from witnesses, Alexander has expressed no indication of how he will vote next week on the most critical roll call vote yet. 

“He is very well-respected by the entire conference and is close to Mitch McConnell. I’ve found Lamar to be one of the most effective members of the entire Senate,” Collins said of Alexander. “I don’t know what his position will be. I suspect that he’s waiting until he’s heard the case presented, and the questions answered for the senators. And that’s a very logical position to take.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are holding out hope that Alexander will be their hero in the mold of the late Sen. John McCain, whose extraordinary vote derailed the GOP’s effort to repeal Obamacare. Though Alexander would never blindside McConnell the way McCain did, he is widely believed to be a Republican who could be receptive to Democrats’ message that the Senate needs to hear more evidence.

“There is an opportunity here for Sen. Alexander, who has long been a leader in crafting bipartisan resolutions to impasses, to play a significant, even a historic role,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who has spoken with Alexander about witness testimony. “He is so well-respected in his caucus that there are a number of other senators that are also looking to him.” 

Alexander is unlikely to be the 51st vote for witnesses and throw momentary control of the Senate to the Democrats. More likely, if he’s feeling the need to hear new evidence in the trial, other Republicans would join him and scramble plans on how to handle witnesses and documents. 

Yet at the moment, GOP leaders are not worried about Alexander, according to a Republican senator and aides privy to party strategy. They believe Alexander is likely to side with McConnell and help wrap up the trial. 

But publicly, Republicans are giving him plenty of leeway and refusing to predict where he will end up. And if he is signaling how he will vote, it’s likely directly to McConnell and to no one else.

The notion that Alexandar might be the key to witnesses has the White House openly issuing threats.

In opening statements, House managers examined the debunked conspiracy theories invoked by Pres. Trump.

A @POTUS confidant tells CBS News that GOP senators were warned: “vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.”

Here's @nancycordes https://t.co/LV1Y6QveIh pic.twitter.com/tLB9EpoWr8

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 23, 2020

Head on a pike seems right.  I can't see any Republican risking not only their Senate career and party membership but their valuable lobbyist and media sinecures as well.  Nobody would dare stand up to Trump in this party of cowards. 

So no, I don't see Alexandar's vote somehow being the magical logjam breaker any more than I see Trump being found guilty.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is now saying he is open to earned benefit program cuts like Social Security and Medicare.
• A Saudi comedian and dissident says that the FBI stopped a plot to kidnap him on US soil by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
• Multiple US states are suing the Trump regime over blocking 3-D printing of firearms, saying it violates the Second Amendment.
• The Trump regime says it will unveil its latest Mideast peace plan next week as embattled Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu plans to visit the US.
• The latest yearly move by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to just 100 seconds before midnight, symbolizing global nuclear war.

Last Call For Church Is State

After Wednesday's depressing US Supreme Court hearing on state funding for parochial schools, it seems the only remaining question is how far the inevitable conservative 5-4 decision will go in allowing the Trump regime to force tens of billions of dollars to be taken from public schools to give to religious institutions and homeschoolers.

In a case with potentially profound implications, the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed ready to invalidate a provision of the Montana state constitution that bars aid to religious schools. A decision like that would work a sea change in constitutional law, significantly removing the longstanding high wall of separation between church and state.

The focal point of Wednesday's argument was a ruling by the Montana Supreme Court that struck down a tax subsidy for both religious and nonreligious private schools. The Montana court said that the subsidy violated a state constitutional provision barring any state aid to religious schools, whether direct or indirect.

On the steps of the Supreme Court Wednesday, Kendra Espinoza, a divorced mother of two, explained why she is challenging that ruling.

"We are a Christian family and I want those values taught at school," she said. "Our morals as a society come from the Bible. I feel we are being excluded simply because we are people of religious background."

Thirty-seven other states have no-aid state constitutional provisions similar to Montana's, and for decades conservative religious groups and school-choice advocates have sought to get rid of them. On Wednesday, though, that goal looked a lot closer.

Five of the justices at some time in their lives attended private Catholic schools, and some of them were particularly vocal. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that the history of excluding religious schools from public funding has its roots in the "religious bigotry against Catholics" in the late 1800s. He seemed to dismiss arguments made by the state's lawyer that Montana had completely rewritten its constitution in 1972, without any such bias.

Mae Nan Ellingson, one of the delegates to that convention, said afterward that there were ministers and "people of all faiths" at the convention who overwhelmingly had supported the no-aid provision.

"We didn't think that public funds should be used to support private parochial education but rather that public funds need to support public education," she said.

The justices, however, seemed uninterested in that record.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito compared the exclusion of parochial schools from taxpayer-funded aid programs to unconstitutional discrimination based on race.

That view suggested that Wednesday's case has the potential for much broader public funding of parochial schools.

It wasn't enough, for instance, that the Montana court treated all private schools the same way, whether they were religious or not. As Justice Elena Kagan put it, once the Montana court invalidated the tax subsidy for all private schools, weren't they all "in the same boat?"

No, replied lawyer Richard Komer, representing the religious parents. He maintained that the no-aid provision in the state constitution is itself a violation of the federal constitution. And he also argued that because the state constitution illegally discriminated against religious schools and families, the tax-credit program must be revived. In short, that the state has no discretion to abolish it.

"That would be a radical decision," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Stephen Breyer wondered where the plaintiffs' equal-treatment argument would end. He noted major school systems spend billions in taxpayer money to fund the public schools. "If I decide for you," he asked, would these school systems "have to give proportionate amounts to parochial schools?"

Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, representing the Trump administration, basically answered "yes."

"You can't deny a generally available public benefit" to an otherwise qualified institution "based solely on its religious character," he said.

In June we're going to have a ruling that forces states to give billions to religious schools and in the wake of Hobby Lobby, it could be a major decision that forces states to fund churches, period.

You can thank Trump being able to appoint two justices for this one.  Should he be able to replace any of the four remaining liberals, the US becomes an autocratic theocracy overnight.

The people who see Trump as a messiah figure are getting their wish.

Water You Waiting For, Con't

The Trump regime destruction of the environment continues as the Trump EPA will finalize plans to gut the Clean Water Act and remove 2015 Obama-era protections on streams and creeks this week.

The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.

From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.

Mr. Trump has called the regulation “horrible,” “destructive” and “one of the worst examples of federal” overreach.

“I terminated one of the most ridiculous regulations of all: the last administration’s disastrous Waters of the United States rule,” he told the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention in Texas on Sunday, to rousing applause.

“That was a rule that basically took your property away from you,” added Mr. Trump, whose real estate holdings include more than a dozen golf courses. (Golf course developers were among the key opponents of the Obama rule and key backers of the new one.)

His administration had completed the first step of its demise in September with the rule’s repeal.

His replacement on Thursday will complete the process, not only rolling back 2015 rules that guaranteed protections under the 1972 Clean Water Act to certain wetlands and streams that run intermittently or run temporarily underground, but also relieves landowners of the need to seek permits that the Environmental Protection Agency had considered on a case-by-case basis before the Obama rule.

It also gives President Trump a major policy achievement to bring to his political base while his impeachment trial continues.

“Farmers coalesced against the E.P.A. being able to come onto their land, and he’s delivering,” said Jessica Flanagain, a Republican strategist in Lincoln, Neb. “This is bigger news for agricultural producers than whatever is happening with the sideshow in D.C.,” she added.

The new water rule will remove federal protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of small waterways. That would for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.

“This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen,” said Blan Holman, a lawyer specializing in federal water policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ’70s and ’80s that Americans have relied on for their health.” 

Mr. Holman also said that the new rule exemplifies how the Trump administration has dismissed or marginalized scientific evidence. Last month, a government advisory board of scientists, many of whom were handpicked by the Trump administration, wrote that the proposed water rule “neglects established science.”

But farmers and fossil fuel groups supported the change.

“This is a big win for farmers, and this is the president delivering what he promised,” said Donald Parrish, senior director of regulatory affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation, which had lobbied for years to weaken the Obama administration’s water rules.

If you thought for a moment that Trump voting rural farmers were going to break from the GOP after Trump's tariffs squeezed them for billions, this will more than make up for it.  Scrapping the Waters of the US rule will give Trump "Big Damn Hero" status out here in the Midwest.

Say goodbye to wetlands and clean drinking water for tens of millions of Americans.  Maybe Cleveland's rivers will catch fire again, just to remind us how far we're going backwards.

Or newly polluted rivers will catch fire, more likely.  Enjoy, America.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

The opening arguments for the impeachment case against Donald J. Trump by House Democrats was staggering, with GOP senators looking on with obvious discomfort, most likely hearing the evidence against Trump for the first time.

And on the first day, Democrats unleashed the flood.

One by one, the seven House impeachment prosecutors seeking President Donald Trump’s removal from office reconstructed a case against the president so dense — at times, head-scratchingly complex — that it was hard for senators new to the material to keep up.
After a lofty introduction by the House’s lead manager, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Democrats shed any pretense of offering a streamlined, made-for-TV version of events meant to captivate the Senate or the nation. For much of the day, they cast aside any attempt to make a narrowly tailored case to Republicans that they should support calls for additional witnesses.

Instead, they decided to hammer senators with everything they had: an all-day torrent of intricate information, peppered with screenshots of deposition transcripts, emails, text messages and about 50 video clips — nearly three times more than House Republicans used during the entirety of their arguments in the 1999 Clinton trial.

It was a presentation that seemed designed to demonstrate what Democrats have long professed: that the facts of the Ukraine scandal threatening Trump’s presidency are so overwhelming as to be almost infallible. As Republicans harangued Democrats for failing to “do their homework,” the House managers were intent to emphasize just how much “homework” they did.

“We have some very long days yet to come,” Schiff warned the Senate as he kicked off the House’s arguments on Wednesday. He added, “Over the coming days, we will present to you and to the American people the extensive evidence collected in the House's inquiry into the president’s abuse of power, overwhelming evidence ... despite his unprecedented obstruction into that misconduct.”

What followed was a painstaking chronology of Democrats’ case that Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals and obstructed Congress' investigation of the alleged scheme.

The Democrats included lengthy reconstructions of the April ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump's associates viewed as an obstacle in their quest to launch the investigations. They picked apart Trump’s decision in May to cancel Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Ukraine, which Ukraine had sought as an important gesture of support.

The House lawmakers also dissected a two-week stretch in July during which administration officials agonized over Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine amid his call for investigations. And they recounted at length the turmoil this hold on aid provoked in the diplomatic corps in August and September.

To one Senate Republican, the firehose of evidence was an education in itself, for him and his colleagues.

“Nine out of 10 senators will tell you they haven’t read a full transcript of the proceedings in the House,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) quipped. “And the 10th senator who says he has is lying.”
Some Republicans even sounded envious of the Democrats’ use of multimedia during the trial and wished Trump’s defense team would follow suit. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of Trump’s top defenders, said Democrats have been presenting their case to the public like it's "cable news" — but lamented that the defense team’s case presented more like “an 8th grade book report.”

“Actually, no, I take that back,” he added, because an 8th grader would actually know how to use PowerPoint and iPads.

I'd like to think that the presentation given today would be the turning point in American history that would snap the hold Trump had over the jurors in his case.  In some alternate dimension, there are Republican staffers on the phone with the White House saying Trump is in dire trouble, and that his acquittal is no longer assured by any means.

Sadly, that reality is not one we inhabit currently.

Well into Schiff’s second hour of opening arguments, he moved on from discussing the first of two charges against Trump.

“Now let me turn to the second article,” Schiff said. That prompted several senators to shift in their seats and smile at each other in apparent bemusement. It also sparked a small exodus for the cloakroom, especially on the Republican side, including Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Within the first hour, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia could be seen at his desk in the back row, leaning on his right arm with a hand covering his eyes. He stayed that way for around 20 minutes, then shifted to rest his chin in the same hand, eyes closed, for about five more minutes. Despite the late-night votes, Warner’s day had started as scheduled at a 10 a.m. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

Crow, a military veteran speaking on the impact of Trump’s holdup of military aid to Ukraine, had trouble holding the Senate’s attention. Some senators left their seats and headed to cloakrooms, stood in the back or openly yawned as he spoke. At one point during his address, more than 10 senators’ seats were empty.

Crow wondered aloud if the Senate wanted to take a recess.

No dice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said there would be no break until dinner, more than an hour later.

Several GOP senators got up and left during Schiff's presentation.  They did so because as impressive as the Dems' opening arguments were, the outcome of this trial was preordained months ago.