Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Russian missile strikes in Ukraine on Saturday knocked out power to 1.5 million people as Moscow is warning civilians in occupied Kherson to leave or face consequences.

 

Ukraine said it defended itself against a “barrage” of 36 rockets that Russian forces fired at areas including Kyiv, Volyn, Kirovograd and Odessa on Saturday, wiping out power for almost 1.5 million people. Its air force said it had shot down at least 18 Russian cruise missiles. Odessa regional governor Maksym Marchenko said two rockets hit energy infrastructure, wiping out power in some areas, while Ukraine’s electricity company Ukrenergo said repair crews were working to restore power to networks in the west of the country. In Kyiv, air raid sirens sounded in the capital as Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged civilians to stay indoors and seek shelter. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba decried the “barrage of Russian missiles aimed at critical civilian infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, Russian authorities in illegally annexed Kherson urged civilians to leave the city “immediately” Saturday afternoon in an effort to portray Kyiv as an aggressor in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian troops have been pushing out Russian forces in the country’s south and east, with clashes in cities it seeks to liberate.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Moscow of seeking to blow up a major hydroelectric dam in Nova Kakhovka near Kherson, potentially flooding southern areas. “Destroying the dam would mean a large-scale disaster,” he warned in a television address, urging the West to act “powerfully and quickly” to prevent such an outcome. Russia has denied the accusations.

There's a lot going onas nighttime temperatures are dropping below freezing and millions remain without power or heat thanks to Russian missile strikes on power plants and substations.

Concern is growing about the Kakhovka dam this weekend as a potential target. Earlier in the week, Zelensky accused Russian forces of mining the hydroelectric plant, one of Ukraine’s largest power facilities, in preparation for a “false flag” attack. He did not provide evidence of the Russian plot but told European Council leaders that the infrastructure attack could lead to flooding in 80 settlements and destroy much of southern Ukraine’s water supply. Kremlin-backed officials have instead claimed that Ukraine is planning to blow up the 1956 dam on the Dnieper River to flood Russian-occupied Kherson and has evacuated thousands of people from the city in preparation. The Washington Post could not independently verify the claims.

Occupying Russian authorities told residents to flee Kherson Saturday afternoon, urging them to take “documents, money, valuables and clothes.” Ukrainian troops have been advancing toward the city in an effort to upend the Russian-backed administration that was installed there under an orchestrated annexation violating international law. In an effort to lure Kherson residents into places with stronger Kremlin footholds, Russian cities and the occupied Crimean region were offering incentives such as payments and housing assistance, according to Moscow-backed authorities’ Telegram accounts.

Washington sees no evidence of Moscow ending the war soon, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Friday alongside his French counterpart. Instead, he said the Kremlin was “doubling and tripling down” on its aggression in Ukraine. “Every indication is that far from being willing to engage in meaningful diplomacy, President [Vladimir] Putin continues to push in the opposite direction,” Blinken said.

A bipartisan congressional delegation met Zelensky in Kyiv, including Reps. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). The group “talked about financial support, about our political interaction, about what new anti-European and anti-democratic steps to expect from Russia,” Zelensky said. The visit came after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) this week signaled that the GOP would oppose more aid to Ukraine. President Biden said this week said he was worried that Republicans may cut aid to Ukraine if they win back the House.

 

Another 30 or 40 Republicans in the House would not only give the GOP control, it would certainly give them the votes to defund everything Biden has accomplished and hold the country hostage, causing tremendous damage to the economy while doing it.

Putin is counting on a GOP win.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As many have suspected, the stolen classified documents Trump kept in his Mar-a-Lago pool closet contained sensitive national security information about both Iran and China.

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.

Unauthorized disclosures of specific information in the documents would pose multiple risks, experts say. People aiding U.S. intelligence efforts could be endangered, and collection methods could be compromised. In addition, other countries or U.S. adversaries could retaliate against the United States for actions it has taken in secret.

The classified documents about Iran and China are considered among the most sensitive the FBI has recovered to date in its investigation of Trump and his aides for possible mishandling of classified information, obstruction and destruction of government records, the people said. The criminal probe is unfolding even as the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia investigate alleged efforts by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and as a House select committee has subpoenaed the former president seeking documents and testimony related to those allegations.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in having the documents at Mar-a-Lago, claiming in a recent television interview that he declassified any documents in his possession, and that a president can declassify information “even by thinking about it.” National security lawyers have derided those claims.

A spokesman for the former president did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. But after this article published online, Trump posted on social media, decrying what he called leaks “on the Document Hoax” and suggesting that the FBI and the National Archives and Records Administration were trying to frame him.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA,” Trump wrote. “ … Also who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents — we will never know, will we?”

 

Foreign agents certainly have seen these documents. There's no way they were kept secure with known Chinese, Russian, and Saudi nationals running around the place as Trump's guests, and probably even more infiltrating the resort as staff.

Even if Trump didn't sell these documents to the highest bidder, he almost certainly showed them off to brag. Trying to blame this on the FBI is just silly.

Trump is in real trouble, and even he knows it.

Bannon Bonked Badly

The human racism factory is going to federal prison for four months for contempt of Congress.

 

A federal judge on Friday sentenced Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who aided in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to four months in prison for disobeying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Bannon, 68, was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress this summer after Judge Carl J. Nichols rejected an array of arguments offered by Mr. Bannon’s defense team, including that he was protected from being compelled to testify by executive privilege.

Mr. Bannon will remain free pending his appeal. 

The sentence, coming a year after Mr. Bannon was held in contempt by the House, is two months short of what federal prosecutors had requested this week. They had accused Mr. Bannon, the onetime editor of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, of having “pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt” from the moment he received the subpoena seeking information about his knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his electoral defeat.

“Others must be deterred from committing similar crimes,” said Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee, who also imposed a fine of $6,500 on Mr. Bannon.

In a contentious exchange with the defense team before announcing a sentence, he said Mr. Bannon had shown “no remorse for his actions” and had yet to “demonstrate he has any intention of complying with the subpoena.”

In issuing the sentence, Judge Nichols dismissed Mr. Bannon’s claims that his refusal to testify was protected by executive privilege. But he also cited Mr. Bannon’s belated effort to reach an agreement with the committee, his service in the Navy, his lack of a criminal history and the unsettled judicial status of executive privilege as factors mitigating against a longer sentence.

Mr. Bannon, a rapid-talking provocateur who has used his daily internet radio show to skewer the government for prosecuting him, approached his sentencing with the same defiance that has characterized his attitude toward the congressional summons that prompted the case. He told reporters that he viewed President Biden as “illegitimate” as he entered Federal District Court in Washington, flanked by his lawyers.

After thanking reporters for showing up, he went on to claim that Democrats would face their “judgment day” in the coming midterm elections and urged all within earshot to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.

He sat impassively in a dark military-style jacket and an untucked blue shirt as the sentence was issued.

 

Bannon, as mentioned, will remain free on appeal, thanks to the Trump-appointed judge. no doubt shilling for his legal fees and martyring himself, or trying to. Bannon was never going away, anyway. He is 100% the face of the Republican party, and 100% of the racist voters in the party who remain in the post-Trump era. 

We'll see if he actually goes to prison. The appeals process could take years.

Legal Eagles, Con't

Not a good day for the GOP in the arena of the federal courts, as the 11th Circuit and SCOTUS handed down big L's to Sen. Lindsey Graham and GOP attorneys general, respectively. First, Graham lost his bid to quash the subpoena in the Trump election fraud investigation by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Wilson.

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s emergency request that it halt a subpoena for his testimony from the Atlanta-area grand jury investigating efforts to undermine the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court judge in ruling that the South Carolina Republican senator may be questioned about certain topics.

“(C)ommunications and coordination with the Trump campaign regarding its post-election efforts in Georgia, public statements regarding the 2020 election, and efforts to ‘cajole’ or ‘exhort’ Georgia election officials” are not legislative activities protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution, the three-judge panel ruled.

With its new ruling, the appeals court lifted the temporary hold it had placed on the subpoena while it was considering Graham’s case.

However, Graham may not be questioned about conduct related to any fact-finding he was doing about whether to vote to certify the 2020 election results, the court ruled, okaying the approach taken by the lower court.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the investigation, has indicated that she wants to question Graham about his phone calls with Georgia election officials as former President Donald Trump and his allies were seeking to reverse his defeat in the state.

The appeals court said if there was a dispute over whether investigators’ questions about those calls related to the fact-finding he was doing for the certification vote, Graham could raise those issues when he is testifying. But the new ruling makes clear that the three other categories of conduct fall outside of the protections of the Speech and Debate Clause, which shields legislators from certain law enforcement activities connected to their duties as lawmakers.

The 11th Circuit order was unanimous and came from a panel made up of two Trump appointees and a Clinton appointee.

 

Meanwhile, the courts refused to block President Biden's college debt relief program, not once, but twice.

Federal courts on Thursday delivered two wins for President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a challenge to the program brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group. And on the same day, a federal district court judge rejected a separate lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states.

Student loan cancellations, worth up to $20,000 per eligible borrower, could begin on Sunday.

The appeal at issue in the Supreme Court case was considered an uphill battle because lower courts had ruled that the group, the Brown County Taxpayers Association, did not have the legal right or “standing” to bring the challenge. Under normal circumstances, taxpayers don’t have a general right to sue the government over how it uses taxpayer funds.

Barrett acted alone because she has jurisdiction over the lower court that ruled on the case. She declined to refer the matter to the full court. Her denial appeared as a single sentence on the court’s docket.

A federal judge in Missouri, US District Judge Henry Edward Autrey, rejected the lawsuit from the GOP-led states also because the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

As I said before, the issue is standing: who is harmed by the student debt relief program, and what harm needs to be redressed? The courts' answer at both the appeals and SCOTUS level is that there is no harm. I'm shocked, personally. I figured Justice Barrett would go along but she 100% did not.

Too nuts even for her. 

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As Arit John at the LA Times reminds us, your access to vote depends entirely on where you live, as the red/blue divide increasingly defines how, when, where and even if you can vote at all.

For a brief time in 2020, it seemed as though the vote-by-mail movement was having a bipartisan moment.

Red and blue states that had offered the option only to a relatively small number of residents were suddenly scrambling to expand mail voting to as many people as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19 at polling places. Voting rights advocates saw it as a chance to educate lawmakers and voters about the long-term benefits of moving away from casting ballots in person.

Then came President Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread mail ballot fraud.

Two years later, access to mail voting looks radically different from state to state, mirroring a broad partisan divide in voting policies.

Republican-led states, echoing the former president’s unfounded fraud claims, have passed laws restricting access to ballot drop boxes, created new requirements for verifying voters, limited who can return a voter’s ballot and made it harder to correct mistakes on mail ballots. Democratic states have moved in the opposite direction — or attempted to do so. Legal challenges, failed ballot initiatives and constitutional hurdles have hampered efforts to make mail voting easier, particularly in the Northeast.

Voting rights advocates say mail voting makes the process easier for people who have difficulties traveling to polling places and helps blunt the impact of policies that suppress voter turnout, such as polling location closures that have a disproportionately negative effect on Black and Latino communities, leading to longer lines. They have raised concerns that the policies Republicans have enacted to prevent mail ballot fraud — despite existing safeguards such as signature verification and ballot tracking — are discriminatory and disenfranchise people of color and low-income voters.

“It’s getting to the point where, really, we’re seeing these two democracies emerge,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy advisor at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan advocacy group that tracks state election laws. “Your ZIP Code really determines what kind of access you have to the ballot, which is concerning.”

During the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly attempted to cast doubt on the security of mail ballots, though he has used the practice himself, claiming without evidence that the general election would be “rigged.” After he lost, his campaign filed more than five dozen election lawsuits that failed to turn up proof of widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.

The lasting impact of his claims has led to stark differences between how Democrats and Republicans view mail voting. Democratic voters were nearly twice as likely to support allowing voters to request an absentee ballot without a documented excuse or vote early in person as Republicans were, according to a June 2020 Pew Research Center poll. Several Republican nominees for secretary of state across the U.S. have campaigned against mail voting, including Arizona candidate Mark Finchem, who has denied the results of the 2020 election and, like the former president, has himself voted by mail.

Vote-by-mail policies exist on a spectrum. Eight states, including California, offer universal mail voting, which means registered voters automatically receive a ballot for elections. About a dozen states offer mail voting in smaller counties or in state and local elections.

In 15 states including Texas, voters can request an absentee ballot only if they provide an approved reason for voting by mail, such as being outside of one’s voting jurisdiction, working as a poll worker or having an illness or disability that prevents in-person voting.

Conversely, 27 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to request a mail ballot without providing a reason. Some of those states allow eligible voters to sign up to receive an absentee ballot on an ongoing basis.

Within those states, there are varying rules dictating how ballots are verified, when and how ballots should be returned, and what happens if a voter’s signature doesn’t match the one on file or they don’t properly fill out their ballot.

 

Increasingly in red states, voter ID laws are designed to eliminate marginalized, Democratic-leaning groups from the electorate altogether, laws selectively applied to intimidate potential voters, while making voting as easy as possible for white, rural precincts. 

No wonder then that Republicans vehemently fought against a national voting legislation rather than letting the patchwork of state laws proliferate into a confusing mess. 

They are destroying the country on purpose, and they know it.

All Trussed Up, Con't

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, drowning in the Tory budget mess that nearly sank the British pound, announced her resignation this morning.

 

Liz Truss is continuing her statement outside Number 10.

In front of dozens of reporters she says she came into office at a time of "great economic and international instability".

She added: "I recognise... given the situation I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party."

Liz Truss goes on to say that she met with 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady today.

They agreed there will be a leadership election within the next week, adding that she will remain as prime minister until a successor is chosen.

The shortest government in modern British history, 44 days, and I'm not sure that the Tories can prevent a new general election, where Labour now has something like a 30-point lead in the polls and a government itself notable only for presiding over the death of QE II. BBC's Nick Eardley:

 

I've never seen anything like this. Let's be clear what's happened: yesterday Truss told us she was a fighter.

But the level of chaos in government, Parliament and the Conservative Party has led Truss to a point where she knows she can't continue.

What happens now is the quickest turnover of power we have seen in modern times.

This is a lightning speed change. The question is whether the Conservative Party can coalesce around a new leader and whether the party can avoid a general election.

In October we are going to have our third PM of the year.

This is an unprecedented situation and an unprecedented short tenure as PM and an unprecedented crisis in British politics.

 

Nobody's seen anything like this. Hic sunt dracones.

 

 

Last Call For These Disunited States, Con't

Democrats have finally figured out, after some ten years, that state legislatures are where the real action is as far as what rights Americans in those states are actually afforded. Likewise, they're pouring $20 million into state legislative races in key states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.

With the battle for state legislatures taking on an elevated importance during this midterm cycle, a Democratic super PAC is investing more than $20 million in state legislative races, with about 70 percent of the funds going to support candidates in 25 districts across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona.

The investment is from Forward Majority, the super PAC, as Democrats across the country are pouring significant resources into state legislative races. Last month, the States Project, another Democratic super PAC, pledged to spend $60 million in legislative races in five states. And Tech + Campaigns, another Democratic group, has pledged to spend $8 million on such races.

State legislatures have long been dominated by Republicans, who have excelled at motivating their voters to engage beyond federal races. The party made a concerted effort to win state legislatures ahead of the 2010 redistricting cycle and then proceeded to draw gerrymandered legislative maps to help shore up their control. As a result, Republicans have complete control of 29 state legislatures.

But with the Supreme Court set to rule in a case that could give state legislatures nearly unchecked authority over federal elections, Democratic groups have been aggressively playing catch-up, reaching parity with Republicans in television ad spending this year.

Forward Majority, however, is focusing more of its spending on the detailed aspects of campaigning, like voter registration and a tactic known as “boosted news,” or the practice of paying to promote news articles on social media newsfeeds.

The group has been targeting suburban and exurban districts that are split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats with a push to register new Democrats, who may be voters who have moved or who haven’t been engaged in a while, and encourage them to vote on the whole ballot instead of just the top of the ticket.

“Even as we see Joe Biden, Mark Kelly, Gretchen Whitmer win at the top of the ticket, we are still losing those races down-ballot,” said Vicky Hausman, a co-founder of Forward Majority. “So we have been obsessed with finding ways to add additional margin and add additional votes in these races.”

Republicans have noticed the increased investments of Democrats in state legislative races and have sounded the alarm to donors.

“We don’t have the luxury of relying on reinforcements to come save us,” Dee Duncan, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, wrote to donors last month. “We are the cavalry.”

The path for Democrats in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania is narrow, but Ms. Hausman pointed to the thin margins in recent state legislative battles as an encouraging sign.

“The Virginia House was decided by about 600 votes in 2021,” she said. “The Arizona House came down to about 3,000 votes in two districts in 2020. So it is going to be a dogfight.”

 

I'm glad Democrats are finally playing hardball, but the time for this was in 2010.  Democrats gave away a dozen state legislatures to the GOP to be locked in through permanent gerrymandering in states like Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and if SCOTUS sides on the plenary state legislature theory, you may never see a Democrat win a statewide race or even a House race in those states again, they'll simply be overturned by Republican supermajorities in each state legislature.

We've got one more chance to decide before SCOTUS weighs in.

Vote like your country depends on it.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

I'm no polling expert, I just call them how I see them. Having said that, UVA's Kayle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman are such polling experts, and what they are seeing is polls being all over the place, with possible major upsets in a number of sleeper races as polling outfits change from registered voters to likely voters, and likely voter models are favoring the GOP.

With 3 weeks to go until Election Day, there are a few signs that some of the usual midterm dynamics — which push such elections to break against the White House — are reasserting themselves.

President Biden remains unpopular, and House generic ballot polling — probably the best polling catch-all we have for the overall political environment — has gotten a little bit better for Republicans as of late. The headline-grabber was a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday that showed Republicans moving into a 49%-45% lead on the generic ballot. As of this writing, the Democratic edge in the FiveThirtyEight generic ballot tracker is down to half a point, and the Republicans are up a couple of points in the RealClearPolitics tracker (the latter uses fewer polls and is also more sensitive to short-term changes).

It would not surprise us if the numbers improve a bit for Republicans down the stretch. Despite Democratic improvements after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and some candidate and image problems for Republicans, the usual midterm headwinds remain for Democrats. It’s just tough for a party to thrive with an unpopular president and with the public having significant concerns about issues, like the economy and inflation, that the opposition can pin on the party in power. This is why the House remains very likely to flip to the Republicans and why, despite the aforementioned challenges, Republican chances to win the Senate remain no worse than a coin flip.

With that out of the way, we’ll also say this: There are some weird things going on out there. And there probably will be races that upset our expectations. If in fact Republicans end up doing better down the stretch, that’ll involve races where Democrats appear favored flipping to the GOP. But there are also some opportunities for Democrats to potentially play spoiler, or at least come closer than expected in certain places.

Those following the day-to-day churn of the polls could cherry-pick their way to telling very different stories about the election. For instance, some closer-than-expected polls in the New York gubernatorial race, where Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) is trying to win her first full elected term against Rep. Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1), might indicate that we’re in a clear Republican wave environment.

Likewise, a series of polls showing Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) tied or trailing state Superintendent of Education Joy Hofmeister (D) might indicate the opposite.

It may be that these particular gubernatorial races don’t tell us much about the environment. Maybe it’s a classic case of the dominant party in a given state being underestimated in polls for one reason or another. Or maybe there are localized reasons that both races will end up being close in the same election. It’s hard to know.

 

These are all long shots, but if any of them pan out, it could be a sign of not just a wave election, but a tsunami.

Don't be surprised, is the warning.  And hey, we've seen it all in the last couple of cycles.

And The Meek Shall Inherit A Raid

A very bizarre story from Rolling Stone's Tatiana Siegel today, detailing the disappearance of former ABC News national security producer James Meek. The FBI raided his apartment in Virginia in April, and apparently he has dropped off the grid for the last six months as nobody seems to know where he went.

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

Outside his Arlington, Virginia, apartment, a surreal scene was unfolding, and his storied career was about to come crashing down. Meek’s tweet marked the last time he’s posted on the social media platform.

The first thing Meek’s neighbor John Antonelli noticed that morning was the black utility vehicle with blacked out windows blocking traffic in both directions on Columbia Pike. It was just before dawn on that brisk April day, and self-described police-vehicle historian Antonelli was about to grab a coffee at a Starbucks before embarking on his daily three-mile walk. He inched closer to get a better vantage, when he saw an olive-green Lenco BearCat G2, an armored tactical vehicle often employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law-enforcement agencies. A few Arlington County cruisers surrounded the jaw-dropping scene, but all of the other vehicles were unmarked, including the BearCat. Antonelli counted at least 10 heavily armed personnel in the group. None bore anything identifying which agency was conducting the raid. After just 10 minutes, the operation inside the Siena Park apartment complex — a six-story, upscale building for D.C. professionals, with rents fetching about $2,000 to $3,000 a month — was over.

“They didn’t stick around. They took off pretty quickly and headed west on Columbia Pike towards Fairfax County,” Antonelli recalls. “Most people seeing that green vehicle would think it’s some kind of tank. But I knew it was the Lenco BearCat. That vehicle is designed to be jumped out of so they can do a raid in that kind of time. It can return fire if they’re being fired upon.”

Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on the top floor for more than a decade. An FBI representative told Rolling Stone its agents were present on the morning of April 27 “at the 2300 block of Columbia Pike, Arlington, Virginia, conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. The FBI cannot comment further due to an ongoing investigation.”

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].”)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

An ABC representative tells Rolling Stone, “He resigned very abruptly and hasn’t worked for us for months.”

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid. One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, said in a statement. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

 

This story is extremely weird on its face and it get more strange by the minute. This guy was a well-known national security journalist and producer, he's worked in print, TV, and online. For someone like that to vanish and nobody really saying anything about it for six months, when he had ongoing book and Emmy campaign activities going on?

All of this smells like a head cheese, limburger and durian sandwich.

The other observation is "If you or I had classified documents in our homes" argument about Trump's Mar-a-Lago trove of stolen classified material. Meek apparently did. The FBI showed up as a result.

There's a hell of a lot more to this story, and I'd want to see what it is, but I don't like any of this. All of it sets off my alarm bells, the timing of the story, the disappearance of a national security journalist, the raid, the whole thing just doesn't make much sense without additional context and this story raises more questions than answers.

Keep an eye on this one.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It took less than 10 hours for a jury in Special Counsel John Durham's case against Steele dossier informant Igor Danchenko to acquit him of all charges, in a final failure of the entire case against the "Russia hoax".

A jury on Tuesday found Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a 2016 dossier of allegations about former president Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — not guilty of lying to the FBI about where he got his information.

The verdict in federal court in Alexandria, Va., is another blow for special counsel John Durham, who has now lost both cases that have gone to trial as part of his nearly 3½-year investigation. Durham, who was asked by Attorney General William P. Barr in 2019 to review the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, is sure to face renewed pressure to wrap up his work following the verdict.

Trump predicted Durham would uncover “the crime of the century” inside the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that investigated his campaign’s links to Russia. But so far, no one charged by the special counsel has gone to prison, and only one government employee has pleaded guilty to a criminal offense. In both trials this year, Durham argued that people deceived FBI agents, not that investigators corruptly targeted Trump.

The jury in Danchenko’s case deliberated for about nine hours over two days. Juror Joel Greene said in an interview that there were no holdouts in the deliberations and that the decision was “pretty unanimous.”

“We looked at everything really closely,” said Greene, who declined to comment on the politics of the case. “The conclusion we reached was the conclusion we all were able to reach.”

Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor who was U.S. attorney in Connecticut during the Trump administration, personally argued much of the government’s case against Danchenko. The special counsel alleged that Danchenko misled the FBI officials asking in 2017 about his sources, after the agency determined the researcher was the unnamed person behind some of the most explosive allegations about Trump in reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The trial could be Durham’s last. A grand jury that the special counsel had been using in Alexandria is now inactive, people familiar with the matter have told The Washington Post, though the status of a similar panel in D.C. was not immediately clear. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment when asked whether Durham would continue as special counsel in the wake of the Danchenko acquittal.

Barr, reached by phone Tuesday afternoon after the jury announced its verdict, declined to comment. In a statement released by the Justice Department after the verdict, Durham said, “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.”

A representative for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

And with that, given four years and endless resources, Durham couldn't find a damn thing. The fabled conspiracy to get Trump was just that, a conspiracy. Meanwhile, Trump now faces multiple cases in multiple jurisdictions and at least one of them will nail him to the wall for good.

 

This was all Bill Barr's idiocy, a convenient smokescreen that petered out because it was bullshit all along. Unlike the Mueller probe, Durham's bag of turds dropped off the Empire State Building landed with a splat and no convictions. 

It should be the end of his career. Of course like Barr, Durham will be fine, having done his job in damaging American democracy for years to come.

Maybe fatally.

 

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

More that 70% of all voters in this week's NY Times/Siena College poll agree that American democracy is under threat, but in 2022 that simply means "The other political party".

 

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.

The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.

Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family.

“I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

The poll showed that voters filtered their faith in democracy through a deeply partisan lens. A majority of voters in both parties identified the opposing party as a “major threat to democracy.”

Most Republicans said the dangers included President Biden, the mainstream media, the federal government and voting by mail. Most Democrats named Donald J. Trump, while large shares of the party’s voters also said the Supreme Court and the Electoral College were threats to democracy.

Seventy-one percent of all voters said democracy was at risk — but just 7 percent identified that as the most important problem facing the country.

These ostensibly conflicting views — that voters could be so deeply suspicious of one another and of the bedrock institutions of American democracy, while also expressing little urgency to address those concerns — may in part reflect longstanding frustrations and cynicism toward government.

 

We've spent two generations calling the federal government a threat, and when we get to the point where we're on the knife's edge looking into the abyss, most Americans want to jump. 

I take that back. Most Americans want permission to push the most marginalized among us off the edge in order to "improve" their own lives. A third of a billion bastards, we've become.

I have to hope we can overcome this, but it'll take a miracle.

Image

 

Made In Taiwan, Con't

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is warning that Chinese plans for invading Taiwan have now become a much higher military priority for Beijing.

China has made a decision to seize Taiwan on a “much faster timeline” than previously thought, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, shortly after China’s leader reiterated his intent to take the island by force if necessary.

“There has been a change in the approach from Beijing toward Taiwan in recent years,” Blinken said in an event at Stanford University in California.

The remarks from America’s top diplomat on Monday come as China holds its twice-a-decade Communist party congress, and shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping used a widely-watched speech on Sunday to say the “wheels of history are rolling on towards China’s reunification” with Taiwan. While peaceful means were preferable, Xi added, “we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.”

Blinken said China had made a “fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable, and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” He didn’t elaborate on the timing or provide other details.

Although Biden administration officials have regularly accused China of eroding the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, comments about Beijing’s intentions with regard to an invasion are less common.

Observers are highly sensitive to any remarks that might provide insights into how senior officials in Beijing or Washington view the potential for war over Taiwan -- an event that would have enormous geopolitical and economic consequences, particularly given President Joe Biden’s repeated pledges that the US would help defend the island.

The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a question on Monday about whether Blinken’s comments reflected any formal assessment that China has moved up its agenda for taking Taiwan. In March of last year, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that China wanted to take Taiwan “during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”

 

Pretty sure you can change "years" there to "months". 

 

Seems to me that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have made a deal, and both are betting that there's no appetite here, especially among the GOP, for US troops in Taiwan at all. Besides, we're busy with Ukraine, is the thinking.

 

We can't handle both.

 

The world may about to be changed dramatically by that assumption, and not in a good way.

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

Why yes, Oath Keepers are white supremacist domestic terrorists, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stockpile weapons in order to use them to kill politicians on January 6th.

 

Oath Keepers members spent tens of thousands of dollars in January 2021 on firearms, bullets and other equipment, according to prosecutors in Washington, DC, trying to prove members of the far-right extremist group were building an arsenal as it prepared to try to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

In all, prosecutors said Monday in federal court that nearly $200,000 in withdrawals were made from bank accounts connected to the Oath Keepers that month used for a wide variety of purchases, including guns. Prosecutors used evidence of the withdrawals, coupled with shopping receipts and text messages, to show how some members allegedly stockpiled the weapons.

Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes, according to text messages showed to the jury, bought several firearms from online sellers in what prosecutors called “parking lot purchases.”

Prosecutors then showed the jury evidence that Rhodes withdrew money from ATMs by a Bass Pro Shop, a Lowe’s and a gas station near where he made the purchases. They also displayed receipts showing purchases of firearm accessories, including 14 magazines, eight sights and one scope leveling kit, at retail shops around the same time.

Prosecutors have not said what they believe Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed on his way to Washington, DC, or whether they were taken to a Virginia hotel where the group’s so-called quick reaction force amassed.

An FBI agent testified Monday that Rhodes does not appear on the hotel’s security footage and that the weapons were ultimately found in a storage unit belonging to Oath Keeper Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

The extensive withdrawals are part of prosecutors’ efforts to convince a jury that Rhodes and his organization were preparing for more than just a peaceful rally on January 6, 2021, and that they believed a violent conflict was imminent.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes made the purchases both in his home state of Texas the week before the Capitol attack and on his road trip to the DC region. Rhodes embarked on the trip around January 3, 2021, according to cell phone data, traveling with lawyer Kellye SoRelle. SoRelle faces several charges in connection to January 6 and has pleaded not guilty in a separate case.

Attorneys for the defendants have repeatedly argued that SoRelle was the general counsel for the Oath Keepers organization. But, prosecutors suggested Monday, she was not acting in that capacity around the time of January 6 and was even exchanging sexually explicit messages with Rhodes.

“Speaking of f—ing…If you need some come on over,” Rhodes texted SoRelle on January 2. SoRelle declined, according to another text message. She allegedly later texted Rhodes that “You’re too good at what you do. Whole bad boy thing. I am a damn moth to a [fire emoji]. I really am replaying my teenage years.”

Prosecutors have relied heavily on messages and audio recordings so far to make their case against the five defendants and began to show the jury how those recordings captured the defendants actions on January 6 by calling a journalist to the stand Monday afternoon.

 

Besides the fact that Rhodes was schtupping his legal counsel, the guy bought thousands of dollars worth of firearms himself and the feds literally have the receipts for it. A lot of time in a little box awaits our friend Stewart.

Extreme RINO Hunting, Con't

Alex Henderson at AlterNet notes that even the pretend "Good Republicans" are being driven out of the party, like retiring Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, and the remainder are all soul-selling simps like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, or open fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Although Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska isn’t a full-fledged Never Trumper like the Washington Post’s Max Boot, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, attorney George Conway or former GOP strategist Rick Wilson, the conservative senator has been highly critical of former President Donald Trump at times and voted “guilty” during Trump’s second impeachment trial — a move that has resulted in Sasse being labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by Trump and other far-right MAGA Republicans. Sasse has decided he would rather be in academia than politics, applying for a position as president of the University of Florida.

Sasse is the sole finalist for the position, and his departure from the U.S. Senate is almost certain. GOP strategist and Never Trump conservative Sarah Longwell is sorry to see Sasse leaving politics, although not surprised. In an article published by The Bulwark on October 17, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) laments that in the GOP of 2022, there is little or no room for those who are not far-right MAGA extremists and total devotees of Trumpism.

“Ben Sasse is retiring from the Senate at the youthful age of 50,” Longwell writes. “We know why. Politicians who thought they could wait out Trump now see the writing on the wall. The party’s over. For years, we watched the GOP defenestrations: Will Hurd, Jeff Flake, George W. Bush, the memory of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and any other Republican who stood up to Donald Trump — or even just opposed Trump’s attempted coup. Some fell on their swords. Some were tossed aside involuntarily. The result was the same.”

Trump continues, “Simultaneously, we watched the progress on the other side of the spectrum as normie Republican moderates such as Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and J.D. Vance became unquestioning Trump maximalists. What these two dynamics proved was a simple fact: In the Republican Party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump…. The end result of this truth is that it has driven the Good Republican — that rare animal who was supposed to be the post-Trump future of the GOP — to near extinction.”

 

I'd argue that the last Good Republican was Eisenhower. The rest of them have been playing various levels of race and fear cards to get a Christian white supremacist nation all my life, and I'm only a few years younger than Ben Sasse, who will now go on to do Ron DeSantis's bidding in ridding the University of Florida system of anyone who is "woke", student and instructor alike. 

 

Not such a good guy, Ben Sasse.

 

Like I've said for years now, anyone who's still a Republican past this point is a fascist white supremacist asshole, or is at the very least OK with the country being run by them.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Weeks of relentlessly horrible, racist, brutal attack ads from GOP dark money groups have been flooding the airwaves in sewage. Will Bunch:

 

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

You won’t be shocked to learn that the ads are deliberately dishonest, conflating Democratic immigration policies, for example, with the horrific case of one undocumented immigrant named Christopher Puente accused of raping a toddler at a fast-food restaurant in Chicago (”She was 3 ... years ... old,” the narrator intones, milking the pathos). What’s not said is that the alleged assault occurred in February 2020, more than three years into the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, well before Biden took office.

That’s appalling, but that’s not what’s most upsetting about these ads, which, according to social media, have been broadcast nationally during the baseball telecasts on Fox Sports 1. There is absolutely no filter of jarring and often violent imagery, the racist overtones and the xenophobic innuendo, and the unrelenting darkness of the “American carnage” vibe. No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching. This is America now.

In fact, the comparison to that infamous “Willie” (really William) Horton ad isn’t even fair. That spot — which attempted to stir up racial panic by (misleadingly, of course) linking Democrat Michael Dukakis to a Black inmate who committed a rape and murder after a weekend pass — only aired on TV one time, because just 34 years ago even most Republicans found it too crude, and over the edge. Listen to that 1980s spot and the tone that offended many folks back then seems calm and measured compared to the Natural-Born-Killers-on-acid vibe of the 2022 attack ads. Today, any and all guardrails have been taken down.

One other thing that won’t surprise you about the new attack ads is that the people behind them aren’t eager for you to know exactly who they are.

The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.

 

The polls are all showing that these ads are working spectacularly well, as in this latest NY Times/Siena College Upshot poll.

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

 

Needless to say, going from D+1 to R+4 now is the difference between Dems barely holding on to the House and the GOP picking up 30-40 seats. The crosstabs of tht NYT/Siena College poll are not promising, either. Republicans have a 2-1 advantage: 63-31, among non-college white voters. In a state like Wisconsin, that's a death knell for Team Blue. Republicans are up by 10% points among Independents, 51-41%. The Democratic lead in the suburbs is down to 1 point, where it was double digits in 2018 and 2020.

Overall, Republicans have a 21-point lead among voters 45-64.

If this holds up, Dems will lose the House AND the Senate.

Folks if there's early voting in your state, do it now. We have 3 weeks.

We're going to give the country to the fascists because gas is $4 again.