Reaping What The Gardner Sowed

It's Senate August recess time, and that means it's the time of year where senators sneak home and hold town halls with constituents hoping nobody but supporters show up, so they can check off boxes without making too much in the way of negative national news.  

Alas, this year there's little chance of that going to plan this year for GOP senators especially, as Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner tried to rip the bandage off the failed GOP health care plan debacle and got his town hall over this weekend, before opposition could mobilize (or so goes the thinking.)

Gardner discovered the opposition was waiting for him, and it wasn't pretty.  Washington Journal's Vinnie Longobardo:

The meeting was meant to discuss the disastrous aftermath of an environmental catastrophe, last year’s wastewater spill at the Gold King Mine in south west Colorado. When you haven’t held a town hall in over a year, however, you may find that your constituents have some pent up questions and not a few previously unvoiced frustrations that they want to add to the agenda.

All it took was one man’s pleading question from the audience regarding Senator Gardner’s vote in favor of the failed Republican-designed bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. “Why on earth,” did the Senator vote for this bill “when the vast majority of your constituents opposed it?”, asked the angry citizen, according to an account of the meeting on Shareblue.com.

His reply–“Well, I voted for it because I will vote to continue to work to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act,”– left the audience jeering, booing, and drowning out his pitiful excuses and lies.

“The Affordable Care Act isn’t working. It’s not working. It’s not working,” he stammered, before being reminded of the grim reality of health care in the pre-Obamacare era by a constituent who shouted out:

“I never had insurance until the ACA. I could never afford it.”

The audience wanted accountability. They repeatedly asked why he hadn’t held town hall meetings sooner and when he would set up a “real” town hall. With an audience picked at random from names put into a hat, Gardner couldn’t use the typical Republican canard that he was ambushed by paid protestors with an agenda to sell. These were real people with real concerns.

Perhaps this is not the type of August vacation that the Colorado Senator had in mind. Perhaps if he had held a few town halls when the health care legislation was being crafted, he wouldn’t be so apparently surprised at the reaction of the people he is supposed to be representing to the threat of their healthcare being ripped from their hands.

He has until 2020 until he’s up for re-election. Perhaps he’ll learn a lesson from this latest debacle. Or perhaps the good citizens of Colorado will elect someone who listens to them and cares about their interests, rather than parroting the Republican party line and trading the people’s health for tax breaks that only benefit the rich.

Which brings up a good point: Republicans are going to have to defend a lot of vulnerable seats in 2020 in the same way the Dems are having to defend Senate seats in 2018.  Should the Trump albatross still be on the ticket then, Republicans like Gardner are in for spectacular amounts of trouble.

Sure, a lot could happen between now and then and almost certainly will.  But if the Dems can't quite retake the Senate in 2018, in 2020 they will have an extremely good chance to do just that.

StupidiNews!

• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced that the city will sue the Justice Department over withholding federal law enforcement grants due to Chicago's sanctuary city status.
• Archaeologists in Israel have found the site of the lost Roman city of Julias, the possible home of three of Jesus's apostles near the Sea of Galilee.
• South Korean President Moon Jae-in has agreed to continue to pressure North Korea in a call with Donald Trump as Pyongyang has vowed "ultimate measures" against new UN sanctions.
• Brexit uncertainty continues to weigh down UK consumer spending as everything from housing to food prices are dropping according to the Bank of England's latest figures.
• "Pharma Bro" CEO Martin Shkreli has been found guilty on three of eight federal charges for his role in manipulating drug prices to cover losses for his hedge fund.

Last Call For You Never Go The Full Goebbels

Meanwhile, the Trump regime position of White House Communications Director Minister Of Propaganda Mouth of Sauron is still open, and it looks like Tang the Conqueror has found just the guy jackass neo-Nazi fascist for the job.

Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump, is reportedly under consideration to succeed Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director.

Miller isn't the frontrunner for the job, Axios reported Saturday. But White House chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly likes the idea.

Miller, a former staffer to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), received praise from his colleagues after sparring with CNN reporter Jim Acosta during a press briefing Wednesday.

In that exchange, Miller fiercely defended a White House-backed bill that would establish a merit-based immigration system and accused Acosta of having a "cosmopolitan bias."

Trump applauded Miller's performance at the press briefing, according to Axios. The president was also pleased with Miller's combative performance during a series of appearances on the Sunday news show circuit earlier this year.

We go back to the end of May and Bill Cohan's Vanity Fair profile on Miller for a reason, here's a guy whose claim to fame was the unwavering defense of Duke's lacrosse team a decade ago.

Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence. His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Sessions, with Miller at his side, almost single-handedly killed the 2013 bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “Our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

It was a jaw-dropping statement, even by Trumpian standards. “Horrendous” and “embarrassing” was how Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, described Miller’s claims, adding for good measure, “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.”

Since then, despite winning Trump’s approval for his bravura performance—“Great job!” the president tweeted—Miller has been kept under wraps, more seen than heard, although he was in the Mar-a-Lago photo of Trump and his advisers authorizing the April missile strike on an air base in Syria.

And now this card-carrying white supremacist asshole will almost certainly be running the White House's propaganda mill.  The fact that he's even employed by the federal government is insulting, let alone the White House, but in 2017 the executive branch has decided that only white, male landowning Americans count (just like our founding fathers, heyo!) and there's no better face for this than Miller.

Look at the people Trump has surrounded himself with.  That's all you need to know.

Oh, and Trump TV is beefing up its anchor staff as CNN's Kayleigh McEnany has now joined the weekly state-run social media broadcast praising Dear Leader.

More of this is coming, folks.  A lot more. And it will be coming sooner and closer than you think.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is expanding its conservative-leaning television empire into nearly three-quarters of American households — but its aggressive takeover of the airwaves wouldn’t have been possible without help from President Donald Trump's chief at the Federal Communications Commission.

Sinclair, already the nation’s largest TV broadcaster, plans to buy 42 stations from Tribune Media in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. It got a critical assist this spring from Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who revived a decades-old regulatory loophole that will keep Sinclair from vastly exceeding federal limits on media ownership.

The change will allow Sinclair — a company known for injecting "must run" conservative segments into its local programming — to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations. That’s nearly double the congressionally imposed nationwide audience cap of 39 percent.

The FCC and the company both say the agency wasn’t giving Sinclair any special favors by reviving the loophole, known as the “UHF discount,” which has long been considered technologically obsolete. But the Tribune deal would not have been viable if not for Pai’s intervention: Sinclair already reaches an estimated 38 percent of U.S. households without the discount, leaving it almost no room for growth.

The loophole is a throwback to the days when the ultra-high-frequency TV spectrum —the part higher than Channel 13 — was filled with low-budget stations with often-scratchy reception over analog rabbit ears. That quality gap no longer exists in today's world of digital television, but under the policy that Pai revived, the commission does not fully count those stations’ market size when tallying a broadcaster's national reach.

The stage is being set for state-run, pro-Trump media. Sinclair will now be able to reach every home east of the Oklahoma panhandle with their mandated "local news" segments on how great Trump is.  The White House can reach everyone else with social media and Trump TV.  All this is happening within just six months of him taking office, and it will only get worse.

Stay tuned, as they say.

You may not have a choice much longer on that, by the way.

That's Real White Of You, Donny, Con't

Emory professor of African American Studies and author Carol Anderson pens an op-ed in the NYT today on Trump, how he got there, and why he's not going anywhere soon: white resentment and identity politics fully rule our political landscape now, cemented by the backlash against Barack Obama, and the country will continue down this dark path for some time.

White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. And there is every indication that it will keep him there, especially as he continues to transform that seething, irrational fear about an increasingly diverse America into policies that feed his supporters’ worst racial anxieties.

If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Barack Obama’s birth certificate gave him the white nationalist street cred that no other Republican candidate could match, and that credibility has sustained him in office — no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he, and he alone, could Make America White Again.

The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage — that calculated mechanism of executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermines and punishes minority achievement and aspiration. No wonder that, even while his White House sinks deeper into chaos, scandal and legislative mismanagement, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among whites (and only whites) has remained unnaturally high. Washington may obsess over Obamacare repeal, Russian sanctions and the debt ceiling, but Mr. Trump’s base sees something different — and, to them, inspiring.

Like on Christmas morning, every day brings his supporters presents: travel bans against Muslims, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Hispanic communities and brutal, family-gutting deportations, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, an Election Integrity Commission stacked with notorious vote suppressors, announcements of a ban on transgender personnel in the military, approval of police brutality against “thugs,” a denial of citizenship to immigrants who serve in the armed forces and a renewed war on drugs that, if it is anything like the last one, will single out African-Americans and Latinos although they are not the primary drug users in this country. Last week, Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions put the latest package under the tree: a staffing call for a case on reverse discrimination in college admissions, likely the first step in a federal assault on affirmative action and a determination to hunt for colleges and universities that discriminate against white applicants.

That so many of these policies are based on perception and lies rather than reality is nothing new. White resentment has long thrived on the fantasy of being under siege and having to fight back, as the mass lynchings and destruction of thriving, politically active black communities in Colfax, La. (1873), Wilmington, N.C. (1898), Ocoee, Fla. (1920), and Tulsa, Okla. (1921), attest. White resentment needs the boogeyman of job-taking, maiden-ravaging, tax-evading, criminally inclined others to justify the policies that thwart the upward mobility and success of people of color.

The last half-century hasn’t changed that. The war on drugs, for example, branded African-Americans and Latinos as felons, which stripped them of voting rights and access to housing and education just when the civil rights movement had pushed open the doors to those opportunities in the United States.

Similarly, the intensified war on immigrants comes, not coincidentally, at the moment when Latinos have gained visible political power, asserted their place in American society and achieved greater access to schools and colleges. The ICE raids have terrorized these communities, led to attendance drop-offs in schools and silenced many from even seeking their legal rights when abused.

And it's my generation who is happily embracing this.  We grew up with improving race relations, but all of that was dismantled as Republicans out of power went back to the oldest trick in the book to win back two-thirds of the states, Congress, and the White House.  At this point the Trump regime is actively hostile to the civil rights of anyone who isn't white and male, and Millennials are discovering a heady cocktail of power indeed.

And so it goes.  We're still fighting the same civil rights battles of 50 years ago because the people who needed to change didn't.

Sunday Long Read: These Kids Are Liable To Snap(chat)

This week's Sunday Long Read comes from The Atlantic with an excerpt from sociologist Jean Twenge's book on the post-Millennial generation.  Twenge calls them the iGen, the first generation completely connected to the world of social media, and they are as different from Millennials as Millennials are from Generation X.

The big thing for iGen is the smartphone, as the PC was to my generation and the TV was to my parents, and while Twenge finds iGen teens are far less likely to drink, smoke, have sex or even drive then Millennials or their Gen X parents, Twenge cautions that coming of age in the world where Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook are available 24/7 is putting today's kids at serious risk of mental health issues.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it. 

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. 

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. 

Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills. 

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones. 

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

I'm going to say that having been around computers since I was in grade school and the internet since high school, (the glorious days of telnet, VAX terminals, America Online and my first IT job at a dial-up ISP) that the problem is less the technology and more of the people using it.  Kids can be cruel, that part hasn't changed. Kids given a platform and someone to pick on with other kids watching can be awful. Kids given the power of social media and a global audience can be lethal.

Giving that power to kids is a bad idea, but at the same time in 2017 I've made the argument on a number of occasions that the internet should be treated as a public utility, like power, water and sanitation.  You need it in order to function as a member of society, full stop.

What the solution is, parents that get involved in their kids' lives, still applies.

Our Little Domestic Terror Problem Hasn't Gone Away

This time in Bloomington, Minnesota, where "Minnesota nice" has turned into an IED through the window of an Islamic center and detonating.

A blast caused by what the FBI called “an improvised explosive device” rocked a Bloomington Islamic center before dawn Saturday, just as a small group of Muslim worshipers had gathered for the day’s first round of prayers.

No one was hurt in the explosion, which heavily damaged an imam’s office at the Dar Al Farooq Center and sent smoke wafting through the large building. Windows in the office were shattered, either by the blast or by an object thrown through them.

The blast was reported at 5:05 a.m. as about a dozen people gathered in a room nearby for morning prayers and jolted awake many residents of the neighborhood. Congregants and neighbors expressed relief that there were no injuries, but also reacted with shock and dismay.

When police arrived, they found smoke and fire damage to the building, said Bloomington Police Chief Jeff Potts. Agents from the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives soon joined the investigation. A large area outside the center was taped off as investigators, including members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, combed through the grass.

At an early evening news conference, Special Agent in Charge Richard Thornton said an “improvised explosive device” caused the blast, but that investigators still must determine “who and why.”

“The post-blast environment is very detailed,” he said. “You search the wide area in an attempt to find as many components as you can of the device to help us understand how the device was made. That process is substantially complete. … It was an improvised explosive device that was set off early this morning.”

Hopefully the FBI will track this bastard down, but as to the why, well, welcome to Trump's America, where both immigrants and Muslims are targets for ongoing violence sanctioned by the man currently on a 17-day golf vacation.

The Crackdown Sessions

Didn't take long for this week's Trump regime leaks to trigger another round of open threats from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions against the free press, and I'm betting this time around they won't be idle threats, either.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Friday that the Department of Justice plans to crack down on leaks coming from the department and intelligence community.

“I have this message for our friends in the intelligence community. The Department of Justice is open for business and I have, this morning, this warning: Don’t do it,” Sessions said. “For the past several months we have made changes and are seriously ramping up our efforts.”

Sessions also said the department is reviewing its policy on media subpoenas.

“We respect the important role the press plays and will give them respect, but they cannot place lives at risk with impunity,” he said. “We must balance their role with protecting our national security and the lives of those who serve in the intelligence community, the armed forces and all law-abiding Americans.”

“This nation must end this culture of leaks,” he went on. “We will investigate and seek to bring criminals to justice. We will not allow rogue anonymous sources with security clearances to sell out our country.”

Sessions noted that the department has tripled the number of active leak investigations compared to the number at the end of the last administration.

President Donald Trump has raged against leaks that he says are damaging to him, and publicly complained that Sessions has not been tough enough on leaks.

“I want the attorney general to be much tougher,” Trump said last week. “I want the leaks from intelligence agencies, which are leaking like rarely have they ever leaked before, at a very important level. These are intelligence agencies we cannot have that happen.”

Sessions wants leakers, and he's willing to go through as many press protections as possible in order to get them, but I honestly don't think it will be very long before Sessions starts putting reporters in jail along with career FBI, CIA and NSA folks, who just happen to be to people who are working on the investigations into Trump's dirty laundry.

Then again, he might go after Mueller too.  Who knows?

The closer the trap's jaws get to Trump's throat, the more he'll lash out.  It's what failing dictators do, folks.

Last Call For The General Gets A Head

Let's not mince words here: White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly is still a right-wing racist Islamophobic lunatic and getting him out of Homeland Security (while a good idea) still means he's there working for Trump.

But if anything, Kelly seems to be good at collecting pelts of Trump's worst hires because Trump himself won't do it.  Kelly has already cashiered Tony Scaramucci and along with an alliance with National Security Council head Gen. H.R. McMaster, the notion is that Kelly will start taking out the garbage.

Looks like Kelly may have found his first head in actual card-carrying Bannon flunkie Seb Gorka, a man whom nobody can explain why he is still there and eating all the office snacks.

A senior administration official says Sebastian Gorka, a former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as a counterterrorism adviser, will be leaving the White House in the coming days.

The official says that Gorka had initially been hired to play a key role on the Strategic Initiatives Group, an advisory panel created by Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon to run parallel to the National Security Council.

But that group fizzled out in the early months of the administration. Gorka was unable to get clearance for the National Security Council after he was charged last year with carrying a weapon at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

The official spoke anonymously to discuss private personnel matters. Attempts to reach Gorka by email for comment were not immediately successful.

Kelly is still a jackass, but Gorka was a no-fooling Nazi white supremacist fascist, so if Gorka's out, that's a small point in Kelly's favor that's still completely overshadowed by the fact he's still working for Trump.

Israeli Serious Charges For Bibi

With all the news this week on the Mueller grand jury, it's important to remember there's a lot going on in the realm of political scandal outside the US as well.  In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro will today convene the first meeting of his 545-member constituent assembly on the way to what will almost assuredly be a full dictatorship.  In Brazil, President Michel Temer has narrowly escaped impeachment on corruption charges but his presidency is in tatters.  But the big one is in Israel, where PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now facing a major bribery and fraud scandal as his former chief of staff has turned state's evidence against him.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's former chief of staff Ari Harow has reached an agreement with the prosecution to turn state's witness in two corruption cases against Netanyahu.

Under the deal, Harow will be convicted of fraud and breach of trust in a separate case, but will avoid jail time. Instead, he will do community service as pay a 700,000-shekel ($193,000) fine. 

The Israel Police confirmed on Thursday that the prime minister is suspected of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu's bureau rejected the allegations on Thursday, calling them "unfounded claims." 

Harow served for two terms in key positions in the Prime Minister’s Office. In 2009 he was appointed bureau chief, but left after a year to pursue private business interests before coming back in 2014, this time as chief of staff. In between he maintained “friendly contact” with the prime minister, as he attested in the past in an official document. 

In 2015, Harow was arrested by the national fraud squad, on suspicions he was continuing to secretly operate a private lobbying and consulting business while he was the premier’s chief of staff. Last year, when the police began to examine matters pertaining to the prime minister, Harow landed in Israel and was immediately taken for questioning under warning, which meant he might be accused of a crime. The moves toward a state’s witness deal began at that time.

And those bribery charges are pretty serious.  Netanyahu is in a lot of trouble because Harow was nailed dead to rights on some pretty nasty stuff, and he has flipped on his boss as a result:

The two cases mentioned in the police request are known as Case 1000, which involves Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, who was asked to purchase luxury items for Netanyahu and his wife; and Case 2000, in which Netanyahu tried to concoct a deal with Arnon Mozes, the publisher of the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

Harow, who is suspected of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, aggravated fraud and money laundering, was also a key figure in a case that the police did not pursue. He headed the American Friends of Likud, which allegedly paid the salary of Odelia Karmon, an adviser to Netanyahu when the prime minister, who heads the Likud party, was opposition leader.

During the investigation of Harow, police confiscated his cell phone, and found recordings documenting the Netanyahu-Mozes conversations that are the basis of the Case 2000 probe. In the Karmon case, the attorney general did not believe that investigators would be able to produce evidence justifying a criminal indictment for alleged offenses that are subject in any event to a 10-year statute of limitations. Senior law enforcement officials believed, however, that the investigation should have been pursued, especially in light of recordings of Karmon that were obtained by police in which she described the sequence of events after she received her salary. 

“Bibi became insanely hysterical, all of a sudden. I don’t know who whispered to him, after all, you can light him up like a flame ... and then he said to me: Odelia, give back the money.” In the recording, Karmon also mentioned Harow: “He plied Netanyahu with many things. Flight tickets or whenever Netanyahu was in a bind. But not in exchange for anything. He was honest and sweet. He was simply helpless.”

Harow in other words had the evidence on him to burn Bibi and cashed it in for immunity.  Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Bye bye Bibi?  We'll see, but it definitely doesn't look good for him.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

More on last night's Mueller grand jury investigation news, last night of course the WSJ confirmed that the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign had empaneled a grand jury to look at a wide range of evidence related to the Russian collusion investigation.  Other news outlets running after this story have released additional information now, and together it paints a pretty grim picture for Trump and company.  First, CNN confirms that the grand jury is looking into Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russian nationals in June of 2016 and has issued subpoenas.

Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller has issued grand jury subpoenas related to Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

The subpoena seeks both documents and testimony from people involved in the meeting, CNN has learned. That meeting has drawn scrutiny since an email exchange beforehand indicated the Russians offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton. 

Mueller's grand jury activity was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. 

Mueller's team of investigators continue to look into whether President Donald Trump or any of his campaign associates colluded with Russia during the presidential contest.

Ahh, but there's more from CNN.

In the summer of 2016, US intelligence agencies noticed a spate of curious contacts between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian intelligence, according to current and former US officials briefed on the investigation. James Comey, in his Senate testimony, said the FBI opened an investigation into Trump campaign-Russia connections in July 2016. The strands of the two investigations began to merge. 

In the months that followed, investigators turned up intercepted communications appearing to show efforts by Russian operatives to coordinate with Trump associates on damaging Hillary Clinton's election prospects, officials said. CNN has learned those communications included references to campaign chairman Paul Manafort. 

That's a big one, folks.  Manafort again was Trump's campaign chairman in 2016.

Even before Mueller was appointed, FBI investigators focused on four Trump associates: Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman, Michael Flynn, former national security adviser, Carter Page, cited by Trump as a national security adviser, and Roger Stone, a Trump friend and supporter who openly engaged with hackers calling themselves Guccifer 2.0, which US intelligence says was an online persona created as a cover for Russian intelligence agents. 

The approach to the Manafort and Flynn probes may offer a template for how investigators' focus on possible financial crimes could help gain leverage and cooperation in the investigation. 

CNN has learned that investigators became more suspicious when they turned up intercepted communications that US intelligence agencies collected among suspected Russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with Manafort, who served as campaign chairman for three months, to coordinate information that could damage Hillary Clinton's election prospects, the US officials say. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians. 

Manafort faces potential real troubles in the probe, according to current and former officials. Decades of doing business with foreign regimes with reputations for corruption, from the Philippines to Ukraine, had led to messy finances. 

The focus now for investigators is whether Manafort was involved in money laundering or tax violations in his business dealings with pro-Russia parties in Ukraine. He's also been drawn into a related investigation of his son-in-law's real estate business dealings, some of which he invested in. 

The Trumpies will no doubt tell you that the focus on finances means that the collusion case can't be proven.  As I say, the Feds eventually got Al Capone on tax evasion.

Oh, and the CNN story ends thusly:

Page had been the subject of a secret intelligence surveillance warrant since 2014, earlier than had been previously reported, US officials briefed on the probe told CNN.

No big deal.  The government had a FISA warrant on Carter Page for two years before the Trump campaign hired him, nice.

And that brings us to this: The bigger point is that grand juries don't happen if there's no charges to be brought.  The Mueller investigation is moving inexorably forward, and they are issuing subpoenas (Reuters too backs up the CNN subpoena story.)

Again though this case will take months, if not years.  There's a lot here, there's a lot of evidence to examine that we don't know about yet, but the grand jury will have access to it all.  But the train is moving forward and somewhere down the line will be the decision to seek indictments against Trump campaign officials.  We're most likely very far from that point. 

But just six months into this administration and we're already at the grand jury stage.  Things may not be moving as fast as we'd like, but they are moving, deliberately, inexorably, and inevitably forward, towards one Donald J. Trump.

Count on it.

StupidiNews!

• At a rally in Huntington, WV last night Donald Trump characterized the investigation into his campaign as a "total fabrication" and again demanded Hillary Clinton be investigated.
• The US Secret Service has been unable to come to a financial agreement to keep a command post in Trump Tower in NYC, the post has been moved to a "nearby off-site location".
• Russian officials confirm that some 150 miners are being evacuated from a Siberian diamond mine after water broke into the underground mining complex.
• As border tensions between India and China expand, India is preparing to commission the first of six new naval attack submarines as Beijing increases its fleet in the Indian Ocean.
• Cable giant Charter has moved 30% of the customers acquired in last year's merger with Time Warner and Bright House to new higher cable prices, tens of thousands of customers have left.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time

Well now.  Today just got real interesting.

Here at Mueller Brewing Company, if you've got the time, we've got the grand jury.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury in Washington to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The grand jury, which began its work in recent weeks, is a sign that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry is ramping up and that it will likely continue for months. Mr. Mueller is investigating Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign or associates colluded with the Kremlin as part of that effort.
A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, Joshua Stueve, declined to comment. Moscow has denied seeking to influence the election, and Mr. Trump has vigorously disputed allegations of collusion. The president has called Mr. Mueller’s inquiry a “witch hunt.”

Ty Cobb, special counsel to the president, said he wasn’t aware that Mr. Mueller had started using a new grand jury. “Grand jury matters are typically secret,” Mr. Cobb said. “The White House favors anything that accelerates the conclusion of his work fairly.…The White House is committed to fully cooperating with Mr. Mueller.” 

Before Mr. Mueller was tapped in May to be special counsel, federal prosecutors had been using at least one other grand jury, located in Alexandria, Va., to assist in their criminal investigation of Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser. That probe, which has been taken over by Mr. Mueller’s team, focuses on Mr. Flynn’s work in the private sector on behalf of foreign interests. 

Grand juries are powerful investigative tools that allow prosecutors to subpoena documents, put witnesses under oath and seek indictments, if there is evidence of a crime. Legal experts said that the decision by Mr. Mueller to impanel a grand jury suggests he believes he will need to subpoena records and take testimony from witnesses. 

A grand jury in Washington is also more convenient for Mr. Mueller and his 16 attorneys—they work just a few blocks from the U.S. federal courthouse where grand juries meet—than one that is 10 traffic-clogged miles away in Virginia. 

“This is yet a further sign that there is a long-term, large-scale series of prosecutions being contemplated and being pursued by the special counsel,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. “If there was already a grand jury in Alexandria looking at Flynn, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel for the same guy. This suggests that the investigation is bigger and wider than Flynn, perhaps substantially so.” 

Thomas Zeno, a federal prosecutor for 29 years before becoming a lawyer at the Squire Patton Boggs law firm, said the grand jury is “confirmation that this is a very vigorous investigation going on.”

“This doesn’t mean he is going to bring charges,” Mr. Zeno cautioned. “But it shows he is very serious. He wouldn’t do this if it were winding down.”

The table is being set, folks.  The feast is being prepared.

And I'm betting a big platter of spatchcocked orange chicken is on the menu in the months ahead.

In Order To Form A More Perfect Union

The United Auto Workers are still trying to unionize auto plants in at-will employment Southern states, and they've been trying for over a decade now with basically zero success even as the Great Recession mangled the industry and then the recovery under Obama.

But in the age of Trump, where auto sales are starting to slump again after several solid years, the push to unionize may become far more important in states where the focus on getting good high-paying jobs.  The problem is nobody locally thinks unions are the answer anymore,.

For nearly a decade, the United Auto Workers union has tried to organize workers at Nissan Motor Co Ltd's (7201.T) assembly plant here, challenging the company's wages, safety record and commitment to treating African-American workers fairly. 

Starting Thursday, the roughly 4,000 workers at one of Mississippi's largest industrial employers will cast their votes, affecting not only their own futures but the union's as well. 

Another failure to organize a southern auto factory would leave the UAW weakened ahead of contract negotiations with the Detroit Three automakers in 2019, when many analysts forecast U.S. auto sales will be in a cyclical slump. 

The organizing vote, which the UAW called for last month, has divided workers at the Canton plant, which builds Nissan Murano sport utility vehicles, commercial vans and Titan and Frontier pickup trucks. 

Pro-union workers said the plant has a record of poor safety and complain that the company moved to a 401(k) defined contribution plan from a traditional plan. 

"This is not about wages, I'm concerned about safety issues at the plant and about my pension," says Patricia Ruffian, 51. "They say if we vote for the union we're going to have nothing, we have to start from scratch, and that's not true." 

The UAW also claims Nissan has illegally threatened workers that if they vote for the union, the plant will close. Based on those claims, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board has issued a number of complaints that Nissan has made that threat a number of times in recent years. The automaker denies the allegations. The outcome of the election could be contested, leading to a test of how the Trump-era NLRB will handle contentious labor issues. 

Rodney Francis, director of Human Resources at Nissan's Canton plant, said, "Labor rights are about the right to organize, or not to organize. All we've been doing is providing employees with the facts so they can make an informed decision and at the end of the day this is about what they choose." 

Nissan has strong supporters on the factory floor, who point to the history of problems at Detroit's unionized automakers and reject the UAW's arguments that black workers are not treated fairly. 

"Black people are doing much better here since Nissan came," said Tony Jacobson, 52, who is black. He has worked at the plant since it opened in 2003 and makes $28 per hour - comparable to the top rate for unionized workers at General Motors Co (GM.N) or Ford Motor Co (F.N). "I'm trying to save our livelihoods, I don't want Canton to be like Detroit."

If you haven't noticed, the fearmongering from FOX and Friends (and friends) are that Detroit's economy was destroyed by unions, and that if places unionize in 2017, they'll simply go to another plant in another state without them and leave the community destroyed.  Unfortunately, a lot of automakers and other large multinational corporations are big enough to do just that with their North American operations.

But unions have to start somewhere and grow membership or perish.  We'll see what the vote turns out to be, but if it's anything like Volkswagen's plant in Tennessee a few years back, I wouldn't hold out for too much hope.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

John Sipher and Steve Hall, two former career CIA men (one a station chief, one a Russia analyst) give their opinion in the NY Times on the Trump regime's growing collusion troubles and the Mueller investigation, and come up with a very plausible scenario of how things could have possibly went down.

Did the Trump campaign collude with Russian agents trying to manipulate the course of the 2016 election? Some analysts have argued that the media has made too much of the collusion narrative; that Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Kremlin-linked Russians last year was probably innocent (if ill-advised); or that Russian operatives probably meant for the meeting to be discovered because they were not trying to recruit Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump as agents, but mainly trying to undermine the American political system. 

We disagree with these arguments. We like to think of ourselves as fair-minded and knowledgeable, having between us many years of experience with the C.I.A. dealing with Russian intelligence services. It is our view not only that the Russian government was running some sort of intelligence operation involving the Trump campaign, but also that it is impossible to rule out the possibility of collusion between the two. 

The original plan drawn up by the Russian intelligence services was probably multilayered. They could have begun an operation intended to disrupt the presidential campaign, as well as an effort to recruit insiders to help them over time — the two are not mutually exclusive. It is the nature of Russian covert actions (or as the Russians would call them, “active measures”) to adapt over time, providing opportunities for other actions that extend beyond the original intent. 

It is entirely plausible, for example, that the original Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers was an effort simply to collect intelligence and get an idea of the plans of the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate. Once derogatory information emerged from that operation, the Russians might then have seen an opportunity for a campaign to influence or disrupt the election. When Donald Trump Jr. responded “I love it” to proffers from a Kremlin-linked intermediary to provide derogatory information obtained by Russia on Hillary Clinton, the Russians might well have thought that they had found an inside source, an ally, a potential agent of influence on the election. 

The goal of the Russian spy game is to nudge a person to step over the line into an increasingly conspiratorial relationship. First, for a Russian intelligence recruitment operation to work, they would have had some sense that Donald Trump Jr. was a promising target. Next, as the Russians often do, they made a “soft” approach, setting the bait for their target via the June email sent by Rob Goldstone, a British publicist, on behalf of a Russian pop star, Emin Agalarov.

They then employed a cover story — adoptions — to make it believable to the outside world that there was nothing amiss with the proposed meetings. They bolstered this idea by using cutouts, nonofficial Russians, for the actual meeting, enabling the Trump team to claim — truthfully — that there were no Russian government employees at the meeting and that it was just former business contacts of the Trump empire who were present. 

When the Trump associates failed to do the right thing by informing the F.B.I., the Russians probably understood that they could take the next step toward a more conspiratorial relationship. They knew what bait to use and had a plan to reel in the fish once it bit.

Again, the Russians have been dealing with Trump for decades, he's a known quantity to them.  They knew how he worked, they know how he played, and everything in between.  They simply took the person they knew and played the game from there.  It was far, far more successful than they could have dreamed and the damage done to our country will ne generation as a result.  They know they've scored a massive victory, and as both Sipher and Hall have pointed out, finding the evidence of collusion should be considered somewhat inevitable.

The goal wasn't to get Trump into the White House, although that was secondary and arguably the best outcome for Moscow.  The goal was to damage the US political system to the point where it could no longer function and interact reliably with allies or interfere with enemies.

The last six months have proven to be the greatest success of Russian spycraft in history in that regard.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump has signed legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea that limits his authority to remove them, Russia is threatening a "full-scale trade war" in return.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry may be Trump's choice to head the Department of Homeland Security as previous DHS head Gen. John Kelly is now White House Chief of Staff.
• Republicans and the White House are pushing newly proposed legislation to cut legal immigration to the US in half over ten years, but the bill faces long odds in the Senate.
• In the wake of Saudi Arabia's continued blockade, Qatar is moving forward with granting some benefits of citizenship to permanent resident foreigners.
• Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is accusing Louisville TV station WDRB of flying a drone over his house, Bevin's million-dollar home has been the subject of ethics inquiries in the past.