Skinned Like Flynn, Con't

Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is OUT, resigning late last night.  His ties to Putin became too much to ignore after the questions raised this weekend over communication with the Russian ambassador over sanctions before Flynn or Trump were even in their jobs, and especially after the Washington Post dropped the bombshell that Trump was warned about Flynn's ties by the Justice Department.

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.

The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that ­Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice ­President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.

Flynn resigned Monday night in the wake of revelations about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

You remember Sally Yates, right?  The acting Attorney General who was dismissed by Trump over advising the President that his Muslim ban was unconstitutional?   Turns out Yates had warned the White House along with Jim Clapper and John Brennan that Flynn was compromised by the Russians and was a threat to national security.

But here's the explosive stuff:

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

A senior Trump administration official said before Flynn’s resignation that the White House was aware of the matter, adding that “we’ve been working on this for weeks.”

The current and former officials said that although they believed that Pence was misled about the contents of Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador, they couldn’t rule out that Flynn was acting with the knowledge of others in the transition.

The FBI, Yates, Clapper and Brennan declined to comment on the matter.

Pence is the Vice-President.  There's only one other person who outranks him in the Trump camp, and that's Mango Mao himself.

Supposedly Flynn is being fried up and served over hot coals because he lied to Pence.  I'm wondering why he's being fired at all, the Trump regime said at late as yesterday afternoon that they had "full confidence" in Flynn and that he wasn't going anywhere.

That's all garbage of course.  But things have shifted in the Trump regime.  Nobody at this point believes the Trump line that Flynn acted on his own.  Democrats have been handed the keys to dismantle the Trump regime, and possibly to go straight for Trump, but they can't do it without help.

And that leads us to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.  Sooner or later something's got to give there.

Whether or not Flynn ever testifies to Congress remains very much unknown.

StupidiNews!

• There's still no word when nearly 200,000 California residents near Lake Oroville will be able to return to their homes after being evacuated Sunday due to an overloaded dam spillway.
• Missouri police have arrested the wife and son of Klan leader Frank Ancona whose body was found floating in the Big River last week, he may have been killed over wanting a divorce.
• Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood financier Stephen Mnuchin, was confirmed yesterday in a 53-47 Senate vote mostly along party lines.
• Trump's Labor Secretary pick, Hardees/Carl's Jr. CEO Andy Puzder, is facing possibly fatal opposition from Senate Republicans over his hiring of an undocumented housekeeper.
• Drugmaker Marathon Pharmaceuticals says it will pause the rollout of a new drug for muscular dystrophy after outrage over the treatment's $89,000 per year price tag.

Last Call For Public Safety Dance

Cops and firefighters across America voted for the Trump and the Party of Law And Order® and all that, and they expect Republicans to treat them well.  The problem with that is cops and firefighters are still government employees with strong public sector unions, pensions, and benefits, and Republicans will not let those remain.  Iowa is a good example of this, where first responders are finding out the hard way that they voted themselves into oblivion.

In the highly contentious battle to extinguish public worker rights, Iowa Republicans have attempted a divide-and-conquer approach to pit unions against each other. Their legislation splits public workers into two groups, one that’s “public safety workers,” and one that isn’t. The idea was to strip away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public employees, but keep most of it for police and firefighters, who are politically more difficult to go after.

It didn’t work.

Hundreds of helmeted firefighters have flooded the Statehouse in the last week and police officers and sheriffs have lined up at committee hearings to speak against it. They don’t trust that this carve-out for their jobs will last long, nor do many of them feel it’s appropriate to deny the bargaining rights they have to fellow workers who have also had them for over 40 years.

And several police officers and firefighters warned that Republicans’ plan to create a special “public safety” class for negotiations wouldn’t work in many cases. John Thomas, a police officer from Mitchellville, explained last week that some sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t get classified as “public safety” workers because there’s more jailers and clerks in the bargaining unit. The Republican bill only classifies workers as “public safety” employees if a majority of workers in a bargaining unit is made up of police or firefighters.

That has many police officer, who voted for Republicans in large numbers this year, particularly upset.

“It’s collective begging, that’s what it is,” Thomas labeled the bill at a subcommittee hearing. “Half of law enforcement folks I work with are Republicans. And we voted for Republicans because of conservative values. But we didn’t vote for Republicans to get stabbed in the back while we’re trying to dodge cars and bullets.”

Even for those who do get covered as “public safety” workers, the other changes in the bill would still have damaging consequences. Removing the provisions for “just cause” firings means public workers could get the ax at whatever whim of their boss, with no potential recourse of action. Firefighters cautioned that could lead to a chilling effect on discussions over best safety practices.

“After a fire … we sit down as a group, around a table and we talk about the fire,” explained Doug Neis, head of the Iowa Professional Fire Fighters union. “We talk about what went good, what went bad, and about how to improve. In those meetings we need to be able to be critical sometimes of our administration and the decisions they make. This bill removes just cause. Our members across the state will be fearful of speaking up and being critical when they need to … People are going to be in danger, our members and citizens.”

Iowa cops and firefighters realize their necks on next on the blocks.  I'm glad to see them fighting back, but it would have been better to see them vote Democratic too.  Maybe they will in 2018, that is if there's anything left of public-sector unions by then.

National Insecurity Council, Con't

Just over three weeks in, and there's no greater evidence that the Trump regime is descending into complete chaos than the National Security Council, which is already coming apart at the seams.

Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks.

The national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance.

Although Mr. Trump suggested to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of the latest questions swirling around Mr. Flynn’s dealings with Russia, aides said over the weekend in Florida — where Mr. Flynn accompanied the president and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — that Mr. Trump was closely monitoring the reaction to Mr. Flynn’s conversations. There are transcripts of a conversation in at least one phone call, recorded by American intelligence agencies that wiretap foreign diplomats, which may determine Mr. Flynn’s future. 

Stephen Miller, the White House senior policy adviser, was circumspect on Sunday about Mr. Flynn’s future. Mr. Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that possibly misleading the vice president on communications with Russia was “a sensitive matter.” Asked if Mr. Trump still had confidence in Mr. Flynn, Mr. Miller responded, “That’s a question for the president.”

This account of life inside the council — offices made up of several hundred career civil servants who advise the president on counterterrorism, foreign policy, nuclear deterrence and other issues of war and peace — is based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former council staff members and others throughout the government. All spoke on the condition that they not be quoted by name for fear of reprisals.

“It’s so far a very dysfunctional N.S.C.,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a telephone interview.

In a telephone conversation on Sunday afternoon, K. T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, said that early meetings of the council were brisker, tighter and more decisive than in the past, but she acknowledged that career officials were on edge. “Not only is this a new administration, but it is a different party, and Donald Trump was elected by people who wanted the status quo thrown out,” said Ms. McFarland, a veteran of the Reagan administration who most recently worked for Fox News. “I think it would be a mistake if we didn’t have consternation about the changes — most of the cabinet haven’t even been in government before.”

At best it's paranoia in the bunker, at worst it's outright chaos. Oh, but ladies and gents, it gets worse.  If the parts of the cabinet who haven't "been in government before" are baffled newbies, those who have are openly pushing their own dangerous agendas.

Mr. Trump’s council staff draws heavily from the military — often people who had ties to Mr. Flynn when he served as a senior military intelligence officer and then as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency before he was forced out of the job. Many of the first ideas that have been floated have involved military, rather than diplomatic, initiatives.

Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was exploring whether the Navy could intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. The potential interdiction seemed in keeping with recent instructions from Mr. Trump, reinforced in meetings with Mr. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, to crack down on Iran’s support of terrorism.

But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked, a threat to security that has helped fuel the move for the insider threat program. But others doubt whether there was enough basis in international law, and wondered what would happen if, in the early days of an administration that has already seen one botched military action in Yemen, American forces were suddenly in a firefight with the Iranian Navy.

I guarantee you this part is coming soon.  I don't want to hear about war with Russia (which precisely zero people want) when the Trump regime badly, badly wants a shooting war with Iran.  And these idiots are going to make it happen.

The Paper Chase

And the Trump regime claims their first head at a major newspaper: Op-ed editor Mark Lasswell of The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor has left the paper following tensions over the section drifting in a pro-Donald Trump direction.

News of the departure of Mark Lasswell, who edited op-eds for the Journal, comes as the paper’s internal tensions over Trump have begun to spill into public view. The reliably hawkish, pro-trade, small government conservative Journal op-ed page has been challenged by the rise of the populist, nationalist Trump movement. The Journal’s opinion pages have been a showcase for the intra-right divide over Trump, featuring Trump-sympathetic writers like Bill McGurn alongside anti-Trump columnists such as Bret Stephens. Lasswell appears to be a casualty of that divide, and his dismissal a victory for the pro-Trump faction on the editorial staff.

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Lasswell was in effect phased out over a period of months from the paper. He took a book leave during the election following conflict with his boss Paul Gigot, the editorial page director, about the extent to which the page should run material sympathetic to Trump.

"We don't talk about internal personnel or editorial deliberations, but suffice to say your information is false in multiple respects,” Gigot said in a statement. “We appreciate Mark Lasswell's contributions to the Journal and wish him well. The Journal editorial page's coverage of Donald Trump speaks for itself, including numerous op-eds from outside contributors and staff editorials pro and con throughout the campaign and now as President. That coverage will continue.” A Wall Street Journal spokesperson declined to identify any false information.

More will follow.  Again, it will be the "Never Trump" forces on the right cleansed first.  That battle is going to be rough and judging by the time frame, quick in its brutality.

So we'll see who's next, but I seriously doubt he will be the last.

Last Call For Miller Time (and Space)

Apparently since Kellyanne Conway is grounded or something, the Trump regime sent Bannon sidekick Stephen Miller around to the Sunday shows today to make some sort of magical case for "massive voter fraud" that Trump keeps screaming about, but nobody was having it.

White House policy adviser Stephen Miller on Sunday insisted that the Trump administration has provided ample evidence of widespread voter fraud, an unsubstantiated claim that President Trump has said cost him the popular vote. 

“The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud, with respect to people being registered in more than one state,” Miller told ABC’s “This Week.”

“Dead people voting, non-citizens being registered to vote. George, it is a fact and you will not deny it that are massive numbers of non-citizens in this country who are registered to vote.”

ABC host George Stephanopoulos specifically asked about Trump’s recent claim that voter fraud is the reason he lost in New Hampshire. 

Stephanopoulos pushed back against Miller, telling him he did not provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud. 

“You have provided zero evidence of the president’s claim that he would’ve won the general — the popular vote if 3 [million] to 5 million illegal immigrants hadn’t voted. Zero evidence for either one of those claims,” Stephanopoulos said.

Oops.  In fact it didn't go well at all.

After appearing on four Sunday news shows, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, was ruthlessly mocked on Twitter. 

Broadcasting from the White House briefing room, Miller repeated the same talking points in interviews with CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. The Trump adviser likely refused to appear on CNN due to the White House’s ongoing campaign against the cable network. 

Miller defended Trump’s travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries by fear mongering and insisting that the judiciary was not the “supreme” branch of government for deciding what is constitutional. He also claimed that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was “always” 100 percent correct.

So at this point Miller is on TV screaming so loudly about voter fraud that nobody believes him.  Of course, as I've said before, when a tyrant continues about things that aren't true, he plans to act like they are.

Spies Dislike Trump

It seems America's Intelligence Community has finally had enough of the Trump regime, and that they're starting to make things extremely uncomfortable for him. John Schindler:

How things are heating up between the White House and the spooks is evidenced by a new report that the CIA has denied a security clearance to one of Flynn’s acolytes. Rob Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer selected to head up the NSC’s Africa desk, was denied a clearance to see Sensitive Compartmented Information (which is required to have access to SIGINT in particular). Why Townley’s SCI was turned down isn’t clear—it could be over personal problems or foreign ties—but the CIA’s stand has been privately denounced by the White House, which views this as a vendetta against Flynn. That the Townley SCI denial was reportedly endorsed by Mike Pompeo, the new CIA director selected by Trump himself, only adds to the pain.

There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.

In other words, the CIA, FBI, and especially the NSA are proceeding as if the Trump regime is already fully compromised, which between Mike Flynn,  Trump's adult sons Eric and Donald Jr., and Paul Manafort still lurking about, should be absolutely considered as true.

And if the NSA is withholding actionable intel from Trump that could lead to something bad because of the Russians wholly owning the regime, what then?

What's it going to take before Trump gets kicked out?

Sunday Long Read: Defining DeVos

If you want to know what awaits America's public education system under the Trump regime and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, you have to go no further than Grand Rapids, Michigan as a primary example.

Mid-century Michigan conservatives no doubt felt their ideological zeal ratcheting up because, for much of the post-war era, unions called most of the shots in the state’s political economy. Especially during the 1970s, when Amway was hitting its stride and the young DeVoses and Princes—whose ranks included Betsy’s brother Erik, who would gain plenty of infamy of his own as the founder of the private-army concern Blackwater—were coming of age, union power was peaking in the state. By 1974, unions represented more than 40 percent of workers in Michigan, the highest rate in the country. The shift in the balance of power between labor and capital, set off when the auto workers sat down in Flint in 1936, had been tilting steadily in the workers’ direction ever since. Worse still for free-market ideologues of the DeVosian stripe, public sector workers in Michigan—its teachers, police and firefighters—had collective bargaining rights too. Not only was the government “in our pockets,” it was handing over the money it confiscated to the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

The union tide that swept across Michigan never reached the western part of the state, though. As Jeffrey Kleiman documents in his history of the great Grand Rapids furniture strike of 1911, that action, which paralyzed the city’s major industry for six days, ended in a near total loss for labor. Not only did the thousands of workers who’d walked off the job fail to win a single concession from their bosses, the strike also concentrated the power of local businessmen, bankers and industrialists. In a pamphlet called “What’s the Matter with Grand Rapids?” the Industrial Workers of the World argued that ethnic tensions kept the city’s workers divided, while high rates of homeownership and churchgoing kept them conservative. Local historian Robert P. Swierenga has a more straightforward explanation: the west Michigan Dutch, with their legendarily strong work ethic, didn’t really go in for unions. Polish workers were the main force behind the furniture strike, and the Dutch crossed the picket line. “The aura of a willing labor force and strong work ethic has not been lost on industrialists coming into the region,” Swierenga writes.

In 2012, the DeVoses pulled off something that would have seemed unimaginable to their free-market forebears: they made Michigan a right-to-work state. Workers in the state are finally free; they can no longer be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment. A subsequent law has made it illegal for employers to process union dues, while simultaneously making it easier for corporations to deduct PAC money from employee paychecks. By 2015, just 15 percent of workers in Michigan were union members. “They won,” former state Rep. Ellen Lipton told me. “It may have taken them longer than they wanted, but they won.” Lipton was referring to the DeVoses’ remarkable success in shaping the state to conform to their hardcore laissez-faire vision over the past two decades. This improbable crusade was immeasurably aided by Michigan’s strict term-limit laws, which keep legislators beholden to donors and party apparatchiks rather than to their constituents. 

The tourist motto for Grand Rapids these days is “cool city.” It’s a nod to a campaign by Michigan’s last democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, whom Dick DeVos tried and failed to unseat in 2006. Granholm donned sunglasses to dramatize her fealty to the trendy development counsel of urbanologist Richard Florida. Across Michigan the word went forth: the key to a bright future for the state’s battered cities was to make them cool, filling them with the sorts of amenities that the young and college educated find irresistible, such as farmers markets, lofts, and art. The right-wing Mackinac Center for Public Policy, funded by the DeVoses, mocked the concept, arguing that “cool cities” discriminated against the extractor class, people who “build things and use energy and emit pollution — things that are not considered environmentally correct by the political ruling class.” Success was mixed. Flint and Pontiac never made it onto the cool list, while Detroit was somehow too cool to be included. But Grand Rapids took the business of being cool seriously.

“It’s a cool place, for a company town,” Mary Bouwense told me over craft beers at one of the city’s many brew pubs. There are more than a dozen breweries in Grand Rapids—including one at Gerald Ford International Airport. Bouwense, who is the president of the local teachers union, offered to take me on a tour of DeVos-related sites, but the snow once more intervened. Founders, the brew pub where she brought me instead, was packed on a Sunday afternoon, a sign, perhaps, of the diminishing influence of the once all-powerful Dutch Christian Reformed Church that helped incubate the moral conviction of the DeVoses. Since the tour was off, Bouwense, who is of Dutch descent, was helpfully guiding me through the theological divides separating the Christian Reformed and the Dutch Reformed. She also confirmed that the DeVoses are apostles of a different sort of Protestant ethic altogether, where conspicuous consumption no longer provokes much anxiety on the part of the believer. “I can see their helicopter coming and going from my office window,” she says.

The DeVos family is selling the American dream as a pyramid scheme through Amway.  Now they have control of America's entire education system with intent to do the same.

And it's your kids on the bottom of that pyramid.  I guarantee it.

Meanwhile In Congress

As I keep saying, Trump's not going anywhere until Republicans in Congress decide he's outlived his usefulness as a lightning rod for all the draconian cuts they plan.  Maybe they'll get rid of him at some point, but not until he signs everything the GOP in Congress have been waiting decades to get.

A House Republican is sponsoring legislation to do away with large portions of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including environmental justice and greenhouse gas programs. 

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) introduced the Wasteful EPA Programs Elimination Act on Thursday, saying it would save $7.5 billion annually. That would leave the agency with a budget of less than $1 billion. 

Major EPA climate change programs would be eliminated under the measure.

The legislation would also close all of the EPA’s regional offices, halt new regulations on ground-level ozone pollution and require the agency to lease unused property. 

“As a fiscal conservative, I believe Washington should be a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars,” Johnson said in a statement. 

“Part of being a good steward includes reining in unnecessary spending, holding agencies accountable for ‘waste,’ and getting rid of politicians’ ‘pet projects.’ For example, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the EPA’s many vacant and underutilized properties that the EPA’s own Inspector General identified as wasteful,” he said.

Of course this has nothing to do with money, not when the Trump regime plans trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy that will explode the national debt.  But cutting the EPA by 90%?  That's a victory for GOP corporate greed that will pay off a hundredfold in donations down the road, and they know it.

Panic Mode On The Right

Expect to see a lot more of this as the reality of the Trump regime kicks in: WaPo conservative columnist Kathleen Parker is pretty confident at this point of her prediction of total victory in 2018 -- for the Democrats.

Good news: In two years, we’ll have a new president. Bad news: If we make it that long.

My “good” prediction is based on the Law of the Pendulum. Enough Americans, including most independent voters, will be so ready to shed Donald Trump and his little shop of horrors that the 2018 midterm elections are all but certain to be a landslide — no, make that a mudslide — sweep of the House and Senate. If Republicans took both houses in a groundswell of the people’s rejection of Obamacare, Democrats will take them back in a tsunami of protest.

Once ensconced, it would take a Democratic majority approximately 30 seconds to begin impeachment proceedings selecting from an accumulating pile of lies, overreach and just plain sloppiness. That is, assuming Trump hasn’t already been shown the exit.

Or that he hasn’t declared martial law (all those anarchists, you know) and effectively silenced dissent. We’re already well on our way to the latter via Trump’s incessant attacks on the media — “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” — and press secretary Sean Spicer’s rabid-chihuahua, daily press briefings. (Note to Sean: Whatever he’s promised you, it’s not worth becoming Melissa McCarthy’s punching bag. But really, don’t stop.)

With luck, and Cabinet-level courage that is not much in evidence, there’s a chance we won’t have to wait two long years, during which, let’s face it, anything could happen. In anticipation of circumstances warranting a speedier presidential replacement, wiser minds added Section 4 to the 25th Amendment, which removes the president if a majority of the Cabinet and the vice president think it necessary, i.e., if the president is injured or falls too ill to serve. Or, by extension, by being so incompetent — or not-quite-right — that he or she poses a threat to the nation and must be removed immediately and replaced by the vice president.

Aren’t we there, yet? 

Of course this is the woman who three months ago wrote this tripe that America would be "fine no matter who wins" so at this point I question her punditry, to put it mildly.

In all seriousness however, Parker's scenario is a dangerous and stupid fantasy.  Trump isn't going anywhere and the odds of the Dems winning back the Senate, let alone the House are next to zero. 

For the Senate, the Dems would have to defend all ten seats in Trump states, and pick off Dean Heller in Nevada and Jeff Flake in Arizona. And then, on top of all that, they would still have to win a blood red Senate seat to get to 51, where their best chance would be Utah.

In the House, the Dems would need something like a +10 or +12 generic congressional ballot to overcome massive GOP gerrymandering to win it back.

Yeah, anything's possible in a midterm, where the President's party usually loses a bunch of seats.  But the last two midterms were complete disasters for the Dems, and the turnout vastly favors the GOP.

Now if Trump tanks the economy by then, yes, this is a possibility. But the 25th Amendment solution is a farce.  What's far more likely to happen is that Trump gets us into a war, and the GOP's crackdown on civil liberties, voting rights, and the free press goes into full effect.

We're in for dark days ahead, and childish fantasies of us easily disposing of Trump must be put aside.  It's going to take sweat, work and most likely a lot of blood to free America from this regime.

New tag, as we need to get started: 2018 Elections.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

And the Flynn/Russia traitor story continues to grow, as CNN is now reporting from its sources that the "Trump dossier" details on conversations by the Trump team with foreign nationals is now being taken far more seriously by the FBI.

For the first time, US investigators say they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials tell CNN. As CNN first reported, then-President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the existence of the dossier prior to Trump's inauguration. 

None of the newly learned information relates to the salacious allegations in the dossier. Rather it relates to conversations between foreign nationals. The dossier details about a dozen conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals. 

Sources would not confirm which specific conversations were intercepted or the content of those discussions due to the classified nature of US intelligence collection programs.
But the intercepts do confirm that some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier, according to the officials. CNN has not confirmed whether any content relates to then-candidate Trump. 

The corroboration, based on intercepted communications, has given US intelligence and law enforcement "greater confidence" in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents, these sources say.

In other words, the meat of the dossier is looking more and more true.  Russian nationals were talking about being in contact with the Trump team multiple times, and the bigger realization here is that it wasn't just Mike Flynn doing the talking. The regime's reaction?

Reached for comment this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, "We continue to be disgusted by CNN's fake news reporting." 

Spicer later called back and said, "This is more fake news. It is about time CNN focused on the success the President has had bringing back jobs, protecting the nation, and strengthening relationships with Japan and other nations. The President won the election because of his vision and message for the nation." 

Spokespeople for the FBI, Department of Justice, CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

US intelligence officials emphasize the conversations were solely between foreign nationals, including those in or tied to the Russian government, intercepted during routine intelligence gathering. 

"It's fake news, shut up" isn't the measured reaction of an innocent group here, guys.

Now, normally this kind of stuff would be classified and wouldn't see the light of day.  It's the NSA's job to record conversations between foreign nationals, because NSA.  But this is the US Intelligence Community basically admitting that "We've got these guys on tape talking about what they did and it backs up what this dossier says."

As much as the Trump regime and Putin want to make this story go away (and the Russians today are now offering up Edward Snowden as a prize to make sure it does) I'm thinking there's real, real damage here.

An NBC News report citing U.S. intelligence sources says Russia may consider handing over Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-blower, to the United States as a favor to President Trump.

NBC News, the only major news outlet to report the development at this point, wrote that "highly sensitive intelligence reports detailing Russian deliberations" suggest Russia is mulling over sending Snowden back to the U.S. as a favor to Trump. NBC News reported it is one of several tactics Russia could use to cozy up to the president.

Snowden called the report "irrefutable evidence" that he wasn't colluding with Russians, despite allegations from U.S. House members.

The Russians are offering up Eddie boy to the IC to make this go away.  That's a very valuable card to play.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For The Fraudster In Chief

Trump at this point will do anything to take the focus off his collapsing regime, now accusing NH Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of voter fraud in her win over Republican Kelly Ayotte in a meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.

President Donald Trump can’t stop—won’t stop—talking about the election.

On Thursday, during a meeting with 10 senators that was billed as a listening session about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, the president went off on a familiar tangent, suggesting again that he was a victim of widespread voter fraud despite the fact that he won the presidential election.

As soon as the door closed and the reporters allowed to observe for a few minutes had been ushered out, Trump began to talk about the election, participants said, triggered by the presence of former New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost her reelection bid in November and is now working for Trump as a Capitol Hill liaison, or “Sherpa,” on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch.

The president claimed that he and Ayotte both would have been victorious in the Granite State if not for the “thousands” people who were “brought in on buses” from neighboring Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire.

According to one participant who described the meeting, “an uncomfortable silence” momentarily overtook the room.

Hillary Clinton narrowly won New Hampshire’s four electoral votes over Trump by nearly 3,000 votes. Ayotte’s margin of defeat was even slimmer: 743 votes.

Once again, Trump is accusing Democrats of perpetrating voter fraud with no evidence whatsoever.  The larger danger is that his indicates the Trump regime clearly plans to either introduce draconian national restrictions on voting, to use the Justice Department as a weapon against Democratic voters, or more likely, both.

As I've been saying, I expect millions to be disenfranchised under the Trump regime, if not tens of millions, in an effort to set up as many Republicans in state legislatures as possible in 2018 and 2020, and gerrymandering Democrats out of existence.

When a fascist keeps repeating an outright lie, it's something he intends to act on as if it were true.

Anti-Immigration Nation

So, I don't want to hear any more about Obama being the "Deporter-in-Chief" while Trump's ICE agents are already getting started on huge raids.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained scores of immigrants across the Los Angeles area in a massive deportation operation on Thursday, following President Donald Trump’s harsh executive order stepping up the crackdown of immigrants with criminal offenses living in the country illegally.

Advocates and lawyers said that ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents detained 134 immigrants at their workplaces and homes in a series of raids. They said that some people were picked up as “collateral arrest” after they opened their doors to agents who were not there to specifically arrest them. ICE agents allegedly requested to see identification from everyone and took in family members who were undocumented.

The immigration sweeps are believed to have taken place across Southern California in Santa Paula, Oxnard, Van Nuys, San Bernardino, and Downey.

As of Thursday night, the ICE agency denied that it had detained 100 immigrants, the original figure given by lawyers who said that the number comes from a list of immigrants apprehended at the ICE office in Los Angeles.

“Our operations are targeted and lead driven, prioritizing individuals who pose a risk to our communities,” ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice wrote in an email to ThinkProgress. She said officers conduct “routine” enforcement actions to arrest “known street gang members, child sex offenders, and deportable foreign nationals with significant drug trafficking convictions.”

Kice added that the agency prioritizes cases based on factors such as the person’s criminal and immigration history, “as well as the viability of the leads we have on the individual’s possible whereabouts.”

But advocates disagree. They say that this particular raid was not “routine” and that the immigrants detained did not pose a risk to their communities.

Routine immigration operations typically detain three to five people — but a sweep across seven counties to round up people appears to be a direct consequence of Trump’s recent executive order that gives broad power for agents to detain immigrants, advocates said.

Expect bigger raids, more often, and with the targets especially being undocumented parents of US citizens.  It's about fear now, fear and the threat that families will be destroyed.  Eventually these are going to get ugly, and the head-cracking will begin in earnest on these "collateral arrests".

Then the informing begins, and Trump divides us yet again.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump regime's massive Russian problem refuses to go away anytime soon, as it looks very much like Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn was making promises to Moscow well before the regime assumed power three weeks ago.

Weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, discussed American sanctions against Russia, as well as areas of possible cooperation, with that country’s ambassador to the United States, according to current and former American officials.

Throughout the discussions, the message Mr. Flynn conveyed to the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak — that the Obama administration was Moscow’s adversary and that relations with Russia would change under Mr. Trump — was unambiguous and highly inappropriate, the officials said.

The accounts of the conversations raise the prospect that Mr. Flynn violated a law against private citizens’ engaging in diplomacy, and directly contradict statements made by Trump advisers. They have said that Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak a few days after Christmas merely to arrange a phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump after the inauguration.

But current and former American officials said that conversation — which took place the day before the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over accusations that it used cyberattacks to help sway the election in Mr. Trump’s favor — ranged far beyond the logistics of a post-inauguration phone call. And they said it was only one in a series of contacts between the two men that began before the election and also included talk of cooperating in the fight against the Islamic State, along with other issues.

The officials said that Mr. Flynn had never made explicit promises of sanctions relief, but that he had appeared to leave the impression it would be possible.

Mr. Flynn could not immediately be reached for comment about the converations, details of which were first reported by The Washington Post. Despite Mr. Flynn’s earlier denials, his spokesman told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

Remember that Christmas phone call Flynn had with Russian ambassador Kislyak?  That was a very pointed leak to the press last month that heavily implied that Flynn was cutting a deal, but the Trumpies walked away from it relatively unscathed.  This leak tells us what Flynn said, and it's a doozy.

During the Christmas week conversation, he urged Mr. Kislyak to keep the Russian government from retaliating over the coming sanctions — it was an open secret in Washington that they were in the works — by telling him that whatever the Obama administration did could be undone, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified material.

And it gets worse, because now that means that the Trump regime was lying when they said they didn't know anything about Flynn's conversation.

Days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Vice President-elect Mike Pence also denied that Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions with Mr. Kislyak. He said he had personally spoken to Mr. Flynn, who assured him that the conversation was an informal chat that began with Mr. Flynn extending Christmas wishes.

“They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,” Mr. Pence said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

Except we now know he did discuss just that.

Some officials regarded the conversation as a potential violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes involving the American government, according to one current and one former American official familiar with the case.

Federal officials who have read the transcript of the call were surprised by Mr. Flynn’s comments, since he would have known that American eavesdroppers closely monitor such calls. They were even more surprised that Mr. Trump’s team publicly denied that the topics of conversation included sanctions.

The call is the latest example of how Mr. Trump’s advisers have come under scrutiny from American counterintelligence officials. The F.B.I. is also investigating Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.

The Trump regime lies because they know they can get away with it.  So far they have, and completely.  Will anyone care enough to call this what it is?

Flynn's a traitor, period.  And our government is owned by the Russians. I would expect that Flynn will be let go for the crime of lying to Pence, not for being an obvious traitor.  And that's only if the heat starts coming on Pence, which at this point is anyone's guess.

Odds are good that again, since Trump's base won't care, Trump won't care.  We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• In a unanimous 3-0 ruling the Trump regime lost its case to reinstate the Muslim travel ban before the 9th Circuit, an appeal to the Supreme Court is expected soon.
• Donald Trump spoke to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday amid calls from the commander of US troops in Afghanistan for more advisors on the ground.
• The French interior ministry says they have arrested four in the town of Montpelier in connection with a planned terror attack on Paris.
• Ride-sharing giant Uber says it will fight new proposed tougher standards in Denmark for cabs and the Danish parliament may consider Uber an illegal taxi service. 
• The newest weapon in fighting cancer could be modified Salmonella bacteria designed to penetrate tumors and mark them for destruction by the body's immune system.