The GOP's Money Masters Are Mad

The people who truly run America -- wealthy mega-donors to the GOP's campaign coffers -- are swiftly becoming angry at the complete inability of the Trump regime to give them their trillions in tax cuts, austerity spending cuts, and Obamacare repeal.

As primary challengers to House and Senate GOP losers are popping up like dandelions after a summer storm, the big money guys are now turning their backs on those in the Republican leadership who have failed them.

Tensions reached a boiling point at a recent dinner at the home of Los Angeles billionaire Robert Day. In full view of around two dozen guests, Thomas Wachtell, a retired oil and gas investor and party contributor, delivered an urgent message to the night’s headliner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: Just do something.

Wachtell, who has given tens of thousands of dollars over the years to Senate Republicans, recalled that McConnell responded defensively. Passing legislation takes time, the Republican leader responded, and President Donald Trump didn’t seem to understand how long it required. 

“Anybody who was there knew that I was not happy. And I don’t think anybody was happy. How could you be?” said Wachtell, who has previously given over $2,000 to McConnell but recently stopped donating to Senate GOP causes. “You’re never going to get a more sympathetic Republican than I am. But I’m sick and tired of nothing happening.” 

With the GOP’s agenda at a virtual standstill on Capitol Hill, the party is contending with a hard reality. Some of the party's most elite and influential donors, who spent the past eight years plowing cash into the party’s coffers in hopes of accomplishing a sweeping conservative agenda and undoing Barack Obama’s legislative accomplishments, are closing their wallets.

It's probably not helping the GOP that donors are well aware of the fact that Mitch and Paul Ryan are most likely complicit in Trump's Russia collusion scheme too.  Giving lots of money to guys who are about to end up crashing and burning in disgrace is a bad investment.

The backlash is threatening to deprive Republicans of resources just as they're gearing up for the 2018 midterms. Party officials are so alarmed that North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who oversees fundraising for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told his colleagues at a recent conference meeting that donations had fallen off a cliff after the Obamacare flop. The committee’s haul plummeted to just $2 million in July and August, less than half of what it raised in June. 

"When you’re in a business and you tell your stakeholders you’re going to build a building or something, you have to follow through," said Houston-based energy executive Dan Eberhart. "I can’t borrow money to build a building and then not follow through, which is what these guys are doing.” He said he's spoken to four Republican senators over the past month to express his displeasure, mostly over the party's failure to repeal Obamacare. 

Behind the scenes, the GOP has begun to try to smooth things over with its most important givers. On Monday, Trump met with the party’s most prominent donor, Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has privately expressed frustration that the president hasn't moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And in the wake of an establishment-backed candidate’s loss in Alabama, a top McConnell political lieutenant, Steven Law, held a series of frank discussions with key benefactors. 

Some of the donors are giving lawmakers an earful. Bruce Rastetter, an Iowa agribusiness mogul who has funded a long list of Republican elected officials, said he had informed his state’s two GOP senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, that he would not donate to Republican senators “unless they pass new legislation or get new leadership.” 

In the world of campaign politics, big donors have long been known as gripers — an exclusive group accustomed to stroking and attention. But this year is different. Veteran fundraisers say they’re having an unusually hard time setting up meetings with major contributors, lining up checks and organizing events. 

One seasoned GOP fundraiser forwarded along a curt email from a sought-after donor. “The GOP leaders should know, no movement on remaining agenda: tax reform, infrastructure, deregulation, etc. means no funding from supporters like me,” it read. “No meetings, calls, contributions until we see progress.”

The true leaders of the country have spoken.  They bought and paid for the Republican-controlled government under the Trump regime, and now they want their money back.

So they're going around the GOP altogether and targeting vulnerable Trump state Democrats.

A Charles and David Koch-backed group is launching a $4.5 million ad campaign targeting three Democratic senators, urging them to support the Republican tax reform plan. 

The television ad buy, announced Thursday morning, will target Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, all of whom are facing tough re-election efforts next year in states that President Donald Trump won. 

The conservative-leaning Koch organization has made passing tax reform a priority and has pledged to spend tens of millions of dollars organizing voters and pressuring elected officials to support an overhaul. 

In the ad, a woman looks at the camera and says that tax reform will help "average" Americans. 

"People are sick of politics. I am too. But fixing our broken tax system isn’t about politics — it’s about helping people," she says. "That’s what tax reform will do. So, what’s stopping us?"

Grab your wallets, folks. Sooner or later they're get every penny and then some from Trump's "populist agenda"  Count on it.

Just Another Day In Gunmerica

We've heard a lot about how the Las Vegas massacre terrorist (and he's a terrorist, period) somehow "didn't fit the profile of a typical mass shooter".  Andrea Grimes reminds us that secular white men with multiple firearms and a history of domestic violence like Stephen Paddock fit exactly the profile of the vast majority of people who use firearms to commit acts of atrocity.

There was no “lack of red flags” in Paddock’s history. He very closely fits the profile of the kind of person who is demographically most likely to commit a domestic terror attack in the United States: He’s a white man, and he wasn’t a Muslim, and in fact he wasn’t particularly religious at all, and he had unfettered access to guns. When the news media reports shock and surprise at the lack of warning signs before a quiet, secular white guy commits an act of domestic terrorism, they’re not actually reporting a real lack of warning signs—they’re bolstering America’s steel-plated, gold-engraved, marble-polished tendency to give violent white men the benefit of the doubt, every time and indefinitely. This despite the fact that evidence shows men who look and act like Stephen Paddock are more likely than anyone else to commit crimes of this nature. 

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with profiling the men—it’s always men, don’t @ me—who commit these crimes. I think there’s value in exposing the monsters who live among us. The monsters who are our brothers, our fathers, our dads, our neighbors, our bosses, our partners. 

But I wonder when the journalists responsible for crafting the national, historical narrative around mass murder are going to connect the dots instead of scratching their chins over how yet another quiet, pasty loner of a guy could possibly take to the streets with murder and mayhem on his mind. I wonder if that time will ever come, when our newsrooms are still mostly white and mostly male, full of men who appear to be deeply reluctant to accept that the next terrorist in our American streets will probably look like them.

No.  And they will give him a pass precisely because of this.  It should be newsworthy that Paddock committed the crime at all, but that would be a tacit admission that the real problem in this country are white men with legal stockpiles of guns and ammo and the willingness to use them against others.

Journalists can absolutely report that people say they are shocked or surprised, but journalists don’t have to take it at face value that it is, objectively, shocking or surprising that a quiet, nonreligious white guy would murder people in the streets of an American city. It is perfectly possible—and, if we are ever going to confront America’s culture of toxic white masculinity with the aim of ending this kind of violence, absolutely necessary—for a journalist to quote a surprised neighbor or brother and observe, in the next sentence or graf, that Stephen Paddock (or the next mass-murdering dude like him) fits the demographic profile of an American domestic terrorist. 

To treat white male violence of this nature as unusual, when evidence suggests it is anything but, is to perpetuate the racist, Islamophobic and often misogynist narratives that empower broader political oppression of Americans of color and Muslim Americans. To be surprised by Stephen Paddock, and to fail to challenge readers and audiences to recognize the cultural biases that blind them to the reality of who commits mass murders in this country, is to normalize racism and bigotry. And that normalization trickles up and out: It empowers leaders like Donald Trump to enact bans on Muslim travelers, it stokes a “Build the wall!” mob mentality, and it delays the reckoning that this country so urgently needs to have with itself on the subjects of racism and xenophobia.

The country was built on racism and xenophobia, and that remains to this very day.  Why would we ever expect anything to change?  That power has always been backed by the implicit threat of the use of force, and the Second Amendment has been used as a tool to further that power.  You can argue that this wasn't the original intent of the Constitution in the age of muskets and Minutemen, but then again the original intent of the document was that people like me counted at 3/5ths of a person. too.

Freedom of gun ownership has never extended to people of color, and especially to black America. That right has always been reserved for "law-abiding" white America, as well as the cultural cache of implied social power and virility that goes with it.

Little wonder then that the bump feed stocks that Robert Paddock used in his crimes are now selling like proverbial hotcakes laced with Viagra.

Bump-fire stocks remain legal, but it is getting increasingly harder to find one to buy. Scores of online retailers have sold out of the devices, which enable a semiautomatic weapon to mimic the functionality of a machine gun. 

Police found at least a dozen rifles equipped with bump-fire stocks in the hotel room from which a gunman killed 59 people in Las Vegas on Sunday night. In the wake of the shooting, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California introduced a bill that would ban the devices. 

Bump-fire stocks are typically widely available for purchase on the Internet. WalMart and Cabela’s, two of the nation’s largest gun sellers, appear to have halted online sales of the devices early Wednesday. For retailers that have continued to sell them, business is booming. The webpages of several online retailers state that the devices are sold out.

“Due to extreme high demands, we are currently out of stock. Please check back with us shortly,” reads a notice on the website of Slide Fire Solutions, the manufacturer of a popular bump-fire device.

After all, this is a country that sold a million firearms in the week after Sandy Hook, where three percent of Americans own half the 150 million guns in the country, and where nutjobs like Alex Jones are close to advocating using all those guns in the next civil war.

The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing, like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready -- Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill people. It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats know when they mass-kill now, they know to not say they’re Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the Second Amendment and get a civil war going.

Something's got to give, and soon.  It won't be pretty when it happens, either.

StupidiNews!

• Las Vegas Police believe the terrorist behind Sunday's massacre may have had help planning the attack, he purchased 33 firearms in the previous 13 months.
• All five living former presidents will gather for a relief benefit concert in Texas on October 21, the presidents will raise money for victims of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.
• House lawmakers from both parties have introduced legislation to curb NSA surveillance programs as the Intelligence Surveillance Act expires at the end of the year.
• Amazon is testing its own delivery service to challenge rival UPS and FedEx for packages on the West Coast, the service is expected to roll out nationwide next year.
• The US Supreme Court says live streaming of court proceedings would "adversely affect" oral arguments in rejecting the request to broadcast proceedings for the 2017-2018 term.

Last Call For Tim Murphy's Law

GOP Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania is the Republican congressman who recently got busted for not only having an affair on his wife, but suggesting to his mistress that she needed to get an abortion.  

Considering Murphy easily won the district in November as part of the new breed of Trump Rust Belt "Economic Anxiety" Republicans, his hypocritical stance on abortion may actually be far more damaging than the affair to his Republican constituents.  But as Martin "BooMan" Longman points out, Murphy's district is exactly the kind of race Democrats must win in 2018 if they want any shot of taking the House back.

There’s even a second extramarital affair disclosed in the leaked documents that dates back about a decade. But it’s Murphy’s hypocrisy in being a staunch anti-choice politician who asked his mistress to get an abortion that is getting most of the headlines. When that is taken in combination with the even more troubling information about his erratic and abusive behavior toward his staff and on the roadways, Murphy is definitely getting into Freezer Cash territory. 

If he actually decides to run for reelection, a Democratic challenger should have a shot at beating him. Most likely, even a victorious challenger would vote with the Republicans a lot of the time in a (probably vain) effort to retain the seat. It wouldn’t necessarily add a lot of political value unless it became the deciding seat to determine control of the House of Representatives. 

But, unlike New Orleans, the areas contained in the 18th Congressional District were competitive not too long ago. It’s actually vitally important that future Democrats do considerably better in the district than Clinton did, because as I’ve already mentioned, it made up more than half of Trump’s statewide margin of victory. For me, this is practically Ground Zero for the 9/11-style devastation of the 2016 presidential election. 

The Democrats have plenty of reasons to want to take advantage of Murphy’s implosion here.

 And Martin is right.  Democrats didn't even bother to run anyone against Murphy in the district in 2016.  They gave the House seat away and Murphy has owned the seat for almost 15 years.

Now Democrats have a real shot here, and as far as I know, nobody's lined up to challenge Murphy yet, but at least some Democrats are willing to try, so that's better than "No candidate at all".

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The plot thickens on the Russian propaganda side of the Trump/Russia story as Facebook has turned over evidence to Congress that political ads on the social network bought by Russian front companies were targeting voters in Michigan and Wisconsin.

A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump's victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation. 

Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said. 

It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds. 

Michigan saw the closest presidential contest in the country -- Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by about 10,700 votes out of nearly 4.8 million ballots cast. Wisconsin was also one of the tightest states, and Trump won there by only about 22,700 votes. Both states, which Trump carried by less than 1%, were key to his victory in the Electoral College. 

The sources did not specify when in 2016 the ads ran in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Those two states aren't enough to have given Clinton the win, but if this included Pennsylvania, then yes, that would have been her win in the electoral college.

The focus on Michigan and Wisconsin also adds more evidence that the Russian group tied to the effort was employing a wide range of tactics potentially aimed at interfering in the election. 

Facebook previously has acknowledged that about one quarter of the 3,000 Russian-bought ads were targeted to specific geographic locations, without detailing the locations. The company said of the ads that were geographically targeted "more ran in 2015 than 2016." In all, Facebook estimates the entire Russian effort was seen by 10 million people.

The Russians knew exactly where to hit us.  I'm thinking that would have been much more difficult without some assistance from the Trump campaign.

It's looking more and more like our worst fears about the 2016 election are true. No wonder then that Trump's allies are now pushing Republicans in the House and Senate to end their investigations. Greg Sargent:

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon to provide a “progress report” on its investigation into Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and possible Trump campaign collusion with it, CNN reports. According to the committee’s Republican chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina, the presser is intended to brief the public on “the things we are either close to closing the book on or have closed the book on.”

But I have learned new details about why this presser is actually happening, and they do not exactly inspire confidence in the future of this investigation, or at least in how Republicans are going to handle it going forward. 

According to a senior aide to a Democratic senator on the committee, the reason this presser is happening is that Burr had initially moved to issue an interim report on the progress made by the probe.

But Democrats on the committee balked at this, the aide tells me. They worried that releasing a report would be premature and that Burr’s desire to do so might be rooted in political pressure he is feeling to wrap up the probe faster. 

So after Democrats objected, a compromise was reached to hold this presser instead. 

The reason this is worrisome is that Republicans are turning up the volume on their efforts to scuttle the probes. In a good piece this morning, Politico reports that pro-Trump Republicans are angry with the GOP leadership for allegedly allowing these probes to get out of hand. Some Trump allies are even claiming that this is happening because the GOP leadership allegedly opposes Trump. As one put it: “Of course, the Republican leadership is behind these probes. The Republicans cannot get over the fact that Trump won and is our president.”

Remarkably, these Trump-allied Republicans are explicitly asserting that GOP leaders are betraying Trump by failing to squelch ongoing efforts to get to the bottom of a hostile foreign power’s apparent sabotage of our democracy, in addition to the possibility of Trump campaign collusion with it. These probes are also designed to establish whether there was Russian interference, and if so, how it happened.

The bottom line is that Roy Moore's primary win in Alabama last week just gave Trump's friends on Capitol Hill significant ammunition to fire back at the House and especially the Senate committees investigating the Trump/Russia story.  The threats are now promises: if you don't pull the plug, we will primary you and nobody will be able to save your career.

It's about to get ugly, folks.  Stay tuned.

Trump's Kids Are Just As Corrupt

Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr are just as corrupt, as greedy, and as odious as their father is, and in a 2012 real estate deal gone bad, the siblings were facing almost certain indictment for fraud.  That is until they bought off the Manhattan DA's office for the relatively cheap sum of $50k.

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.

In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”

In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.

Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped.

On May 16, 2012, Kasowitz visited Vance’s office at One Hogan Place, in downtown Manhattan—a faded edifice made famous by the television show “Law & Order.” Dan Alonso, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, and Adam Kaufmann, the chief of the investigative division, were also at the meeting, but no one from the Major Economic Crimes Bureau attended. Kasowitz did not introduce any new arguments or facts during his session. He simply repeated the arguments that the other defense lawyers had been making for months.

Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case. Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues about representing the Trump children, according to two people. He said that the case was “really dangerous,” one person said, and that it was “amazing I got them off.” (Kasowitz denied making such a statement.)

Vance defended his decision. “I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,” he told us. “I had to make a call and I made the call, and I think I made the right call.”

Just before the 2012 meeting, Vance’s campaign had returned Kasowitz’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution, in keeping with what Vance describes as standard practice when a donor has a case before his office. Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case,” Vance said.

But, less than six months after the D.A.’s office dropped the case, Kasowitz made an even larger donation to Vance’s campaign, and helped raise more from others—eventually, a total of more than fifty thousand dollars. After being asked about these donations as part of the reporting for this article—more than four years after the fact—Vance said he now plans to give back Kasowitz’s second contribution, too. “I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s,” he said.

Kasowitz told us that his donations to Vance were unrelated to the case. “I donated to Cy Vance’s campaign because I was and remain extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity, as a brilliant lawyer and as a public servant with creative ideas and tremendous ability,” Kasowitz wrote in an e-mailed statement. “I have never made a contribution to anyone’s campaign, including Cy Vance’s, as a ‘quid-pro-quo’ for anything.”

Last year, the Times reported the existence of the criminal investigation into the Trump SoHo project. But the prosecutor’s focus on Ivanka and Donald, Jr., and the e-mail evidence against them, as well as Kasowitz’s involvement, and Vance’s decision to overrule his prosecutors, had not previously been made public. This account is based on interviews with twenty sources familiar with the investigation, court records, and other public documents. We were not able to review copies of the e-mails that were the focal point of the inquiry. We are relying on the accounts of multiple individuals who have seen them. 

Sure, this wasn't a quid pro quo situation, and I'm really Captain America in a really convincing disguise that nobody would suspect.

If this is even remotely true, the Trump kids should have been jailed years ago and their father's burgeoning political career ruined as a result, not to mention the elder Trump going to the clink for his involvement in this giant fraud of a building too.

If Cyrus Vance had done his job, America wouldn't be in the lucid nightmare it's in today, and that really pisses me off.  They got away with it before.

They can't be allowed to get away with it again.

StupidiNews!

• Las Vegas police officials say that several of the weapons used in Sunday's massacre had been modified with special stocks that helped convert recoil into simulating automatic fire.
• The US Air Force will continue to fly bombers near North Korea despite threats from Pyongyang that they reserve the right to shoot them down in international airspace.
• Catalonia's president says the region could declare independence from Spain as soon as this weekend, King Felipe VI considers last Sunday's independence referendum to be illegal.
• Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello is warning that without a significant aid package from Congress, the majority of the island's residents will flee to the US mainland.
• The Trump regime's top cybersecurity expert says it's time to stop using Social Security numbers as identifiers and explore a new national security ID standard.

Last Call For Virginia Is For Voters

We're just five weeks away from Election Day 2017, and the eyes of the country will be on Virginia's races with state offices ranging from Governor to Attorney General commanding the nation's attention.  But this year Democrats finally have realized that the GOP was able to take over America by winning at the state legislature level, and in the Trump era, Team Blue is looking to take states back one by one ahead of 2018 and 2020's crucial battles.

If you want a sneak preview of how the 2018 election is shaping up for Democrats, you should pay attention to people like Schuyler VanValkenburg. 

The 32-year-old VanValkenburg is a high school civics teacher at a public school in Henrico County, Virginia. As part of his civics duties, he coaches his team in a statewide “We the People” constitutional competition, in which students are grilled, Senate-hearing-style, by a panel of judges about America’s system of governance. “I’m teaching this really idealistic and really sophisticated program, and the kids are working at a really high level—really taking in the Constitution and working with it—and meanwhile they’re seeing this election going more and more into the gutter,” he says. So not long after President Donald Trump won, with prodding from another teacher and support from a new progressive political outfit called Run for Something, which helps first-time millennial candidates do exactly that, he decided to run for the House of Delegates in the state’s 72nd district. 

Even in an off-year, elections have consequences. On November 7 voters will go to the polls to pick mayors in New York, Atlanta, Detroit, and Birmingham. New Jersey will get a new governor, and a state Senate election in Washington state could give Democrats full control of the state government. But the elections in swingy Virginia, where all 100 seats in the House of Delegates are up for grabs (along with the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general), could be the clearest demonstration yet of Democratic political power in the age of Trump—and a barometer for the party’s strength heading into next year’s midterm election. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Virginia Senate but a 2-to-1 supermajority in the House of Delegates, and have used their numbers to block term-limited Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe from expanding Medicaid in the state. Taking back the House of Delegates is a long shot, but candidates like VanValkenburg demonstrate how they’ll try. 

VanValkenburg’s platform is what you’d expect from a suburban Democrat running against intransigence—he’s pledging more money for public schools, passage of Medicaid expansion, and a rejection of the conservative culture war. What’s different is that it’s happening in Henrico. The 72nd, which comprises the northwest suburbs of Richmond, is Republican by habit. Three years ago, Republican primary voters in Henrico County replaced House Majority Leader Eric Cantor with Ayn Rand-quoting economics professor Dave Brat. Democrats have long approached the district with the attitude that you can’t lose a fight you never join. The current Republican delegate Jimmie Massie, who is retiring at the end of this term, won reelection in 2015 without any Democratic opposition. Just like the Republican nominee in 2013. And 2011. And 2009. And 2005. And 2003. And 2001. And 1999. And 1997. And 1993. And 1991. 

But this year, Democrats have put the 72nd in their sights. VanValkenburg has raised $150,000 as of September, nearly as much as his Republican rival, Eddie Whitlock. The Cook Political Report named his race a “toss-up,” the outcome of which will hinge on the strength of the Democratic Resistance. After the disappointment of 2016, progressive politicos sought to rebuild their party’s bench through strength in numbers—by coaxing a record number of candidates to seek down-ballot offices. (Run for Something, which was founded by a Hillary Clinton campaign alum, has assisted seven Democratic delegate candidates in Virginia alone.) Seven Republican retirements have strengthened Democrats’ chances there. Virginia will be the first real test of whether the strategy is working.

Democrats have had very good success in state-level special elections so far.  If they can do well next month in Virginia's House of Delegates, it just may be the turning point that leads to another 2006 and 2008 model of victories across the country.  2005 saw Tim Kaine winning the governor's race, and hopefully 2017 will see Ralph Northam win as well.

I'm betting it will be a good day for Democrats.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

As I keep saying, the odds of any major gun safety legislation passing is low even if Democrats had the House, the White House, and 60 Senate votes, because as former Democratic Rep. Steve Israel points out in the NY Times today, any Republican who crosses the NRA is immediately done.

There were moments when I thought, “Finally, we will do something.” I remember sitting at my desk in my district office on Long Island watching the grisly images of the murder of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., in 2012, and President Barack Obama with tears streaming down his cheeks. I was confident that at the very least we’d expand background checks or make it harder for people with mental illness to obtain guns.

My confidence ebbed when I heard my colleagues turn this into a debate over the rights of gun owners instead of the right to life of children. In the confines of the members-only elevators, where my colleagues could speak honestly, I heard colleagues confide that any vote for gun safety would lower their N.R.A. scores, making them casualties in the next election. 

“Finally, we will do something,” I thought after the June 2016 mass shooting in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub. I was in a leadership meeting with Nancy Pelosi when we heard that several colleagues had taken to the floor and started a sit-in to force the House to address gun violence. I was stunned to see dozens of my colleagues sitting and chanting, just before we were about to take a long recess, “No bill, no break.” 

We held the floor for 24 hours. Thousands converged spontaneously on Capitol Hill in support. This was a moment I thought we could no longer be ignored. I was right. Congress did act. It declared that fines would be slapped on House members who broadcast audio or video from the House floor. Thank God the decorum of the House was safe, at least. 

Then there were the annual rituals in the House Appropriations Committee. Democrats would offer amendments to prevent people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms. A no-brainer, I thought. If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous to buy an assault weapon, a common-sense position shared by over 80 percent of Americans. 

I remember the Republican chairman of the committee rising in opposition to the amendment, arguing that in America, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. I’m not sure he ever extended that argument to other populations, but it didn’t matter. The amendment failed. 

So did our attempts to rescind the infamous Dickey Amendment, which prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from even researching the relationship between gun violence and public health. The Dickey Amendment was so absurd that it was ultimately opposed by its own sponsor, Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican. Still, we failed. The result? The government can’t study gun violence but is spending $400,000 analyzing the effects of Swedish massages on rabbits. So at least the rabbits feel safe. 

And finally, there are those moments when members ourselves became victims. Gabby Giffords in Tucson; Steve Scalise at the congressional baseball game. Even the proximity of bullets resulted in shock and inaction. 

Why? Three reasons. 

First, just like everything else in Washington, the gun lobby has become more polarized. The National Rifle Association, once a supporter of sensible gun-safety measures, is now forced to oppose them because of competing organizations. More moderation means less market share. The gun lobby is in a race to see who can become more brazen, more extreme. 

Second, congressional redistricting has pulled Republicans so far to the right that anything less than total subservience to the gun lobby is viewed as supporting gun confiscation. The gun lobby score is a litmus test with zero margin for error. 

Third, the problem is you, the reader. You’ve become inoculated. You’ll read this essay and others like it, and turn the page or click another link. You’ll watch or listen to the news and shake your head, then flip to another channel or another app. This horrific event will recede into our collective memory. 

That’s what the gun lobbyists are counting on. They want you to forget. To accept the deaths of at least 58 children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends as the new normal. To turn this page with one hand, and use the other hand to vote for members of Congress who will rise in another moment of silence this week. And next week. And the foreseeable future.

And he's right.  You'll also notice I said "former" Representative Israel.  He retired in January 2016, Democrat Tom Suozzi was elected in his place.  But Israel dropped out of the House to pursue gun safety advocacy because he knew Congress would never get things done until the American people changed their minds.

It's possible.  Attitudes have certainly shifted on smoking and same-sex marriage in the US in the last 10-20 years.  But guns, well, Gunmerica is Gunmerica, and that's not going to change in my lifetime I believe.

Oh, and that GOP silencer bill in the House is now off the docket for the week, but don't expect it to be for long.

That may now be scuttled after a shooter opened fired on a crowd of country music concert-goers in Las Vegas, killing 58 and injuring more than 500—the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. A spokesman for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) declined to speculate on whether Sunday night’s tragedy has changed the GOP’s calculus. But according to the House schedule, the bill is not on the docket for this week. 

That the SHARE Act even got to this point underscores the potency of the gun rights lobby and the relationships it has cultivated both in Congress and within President Donald Trump’s innermost circle. 

Utah-based SilencerCo is one of the top manufacturers of suppressors in the United States. And its CEO Josh Waldron counts Donald Trump Jr. as a top ally.

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, Waldron got an assist from the president’s eldest son in helping to popularize his company’s products. Trump Jr., an avid hunter, appeared in a promotional video for SilencerCo in September of 2016.

Trump's adult sons are avid hunters and boy, do they want silencers.  Expect this to get passed quietly (if you'll excuse the pun) next week and head to the Senate before the end of the month.

Making America Gunmerica Always.

Not Doing So Welfare These Days

The Trump regime reportedly has welfare programs in their sights as part of GOP across-the-board austerity cuts, and that means every part of the safety net for the working poor and unemployed has to take a hit.

Trump administration officials are mulling an executive order that would instruct federal agencies to review low-income assistance programs, part of a coming effort to make sweeping changes to the country’s welfare system.

The White House began circulating a draft order to federal agencies for comment last week, according to two administration officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

One of the officials said the draft order calls on agencies to review existing regulations and propose new rules that conform to a set of broad welfare principles, including tighter work requirements that encourage recipients to shift back into the labor force.

The order also calls for streamlining or eliminating duplicate services and establishing metrics for holding agencies accountable for program performance. It also encourages greater cooperation with state and local governments.

The initiative comes as President Donald Trump shifts attention to his ambitious tax reform initiative in the wake of his failed effort to repeal Obamacare. Administration backers of the welfare executive order hope he signs it before Thanksgiving, one of the officials said.

Trump has mostly backed off his train of executive orders that marked the opening months of his regime, apparently having picked all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to erasing Barack Obama's legacy from existence, the rest will require Republicans in Congress to act (and take the blame).

But as with the Affordable Care Act, the executive branch is still quite capable of sabotaging the implementation of programs like SNAP, WIC, housing assistance, and more to the point where they will fail to work at all, and then Republicans can claim they're doing us a favor by getting rid of them.

The major austerity is coming with the next GOP budget. Until then, Trump's sabotage will do in a pinch.  But red state governors and state legislatures are more than happy to cooperate with the GOP sabotage of government in general.  Just look at what's happening to rural hospitals in red states that have refused Medicaid expansion, like my beloved western North Carolina where I grew up, where women like Lucia Parker will have to drive at least an hour to get to a hospital with a maternity ward now as hospitals are closing maternity wards just to stay open.

As Congress debates repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, rural hospitals are in a kind of purgatory, unsure about their Medicaid budgets and the private health insurance that sustains them. At least 81 rural hospitals have shut down across the country since 2010, according the North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center at UNC. The pace of closures has been increasing since the Great Recession, but the current health care policy limbo—which leaves hospitals and insurers unable to predict their income—exacerbates the problem. “The uncertainty is really impinging providers, particularly hospitals, from making the kinds of decisions that might put them on a better footing,” says center director Mark Holmes. 

Parker lives in an impoverished swath of rural Appalachia where the hospitals are particularly vulnerable. In her Congressional district, 20 percent of families with children live below the poverty line and more than 40 percent of residents—roughly 318,000 people—rely on some form of publicly-funded health care. Another hospital in the district, Angel Medical Center in Franklin, North Carolina, shut down its maternity ward in July, after officials said the unit was losing $2 million a year. And Parker’s congressman, Republican Mark Meadows, has not intervened to keep them open. The Freedom Caucus chairman has been one of the nation’s most vocal critics of Obamacare, favoring legislation that ends insurance subsidies and makes deep cuts to Medicaid. 

Any cuts to Medicaid would hurt rural hospitals, says Diane Calmus, government affairs and policy manager for the nonprofit National Rural Health Association. Seventy-five percent of patients in the Mission Health system—the nonprofit that runs Blue Ridge, Angel, and four other western North Carolina hospitals—are either uninsured or on Medicare or Medicaid. These hospitals were especially hard hit when the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly refused to expand Medicaid in 2013. Eighteen other states made the same decision, and the impact was clear: more than 70 percent of the rural hospitals that shut down in the past seven years were in 16 of those states. Four hospitals in rural North Carolina have closed since 2013, and Blue Ridge has been losing money every fiscal year since 2013. Last year it lost $3.1 million. Charity care—services that no one pays for—at rural hospitals has increased more than 50 percent since Obamacare passed. “We have a rural hospital closure crisis,” Calmus says. 

Holmes and other experts say the lack of Medicaid expansion is not the only cause of the crisis. They point to low Medicaid reimbursement rates, patients who can’t afford their deductibles, consolidation of hospital ownership, declining rural populations, medical staffing shortages, and a longstanding trend of Southern hospitals struggling to make ends meet. “You really have a death by a thousand paper cuts situation here,” Holmes says. But if a hospital wants to stay open, Calmus says, it may close a unit that is well-known for losing money: the maternity ward.

It's red state Trump voters in rural GOP districts who are going to get hurt the most by the Trump regime's austerity cuts.  They're going after not just the safety net, but the entire health infrastructure that keeps America together just to give the richest Americans another million a year in tax cuts.

And remember, none of this matters to the Republicans.  They just want to destroy as much government as possible in order to justify to voters why massive draconian cuts are necessary in order to make the rich who donate to them richer.

StupidiNews!

• Music legend Tom Petty is dead at the age of 66 of cardiac arrest, the 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee had just completed his final tour with his band, the Heartbreakers.
• The Trump regime is expected to expel as many as two-thirds of Cuban embassy staff from the US after Friday's announcement to slash US embassy staff in Havana.
• Donald Trump will travel to Puerto Rico today to survey the ongoing relief effort after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, millions still lack power, clean water, cell service, food and fuel.
• Activists in Catalan continue to take to the streets for a second day of protests after Sunday's independence referendum from Spain as Catalan leaders decide the next step.
• Microsoft is folding up its Groove music service, users will be able to migrate their music to Spotify through January 31, 2018.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump regime is turning over documents on Trump's Russian contacts and surprise!  Turns out that the White House has been lying again about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, yet again. This time it's Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, in the hot seat.

Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. 

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. 

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the Russian Senate, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. 

Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan. 

Nonetheless, the information about the interactions has been provided to congressional committees as well as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as they investigate whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election, according to people familiar with the inquiries who, like others cited in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the inquiry. 

Details of the communications were turned over by the Trump Organization in recent days to the White House, defense lawyers and government investigators and described to The Washington Post. 

Though there is no evidence that these Russia-related entreaties resulted in further action, the email communications about them show that Trump’s inner circle continued receiving requests from Russians deep into the presidential campaign.

In other words, the Trump organization had no problem with listening to "requests" from Putin's circle of Russian oligarchs for the purpose of putting a Trump Tower in Moscow.  It really is all about greed with these guys, pure, unadulterated avarice.

Trump sold our country for a goddamn chunk of prime Moscow real estate, but hey, the Russians had some help, and that was from an all too eager Silicon Valley who wanted in on the presidential ad campaign millions.  Turns out that Vlad and friends know a little something about catapulting the propaganda, and they were more than happy to use social media to do it.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.

One such ad featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber — the people familiar with the investigation said.

Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.

Another showed an image of Democrat Hillary Clinton behind what appeared to be prison bars.

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Russia’s exploitation of the Custom Audiences system. Facebook officials have previously said that they were caught off guard by the Russian propaganda campaign because the accounts, pages and ads appeared to be legitimate.

In addition to Custom Audiences, Russian operatives used other Facebook tools to target groups by demographics, geography, gender and interests, according to the people familiar with the investigation. The Custom Audiences tool differs because it allows advertisers to feed into Facebook’s systems a specific list of users they want to target. 

You mean exploiting technology to micro-target your message directly to the people most susceptible to that message has a dark side?  Gosh, who knew.

Ahh, but the Russians were more than eager to lead us down the path of destruction, after all were more than happy to follow the trail of blood where their propaganda led America.

And now we have Trump.

Another Day In Gunmerica

The death toll from last night's domestic terrorist attack in Las Vegas is now 58 with at least 400 injured, and over in the House, Republicans are hoping you won't notice two pro-gun bills they're trying to pass, because what we really need is more lethal guns in more places.

The House could pass legislation as early as this week that would roll back decades-old restrictions on gun silencers, opening up the market for a device that critics say would make it difficult in a mass shooting to detect where gunfire is coming from.

The House is also expected to move this fall on separate legislation that would allow people to carry their legally concealed weapons across state lines into jurisdictions, such as California, that tightly restrict weapons concealment.

The silencer measure is part of the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, a broad-ranging gun bill delayed in June after House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and two Capitol Hill police officers were wounded by a gunman who opened fire on a congressional baseball practice session. 

Critics say silencers — called noise suppressors by supporters and heavily regulated by the federal government for more than eight decades — would make it harder for police officers to locate a shooter in an attack. 

“What it does is it disperses the sound, so you can’t identify where the sound is coming from,” said Rep. Mike Thompson, a St. Helena Democrat and avid hunter who opposes the bill. “It puts both law enforcement and the public at risk.” 

But Republicans say the provision, called the Hearing Protection Act, doesn’t really silence the sound of gunfire, only diminishes it enough to shield hunters and recreational shooters from hearing damage. 

“It isn’t a silencer because it still makes sound, but what it does is cuts the percentage of the noise down to make shooting sports a little nicer for people’s hearing,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale (Butte County). 

“There’s a lot of false narrative being driven by this,” he said. “Anything to do with making guns more available or more convenient for people is going to find opposition by the left.”

Sure, because the real problem is hunters shouldn't have to wear ear protection.  Jesus wept.

Oh, and the bill would basically trash the Endangered Species Act by allowing more types of weapons to be used to hunt on federal land, and more animals to be hunted.  Even cops hate this silencer bill, but apparently this is one of those situations where cops are dirty government union employees and not cops, because what America really needs right now is more silencers.

Oh well.  Just another day in Gunmerica.

CHIP Off The Old Blockheads

While Republicans were busy trying to take health care coverage away from tens of millions over the last week, their incompetence actually did accomplish something: they took away health coverage from 9 million kids as federal funding for CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program, expired Saturday night.

Congress just allowed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provided low-cost health insurance to 9 million children, to expire.

If action is not taken soon to restore the funding, the effects will become obvious in schools across the country, with many of the children in the program unable to see a doctor for routine checkups, immunizations, visits when sick and other services.

The program, created under a 1997 law passed with bipartisan support during the administration of President Bill Clinton, provided coverage for children in families with low and moderate incomes as well as to pregnant women. It was instrumental in lowering the percentage of children who were uninsured from nearly 14 percent when it started to 4.5 percent in 2015. It was last reauthorized in 2015 and was due to be renewed by Sept. 30, 2017.

Amid unsuccessful efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the Republican-led Congress allowed the CHIP deadline to pass without action.

The program was primarily funded by the federal government, with states paying a good deal less. States still have some CHIP money available, but if Congress does not act quickly to restore the program, they will start to run out. Several states and the District of Columbia are expected to drain CHIP funding by the end of this year and many more by March 2018, according to this government report.

There doesn't seem to be any effort by the GOP to want to restore CHIP funding either, but hey, playing with the lives of millions of kids in order to get political leverage sure makes things fun, right?

Again, CHIP covered basic services like checkups, dental services, immunization and emergency services for kids from families that needed the most help.  It was very successful and helped a generation of young people over the last 20 years.

Right now it's broke, and there's zero urgency from Republicans in Congress to get anything done to reauthorize the program.  None.

As I've said numerous times, Trump is far from the only monster leading our government right now.

StupidiNews!

• Las Vegas police say at least 50 are dead and at least 200 are injured as a gunman opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort into an outdoor concert crowd below.
• Puerto Rico faces its 12th day without power, water, fuel and food as distribution of aid into rural areas cut off by Hurricane Maria continues to be a problem for relief efforts.
• Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy says Spain will remain united as Sunday's Catalan independence vote came in at over 90% to secede, despite Spanish police breaking up voting with tear gas.
• The US Supreme Court's new term begins today as Justice Neil Gorsuch and the Roberts Court will hear cases on union dues, abortion access, affirmative action, voting rights, and more.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry is proposing new power generation rules that favor the "security" of  "reliable" coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric power instead of solar and wind.