StupidiNews!

• North Korea will not come to the table for any talks until it has developed missiles that can hit the US East coast as "reliable defensive and offensive capability" against Washington.
• In a 70-23 vote, the US Senate confirmed Callista Gingrich as Ambassador to the Vatican, the wife of former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich remains an ally of the Trump regime.
• US-backed rebel militias in Syria have retaken the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa after four months of fighting, ISIS took Raqqa three years ago after a string of victories.
• European airplane maker Airbus will buy a stake in Canadian rival Bombardier to build planes in the US as a direct challenge to Boeing's dominance.
• Major security flaws recently discovered in the vast majority of Wi-Fi devices has both hardware and software manufacturers scrambling for fixes.

Playing The Panic Card

House Republicans are both freaking out over Trump and happy to fundraise off his problems, because that's how the modern GOP works in 2017.  The House GOP caucus is warning that Trump throwing them under the bus next year will put the Speaker's gavel in the hands of Nancy Pelosi, assuring Trump's impeachment in 2019, and at the same time they're using the opportunity to raise millions from Trump faithful as a necessary part of maintaining Trump's proto-dictatorship.

Top White House aides, lawmakers, donors and political consultants are privately asking whether President Donald Trump realizes that losing the House next year could put his presidency in peril. 

In more than a dozen interviews, Republicans inside and outside the White House told CNN conversations are ramping up behind the scenes about whether Trump fully grasps that his feuds with members of his own party and shortage of legislative achievements could soon put the fate of his presidency at risk. 

Donors who trekked to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in support of House Speaker Paul Ryan were treated to a slide show late this summer to fundraise off those very fears, according to multiple attendees. Among the slides: An overview of the Democrats who would be tapped to lead key committees if the GOP loses control, including Rep. Elijah Cummings as the head of the House Oversight Committee. 

To some attendees, the subtext was clear. If Republicans forfeit the House, Democrats will almost certainly create a spectacle that will derail conservatives' agenda and the remainder of Trump's first term -- a spectacle complete with a raft of new subpoenas, a spotlight on the Russia investigation and, many are convinced, impeachment proceedings. 

"When Democrats take control of the House they will absolutely move for articles of impeachment," one Trump confidant predicted. 

Alex Conant, a partner at GOP public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, said Trump should focus on protecting his own party. 

"The number one thing Trump should be doing to save his presidency is helping congressional Republicans maintain their majorities," Conant said. "Instead he's allowing his allies like Steve Bannon to really undermine Republican reelection campaigns. It's just reckless and politically naive considering how devastating it would be to his presidency."

Of course all this is being coordinated by Steve Bannon and the White House.  The entire point is since that fear of liberals moving against Christian white America put Trump and the GOP in office in the first place, maintaining that level of hair-on-fire fear is vital to keeping the money flowing and keeping the GOP in power.

Which means Bannon and company think GOP voters are suckers who will soon be parted with their money.  Surprise!

Of course, the plan works too.  Playing the panic card worked in 2016, after all.

Breaking The NFL Salary Kaep(ernick)

Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been blackballed from the league ever since he started taking a knee during the national anthem last year as a protest against policy brutality against black and brown folks.  Despite leading the 49ers to the Super Bowl five years ago, the team let him go at the end of the 2016 season and he hasn't been able to even get a workout with any team since.  But now Kaepernick is going to the courts, suing the NFL's team owners for collusion against hiring him in what could be a landmark sports labor case.

The move marks another escalation in the ongoing controversy over sports players kneeling or sitting during the national anthem. The protest movement that began with Kaepernick and a handful of other NFL players in 2016 was suddenly propelled this year after repeated criticisms from President Donald Trump.

The president's attacks, including his call for the NFL to fire players who refused to stand during the anthem, prompted displays of solidarity across the league, with many players, coaches and owners linking arms or kneeled during the anthem.

Still, Kaepernick remains unemployed. The grievance, filed Sunday night, alleges that NFL owners “have colluded to deprive Mr. Kaepernick of employment rights in retaliation for Mr. Kaepernick’s leadership and advocacy for equality and social justice and his bringing awareness to peculiar institutions still undermining racial equality in the United States.”

In a statement Sunday, his attorney, Mark Geragos said the complaint was filed "only after pursuing every possible avenue with all NFL teams and their executives."

"If the NFL (as well as all professional sports leagues) is to remain a meritocracy, then principled and peaceful political protests — which the owners themselves made great theater imitating weeks ago — should not be punished and athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government," Geragos continued. "Such a precedent threatens all patriotic Americans and harkens back to our darkest days as a nation. Protecting all athletes from such collusive conduct is what compelled Mr. Kaepernick to file his grievance."

The NFL has not yet commented on the complaint, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has stated previously that Kaepernick is not being blackballed.

I hope Kaep gets a nine-digit payout out of this, and then donates most of the money to fighting police brutality.  The NFL is going to find out that the legal discovery process is a hell of a thing, and if you think fans are upset now, wait until the inevitable evidence of collusion comes out in a court of law.

Pull up a chair.  This ought to be a good show.

StupidiNews!

• More than 250 are dead and hundreds more injured after a double truck bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia over the weekend, so far nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack.
• Firefighters in California are making progress battling wildfires in Napa Valley, but thousands more people were evacuated from homes in the path of the blazes on Saturday and Sunday.
• As Catalan leaders in Spain have yet to fully endorse independence from Madrid, Spanish government officials are moving towards direct rule as a Monday deadline passed.
• Hurricane Ophelia will bring heavy rain and damaging wind to Ireland and Scotland today as it makes landfall on the southern Ireland coast as a Category 1 storm.
• Automaker Tesla has fired hundreds after yearly performance reviews, CEO Elon Musk says highly-performing workers were rewarded, critics say it was a de facto layoff cycle.

Last Call For The Specter Of War

NY Times columnist Nick Kristof has returned from a five-day stay in North Korea and is convinced more than ever that the Trump regime is headed for a devastating military conflict with Pyongyang.

North Korea is the most rigidly controlled country in the world, with no open dissent, no religion and no civil society, and there is zero chance that anyone will express dissatisfaction with the government.

Still, the conversations were illuminating. Ordinary North Koreans were unfamiliar with the name of Otto Warmbier, the American student who died days after being returned to the United States in a vegetative state after his detention in Pyongyang for stealing a poster. But they knew all about President Trump’s threats to destroy their country. That’s because the government wants them to know about Trump’s threats, because they bolster Kim’s nationalist narrative that he protects Korea from imperialist American aggressors.

Being on the ground in a country lets you see things and absorb their power: the speaker on the walls of homes to feed propaganda; the pins that every adult wears with portraits of members of the Kim family; the daily power outages, but also signs that the economy is growing despite international sanctions; the Confucian emphasis on dignity that makes officials particularly resent Trump’s personal attacks on Kim; the hardening of attitudes since my last visit, in 2005; and the bizarre confidence that North Korea can not only survive a nuclear war with the U.S. but also emerge as victor.

At one factory, we came upon workers doing their “political study.” North Koreans explained that they have political study for two hours a day, plus most of the day on Saturday, so I asked what they focused on these days. “We must fight against the Americans!” one woman answered earnestly. And then the North Koreans in the room dissolved into laughter, perhaps because of the oddness of saying this to Americans.

A visit humanizes North Koreans, who outside the country sometimes come across as robots. In person, you are reminded that they laugh, flirt, worry, love and yearn to impress.

A military officer greeted me with a bone-crushing handshake, and I asked if that was meant to intimidate and convey to the Yankee imperialists that North Koreans are muscular supermen. He laughed in embarrassment, and when we ended the interview, he was much gentler.

I left North Korea fearing that we are far too complacent about the risk of a cataclysmic war that could kill millions. And that’s why reporting from within North Korea is crucial: There simply is no substitute for being in a place. It’s a lesson we should have learned from the run-up to the Iraq war, when the reporting was too often from the Washington echo chamber rather than the field. When the stakes are millions of lives and official communications channels are nonexistent, then journalism can sometimes serve as a bridge — and as a warning.
Yes, we must carefully weigh the risks — physical risks and the danger of being used by propagandists — and work to mitigate them.

But I have a sinking feeling in my gut, just as I had on the eve of the Iraq war, that our president may be careening blindly toward war. In that case, the job of journalists is to go out and report, however imperfectly, and try to ring alarm bells in the night.

I wouldn't exactly call Kristof's column from January 2003 he links in he last paragraph there an objection to the Iraq War, rather more of a grim resignation of the reality of the mess he admits the Bush administration could (and did) cause.  But he does appears to have a much clearer objection to the North Korean drumbeat as there is no good military solution at this point, and no scenario involving US forces that doesn't lead to millions dead in South Korea.

And yet that seems to be where we are headed at this point.  Every diplomatic overture is crushed by Donald Trump's rapacious ego, China isn't doing very much to stop Pyongyang, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is openly telling people that diplomacy will continue "until the first bombs drop".

I'm hoping that the bluster will pass as Trump becomes embroiled in the fallout from the Mueller investigation and soon, but that too raises the possibility that he could order strikes to stay in power. At this point nothing would shock me anymore.

The Far Right Still Simmers In Europe

Despite the decisive defeat in May of Marine Le Pen in France to President Emanuel Macron, reactionary Trumpian racist nationalism is rising across the pond and while it may not be winning outright yet in Europe in 2017, those forces continue to make substantial political gains. German elections last month left Angela Merkel in power but also greatly weakened and with the unabashedly neo-Nazi AfD party with 94 of 709 seats in Germany's Bundestag as the third-largest party in the country.  This weekend we're seeing a similar story play out in Austria as the Nazi apologists in the Freedom Party got nearly 26% of the vote.

Austria’s far-right Freedom party has scored its best result in a national election for almost two decades and could join the country’s next government, in a significant boost for Europe’s nationalist and anti-establishment movements.

Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old leader of the mainstream conservative People’s party, looked set to become Austrian chancellor — and the EU’s youngest leader — after narrowly topping Sunday’s poll, with 31.5 per cent according to projections based on early results.

But the projections showed 25.9 per cent of the vote went to the Freedom party, which has earned international notoriety for its xenophobia and airbrushing of Austria’s Nazi past. If borne out by final results, that would be its strongest performance since the 26.9 per cent it won in 1999 when the party was led by the charismatic Jörg Haider.

Its strong showing means the Freedom party could demand a high price to join a coalition led by Mr Kurz. That would almost certainty result a more hardline position from the government in Vienna on many EU topics, including immigration, and the Freedom party occupying top government posts such as the foreign and interior ministries.

However, Mr Kurz could seek another coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats, which gained 27.1 per cent of the vote according to projections, even though that would continue the “grand coalition” government between Austria’s two mainstream parties which disenchanted voters and which Mr Kurz had promised to overhaul.

Austria, which has a population of about 9m, was on the route of refugees fleeing wars in countries such as Syria, and received 130,000 asylum applications in 2015 and 2016.

Kurz's win is a reprieve so far but he may have no choice but to form a coalition with the Freedom Party.  Austria's president, Alexander Van der Bellen, barely beat out the Freedom Party's Norbert Hofer in last year's presidential race, so once again Austria dodges a bullet.

How long that will remain true, I can't tell you.

Sunday Long Read: The Women Of Generation Wrecks

Generation X, now in their 40's, remain the least financially stable and most downwardly mobile generation compared to their parents in American history by most standards: wealth compared to our parents, percentage of home ownership, retirement nest egg size (which for an increasing number of us is zero), and burden of student loans which we're still paying off.  It's bad enough for me, but in every case the women of Gen X are faring far worse than their Boomer mothers, and the collective mid-life crisis of women who grew up during the 80's is now an economic landmine in the heart of the American economy.

Is it any wonder that women our age possess a bone-deep, almost hallucinatory panic about money? It's not an idle worry. By some estimates, we carry more debt than any other age group (about $37,000 more than the national consumer debt average). We're some of the best-educated women in history, and yet we're downwardly mobile; about two-thirds of us have less wealth than our parents did at the same age.

This isn't because we spent too much on Pearl Jam CDs. The cost of a home has increased by more than 80 percent from 1970 to 2000, the last year for which data is available. (Between 2000 and 2005 and since 2013, home prices have outpaced salary growth.) In the late '70s annual tuition for a four-year college was less than $11,000 in today's dollars, now it's three times that. Which helps explain why 40-somethings haven't saved nearly enough for retirement. More than half of unmarried Gen Xers have less than $50,000 saved. When a woman takes time off to care for a sick relative—and it is usually the woman who takes time off—the potential cost in terms of lost wages and Social Security benefits averages $324,000 over her lifetime. Women not only earn less than men but also invest less—and then they live longer. That, writes investment expert Sallie Krawcheck, is "the gender gap that's really hurting us." Meanwhile, the safety net is vanishing; in 2040, the Social Security trust fund is due to run out—right as many of us hit retirement age.

"I call my midlife crisis Betty," says a 43-year-old filmmaker in Brooklyn, New York. "Betty is on me about being single and broke. Not having money reaches deep into you, and it creates a vicious and pernicious situation." In their 40s, our parents' generation could expect to own a house and to have money saved. In our 40s, we are often still scrambling like we did at age 25, and not just in creative fields, like filmmaking. Fifty-six percent of women still live paycheck to paycheck, and, according to a 2014 study on women and their money by Prudential, Gen X women are less confident in their ability to achieve their most important financial goals than either millennials or boomers.

Even women with cash in the bank—I had to work to find some—sound concerned. "I have a million dollars in my retirement account," says a 49-year-old New York City–based biotech executive, "and I'm still worried. Our kids are going to have to take out loans for school. Then, there are the retirement calculators on the internet. All of the information is: 'Lady, you better save money because no one else will take charge of your financial future!' I was incredibly frugal my whole life. I've been working my ass off. Since I was 10 years old, babysitting. And still I am stressed out about money."

Stress about money, of course, goes hand in hand with stress about work. If you've never lost a job or had to prove yourself in an industry that's changed massively in the few years you were away (and if this is you, I'm so happy for you!), then you might not realize how holding on in today's workforce, or trying to ascend, can feel like a feat of endurance. A 2011 report by the Center for Work-Life Policy (now the Center for Talent Innovation), which described Gen X as the “wrong place, wrong time” generation, noted that “thwarted by boomers who can't afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging millennials…49 percent of Gen Xers feel stalled in their careers.”Although the wage gap is now 82 cents on the dollar (as of the last annual Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and far more women these days are out-earning their husbands (29 percent of the time when both have jobs), women are still underrepresented among top earners. A report by PayScale that compared 1.4 million salary profiles found that in 2016 "men are 85 percent more likely than women to be VPs or C-Suite execs by mid-career." That's now, when many Gen X women are mid-career. New data from the BLS shows that women's median weekly earnings are highest for women 35-44 and slightly less for women 45-54. Men's earnings, not surprisingly, are higher than women's in all age groups, including these Gen X–heavy cohorts, but it's notable that earnings for men 45-54 are higher than men 35-44—there's no plateau for them.

One bright light that's often noted in our post–Great Recession world, where many industries are convulsing, is that jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are growing. But women hold only 25 percent of STEM jobs. The result is that unlike the job-hopping millennials, many women our age feel lucky to have steady work, even if it's not their dream job. But if there were a recipe for a midlife crisis, it could be showing up day after day for a job that's slowly corroding your soul.

"Sometimes, I have these moments of clarity, usually during lengthy conference calls," says Lori, 41, a contracts analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina. "This voice in my head suddenly starts shouting: What are you doing? This is pointless and boring! Why aren't you out there doing something you love? Name one thing you love! Cheese? Okay, great. Let's get some goats and start making cheese, and we can sell it from a truck. We'll call it something clever. And then, I spend the rest of the conference call thinking up names for my imaginary cheese truck: Hmm, some pun on a wheel? Fromage on a Wheel?"

So why doesn't she become the Fromage on a Wheel lady?

"I have friends who have told me over the years, 'Just quit your job and be a baker or be a cheesemaker,'" she says. "I've never had that option. Especially now, we have a child. You want to provide security and safety and health insurance. Those things overrule your own personal preferences. What if something really bad happens? Or if we lose a job?" She shudders.

For a lot of Gen X men, there's nothing to fall back on.  For Gen X women, it's only worse across the board.  They were expected by now to have it all: a successful career, a family, a home, and everything that goes with it.  Instead they got squeezed out by the Boomers and the Millennials and ended up in limbo.  And now we're headed for the Age of Austerity.

And as it always has been in America, it's harder for women on top of everything else.

Last Call For The Two-Front War

Both Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka have been booted from the White House, but it doesn't mean they are gone from the Trump regime at all.  In fact they both are vowing to take on the two-thirds plus of Americans who disapprove of Trump and destroy them by any means necessary.  Bannon will take on Republicans and conservatives who don't swear allegiance to Dear Leader...

Steve Bannon taunted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday and vowed to challenge any Senate Republican who doesn’t publicly condemn attacks on President Donald Trump.

“Yeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. They’ve all left you. We’ve cut your oxygen off,” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said during a speech to religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

Referencing Shakespeare, Bannon compared McConnell to Julius Caesar, adding that lawmakers are wondering who will emerge as Brutus, the character who reluctantly joins in on the assassination of Caesar for the benefit of Rome.

Bannon, now the executive chairman of Breitbart News, bashed Senate Republicans by name for not publicly distancing themselves from Sen. Bob Corker’s criticism of Trump, reserving particular animus for Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Dean Heller (Nev.) and Deb Fischer (Neb.).

“Nobody can run and hide on this one,” he said. “These folks are coming for you. The days of taking a few nice conservative votes and hiding are over.”

 ...while Gorka is vowing to destroy anyone to the left of Trump.

During his speech to the Values Voter Summit today, Sebastian Gorkasaid liberals who were celebrating him leaving the White House should be more worried now.

Gorka spoke before Steve Bannon did and told the crowd not to be so troubled by the fact that the two of them left the White House.

“This is much larger than the White House,” he said. “This is a national movement to retake our country.”

He noted how liberals celebrated when both he and Bannon left, but after once again invoking Star Wars, he said this:

“The left has no idea how much more damage we can do to them as private citizens, as people unfettered by being part of the U.S. government.”

Those who oppose Trump must be exterminated, you see.

And that above sentence may not be figurative for much longer.

The Blue Wave Builds For 2018

Once again Cook Political Report is checking on 2018 House races, and in the dozen districts that warranted a shift in fortunes in the last month, all 12 have seen moves to the Democratic side.

President Trump and GOP control of Congress have sparked a 2018 Democratic candidate bonanza. Don't call it "recruitment:" for the most part, these aspirants decided to take the plunge on their own. Many are political newcomers; others have waited years for the right moment to run. And in light of national polling, it was only a matter of time before more GOP-held House seats joined the ranks of the vulnerable.

Over the past week, the Cook Political Report has met with dozens of Democratic candidates sporting impressive resumes, ranging from military veterans and former Obama administration officials to prosecutors and scientists. Much like the GOP's crop of candidates in 2010, only a handful were current or former elected officials. However, some campaigns have progressed more quickly than others and not all opportunities are created equal.

For example, Democrats are rightfully excited about former federal prosecutor Jay Hulings, 42, who has taken on drug cartels and public corruption in South Texas. He possesses the national security credentials to go toe to toe with GOP Rep. Will Hurd (TX-23), a former undercover CIA agent, and it doesn't hurt that he's politically close to the Castro brothers and married to a former Miss San Antonio. But he must also overcome a competitive primary and typically low Latino turnout in midterms.

The races to watch right now are:

Arizona's 2nd, which is now a true toss-up after GOP Rep. Martha McSally sided with Trump in taking health coverage away from thousands of Arizona voters and could face a substantial challenge from Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick

California's 48th, where Putin's favorite congressman GOP Rep. Dana Rorabacher is now in the fight of his life against Democrat Hans Kierstead, who has a big war chest after selling his cancer research biotech company in order to enter public service.

California's 50th, where Duncan D. Hunter inherited his seat from his father only to face a DoJ investigation for campaign finance spending on private school for his kids and airline trips that included the family's pet rabbit, he'll face former NAVY Seal Josh Butner running on the Democratic side.

Iowa's 1st, where GOP Rep. Rod Blum now faces a strong challenge in what's now a toss-up race against state Democratic Rep. and rising star Abby Finkenauer.

Kansas's 2nd, where GOP Rep. Lynn Jenkins was one of the first retirements after Trump won, all but announcing her disgust with the party and the fact she's leaving public service.  Republicans have a mess on their hands as to who will replace her, but Democrats have made it a toss-up with the arrival of Kansas House Minority Leader Paul Davis as the top challenger for the open seat.

Hopefully more will join the ranks of these seats the Dems can flip over the next year or so.

A Bit Left Of The Moon

New Republic's Sarah Jaffe argues that post-2016 liberals winning at the state and local level in 2017 aren't winning because of Bernie, they're winning because they're liberals in a world where Trump makes both an easy and immoral contrast as he is the modern GOP.

One of the few bright spots of the Trump era thus far has been a new wave of electoral wins for candidates with decidedly left-of-center views. The victories have come in municipal and state-legislative races—most notably in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Long Island, where the left isn’t “supposed” to have a chance to win anything. In some cases, like last week’s mayoral victory of Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, left-wing Democrats are unseating centrist, Chamber-of-Commerce-style Democrats. In others, longtime left-wing activists are successfully challenging Republicans in places where centrist Democrats have long failed.

These breakthroughs are bringing fresh ideas and new faces into the foundational layers of the political system, where conservatives have been ascendant for years. But the national media, which actively misunderstands both the South and the rest of “red” America, has decided to cover these stories only as triumphs of the “Bernie Sanders left,” as though all politics were not (in the famous phrase) “local” anymore; instead, national reporters and pundits increasingly, misleadingly, see all local politics as national.

“Bernie Wins Birmingham” is convenient shorthand for those who have no idea what actually goes on in Birmingham. But Bernie Sanders and the group his 2016 campaign inspired, Our Revolution, are not winning elections in places like Birmingham or Jackson, Mississippi, which in June elected a mayor who’s promised, “I’ll make Jackson the most radical city on the planet.” Activists in Birmingham and Jackson and Albuquerque and Long Island are winning them—left-wing activists who’ve toiled for years in the trenches, working with a new wave of organizers from Black Lives Matter and other insurgent groups, who bring social-media savvy and fired-up young voters into the mix.

Of course, it’s a great thing that groups like Our Revolution, which sprung out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, are bringing money, volunteers, and national attention to candidates like Woodfin. But the top-down narrative misses a lot about what is happening on the ground around the country. For starters, it misses the movements that shifted politics to the point where someone like Sanders could run for president and win state after state in the first place. More important, it misses the specifics—the ideas, the tactics, the challenges to existing political hegemonies—that have made these campaigns successful. And telling the story wrong lessens the chances that these unlikely wins can be replicated elsewhere.

In other words, it's amazing what liberal Democrats can do in the Trump era without the baggage that the Village media has dumped on the backs of Hillary Clinton, but it doesn't mean that Bernie Sanders should get the credit, either.

I've said for years that the Democrats needed a better political candidate farm team at the state and local level, especially in Trump states that Obama has success in like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida, and we're finally seeing it get rolling.  The fact that we're seeing it in Alabama and New Mexico too is all the more impressive.  It's coming from the bottom and moving up, not the top down.

But our idiot media wants to frame it in terms of Hillary vs. Bernie, and I'm sick of it.  I reject it in the era of Trump and rejected it before the era of Trump too.

Sadly, many in the country did not, which is why we have Trump today.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

If there's something you can count on in 2017, it's a story about Trump campaign wrongdoing being far worse than originally believed as additional information comes out to prove them to be liars again and again.  This time it's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, whose financial ties to Russian mobster Oleg Deripaska are far more extensive than reported earlier this year.

Paul Manafort, a former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, has much stronger financial ties to a Russian oligarch than have been previously reported.

An NBC News investigation reveals that $26 million changed hands in the form of a loan between a company linked to Manafort and the oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin.

The loan brings the total of their known business dealings to around $60 million over the past decade, according to financial documents filed in Cyprus and the Cayman Islands.

Manafort was forced to resign from the Trump campaign in August 2016, following allegations of improper financial dealings, charges he has strenuously denied. He is now a central figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Investigators have said they are looking into Manafort's financial ties to prominent figures in Russia.

According to company documents obtained by NBC News in Cyprus, funds were sent from a company owned by Deripaska to entities linked to Manafort, registered in Cyprus.

Manafort's in a lot of trouble.  The only question is how much he can offer Mueller, because if he doesn't turn evidence, he's going down for stuff like this:

The NBC News investigation shows that $26 million was transferred from Oguster Management Ltd. — which is wholly owned by Deripaska, according to a disclosure filed at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange — to Yiakora Ventures Ltd. Yiakora, according to Cyprus financial documents, is a "related party" to Manafort's many interests on the island, a financial term meaning that Manafort's interests have significant influence over Yiakora.

The investigation also confirms a smaller loan of just $7 million from Oguster to another Manafort-linked company, LOAV Advisers Ltd., a figure first reported by The New York Times. Company documents reviewed by NBC News reveal the entire amount was unsecured, not backed by any collateral.

The $7 million loan to LOAV had no specified repayment date, while the $26 million loan to Yiakora was repayable on demand. It’s not known if either sum has ever been repaid.

Lawyers specializing in money laundering said the loans appeared unusual and merited further investigation.

“Money launderers frequently will disguise payments as loans,” said Stefan Cassella, a former federal prosecutor. “You can call it a loan, you can call it Mary Jane. If there's no intent to repay it, then it's not really a loan. It's just a payment.”

Manafort was in for $33 million to one of Putin's favorite mobster pals.  That's a hell of a lot of leverage, which became exponential once Manafort joined Team Trump.  And Now Trump is president.

But Manafort is far from the only person to turn evidence on Trump.  Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is definitely talking to Mueller about what he knows.

Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff to President Trump, was interviewed for a full day Friday by members of special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s team, Priebus’s lawyer said.

In a statement, William Burck said his client was interviewed voluntarily.

“He was happy to answer all of their questions,” Burck said.

The interview, which took place at the special counsel’s office in Washington, is a sign that Mueller’s investigation is now reaching into the highest levels of Trump’s aides and former aides.

Priebus served as chairman of the Republican National Committee during the 2016 election campaign before joining the White House when Trump was inaugurated. He resigned as chief of staff in July after Trump had stewed for months about his handling of the White House’s legislative agenda in the president’s first months in office. He was replaced by John F. Kelly.

Mueller’s team has also indicated an interest in interviewing a series of other current and former White House aides, including White House counsel Don McGahn and director of communications Hope Hicks.

A full day's interview?  That alone should have Trump in panic mode and the theory I've seen is that the vindictive and punishing behavior we've seen where Trump is deliberately lashihng out to hurt the American people is something an abuser does when he knows he's in trouble.

Doesn't take a genius to see what happened.

Last Call For The Pentagon And Puerto Rico

We've reached the point of the Trump regime where we don't honestly know if leaks proving their complete incompetence are done as a cry of help by captive executive branch employees or if they are just completely incompetent.  Considering the DoD is involved, it's a coin flip as Bloomberg's Chris Flavelle was emailed the Pentagon's spin cycle talking points strategy on cleaning up Trump's mess in Puerto Rico.

Sept. 28: Eight days after Maria hit, coverage of the federal government’s response is getting more negative. 

The Government Message: Pentagon officials tell staff to emphasize “coverage of life-saving/life-sustaining operations” and for spokespeople to avoid language about awaiting instructions from FEMA, “as that goes against the teamwork top-line message.”

Sept. 29: San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz criticizes Washington’s spin, calling Puerto Rico a “people-are-dying story.” 

The Government Message: FEMA talking points ignore Cruz, instructing its officials to say that “the federal government’s full attention is on Hurricane Maria response.” 

Sept. 30: Trump attacks the mayor’s “poor leadership ability.” The Pentagon worries that Trump’s “dialogue” with Cruz is becoming the story, with “many criticizing his lack of empathy.” 

The Government Message: FEMA stresses its success in reaching “all municipalities in Puerto Rico.” 

Oct. 1: Trump calls critics of the response “politically motivated ingrates.” 

The Government Message: Defense staff admit that “the perception of USG response continues to be negative.” Spokespeople are told to say, “I am very proud of our DOD forces,” before conceding “there are some challenges to work through.” 

Oct. 2: The massacre in Las Vegas dominates the headlines. 

The Government Message: The shooting “has drawn mainstream TV attention away from Puerto Rico response,” FEMA says. Still, the roundup seems to have lost some of its previous optimism. It concludes, simply: “Negative tonality.”

The Trump regime was goddamn relived that 58 people were killed in Las Vegas because it took the spotlight off the millions suffering in Puerto Rico.   Ghoulish doesn't begin to describe it.  Meanwhile 3 weeks after the second hurricane to hit the island this fall, millions still lack power and drinking water.

Meanwhile, Trump regime state media is trying to portray Puerto Rico government officials as corrupt crooks keeping relief supplies for themselves rather than it being, you know, Trump's fault.

This is where we are in 2017.

The Retail That Wags The Dog

Everything old is new again as big box stores like Wal-Mart and Target moved into rural America in the 90's and wiped out general store chains like Woolworth's.  Now internet giants like Amazon are putting the squeeze on the big box stores, and that's leaving room for the new, old future of retail: the rise of Dollar General and Dollar Tree as the new American Corner Store.

On a Friday in April, Bob Tharp, the mayor of Decatur, Ark., takes me to see what used to be the commercial heart of his town. There isn’t much to look at beyond the husk of a Walmart Express: 12,000 square feet of cinder block painted in different shades of brown. The glass doors are locked, as they’ve been for 14 months. “For so many people in this town, to have to see this empty building every day, they couldn’t drive by without getting tears in their eyes,” Tharp recalls. The store had opened on a frigid morning in January 2015, just days into his mayorship. “Pinch yourself and it is true,” he’d posted on Facebook the night before. For the first time in a decade, the 1,788 residents could buy groceries in town. But the reprieve was short. The following January, word came from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s corporate headquarters, 18 miles to the east in Bentonville, that within the month the store would be closed. 

“You rascals!” Tharp remembers telling the executive who called to deliver the news. “You come to these small towns, and you build these stores, and you cause all the mom and pops to close down, and now you’re the only ones left standing, and you want to go home? Why would you do that to our community?” 

The Walmart Express had been a pilot store, the smallest ever for the world’s largest retailer, designed to test whether a national brand with major supply-chain advantages could wrest a profit from towns long considered too sparsely populated. The answer, it seemed, was no: The company closed more than 100 stores across Arkansas and other southeastern states that day.

Tharp did what he could to turn things around, putting out calls to urge a grocer, or any retailer, to move into the vacant building. He found no takers for a year, until at last, Dollar General Corp., which had operated a smaller store on the outskirts of Decatur’s downtown since 2001, agreed to relocate to Main Street—and start offering fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables.

The Decatur store is one of 1,000 Dollar Generals opening this year as part of the $22 billion chain’s plan to expand rapidly in poor, rural communities where it has come to represent not decline but economic resurgence, or at least survival. The company’s aggressively plain yellow-and-black logo is becoming the small-town corollary to Starbucks Corp.’s two-tailed green mermaid. (Although you can spot her on canned iced coffee at Dollar General, too.) Already, there are 14,000 one-story cinder block Dollar Generals in the U.S.—outnumbering by a few hundred the coffee chain’s domestic footprint. Fold in the second-biggest dollar chain, Dollar Tree, and the number of stores, 27,465, exceeds the 22,375 outlets of CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens combined. And the little-box player is fully expecting to turn profits where even narrow-margin colossus Walmart failed.

There are a lot of players in this market: Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and they're getting competition from German efficiency in Aldi Foods and newcomer Lidl.  The Saturday half-day trip to the giant Wallyworld, Costco, or Target to get everything all in one place doesn't work for flyover country where Amazon won't deliver,  and "small box" chains are aggressively moving in.  After all, the Mom and Pop stores are already long gone.

And I've talked about Dollar General before: the other main issue is price.  Wal-Mart and Costco may be the champions of selling you that 55 gallon drum of mayo, but for convenience store location without the huge price hikes, you can't beat the model.  And yes, there's still a Dollar General within walking distance of the new apartment building I moved to a couple years back, just like there was when I wrote that post seven years ago at the old apartment.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  The Dollar General Recession never really left rural America, and neither has DG. The Wal-Mart model isn't the only game in town anymore.

America Is Getting Trumpcare Anyway

With Republicans unable to destroy Obamacare in Congress, Trump is simply going to do it for them through applied executive branch neglect, and he really no longer cares what the American people have to say about it.

Trump is asking federal agencies to look for ways to expand the use of association health plans, groups of small businesses that pool together to buy health insurance, and to broaden the definition of short-term insurance, which is exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s rules, administration officials said. 

The ultimate impact will depend on any new regulations written as a result of the order, but overall, the Trump administration could make cheaper plans with skimpier benefits more available — and experts worry that will damage the ACA’s marketplaces. 

“The president still firmly believes that Congress must act to repeal and replace Obamacare, but before that can be done, this administration must act to provide relief,” Andrew Bremberg, who oversees domestic policy at the White House, told reporters Thursday morning. “We expect these policy changes to potentially benefit tens of millions of Americans over time.” 

Policy experts warn that together, these changes could represent a serious threat to Obamacare: Trump wants to open more loopholes for more people to buy insurance outside the health care law’s markets, which experts anticipate would destabilize the market for customers who are left behind with higher premiums and fewer insurers. 

The fear is that Trump’s action could lead to many association health plans being exempted from core Obamacare requirements like the coverage of certain essential health benefits. It could also potentially allow some individuals to join these plans too, which could hurt the individual insurance marketplaces by drawing younger and healthier people away from them. In much the same way, short-term insurance could also take healthier people out of the law’s markets. 

The effect won’t be immediate: Administration officials said they didn’t expect any new regulations to be implemented before the end of the year. But Trump’s order does present a long-term risk to the ACA. 

“The clear intent of the executive order is to create a parallel insurance market exempt from many of the consumer protections in the Affordable Care Act,” Larry Levitt at the Kaiser Family Foundation told me. “This has the potential to siphon off healthy people with skinnier benefits and cheaper premiums, leaving behind a sicker pool of people under ACA plans.”

The long-term goal is to collapse the individual market and then Congress will have no choice but to put a health care "reform" Trump will sign on his desk.  Sure it'll wreck the lives of tens of millions, but who cares, right?

But then this morning Trump completely blew up the Obamacare exchanges by cutting off subsidy payments to insurers to lower premiums.

The subsidies, which are worth an estimated $7 billion this year and are paid out in monthly installments, may stop almost immediately since Congress hasn’t appropriated funding for the program.

The decision, which leaked out only hours after Trump signed an executive order calling for new regulations to encourage cheap, loosely regulated health plans – delivered a double whammy to Obamacare after months of failed GOP efforts to repeal the law. With open enrollment for the 2018 plan year set to launch in two weeks, the moves seem aimed at dismantling the law through executive actions.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the decision in a statement emailed to reporters at 10:47 p.m. Thursday.

“Based on guidance from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is no appropriation for cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies under Obamacare,” she said. “In light of this analysis, the Government cannot lawfully make the cost-sharing reduction payments. …The bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system.”

Who will be hurt by this? Sure, this is going to harm red state Trump voters, but the biggest problems will be in states that expanded Medicaid. After all, the majority of those who will suffer aren't Trump voters, but blue states who already raised premiums for 2018 because they saw what was coming.

Threats by President Donald Trump to ax crucial payments to health insurers will double, on average, the price of most Obamacare plans in California next year. 

Obamacare officials in the Golden State on Wednesday said they are slapping a 12.4 percent surcharge on the prices of so-called silver individual health plans in 2018 because of uncertainty over whether Trump will continue making those payments.
And it will be taxpayers, not the insurance customers themselves, who will end up footing much of the bill.

Without the surcharge, silver plans sold on Covered California, the state's Obamacare marketplace, would have risen an average of just 12.5 percent next year, officials said as they revealed overall prices statewide.

With the surcharge, the average price hike is just shy of 25 percent. 

For individual insurers, the actual added surcharge per plan will be anywhere from 8 percent to 27 percent. 

About 6 out of 10 customers of Covered California are enrolled in silver plans, which cover 70 percent of enrollees' health costs. 

Covered California said that even with the surcharge, 78 percent of customers who qualify for federal subsidies to reduce their monthly premiums will "either see no change in what they would pay for insurance in 2018, or would pay less than what they would have paid if there had been no ... surcharge." 

That is because the value of those premium subsidies, which are in the form of federal tax credits, rises with the retail price of the health plan. In "many" cases, Covered California said, subsidized silver plan customers will see their subsidies rise more than the amount of the surcharge.

And those payments will go away completely should the GOP have their way, along with Medicaid expansion.  California would then be on the hook for tens of billions yearly to keep these plans up. Even if the GOP can't pass a plan, by wrecking the individual market, Trump can make sure there are no plans to offer other than the garbage plans the GOP has favored all along.

Trump can just blame Obamacare for being broken, even though he's the one swinging the sledgehammer.

And so it goes.

StupidiNews!

• The White House says Donald Trump will announce decertification of the Iranian nuclear deal, giving Congress 60 days to come up with a path forward.
• The House on Thursday voted to approve disaster funds for federal hurricane and wildfire relief, Democrats all voted for the measure, 69 Republicans voted against.
• Amazon Studios head Roy Price was suspended immediately yesterday for sexual harassment allegations in the wake of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's long history of abuse.
• Commercial spaceflight company SpaceX says plans to shuttle US astronauts to and from the International Space Station may slip into 2019 as testing and logistics problems remain.
• California has published new draft rules for driverless cars which could become final by the end of the month, driverless taxis could be on California roads as soon as next year.