Bit Of A Break

On vacation this week, so light posting (as I've sure you've seen.)

Should be back to regular order next week.

Never Look A Gift Trump In The Mouth

Republicans are screaming masters of projection, and nobody's better (or worse) at it that Trump. If he has ever accused somebody of doing something immoral or illegal, I guarantee you it's because he's doing it himself, and accepting foreign contributions is no different.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for accepting money from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, complaining during one of the debates, “These are people that kill women and treat women horribly and yet you take their money.” 

That was, of course, before he made his first foreign visit as president to Saudi Arabia—and accepted dozens of gifts from the kingdom. In fact, during Trump’s visit, the White House accepted at least 83 separate gifts from Saudi Arabia, according to a document The Daily Beast has obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department.

The gifts range from the regal (“Artwork featuring picture of President Trump”) to the martial (multiple swords, daggers, leather ammo holders and holsters), to the baroque (tiger and cheetah fur robes, and a dagger made of pure silver with a mother of pearl sheath). Now when the president is contemplating the state of Saudi women’s rights, he can do so before a “large canvas artwork depicting [a] Saudi woman.”

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as a much better man named Jim once said before me.

Amusing as the gifts may be, they are emblematic of a more serious issue: Trump’s embrace of the Saudi regime, a stark reversal from his campaign rhetoric. During the campaign, Trump accused the regime of everything from being responsible for 9/11 to failing to “reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed,” going so far as to threaten to stop buying their oil if they didn’t shape up. 

Trump’s decision to make his first foreign visit to Saudi Arabia was a singular one, breaking with a long-standing presidential tradition of first visiting Mexico or Canada.

“Trump’s decision to visit Saudi first clearly signaled his top prioritization of America’s most profitable relationship with its number one weapons client in the world,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, told The Daily Beast. 

No less noteworthy than the visit itself was the administration’s conduct during it. During the visit, the Trump administration announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis, totaling $350 billion over 10 years. This represented a decisive reversal of the Obama administration’s 2016 policy of blocking certain arms sales to the regime because of civilian deaths in Yemen.

And yet this wouldn't even make the top 20 impeachable violations of the first seven months and change of the Trump regime.  Hell, it would barely make the top 100.

We still see the poison fruits of this deal too, a green light on a Saudi blockade of Qatar that is going into month four and now open calls for regime change in Doha.

A leading voice in Qatar’s political opposition has thrown his support behind an emerging contender for emir, asserting that new leadership in Doha is the only way to resolve a regional crisis over its policies. 

Khalid al-Hail, currently exiled in London after being imprisoned and tortured by the government in 2014, told The Jerusalem Post that a consensus candidate has emerged in his conversations with those in Doha’s political class seeking an end to the current Qatari regime.

That figure – Sheikh Abdullah bin Ali bin Abdullah bin Jassim al-Thani – recently met with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman at his summer home in Morocco, and the nation’s crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman. 

Qatar’s emir, Tamim bin Hamad, has in recent years reinforced his country’s support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, to the ire of Sunni powers and the United States.
As a result, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut all diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar on June 5. Together they refuse to normalize ties until Doha changes course, and pivots from its alliance with Iran. 

The crisis has shaken Qatar’s economy and the power dynamics of the region, striking fear in some that rising tensions there may lead to an armed conflict. 

“I consider it a long-term crisis, specifically because the Qatari government refuses to respond and cooperate with the international community in order to reach a resolution,” Hail said in a phone interview from London, speaking through his translator. “The only possible scenario [to end the crisis] is a new emir – and I don’t see an imminent compromise.” 

Yet Hail suggested Abdullah bin Ali might be that candidate, eventually. 

“He is an accepted personality both in the country and in the region, and therefore there are many voices in Qatar who support this person to be appointed the next emir in the country,” Hail said.

A quiet coup for the House of Saud as they appoint a satrap while America looks the other way? No wonder Trump is getting a boatload of gifts.

And this is only the beginning, I suspect.  From one oppressive regime to another.

L'Enfants Terrible, Nuclear Edition

Another nuclear test from North Korea, this time of a missile-mounted ICBM hydrogen bomb, and Trump's response is the promise of war.

North Korea’s detonation of a sixth nuclear bomb on Sunday prompted the Trump administration to warn that even the threat to use such a weapon against the United States and its allies “will be met with a massive military response.’’ 

The test — and President Trump’s response — immediately raised new questions about the president’s North Korea strategy and opened a new rift with a major American ally, South Korea, which Mr. Trump criticized for its “talk of appeasement” with the North. 

The underground blast was by far North Korea’s most powerful ever. Though it was far from clear that the North had set off a hydrogen bomb, as it claimed, the explosion caused tremors that were felt in South Korea and China. Experts estimated that the blast was four to sixteen times more powerful than any the North had set off before, with far more destructive power than the bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. 

Yet after a day of meetings in the Situation Room involving Mr. Trump and his advisers, two phone calls between the president and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, and even demands from some liberal Democrats to cut off North Korea’s energy supplies, Mr. Trump’s aides conceded that they faced a familiar conundrum. 

While the Pentagon has worked up a series of military options for targeted strikes at North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites, Mr. Trump was told that there is no assurance that the United States could destroy them all in a lightning strike, according to officials with knowledge of the exchange. Cyberstrikes, which President Barack Obama ordered against the North’s missile program, have also been judged ineffective.

Mr. Trump hinted at one extreme option: In a Twitter post just before he met his generals, he said that “the United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.’’

The country that does well over 80% of trade with North Korea is China.  Good luck stopping that, Donny.

Still, we have the very real threat of a Second Korean War on our plates, and possibly tens of millions of dead as a result.  I have no idea how we're going to get through this, but I do know the person at the helm of the US should not be Donald Trump for god's sake.

I don't quite think it's Cuban Missile Crisis time yet, but it's getting scary as hell.

Waking Up From The DREAM

As expected, Donald Trump will announce the end of DACA on Tuesday, but delay ending the program for six months in order to call Paul Ryan's bluff on a legislative fix.

President Donald Trump has decided to end the Obama-era program that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises. 

Trump has wrestled for months with whether to do away with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. He has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program and struggled with his own misgivings about targeting minors for deportation.

Conversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program, the two sources said, though White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made. 

In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, “thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.” 

Trump is expected to announce his decision on Tuesday, and the White House informed House Speaker Paul Ryan of the president’s decision on Sunday morning, according to a source close to the administration. Ryan had said during a radio interview on Friday that he didn’t think the president should terminate DACA, and that Congress should act on the issue.

Trump will call Ryan out on Tuesday it seems and leave the problem on his doorstep with a six-month time bomb attached.  Trump can blame Republicans in Congress for failing to fix DACA and he'll get away with it too as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are right now just about the only folks in Washington that everyone hates more than Trump.

If the Dems are smart they'll have a DACA fix bill ready.

But Trump is crafty here, he's not going to take the fall for DACA alone.  Should Ryan and McConnell get a bill through Trump won't sign it anyway, but there's no way one gets to his desk anyhow, the racists in the House GOP may not even let a fix out of committee.

Privately kicking DACA to March must be a relief for a lot of Republicans. A lot can happen in six months politically.

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Our First Drug Crisis

American minority communities ravaged by drugs and indifference is nothing new, folks.  While it only seems to reach "crisis" mode when the victims are suburban and white these days, those silent epidemics have been going on for centuries, all the way back to Native Americans and the oldest drug of all, alcohol.

Before they began to encounter European explorers and fishermen in the sixteenth century, very few indigenous people of the eastern coast of North America had ever tasted alcohol, and none had experienced anything more than the mild inebriation of fermented drinks used ceremonially. Nothing prepared them for the effects of distilled spirits. In 1609, explorer Henry Hudson offered alcohol to a group of Munsee Indians he encountered on Manhattan Island. His purpose in giving them drink was to determine “whether they had any treaherie in them,” but he was surprised when one of the Munsee became intoxicated. “[T]hat was strange to them, for they could not tell how to take it.” It must have been memorable for the Indians as well. (One theory of the origin of the word “Manhattan” is that the Indians named the island manahactanienk—the “place of general inebriation.”) 

The experience of getting drunk for the first time could be terrifying for anyone. Not long after Hudson’s encounter with the Munsee, Captain John Smith, the military leader of the colony at Jamestown, gave liquor to a native man who he was trying to revive. “[I]t pleased God to restore him againe to life, but so drunke and affrighted, that he seemed Lunaticke,” Smith said. The man’s brother was “tormented and grieved” by his wild behavior. 

Once the Indians lost their fear of alcohol, they fell in love with it. The euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death. A Jesuit attempting to convert the Cayuga Indians in the seventeenth century reported that they would announce their intention to get drunk before a drinking episode. “I am going to lose my head,” a man would shout. “I am going to drink the water that takes away one’s wits.” Another missionary noted that the native people appeared to relish the disorientation that occurred as the alcohol took effect. “They rejoice, shouting, ‘Good, good. My head is reeling!’ ” Once a man was drunk on alcohol, he found new powers in himself. When an Ottawa Indian was asked what brandy was made of, he said, “Of hearts and tongues. . . . [A]fter I have drank of it, I fear nothing and I talk like an angel.” The drinker experienced a surge of self-confidence. “[I]n their drunkenness, . . . they become persons of importance, taking pleasure in seeing themselves dreaded by those who do not taste the poison,” a third missionary said. Of course, inebriation also made Indians more vulnerable to manipulation by white men. 

The Europeans expressed shock over the self-destructive way the Indians drank. Alcohol abuse was certainly not unknown among whites, particularly those living on the frontier where many fur traders were killed in drunken brawls. But coming from cultures that had encountered alcohol centuries earlier, some of them had clear rules against abusing alcohol. Prohibitions against drunkenness were spelled out in Christian scripture, Western social etiquette, and even law, but the natives had no prohibitions against getting drunk. Wasn’t that the point? One Indian observed: “The Great Spirit who made all things made everything for some use, and whatever use he design’d anything for, that use it should always be put to; Now, when he made rum, he said, Let this be for Indians to get drunk with. And it must be so.” 

From the beginning, Indians drank to get drunk, to escape. “[G]ive two Savages two or three bottles of brandy. They will sit down and, without eating, will drink one after another until they have emptied them,” a missionary said. At first, there were limited supplies of alcohol in America. But if the Indians didn’t have enough brandy or rum to get everyone drunk, they gave it all to a chosen few. “And if any one chance to be drunk before he hath finisht his proportion (which is ordinarily a quart of Brandy, Rum or Strong-waters), the rest will pour the rest of his part down his throat,” a colonist wrote. The Europeans agreed that the Indians had a drinking problem. “They will pawne their wits to purchase the acquaintance of it,” Thomas Morton said in 1637. “Their paradise is drinking,” Louis Antoine de Bougainville observed a century later.

On the rez today, things aren't much different.  President Obama at least realized this and made crucial inroads to helping, but under Trump, well, under Trump we're basically all screwed, aren't we.

Houston, We Have A Problem, Con't

The effects of Hurricane Harvey will be felt in the Houston region for years, but the short-term effects are still potentially lethal.  The rains may have stopped, but history tells us that with infrastructure critically damaged for millions and the sheer scale of how widespread toxic waters are, the threat of a public health nightmare scenario is almost assured.

For the thousands of people traveled through Harvey’s flood waters to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, safety was not yet at hand. Although delivered from the worst of the storm, the packed masses were one of the loci of another brewing problem, one that officials expect might last a year or more after landfall.

Every flood disaster is also a public-health disaster, and even as Harvey dissipates over the Gulf Coast, the beginnings of that secondary calamity were on display in the Houston area. During the worst of the flooding, hospitals faced critical shortages of food and medicine, people with serious chronic diseases had to make difficult decisions between evacuation and sheltering in place, and hundreds of victims faced prescription shortages and mental-health issues. And based on the health problems people in New Orleans and elsewhere in the region faced after Hurricane Katrina, experts expect major public-health emergencies, environmental illnesses, and outbreaks will only intensify in the aftermath of Harvey.

Those challenges are already taxing the city’s health infrastructure. According to Bill Gentry, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and a former emergency management official, one key public-health issue that attends the early stages of any disaster is the set of risks facing people who are disabled or elderly and face special health needs. “With our push towards home health-care and taking care of more Americans in the home,” Gentry said, “it quickly turns into 'can we get their home health-care needs taken care of,’ with everything from oxygen to prescription meds to getting them clinical access, especially for dialysis. Those types of clinical worries compound as many days as the water stays up.”

Dialysis is a special concern, and for residents in Houston, already approaching crisis. As NPR reports, it’s important for patients with kidney failure to receive dialysis services every two to three days. But local dialysis centers are struggling with the demand, and with shortages of qualified staff, since several nurses who’d normally work in the centers are themselves displaced by the flood. And while companies like the DaVita Med Center and its locations around the Houston area are working around the clock to meet the area’s dialysis needs, as patients go longer without regular services and appointment reminders, the only solution to keeping them alive may be taking them to one of the area’s hospitals.

And the hospitals are running up against their limits, too. When I spoke to Mary Brandt, a pediatric surgeon at Texas Children's Hospital, she was driving home through receding floodwaters after five straight days of work. She and her colleagues had just completed the first shift of what she described as a “military kind of operation,” and fittingly had just been relieved by a team of reinforcements. “Texas Children's Hospital has leadership that has just gotten this down to an art,” Brandt told me. “Everything was covered.”

That military-like response among Houston-area hospitals was largely effective in dealing with some of the most immediate effects of the storm. Brandt’s team saw mostly children who’d faced non-life-threatening injuries and illnesses. Meanwhile, kids with ailments requiring management, like asthma, or those with fevers and other serious conditions were airlifted to the Texas Children’s Hospital building in The Woodlands, a suburb north of Houston. The triage and logistics systems in place for Houston’s hospitals helped ensure that patients with the most sensitive conditions received treatment and resources on time.

Still, there’s reason to suspect that effective disaster-management system will be stressed in the days to come. As Brandt notes, the bulk of patients with conditions directly related to the floods haven’t yet made it to hospitals. “Since the water's just subsiding,” Brandt said, “we're expecting there's going to be a huge number of patients that are going to come in today and tomorrow with problems that they needed to have taken care of in the last few days, but just couldn't get to us.” That “huge number” might be more than hospitals can handle, as Texas Children’s is already near its bed capacity, and local general hospitals like Ben Taub Memorial have already faced food and drug shortages.

Residents of the area will be facing major physical and health issue in the days and weeks ahead, and the misery will only be compounded by the austerity cuts and poor public planning of Texas officials.  The bill for that shortsightedness will come due, and the cost will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of lives.

Where the area goes from here, we don't know.  Americans pull together the most in times like these, but we're about to see if the nation's fourth largest city can hold itself in one piece in a worst-case public health scenario.

I don't have much hope.  I want Houston to prove me wrong, believe me.

The Golden (Brown) State

Harvey dumped a good 4-5 inches of rain here in the Cincy/NKY area over the last 24 hours and of course things are nightmarish in southeastern Texas and western Louisiana, but out on the West Coast the problem is record-smashing heat across California, spawning tinder-dry wildfire conditions as San Francisco and Los Angeles are baking in triple digit temps.

In almost 150 years of record keeping, it has never been as hot in San Francisco as it was on Friday.

Amid a brutal heat wave that has broiled California for a week while intermittently knocking out power to thousands and fueling more than a dozen wildfires, downtown San Francisco hit 106 degrees.

“San Francisco continues to climb. Latest high temperature for downtown is an incredible 106 degrees!” the National Weather Service’s Bay Area station tweeted Friday.

The previous record was 103 degrees, set in 2000. San Franciscans got creative on social media to document their pain.

But that was not even the worst of it for Northern California. By 3 p.m., the East Bay valley cities of Livermore and Pleasanton were at 110 degrees. Livermore was expected to flirt with its all-time record of 115 degrees Saturday — but came up short Friday, reaching 109 degrees.

“When we’re approaching all-time record highs, that’s very unusual,” said Steve Anderson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

The temperature reached 108 degrees in San Jose, breaking the city’s record for Sept. 1 of 101 degrees, set in 1950.

The heat wave marks the finale for what has ended up being the state’s hottest summer on record, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said.

All-time record highs in California, all-time record flooding in Texas, and more hurricanes on the way.   And it's not just America seeing awful weather, either.  As much as a third of Bangladesh is underwater with 1,200 dead and the toll rising dramatically as monsoon flooding in South Asia has inundated tens of millions from Nepal to Pakistan.

Welcome to the age of Chinese hoaxes climate change, guys.  As Captain Barbossa said in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, "Ye best start believin'" in climate change stories.  "Yer in one."

General Chaos In The White House

Martin "BooMan" Longman thinks Trump WH Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly is headed for the exits in Trumptempber:

I will be mildly surprised if Kelly lasts to the end of the month. I don’t see the point in what he is trying to do, and I doubt he’ll be able to see any point in it for much longer. He can’t save this administration or even keep it afloat. And I don’t think Trump will stop disrespecting him in front of the staff, so unless he enjoys being treated like Reince Priebus he’s going to take a walk or get himself fired before too much longer.

Things might be different if the administration were not taking on water faster than Kelly can bail it out, or if September were not set up as a crucible custom-designed to destroy the illusions of Republicans and Trump supporters everywhere. But playtime is over and the grim waiter has brought the check. Failure will begin to roll down like waters, and haplessness like a mighty stream. Brother shall deliver up brother, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause their political death.

Through it all, for as long as he lasts, Kelly will vainly try to steer the ship away from the shoals, and he’ll take the blame for errors not of his making and decisions made against his advice.

The real issue is what happens after Kelly departs, depending on how much damage is done with Trump ending DACA, possibly shutting down the government and wrecking the country's credit rating over the debt ceiling, botching tax reform, and running out of time for whatever hail Mary play on Trumpcare happens before September 30.

The same goes for Rex Tillerson, by the way.  He's not much longer for this State Department job in this dumpster fire of an administration, and neither is Treasury Secretary Gary Cohn.  It's possible and even likely that the three of them (along with Gen. Mattis at the Pentagon) get a hold on the country and run things as best they can for a while, but eventually they will realize that Trump is headed for history's septic tank and anyone along with him will be covered in crap.

It's even more likely that Mueller will come along and pull the plug anyway.  Where the country goes from there, I can't tell you.  Trump won't go quietly or peacefully and things could get violent pretty fast.  But Kelly could be a big part of directing the country towards the lifeboats.

Maybe.

We'll see. 

Scorched Earth, Hurricane Wind And Fired Staff: Trumptember

As Martin BooMan Longman reminds us, September is when Trump and the GOP will remember every cloudy day.

It’s happened. The Republicans’ month-from-hell has arrived. It’s the month I coined a meat-grinder. And it’s going to get off to the slowest of starts owing to the long Labor Day weekend holiday. There will much work for responsible government officials to do, and very little time for them to get it done. 

Yet, the president is the farthest thing from focused. The Russia investigation is terrifying him. He wants to fire his Secretary of State and it looks like Rex Tillerson would welcome that outcome. He’s fuming at his National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn because Cohn essentially called him a racist in public, but he doesn’t feel like he afford to fire him because he’s trying to pivot to a doomed tax reform effort. He’s chomping at the bit his chief of staff put on him to limit his access to fake news and crazy supporters and advisers. He’s still obsessed with his media coverage and the camera angles and attendance he gets at his political rallies. He’s more energized by his efforts to settle scores with Republican senators who have crossed him than he is with attracting the support of Democratic senators he will soon need. He’s recently made open war on the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, both of whom have been increasingly critical of his behavior and performance. Most of all, he misses the brief period during which the job of president was kind of fun.

And every day this month, more pictures of Hurricane Harvey's devastation will come in and the job of fixing it will be on his shoulders too.  Tillerson and Cohn might not survive the month as cabinet secretaries, hell Tillerson might not survive the weekend.

The job is hard, and Trump was never up for actually doing it.  Having the orange idiot at the helm is no longer funny or darkly humorous, but deadly serious (especially if Hurricane Irma comes to visit the US too).  Things are going to go extremely badly this month for Trump and for the country.

As Trump lashes out like a badger in a burlap sack, his attacks are not suited to his challenges. He threatens to force a government shutdown if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall, but he has absolutely no plan for getting the votes he’d need from Democrats to get his money. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get the debt ceiling raised or whether or not he should attach it to disaster relief. He doesn’t even have a theory of where the votes will come from or what he might need to trade for those votes. He says that he still wants Obamacare repealed but doesn’t understand that the opportunity to do that will end the moment the Republicans pass a new budget aimed at enacting tax reform. He senses that he’s completely blocked legislatively and calls for an end of the Senate’s filibuster, not realizing that he doesn’t and never will have anywhere near the votes he needs to make that change. 

This is how September is beginning for the president. Lord knows how it will end.

That's the killer.  There are plenty of very plausible scenarios right now where as bad as September is going to most likely be for us, October can easily be far worse, and a lot of those disturbingly plausible scenarios involve Trump saying "screw it" and doing something colossally stupid out of anger, frustration, dementia or a combination of all three.

Hope you enjoyed summer, because fall is going to be a killer.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

More Trump/Russia news on the Mueller investigation front today and it's both nerdily boring and delightfully schadenfreude-filled as the former FBI Director is going to the best forensic accountants in the world to handle Trump's twisted money trail by enlisting the IRS's top criminal investigators.

Special counsel Bob Mueller has teamed up with the IRS. According to sources familiar with his investigation into alleged Russian election interference, his probe has enlisted the help of agents from the IRS’ Criminal Investigations unit.

This unit—known as CI—is one of the federal government’s most tight-knit, specialized, and secretive investigative entities. Its 2,500 agents focus exclusively on financial crime, including tax evasion and money laundering. A former colleague of Mueller’s said he always liked working with IRS’ special agents, especially when he was a U.S. Attorney.

And it goes without saying that the IRS has access to Trump’s tax returns—documents that the president has long resisted releasing to the public.

Potential financial crimes are a central part of Mueller’s probe. One of his top deputies, Andy Weissmann, formerly helmed the Justice Department’s Enron probe and has extensive experience working with investigative agents from the IRS.

“From the agents, I know everyone has the utmost respect for both Muellerand Weissmann,” said Martin Sheil, a retired IRS Criminal Investigations agent.

And he said Mueller and Weissmann are known admirers of those agents’ work.

“They view them with the highest regard,” Sheil said. “IRS special agents are the very best in the business of conducting financial investigations. They will quickly tell you that it took an accountant to nab Al Capone, and it’s true.”

“The FBI’s expertise is spread out over so many statutes—and particularly since 9/11, where they really focused on counterintelligence and counterterror—that they simply don’t have the financial investigative expertise that the CI agents have,” Sheil continued. “When CI brings a case to a U.S. Attorney, it is done. It’s wrapped up with a ribbon and a bow. It’s just comprehensive.” 

Honestly surprised this didn't happen sooner.  The FBI has pretty good bookkeepers but hey, considering Trump has been hiding his tax returns for years now, I'd ask the IRS to help out too if I were Mueller.  We'll see what they can dig up on this mess, because it's the key to nailing the entire Trump regime to the wall and maybe, just maybe, saving this country.

StupidiNews!

• Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke has resigned his position, Clarke has faced years of accusations of police brutality and abuse, he is expected to take a job in the Trump regime.
• The death toll from Harvey has risen to 44 as nearly nearly two million have been displaced or have evacuated voluntarily, Beaumont, Texas remains without drinking water.
• Kenya's Supreme Court has invalidated this month's re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta over vote rigging, a new presidential election has been ordered by the end of October.
• Harvey has knocked out 60% of the country's ethylene production and has taken with it America's production of everything from grocery bags to PVC pipes to medical and auto parts.
• Apple is expected to announce the new iPhone 8 on September 12 in Cupertino, the top-end smartphone is expected to retail for over $1000.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter

Black Lives Matter, even when police freely admit our lives are worthless. Breanna Edwards at The Root:

Y’all, these cops ain’t even trying to pretend anymore. Released dashcam footage provided to a local Georgia news station shows an officer’s interaction with a white female driver who claimed she was afraid to move her hands during a traffic stop due to all the recent videos of cops shooting and/or attacking folks. 

That’s when the Cobb County, Ga., police officer could be heard reassuring the woman that she wouldn’t get hurt because she’s not black.

“But you’re not black. Remember, we only kill black people. We only kill black people, right?” the officer, identified as Lt. Greg Abbott by WSBTV could be heard saying. 

Now Police Chief Mike Register is attempting to do damage control, launching an internal investigation and placing Abbott on administrative duties pending the outcome of that investigation.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I do not know all the nuances of the legal system, but what the hell exactly is there left to investigate?

“The statements was [sic] made by an individual. They are not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County police department and this county in general,” Register said. 

Register indicated that the recording was taken from a DUI traffic stop last year, before he became chief, and that Abbott made his comments after the woman indicated that she was just too nervous to reach down to get her phone due to her exposure to videos on police brutality. 

“No matter what context it was said in, it should not have been said,” Register added. “We’re not making excuses. We’re meeting this head on and we’re going to deal with it.”

No, you're not going to "deal with it".  America has been "not dealing with it" quite pointedly for 400 years now, it's what America does.  The notion that Abbott's statements didn't reflect Cobb County Georgia PD as a whole is horseshit, because Abbott's statements represent the views of basically every police department in America.

There's nothing about the possible humorous intent of the statement that changes it from being the truth.  We are allowed to exist only because the police haven't decided to kill us yet, and that goes for every black person in this country, full stop.

That tree of liberty we keep hearing about often gets refreshed with the blood of black people.  The cops know it, the people know it, we all know it, and any efforts to do something about it get us labeled as terrorists.

When that becomes official under Trump, that's only when the horrors see the light of day.  They'll happen anyway, they are occurring right now and will continue to do so.

I wouldn't wish being black in America on anyone, and I live it daily.

Houston, We Have A Problem, Con't

America's fourth-largest city is underwater and will remain so for months, and as Chuck Pierce points out, the fate of Baghdad on the Bayou was sealed decades ago by Governors and state and local lawmakers in both parties.

It is the Christian thing to do in the middle of tragedies like the one currently unfolding along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf coast not to politicize human suffering and, certainly, the stories of people rescuing their fellow citizens from this calamity deserve to be told and they deserve to be spread as widely as possible. But there is nothing I can find in the Gospels that would forbid us from politicizing politics. So let us summon the ghost of Walter Winchell and review some of the events of the past few days.

Item: In Crosby, Texas, there is a place called the Arkema chemical plant where they work with something called organic peroxides. This plant is located amid a residential and business district where, remarkably, human beings live and work. If the cooling systems in the plant fail, as they apparently have, these organic peroxides can explode. A 1.5 mile radius around the plant has been evacuated. 

That plant exploded early this morning, by the way.

Item: Houston is home to a great number of SuperFund sites—at least a dozen in Harris County alone—because, what the hell, they have to be somewhere, right, and some place has to be the Petrochemical Capital Of America? From the WaPo:

With its massive petroleum and chemical industry, Houston, part of the "Chemical Coast," presents a huge challenge in a major flooding event, said Mathy Stanislaus, who oversaw the federal Superfund program throughout the Obama administration. Typically the EPA tries to identify Superfund sites in a major storm's path to "shore up the active operations" and "minimize seepage from sites," Stanislaus said. "This is not the time to dictate; it's the time to work together well with state and local officials to think about needs that need to be met." 

Item: In Baytown, there is a Chevron Phillips petrochemical facility in a place called Cedar Bayou. As you might have guessed from that name, the facility is, at present, fish food. ExxonMobil has similar problems, which it is involuntarily sharing with its fellow Texans and will be for some time. 

Item: And this one may be my favorite, which is to say, the one that pushes me under the bed the furthest. On Galveston Island, there is the Galveston National Laboratory, which is part of the University of Texas Medical Branch. This laboratory contains some of the most deadly biological agents found in the known world, many of them of the airborne variety. It contain several Bio-Safety Level 4 labs, which are basically the places where plagues are studied. And here's the thing, as HuffPost explains—nobody knows what's going on there at the moment:

There has been almost no news from Galveston as journalists have reported being blocked from reaching the island because of severe flooding. There has been no reporting at all on the condition of the lab. A call to the laboratory on Tuesday immediately went to voicemail. 

Here's a professor with some happy news.

But the generators run on fuel that would have to be replenished. It is not known if the lab is accessible to emergency crews to refuel the generators, which are stored on the roof, according to the 2008 Times piece. "As I see it the existential problem is this: What happens if and when the fuel for the back-up generators runs out?" asked University of Illinois professor Francis Boyle, an expert in biological weapons. "The negative air pressure that keeps (the) bugs in there ends. And (the) bugs can then escape."

To recap, 6.5 million plus people from Corpus Christi to Beaumont and Port Arthur into Louisiana (so really more like 10 million) are screwed.  The biological, ecological, and chemical damage to Houston from Harvey will take years to fix, if not decades.  I don't think people are actually ready for the price tag on this, because I'm thinking it's going to be somewhere around "Apple's current cash reserves on hand" give or take a few tens of billions or so, and I might be lowballing it.

And again, there's a lot of blame to go around for Democrats locally and Republicans state-wide, and that includes everyone from Dubya to Rick Perry to Ann Richards and everyone in between. Houston said "Hold my beer" and turned into a massive sprawl in an antediluvian flood plain, and Harvey came along and filled that flood plain the hell up. The oil money was good, and everyone took it.

Here's the best part:  Trump is only going to make this worse, so much worse.  It really won't be long before the talking heads on FOX are telling the locals that Houston maybe shouldn't be rebuilt because we can't afford it.  You thought getting rid of those people in New Orleans was a massive undertaking, well, you ain't seen nothing yet.  Wait until the Republicans rewrite Houston's history.

As goes Baghdad on the Bayou, goes the rest of America.  Just watch.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Two more developments in the Trump/Russia saga as the Mueller investigation shifts into higher gear this week.  First, one of the Russian lobbyists present at Donald Trump Jr.'s now infamous June 2016 meeting gave hours of grand jury testimony earlier this month.

A new report reveals that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe has heard testimny from at least one of the Russians who attended Donald Trump, Jr.’s infamous June, 2016 Trump Tower meeting

According to the Financial Times, Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian lobbyist and former Soviet army official who attended the meeting in Trump Tower last summer, has testified before Mueller’s grand jury.

According to two sources close to the testimony, Akhmetshin testified for “several hours” on August 11. Though Akhmetshin declined FT‘s requests for comment, the report claims his testimony centered around a “dossier” provided by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The dossier reportedly contained information about “how bad money ended up in Manhattan and that money was put into supporting political campaigns.”

The report also noted that Akhmetshin is currently under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee, who are looking into the circumstances surrounding his American citizenship, his role in the Soviet military and “whether he improperly lobbied for Russian interests.”

This is pretty big.  Akhmetshin is almost certainly a spy working for Putin's interests, and having him testify means Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner are directly in the cross-hairs. It also means that Mueller isn't sticking to the money laundering side of the investigation, but rather is investigating the espionage and collusion side as well.

But speaking of the money laundering investigation, well that brings us to our second development this week: Mueller isn't alone looking at Trump's dirty money slime trail.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is working with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on its investigation into Paul Manafort and his financial transactions, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The cooperation is the latest indication that the federal probe into President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman is intensifying. It also could potentially provide Mueller with additional leverage to get Manafort to cooperate in the larger investigation into Trump’s campaign, as Trump does not have pardon power over state crimes.

The two teams have shared evidence and talked frequently in recent weeks about a potential case, these people said. One of the people familiar with progress on the case said both Mueller’s and Schneiderman’s teams have collected evidence on financial crimes, including potential money laundering.

No decision has been made on where or whether to file charges. “Nothing is imminent,” said one of the people familiar with the case.

Manafort has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has previously denied it. A spokesman for Manafort didn’t return phone calls seeking comment.

The other issue besides cooperation and sharing of information is that Trump cannot pardon sate crimes, only federal ones.  If Schneiderman brings charges against Manafort as New York Attorney General, there's not a thing Trump can do about it.  Schneiderman has long been Trump's bane and he's hired former US attorney for Manhattan Preet Bharara, whom Trump fired for looking into his finances too closely.

Chuck Pierce makes the "game-changer" argument on Schneiderman's involvement:

Manafort seems to be a pile of bones by the side of the road at this point. He'll flip, or he already has. His testimony would open a lot of doors that a lot of people would prefer stay shut. But the alliance between Mueller and New York AG Eric Schneiderman is the most important news in this story. As has been pointed out by practically everyone, the presidential pardon power does not extend to state crimes, and Schneiderman has been after Camp Runamuck since before the voters installed it in the White House last November. He's already won a $25 million settlement on behalf of the marks who were scammed by the president* through his Trump University long con. The president* already has yapped about Schneiderman in public, a sure sign that he's worried about what else Schneiderman might have. Whatever Schneiderman does, there isn't a damn thing the president* can do about it. And, of course, Mueller knows this as well as Schneiderman does.

All this to me says that things are moving fast and that while I wouldn't expect charges anytime soon, it does mean that the Mueller investigation is moving along at a solid pace.  The leaks from the grand jury proceedings are definitely part of the pressure on Manafort to turn states' evidence, and on Trump to do, say, or tweet something stupid.

And remember that the end goal is Trump.  Easily baited, is our Donny.

StupidiNews!

• Two explosions have been reported at a chemical plant near Houston, Texas, residents were evacuated from the area Tuesday due to safety concerns from Harvey flooding.
• A federal judge in Texas has blocked the state's law designed to punish "sanctuary cities" from going into effect on Friday, saying several measures in the legislation violate the Constitution.
• The Pentagon says there are thousands more troops in Afghanistan than previously reported after Defense Secretary James Mattis demanded clarification of troop classifications.
• The FDA has approved a new cancer treatment from Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis that could herald a new era in life-saving drugs...for those who can afford the $475,000 price tag.
• The CDC is tracking a summer outbreak of salmonella across 13 states, the source appears to be pet turtles.