The Restaurant At The End Of America

While Trump's "friend" Luther Strange gets his ass handed to him by 18th century Judge Roy Moore in tonight's Alabama Senate primary runoff (Moore has a double-digit lead in nearly every poll) don't feel bad for Donald Trump. Tonight he will be at famous NYC eatery Le Cirque hosting a quarter-million-dollar-a-plate fundraiser for the RNC.

Some of the biggest names in U.S. finance and real estate are expected to gather at New York’s Le Cirque restaurant on Tuesday as President Donald Trump raises money for the Republican National Committee.

For $250,000 a couple, donors can attend a “private roundtable” with the president, while $100,000 will guarantee “VIP access,” according to people with knowledge of the preparations. The minimum donation is $35,000, and about 150 people will probably attend, these people said.

Good money if you can get it.  NYC hated Trump. Now they are coming to Donald to literally pay their respects just to eat dinner with him, and he loves every second of it.

Accompanying the president at Le Cirque will be Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul and RNC finance chairman, the people said, adding that Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. also will be on hand. Many of the anticipated attendees, such as the executives Howard Lorber and Steve Witkoff, come from New York real-estate circles where the president’s career began, the people said.

John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire with interests in real estate, energy and supermarkets, said he might swing by. While the president has “made some mistakes,” Catsimatidis said, donors are happy with the change in tone Trump brought to the White House.

“Don’t forget, under Obama, the business people and the banks were the enemies of Washington,” Catsimatidis said. “The one thing Donald Trump has done is the business people and banks are no longer the enemies, and the business people feel better and they are making investments.”

Yes, this is about raising money for the 2018 fight, but this is more about Trump laying down the law that he's the most powerful man in the world right now.  And Wall Street is starting to get used to Trump being in power, and how it will be very good for them as the GOP tackles massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

They like Trump as long as he delivers, and Republicans haven't been in a position to deliver like this in decades.  Trump's the best chance Wall Street has had at unregulated greed since Reagan, and they know it.

They'll pay out the nose for it too.

StupidiNews!

• As Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins becomes the third announced Republican no vote on the Graham-Cassidy health care bill, both sides are unsure how to proceed on health care reform.
• A greatly weakened Hurricane Maria may brush North Carolina's Outer Banks before heading out into the Atlantic this week as Puerto Rico remains without power, water, food and fuel.
• Alabama Republicans go to the polls today to decide if Sen. Luther Strange will defend the seat once held by AG Jeff Sessions, or if former State Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore will.
• Trump National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says that the US has multiple scenarios for dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis, both diplomatic and if necessary, military.
• The nearly year-long union strike for voice actors in video games appears to finally be over, as both SAG-AFTRA and game producers have reached a tentative agreement.

Last Call For Weiners And Losers

Former Dem Congressman Anthony Weiner is going to jail, and rightfully so.

Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman who pleaded guilty in May to sexting with a 15-year-old girl, was sentenced Monday to 21 months in prison. 

Weiner, 53, also faces spending the rest of his life as a registered sex offender for his lengthy and lurid social media contacts with the North Carolina teen. 

Weiner cried as he read from a written statement in Manhattan federal court, saying he was sorry and that he was “a very sick man for a very long time.” 

"The crime I committed was my rock bottom," Weiner said. "I live a different and better life today." 

Weiner, who must report to prison by Nov. 6, wept again after the sentence was announced. 

“This is a serious crime that deserves serious punishment," federal Judge Denise Cote said.

Well Carlos Danger, you're going to be serving that better life in prison for a while, where maybe you can, you know, stop being a sex offender.

Jackass.  Glad to be rid of you for a while at least.

How far he has fallen since first crossing my radar seven years ago.

Zuck Trucks Amok But He Mucked Up

Back in August I came to this conclusion about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's nascent political aspirations:

So here's the exit question folks: which is more frightening? 

One one hand there's the notion that Zuck wants to run the country like he's running Facebook, as the ultimate Silicon Valley dudebro who thinks tech can solve everything. On the other hand there's the notion that he's lost control of his social network behemoth and not even he knows how to fix the fake news spewing volcano that he's helped to unleash under the body politic. 

Neither scenario exactly fills me with confidence.

Several weeks later as the evidence piles up that the Russians gleefully used $100,000 in Facebook ads as a pro-Trump propaganda tool and that Zuckerberg has lost control of the platform he built to the algorithms that rule it, now we find out that Zuckerberg was warned 15 months ago that his big blue toy was a target and that the Facebook founder ignored the warnings.

In the days immediately after the 2016 election, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg seemed offended by suggestions that the social network he created might have had any influence on the outcome, beyond serving as a marketplace for the exchange of ideas. “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said, on stage at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, California. While some were quick to blame Facebook for amplifying misinformation about Hillary Clinton, Zuckerberg suggested that critics were betraying a “profound lack of empathy” by not taking voters who supported Donald Trump seriously. 

Zuckerberg wasn’t wrong to be skeptical of Democrats assigning blame rather than engaging in self-reflection. But in dismissing the possibility that social media might be anything other than a force for good, Zuckerberg was also slow to recognize Facebook’s own vulnerabilities in an age of information warfare. About a week after the Techonomy conference, however, Zuckerberg received a “wake-up call” from President Barack Obama, The Washington Postreports. During a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, nine days after the election, Obama tried to personally appeal to Zuckerberg, warning that unless Facebook did something, its fake-news problem would only be exacerbated in the next presidential election:

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. 

The account of Zuckerberg’s post-election reckoning also reveals new details about what Facebook executives knew, and when they knew it. The Post reports that Facebook notified the F.B.I. as early as June 2016 when a hacking group working in connection to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, started making fake Facebook profiles to disseminate stolen e-mails and manipulate public opinion—days before Guccifer 2.0, a hacking persona now thought to be a front for Russian intelligence, took credit for hacking the Democratic National Committee. But after looking into the accounts, which were linked to the GRU’s hacking group called APT28 or Fancy Bear, which set up a Facebook profile for Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks, the company came to believe they weren’t linked to a foreign government but were instead financially motivated.

Facebook thought it was about money, not politics.  Then they took the money anyway. Which just goes to show you that the part of technology most vulnerable to manipulation remains the humans who think they control it.

No wonder then that Steve Bannon sought to put a mole among Facebook's staff.

Steve Bannon plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign’s central figures. And it also shows the lengths to which the brawling new American right is willing to go to keep tabs on and gain leverage over the Silicon Valley giants they used to help elect Trump — but whose executives they also see as part of the globalist enemy. 

The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights. 

“There is one for a DC-based ‘Public Policy Manager’ at Facebook’s What’s APP [sic] division,” Gacek, the Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs at the group, wrote on August 1, 2016. “LinkedIn sent me a notice about some job openings.” 

“This seems perfect for Breitbart to flood the zone with candidates of all stripe who will report back to you / Milo with INTEL about the job application process over at FB," he continued.

Whether or not anything came of it, we don't know.  But the Trump regime certainly knew how important Facebook was to their plans. And in the end, Doctor Zuckenstein here doesn't want to believe that his creation is a dangerous monster that can be used for nefarious purposes.

We're all in trouble as long as this goes on.

The Island Of Misfit Americans

While Trump is doing everything he can to distract from his problems, more than 3 million Americans on Puerto Rico now face a second week without power, and the damage from Hurricanes Irma and Maria were so awful that the island's infrastructure may take months or even years to recover and the immediate humanitarian crisis is far from over.

It’s been less than a week since Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, bisecting the entire island, bringing 150 mph winds and torrential rains to some of its most populated areas. 

But the crisis in Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are citizens of the United States, is just beginning, and will likely last months or years. 

Puerto Rico’s entire power grid was knocked offline during the storm. The New York Times reports it could be four to six months before power is restored on the island. That’s half a year relying on generators, half a year without air conditioning in the tropical climate, half a year where even the most basic tasks of modern life are made difficult. And remember: 3.4 million people live there. 

Making life even harder: Cell service is out on almost the entire island, and communications are generally strained. Thousands of people living in the mainland United States with relatives in Puerto Rico have yet to make contact. At least six people died during the storm, but this number could rise due to the fact that news is moving slowly on the communications-choked island. 

Meanwhile, new crises keep forming in the wake of the storm. On Friday, the National Weather Service issued a dire warning about the Guajataca Dam in the northwestern corner of Puerto Rico, which is reported to be near the point of breaking, threatening downstream areas with deadly floods. Seventy thousand people — enough to fill a small city — have been asked to evacuate areas that could be flooded by the nearly 11 billion gallons of water the dam holds back. 

Puerto Rican officials believe the dam’s failure is imminent. “It could be tonight, it could be tomorrow, it could be in the next few days, but it’s very likely [the dam will break] soon,” Christina Villalba, a spokesperson with Puerto Rico’s emergency management agency, told Reuters.

Evacuations of residents in the path of the dam's flood plain are already underway but the island's inhabitants are facing dire circumstances, and this administration and the Congress that doles out the money don't seem concerned in the least to do a single goddamn thing about it.

Sure, the Texas and Florida coasts are still reeling from billions in damage and there are still hundreds of thousands of people dealing with flooded and destroyed homes and no power in the lingering early fall heat.  But that goes for all of Puerto Rico right now and the Trump regime does not give a damn.

We're on our own, guys.  This is life under Trump.

StupidiNews!

• Nashville police say Emanuel Kidega Samson, 25, a Sudanese immigrant, is the suspect in Sunday's deadly church shooting, killing one and injuring seven.
• Donald Trump has signed a new expanded travel ban that includes extreme vetting measures for anyone from Chad, North Korea, and government officials from Venezuela.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as Germany's leader in Sunday's elections, but for the first time in 60 years a far-right party will have seats in parliament.
• With time running out for a 50-vote reconciliation vote to repeal Obamacare, Republican leaders are mounting a last-ditch effort to pass Graham-Cassidy legislation this week.
• The Department of Justice is taking aim at Google for failing to comply with warrant orders on 22 e-mail accounts, the DoJ is seeking sanctions against the company from a federal judge.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

All I have to say about today's Jared Kushner story in Politico is "But his emails!"

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Aides who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his private account since President Donald Trump took office in January include former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel, according to emails described to or shown to POLITICO. In some cases, those White House officials have emailed Kushner’s account first, said people familiar with the messages.

The decision to set up new, private accounts as Kushner was preparing to enter the White House came in the wake of a bitter election campaign in which Trump routinely excoriated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle government business when she was secretary of state.

There is no indication that Kushner has shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, or that he relies on his private email account more than his official White House account to conduct government business. Aides say he prefers to call or text over using email.

And so we come full circle on "administration officials using private email addresses" and the same people who assured us this was a sign that Hillary Clinton was completely crooked and unfit for office won't lift a finger over multiple people in the Trump regime doing the exact same thing.

What's Kushner hiding from the American people?  Well, who knows.  But this has been going on for months now, and nobody seems to want to care enough to find out.

Fin. Exeunt stage right.

Trump's Sports Race To The Bottom

Even CNN's Chris Cillizza has figured out that Donald Trump is playing to white supremacy by attacking black NFL and NBA players as "disrepectful" and "ungrateful" for daring to protest.

On one level, this is classic Trump. He feels as though he is being disrespected -- whether by NFL players not standing for the national anthem or by Curry saying if it was up to him, the Golden State Warriors would not visit the White House. (The Warriors, in a statement Saturday afternoon, said they would come to Washington and do events to promote diversity and inclusiveness rather than meet with Trump.) 

They hit him, so he hit back. 

But, there's something far more pernicious here. Both the NFL and the NBA are sports in which the vast majority of the players are black and the vast majority of owners are white. In the NFL, there are 0 black owners of the 32 teams. In the NBA, Michael Jordan is the lone black owner of a team. 

Consider that in the context of what Trump said both Friday night and Saturday.
In Alabama, Trump called the players who refuse to stand for the anthem "sons of bitches" and insisted that any owner worth his or her salt should fire them immediately.
That got a lot of attention -- and rightly so. But it's what Trump said next that's really telling. "Total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for," he said --- adding for emphasis: "Everything that we stand for." 

Notice the use of "our heritage" and "we" in those two sentences above. 

But wait, there's more. In both his Curry tweet and his two NFL tweets, Trump expressed frustration that these lucky athletes felt the need to be ungrateful. 

Trump noted the "great honor" of going to the White House and the "privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL." You should just be thankful for what you have and not be making any trouble, Trump is telling these players. 

Here's the thing: Even if we lived in a color-blind society, that would be a dangerous sentiment. After all, freedom of expression is right there in the First Amendment. And our brave soldiers didn't fight and die so that everyone stood during the national anthem. They fought so people could have the right to make a choice about whether or not they wanted to stand. That's the whole damn point of the First Amendment. 

The thing is: We don't live in a color-blind society. Slavery sits at the founding roots of America. The goal of racial equality remains a goal, not an achievement. To pretend otherwise is to willfully blind yourself to hundreds years of history.

And I will say this again: it's so obvious that this is being driven by Trump's racial animus towards successful black people (and there's a slew of successful black people that Trump has personally singled out and attacked, reporter April Ryan,  Merck CEO Ken Frazier, sportscaster Jemelle Hill, now Colin Kaepernick and the NBA's Steph Curry)

Everything you need to know about this is that several NFL players not only took a knee during the anthem to protest this week, at least three teams, the Steelers, the Titans and Seahawks skipped the anthem altogether.  Meanwhile, NASCAR owners say they will happily take retribution out on drivers and crew who get the idea to join the protest.

Sports and protest, especially civil rights protests, have long been part of America.  For Trump to not see this coming is ridiculous. Some even say he's counting on it.

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Just The Facts, Ma'am

This week's Sunday Long Read delves into the arguably the last real bastion of fact-checking in the internet era: the man behind fake news-debunking website Snopes. In the era of Trump, they are being inundated more than ever by falsities to debunk, and they're trying their hardest to be up to the task.

IT WAS EARLY March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on March 4, the president alerted the nation by tweet, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

If the administration had tossed the customs and niceties of American politics to the wind, there was one clearly identifiable constant: mendacity. “Fake news” accusations flew back and forth every day, like so many spitballs in a third-grade classroom.

Feeling depressed about the conflation of fiction and fact in the first few months of 2017, I steered a car into the hills of Calabasas to meet with one person whom many rely on to set things straight. This is an area near Los Angeles best known for its production of Kardashians, but there were no McMansions on the street where I was headed, only old, gnarled trees and a few modest houses. I spotted the one I was looking for—a ramshackle bungalow—because the car in the driveway gave it away. Its license plate read SNOPES.

David Mikkelson, the publisher of the fact-checking site Snopes.com, answered the door himself. He was wearing khakis and a polo shirt, his hair at an awkward length, somewhere between late-­career Robert Redford and early-­career Steve Carell. He had been working alone at the kitchen table, with just a laptop, a mouse, and the internet. The house, which he was getting ready to sell, was sparsely furnished, the most prominent feature being built-in bookcases filled with ancient hardcovers—“there’s a whole shelf devoted to the Titanic and other maritime disasters,” Mikkelson told me—and board games, his primary hobby.

Since about 2010, this house has passed for a headquarters, as Snopes has no formal offices, just 16 people sitting at their laptops in different rooms across the country, trying to swim against the tide of spin, memes, and outright lies in the American public sphere. Just that morning Mikkelson and his staff had been digging into a new presidential tweet of dubious facticity: “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” Trump had the correct total, but the overwhelming number of those detainees had been released during the George W. Bush administration. “There’s a whole lot of missing context to just that 122 number,” Mikkelson said.

There are other fact-checking outfits, like PolitiFact, which is operated by the Tampa Bay Times, or FactCheck.org at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. But Snopes has kicked around the internet since 1994—which makes it almost as old as what we once called the World Wide Web. In this age of untruth, it has become an indispensable resource. Should your friend’s sister start a conspiracy trash fire in a Facebook comment thread, Snopes is a reliable form of extinguisher. Because of this reputation, Snopes was listed as a partner in a Facebook fact-­checking effort announced last fall after the social media giant acknowledged it had become a conduit for fake news. Potentially false stories could be flagged by users and an algorithm, and then organizations like Snopes, ABC News, and the Associated Press would be tasked with investigating them.

As pretty much anyone knows, the truth can be a slippery bastard. Getting to the bottom of something requires what you might generously call a fussy personality. Mikkelson possesses that trait. He spends hours writing a detailed analysis of a claim and feels frustrated when readers just want a “true” or “false” answer. He’s got the world­view of Eeyore, had Eeyore been obsessed with cataloging the precise history, variety, and growing seasons of thistles in the Hundred Acre Wood. He can even get pessimistic about whether his work makes a difference. “Since a lot of this stuff is really complicated, nuanced stuff with areas of gray, it requires lengthy and complex explanations,” he said. “But a lot of the audience, their eyes just tend to glaze over, and it’s just, they don’t want to have to follow all of that. So they just fall back on their preconceptions.”

Among those preconceptions is the right-wing view that Snopes is anti-Trump, its efforts to separate fact from fiction merely a cover for liberal bias. Mikkelson disputes this, saying that if you look at the totality of the posts Snopes has written on the subject of the president, “the vast majority of them are debunking false claims made about him, not affirming negative things said about him or disproving positive things said about him.” But nobody is looking at the totality; if that sort of intellectual honesty ever existed in the public sphere, it’s gone now. And sure enough, the week before I went to Calabasas, Tucker Carlson on Fox News had been jeering at “those holy men at Snopes, those gods of objectivity.”

Like an order of medieval monks recording history in the midst of chaos of the Dark Ages, the crew at Snopes are trying to preserve fact in a world of perception, manipulation, and obfuscation. And they need help.

We'll see how long they can hold on.

Not Getting Away Scott Free This Time

Florida GOP Gov. Evil Batboy Skeletor Rick Scott is in a heap of trouble after it turns out his office deleted the voice mails from the nursing home that requested immediate assistance after losing power during Hurricane Irma. Eight people died because of lack of ability to keep cool in the blistering heat, and it's looking more and more like Scott completely failed his constituents.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is facing criticism after his office revealed that four voicemails sent from a nursing home where eight residents died in the aftermath Hurricane Irma were deleted.

CBS Miami reported on Saturday that Scott's office said the four voicemails, which were all received during a 36-hour period before the first resident died, were handed off to the appropriate agency and then deleted.

Eight people died at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, a nursing home that lost power and air conditioning during Hurricane Irma. Authorities said the deaths were heat-related.“The voicemails were not retained because the information from each voicemail was collected by the governor’s staff and given to the proper agency for handling," the governor's office told CBS in a statement.

A vice president at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills told CBS that she requested "immediate assistance" for the residents at the nursing home.

Last week, Scott's office denied that the nursing home ever indicated its residents were in immediate danger, and stressed that the calls were referred to the appropriate authorities.

“Every call made to the governor from facility management was referred to the Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health and quickly returned,” Scott’s spokesman said last week in a statement to the CBS affiliate.

Two weeks ago it was "the nursing home is at fault, they never contacted us."  Last week it was "They contacted us but we referred them to the Department of Health" (which is blaming the nursing home for not evacuating all residents to a nearby hospital.) Now it's "we deleted the voice mails." 

Oops.

Except this oops cost eight lives.  And remember, the nursing home called four times in 36 hours saying they needed help.

Rick Scott is in trouble, and he should be.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Meanwhile, more evidence is pouring in that our good friends the Russians definitely wanted to help Donald Trump win by any means necessary.

Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year's presidential election, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security notified states of the attempted breaches on Friday, said Michael Haas, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The attempt in Wisconsin was unsuccessful, he said.

Homeland Security officials said the effort was conducted by “Russian government cyber actors," according to Haas. He said he did not know which states other than Wisconsin were part of the hacking attempt.

According to a tally by the Associated Press, election officials in 19 states confirmed their election systems were targeted by hackers last year.

The states are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

North Dakota was the only state that failed to provide answers, the AP said. Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger says he “can’t be specific at this time what the situation is.” He says he’s trying to get more information from Washington.

A response also wasn't available from the District of Columbia.

Homeland Security officials first reported in June that election systems in 21 states had been targeted during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. At that hearing, Haas told the committee he had concluded Wisconsin was not one of the targeted states, at least in part because Homeland Security had not alerted him to any attempted breach.

State officials are seeking more information about the incident and why they were not notified sooner, Haas said.

“This scanning had no impact on Wisconsin’s systems or the election,” Haas said in a statement. “Internet security provided by the state successfully protected our systems. Homeland Security specifically confirmed there was no breach or compromise of our data.”

Tom Evenson, a spokesman for Gov. Scott Walker, said the announcement "confirms what we already knew, which is Wisconsin held an honest and fair election with no interference."

The attempts were made, however.  And while Wisconsin seems very confident that no damage was done, if anyone in the Trump campaign knew about the attempts, and helped enable them, well, there's a word for that.

Treason.  You know, the Article III of the Constitution "or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" part.

How very strange that the Trump regime seems to not care about this at all.

Last Call For The Gang's All Here

If anyone thinks that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going to do anything about Trump's odious malfeasance, well, Jeff's too busy using the position given to him to turn American into shivering wrecks too afraid to go outside their doors because of an imaginary child army of deadly Latino gangbangers waiting to decapitate your family.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is warning that many unaccompanied minors trying to enter the U.S. across its southern border are gang members whom the country should view as “wolves in sheep's clothing.” 

In a speech to local and national law enforcement this afternoon in Boston, Sessions said transnational gangs like Central America-based MS-13, use what’s known as the ‘unaccompanied refugee minors’ program to “as a means by which to recruit new members.”

The attorney general said the Department of Justice is working with the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services to “examine the unaccompanied minors issue and the exploitation of this program by the gang members who come to this country as wolves in sheep's clothing.” 

The program was developed in the 1980s to assist with thousands of children in Southeast Asia without parents, according to the Department for Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. Since 1980, more than 13,000 children have entered the unaccompanied refugee minors program. 

The Obama administration allowed certain minors in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to be considered for refugee status in the United States after tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from those countries flooded into the United States. In August, DHS canceled the approvals of 2,700 kids who had been conditionally approved for parole but had not received final sign-off. 

Sessions described MS-13’s activities in brutal terms. 

“This is America. We will not allow the likes of MS-13 or any other gang to prey upon our communities, to decapitate individuals with machetes, baseball bats and chains,” Sessions said.

Jeff seems awfully convinced that the largest law enforcement problem in America in 2017 is somehow "Americans being decapitated by baseball bats wielded by scary brown teenagers" or something rather than, you know, a President grifting millions and pissing on the Constitution he's sworn to protect, but far be it from me to tell a racist Confederate elf how to do his job or something.

Seems to be a lot of that "fear of people darker than a paper bag" thing going around these days.

So Deafening, These Drums Of Bore

At this point the whole "big macho manly men want to start a war thousands of miles away and want to pay for it with our tax dollars and the blood of our sons and daughters" thing should be considered a regular feature of the Republican party, not a bug.

Rep. Duncan Hunter said that the United States needs to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea in order to prevent the rogue nation from harming the U.S. first. 

“You could assume, right now, that we have a nuclear missile aimed at the United States, and here in San Diego. Why would they not aim here, at Hawaii, Guam, our major naval bases?” Hunter, an Alpine Republican, said during an appearance on a KUSI television Thursday. 

“The question is, do you wait for one of those? Or, two? Do you preemptively strike them? And that’s what the president has to wrestle with. I would preemptively strike them. You could call it declaring war, call it whatever you want,” Hunter continued. 

Hunter, a member of a House Armed Services Committee and the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the United States’ nuclear arsenal, did not say if the military should strike North Korea with conventional or nuclear weapons.

Hunter or his spokesman could not be reached for further comment Thursday night.
His comments come after President Donald Trump, in his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, said that the U.S. is prepared to attack North Korea.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said. 

Hunter called the president’s remarks “great” and not “wishy-washy.” He added that North Korea should join the UN in order to bring them into dialogue with stable countries. He also said that would expose North Korea officials to New York City, the home of the UN's headquarters, and show them what the prosperity they could achieve with reforms.

The hundreds of thousands, possibly millions dead from this aren't the issue.  The issue is Duncan Hunter has a microscopic penis and a brain to go along with it, and he's going to help get a ridiculously high number of people killed in very short order.

Understand that if the US attacks Pyongyang, Seoul becomes a parking lot in 48 hours, and whether or not that parking lot is created just from the saturation of the air with conventional high-explosive artillery fire or the blackened glass of a nuclear blast or three (or both, yay!) is really the only question.

After that, well, things get kinda bad from there.

Mueller needs to move fast or there may not be much of the place left to defend the Constitution for.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's been a hell of a week for developments in the Trump/Russia case: Manafort's wiretapping and possible indictment (they would of course be sealed at this point), Mueller's document load from the White House, and evidence that Manafort was funneling US political info to Putin's oligarch circle.

Now we have another big story, and it's back to that now infamous June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Manafort, Kushner, and the Russians and Donald Trump's reactions and statements resulting from it.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has sought phone records concerning the statement written aboard Air Force One defending a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russians at Trump Tower last year that was set up by Donald Trump Jr., according to two people familiar with the investigation. 

Mueller has also asked the White House for documents and emails connected to a May 3 press briefing where Sean Spicer said the president had confidence in James Comey as FBI director, these people said. The request seeks to determine what White House officials – particularly Spicer – knew about the president’s plans to fire Comey in the days before it happened, according to one of the people familiar with it.

The requests, first reported by the New York Times, are the latest indication that Mueller's probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election is expanding to include what has happened in the White House since Trump took office, including questions of obstruction of justice. 

Most of the requests, one of these people said, focus on what happened inside the White House after Jan. 20. 

White House officials are expected to be interviewed in upcoming weeks by Mueller’s office, but the interviews have not been set, according to one of the people with knowledge of the investigation. 

The special counsel’s office has also asked for documents related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his meetings with Russian officials, one of these people said. 

Investigators are particularly interested in what happened inside the White House after former deputy attorney general Sally Yates told White House lawyer Don McGahn of the Flynn meeting with Russians. Flynn was said to have misled Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition.

We know that Mueller has asked for White House records, but asking for the AF1 communication records in regard to Trump's now infamous initial statement is a GIGANTIC RED FLAG that Mueller is looking into obstruction of justice charges involving the person who wrote the statement.

You know, Donald Trump.

Have a nice day.

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