Banking On A House Of Cards

Our old friends JP Morgan Chase have been up to their old tricks again, and David Dayen's investigation at The Nation finds the bank paid for defrauding homeowners out of billions during the housing crisis by defrauding homeowners out of billions a second time by pretending to pay for it.

After JPMorgan’s deceitful activities in the housing market helped trigger the 2008 financial crash that cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, and life savings, punishment was in order. Among a vast array of misconduct, JPMorgan engaged in the routine use of “robo-signing,” which allowed bank employees to automatically sign hundreds, even thousands, of foreclosure documents per day without verifying their contents. But in the United States, white-collar criminals rarely go to prison; instead, they negotiate settlements. Thus, on February 9, 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the National Mortgage Settlement, which fined JPMorgan Chase and four other mega-banks a total of $25 billion. 

JPMorgan’s share of the settlement was $5.3 billion, but only $1.1 billion had to be paid in cash; the other $4.2 billion was to come in the form of financial relief for homeowners in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. The settlement called for JPMorgan to reduce the amounts owed, modify the loan terms, and take other steps to help distressed Americans keep their homes. A separate 2013 settlement against the bank for deceiving mortgage investors included another $4 billion in consumer relief. 

A Nation investigation can now reveal how JPMorgan met part of its $8.2 billion settlement burden: by using other people’s money. 

Here’s how the alleged scam worked. JPMorgan moved to forgive the mortgages of tens of thousands of homeowners; the feds, in turn, credited these canceled loans against the penalties due under the 2012 and 2013 settlements. But here’s the rub: In many instances, JPMorgan was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned.
The alleged fraud is described in internal JPMorgan documents, public records, testimony from homeowners and investors burned in the scam, and other evidence presented in a blockbuster lawsuit against JPMorgan, now being heard in US District Court in New York City. 

JPMorgan no longer owned the properties because it had sold the mortgages years earlier to 21 third-party investors, including three companies owned by Larry Schneider. Those companies are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit; Schneider is also aiding the federal government in a related case against the bank. In a bizarre twist, a company associated with the Church of Scientology facilitated the apparent scheme. Nationwide Title Clearing, a document-processing company with close ties to the church, produced and filed the documents that JPMorgan needed to claim ownership and cancel the loans. 

JPMorgan, it appears, was running an elaborate shell game. In the depths of the financial collapse, the bank had unloaded tens of thousands of toxic loans when they were worth next to nothing. Then, when it needed to provide customer relief under the settlements, the bank had paperwork created asserting that it still owned the properties. In the process, homeowners were exploited, investors were defrauded, and communities were left to battle the blight caused by abandoned properties. JPMorgan, however, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, thanks to using other people’s money. 

“If the allegations are true, JPMorgan screwed everybody,” says Brad Miller, a former Democratic congressman from North Carolina who was among the strongest advocates of financial reform on Capitol Hill until his retirement in 2013.

They forgave mortgages they didn't actually own.

That's fraud, plain and simple.  And this time, somebody might actually pay for it.

In an unusual departure from most allegations of financial bad behavior, there is strong evidence that Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO and chairman, knew about and helped to implement the mass loan-forgiveness project. In two separate meetings in 2013 and 2014, JPMorgan employees working on the project were specifically instructed not to release mortgages in Detroit under orders from Dimon himself, according to internal bank communications. In an apparent public-relations ploy, JPMorgan was about to invest $100 million in Detroit’s revival. Dimon’s order to delay forgiving the mortgages in Detroit appears to have been motivated by a fear of reputational risk. An internal JPMorgan report warned that hard-hit cities might take issue with bulk loan forgiveness, which would deprive municipal governments of property taxes on abandoned properties while further destabilizing the housing market. 

Did Dimon also know that JPMorgan, as part of its mass loan-forgiveness project, was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned? No internal bank documents confirming that knowledge have yet surfaced, but Dimon routinely takes legal responsibility for knowing about his bank’s actions. Like every financial CEO in the country, Dimon is obligated by law to sign a document every year attesting to his knowledge of and responsibility for his bank’s operations. The law establishes punishments of $1 million in fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years for knowingly making false certifications. 

Dimon signed the required document for each of the years that the mass loan-forgiveness project was in operation, from 2012 through 2016. Whether or not he knew that his employees were forgiving loans the bank no longer owned, his signatures on those documents make him potentially legally responsible.

I would very much like to see Jaime Dimon spend the rest of his natural life in a very, very small prison cell, and I hope this is the reason why.

The NRA Election

So 78% of American households do not own a gun, and 3% of Americans account for 50% of guns owned in this country.  If you split the 2016 vote among gun-owning households and those who do not, Clinton would have won every state except West Virginia (Wyoming doesn't have enough data) among non-gun owners, and Trump would have won every state except for Vermont among gun-owners.



Here's your Two Americas right here.

One side literally has all the weapons, and is completely incompatible with the other.

But the gun owners completely control our country politically.

Last Call For Trump's War On Women, Con't

Donald Trump has failed to repeal Obamacare, but it doesn't mean he can't sabotage it from the inside out.  Today, the regime has all but ended contraception coverage requirements for employee health plans and will allow pretty much all employers to drop coverage of birth control, effective now.

The Trump administration is relaxing an Obama-era requirement that nearly all employers offer health insurance that covers a wide array of contraceptive methods. 

New regulations released Friday significantly broaden the types of companies and organizations that can request an exemption from that rule. This could lead to many American women who currently receive no-cost contraception having to pay out of pocket for their medication. 

The new rules take effect immediately. And they allow large, publicly traded companies to seek an exemption from the birth control requirement if they have a religious or moral objection to providing such coverage. The Obama administration barred these large businesses from such exemptions. 

“This provides an exemption, a limited one, for those with religious or moral convictions implicated by the contraceptive mandate,” an HHS official said in a Friday morning briefing with reporters previewing the rule. 

HHS projects that “99.9 percent of women” will be unaffected by these changes but gave little explanation of how it came to that data point. Officials did note that only a few hundred small businesses have so far raised religious or moral objections against the requirement by filing lawsuits. 

But it is possible that larger publicly traded companies could join their ranks as the exemption gets widened. And the rule itself is blunt about the possible effect, noting that “These final rules will result in some enrollees in plans of exempt entities not receiving coverage or payments for contraceptive services.”

Which is the point.  Your boss now gets to control whether or not the company's health coverage will cover contraception.  I would imagine a number of small businesses would jump at the chance, and don't be surprised if Fortune 1000 companies follow suit.

The worst news is that the legal battle that is coming may already have been lost.

Women’s health groups, including the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for Reproductive Rights, have been preparing to file lawsuits against the regulation, based on an earlier draft that Vox obtained in late May. 

The new rules have been designed specifically to guard against those expected challenges, a source familiar with their drafting told Vox. The Trump administration technically released two separate rules: one broadening the religious exemption and one creating a new moral exemption from the mandate. The reason is that if a court were to strike down one rule in a lawsuit, the other would likely still stand. 

“Bifurcating the rule into two separate parts is like a severability clause on steroids,” Nicholas Bagley, a health law professor at the University of Michigan, said. “It's signaling in the strongest possible terms that the agency independently wants both parts of the rule to remain in place, even if one, or part of one, is invalidated.” 

That strategy should be effective, forcing opponents to chase two targets. “The courts,” Bagley said, “will almost certainly respect that policy choice.”

It's not looking good at this point, especially as House Republicans passed a federal 20-week abortion ban.

It might be time to break out the red dresses and white habits sooner rather than later.

Tim Murphy's Law, Con't

Looks like Murphy's Law caught up with Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy in a gigantic way after the story of multiple affairs and at least one request for a mistress to get an abortion (a big no-no if you're a MAGA Republican) broke earlier in the week.

Now Murphy's career appears to be completely over, ending in his resignation from Congress and rumors of campaign finance violations, abuse of staffers, and more.

Rep. Tim Murphy, a staunch anti-abortion advocate, thought he could withstand the media furor that engulfed him after reports that he’d encouraged his extramarital lover to end her apparent pregnancy. 

He was wrong. 

Just one day after announcing he would retire after the 2018 election, Murphy reversed course and told Speaker Paul Ryan he was resigning effective Oct. 21. Murphy’s abrupt decision ended a 15-year career on Capitol Hill in a shocking manner. The 65-year-old Pennsylvania Republican was so safe in his conservative district that Democrats hadn’t even fielded an opponent against him during the past two election cycles. 

Ironically, Murphy’s swift collapse came not because of text messages he sent to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair, encouraging her to have an abortion as first reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday. In fact, fears among senior Republicans about a potential wave of negative stories on how Murphy ran his congressional office were what ultimately pushed him out the door. 

Multiple top House Republicans during the past 24 hours pressured Murphy to resign once it became clear that the House Ethics Committee might have to investigate allegations tied to his reported mistreatment of staffers. Numerous GOP sources were aware of systemic problems in Murphy’s office, including high staff turnover, which had been the topic of gossip and speculation for years. 

The Post-Gazette had reported on a June 2017 memo in which Murphy’s longtime chief of staff, Susan Mosychuk, warned the Pennsylvania Republican that he was mistreating and “harassing” staff, causing 100 percent turnover. 

But Mosychuk is a source of controversy herself. 

A number of former Murphy staffers told POLITICO that it was Mosychuk’s behavior that drove them to leave Murphy's office. And these ex-aides said the combination of Murphy and Mosychuk — who had a close personal relationship, according to GOP lawmakers and staffers — made the situation intolerable. Mosychuk was promoted to Murphy’s chief of staff in 2004, just a year after becoming his legislative director.

This story is a mess: both Mosychuk and Murphy were apparently awful to their employees and staffers left in droves only to be replaced and the new people leaving as well.

Ex-staffers said Mosychuk kept white noise machines throughout Murphy’s congressional office so constituents waiting in the front room couldn’t hear her screaming. If Mosychuk was angry at staffers, she would make them take the stairs instead of the elevator, so they couldn’t ride with her, according to one former employee who witnessed it. 

Mosychuk would even call staffers out of their bathroom breaks to demand they return to the office, or yell at them for taking too long to use the restroom. Many younger aides did not take lunch breaks, eating at their desks because they were scolded for leaving. One new employee quit after just a couple days because he was dressed down for using a paper clip instead of a staple on a briefing packet, multiple sources said. 

“It was one of the worst places I have ever worked in my life. There was screaming. Intimidation. Nothing you ever did was right,” Nick Rodondo, Murphy’s former district director, told Pittsburgh radio station KDKA’s “Marty Griffin Show.” 

Rodondo said the two of them were fond of each other — he said he saw them feed each other at events — but terrible to many others. 

“Susan Mosychuk was no better than [Murphy]. She wrote that memo to cover her butt," he continued. "I know, Marty. I know what these people are like. To call them creeps is an affront to creeps.”

This went from normal Republican hypocrisy to full-blown meltdown in just a couple of days, and believe me, I'm glad to see Murphy gone.  Democrats absolutely need to find a way to get this seat back in the Age of Trump if they're ever going to take back the House.

Iran It Into The Ground

Tang the Conqueror is about to unilaterally blow up President Obama's Iranian nuclear deal, wrecking our relations with the nations that supported us on the agreement and absolutely putting Iran on a North Korea-style path to a nuclear weapon.

President Trump plans to announce next week that he will “decertify” the international nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is not in the national interest of the United States and kicking the issue to a reluctant Congress, people briefed on an emerging White House strategy for Iran said Thursday. 

The move would mark the first step in a process that could eventually result in the resumption of U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would blow up a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear activities that the country reached in 2015 with the U.S. and five other nations. 

Trump is expected to deliver a speech, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 12, laying out a larger strategy for confronting the nation it blames for terrorism and instability throughout the Middle East.

Under what is described as a tougher and more comprehensive approach, Trump would open the door to modifying the landmark 2015 agreement he has repeatedly bashed as a raw deal for the United States. But for now he would hold off on recommending that Congress reimpose sanctions on Iran that would abrogate the agreement, said four people familiar with aspects of the president’s thinking.

Remember, the US didn't go into this alone, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council supported this deal, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1) which means if we sink the deal, we leave them in the lurch too.

That would start a 60-day congressional review period to consider the next steps for the United States. On its own, the step would not break the agreement among Iran, the United States and other world powers, but would start a clock on resuming sanctions that the United States had lifted as its part of the deal.

The administration has begun discussing possible legislation to “strengthen” the agreement, congressional aides and others said. That is the “fix it or nix it” approach suggested by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a leading Republican hawk on Iran.

It is an uncertain prospect, and many supporters of the deal consider it a dodge.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said last month that he will not reopen the deal for negotiation. 

Separately, representatives of Iran, China and Russia told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the same thing during a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session, two senior diplomats familiar with that meeting said.

So the deal would fall apart for sure, and there would be no reason for anyone to trust the Trump regime or the word of the US again in future negotiations, not that anyone would after Trump sank the Paris Climate Agreement.

We're rapidly joining the ranks of international pariahs, easily making us the most dangerous rogue state on Earth with our massive military and huge nuclear arsenal, not to mention our dangerous loose cannon of a leader.

As I've said before, when does the rest of the world move to act to contain us?

StupidiNews!

• The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for their work in over 100 countries towards the end of nuclear proliferation.
• Flooding and storm surge from Tropical Storm Nate has already killed 22 in Central America, the storm is headed for the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida panhandle by early next week.
• Donald Trump called a Thursday White House meeting with Pentagon officials "the calm before the storm" as possible responses to situations in Iran and North Korea were discussed.
• Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria are expected to weigh heavily on September job numbers due out today, but analyst says October's numbers should rebound sharply.
• Miami Beach police have arrested the man behind a parody Twitter account of a police spokesman, charging with the third-degree felony of impersonating a police officer.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

You would think that given the allegations against our good friends in Russia that the Trump regime would be steaming mad at Moscow and ready to start demanding answers.  Alas, that has yet to happen even as evidence keeps piling up that the Russians have largely succeeded at happily destroying America's intelligence capability for decades.

Hackers working for the Russian government stole details of how the U.S. penetrates foreign computer networks and defends against cyberattacks after a National Security Agency contractor removed the highly classified material and put it on his home computer, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

The hackers appear to have targeted the contractor after identifying the files through the contractor’s use of a popular antivirus software made by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, these people said. 

The theft, which hasn’t been disclosed, is considered by experts to be one of the most significant security breaches in recent years. It offers a rare glimpse into how the intelligence community thinks Russian intelligence exploits a widely available commercial software product to spy on the U.S. 

The incident occurred in 2015 but wasn’t discovered until spring of last year, said the people familiar with the matter. 

The stolen material included details about how the NSA penetrates foreign computer networks, the computer code it uses for such spying and how it defends networks inside the U.S., these people said. 

Having such information could give the Russian government information on how to protect its own networks, making it more difficult for the NSA to conduct its work. It also could give the Russians methods to infiltrate the networks of the U.S. and other nations, these people said. 

The breach is the first known incident in which Kaspersky software is believed to have been exploited by Russian hackers to conduct espionage against the U.S. government. The company, which sells its antivirus products in the U.S., had revenue of more than half a billion dollars in Western Europe and the Americas in 2016, according to International Data Corp. By Kaspersky’s own account it has more than 400 million users world-wide. 

The revelation comes as concern over Russian infiltration of American computer networks and social media platforms is growing amid a U.S. special counsel’s investigation into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign sought or received assistance from the Russian government. Mr. Trump denies any impropriety and has called the matter a “witch hunt.” 

Intelligence officials have concluded that a campaign authorized by the highest levels of the Russian government hacked into state election-board systems and the email networks of political organizations to damage the candidacy of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

A spokesman for the NSA didn’t comment on the security breach. “Whether the information is credible or not, NSA’s policy is never to comment on affiliate or personnel matters,” he said. He noted that the Defense Department, of which the NSA is a part, has a contract for antivirus software with another company, not Kaspersky. 

In a statement, Kaspersky Lab said it “has not been provided any information or evidence substantiating this alleged incident, and as a result, we must assume that this is another example of a false accusation.” 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a statement didn’t address whether the Russian government stole materials from the NSA using Kaspersky software. But he criticized the U.S. government’s decision to ban the software from use by U.S. agencies as “undermining the competitive positions of Russian companies on the world arena.”

I've long said that Kaspersky Labs could have been a Putin intel front, I warned you guys about them two years ago and surprise, that's when the theft took place.  Now we absolutely know that's the case, because the Russians have now hit us not just once (Edward Snowden), not just twice (Harold Martin) but now three times with this yet-to-be-named contractor who got his data hoovered up by Kaspersky Labs.

No wonder the Russians were able to pull off the soft coup of the century and install Donald Trump in the White House.  They had the keys to the front door, back door, and every side door in sight, and every time they opened one they found more keys waiting to be handed over.  And yeah, the guy who has to shoulder the blame for that?

Barack Obama.  I'm sorry to say it, but he messed up.  Badly.  Fatally so, in fact.  We'll be paying for this for the rest of my lifetime, I suspect.  Once would be a mistake, twice is an unfortunate coincidence, but three times is enemy action as they say, and he got rolled along with our entire country.

He lost the first major war of the 21st century without firing a shot.  Maybe that's harsh, but look at the hell we're in today.  There's a lot of blame to go around, and he has to get his share of it.

Don't get me wrong, Donald Trump is a traitor, period.  But Obama made this far too easy for Moscow to win.

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.