Russian To Judgment, Con't

It seems at every turn, Candidate Trump was seeking Vladimir Putin's help to win the election and surrounded himself again and again with people Trump believed who could get him Putin's ear, and the more we dig into this relationship, the more people we find who connect Trump and Putin.  The latest NY Times story on one of those connections involves Jeff Sessions and the NRA.

A conservative operative trumpeting his close ties to the National Rifle Association and Russia told a Trump campaign adviser last year that he could arrange a back-channel meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, according to an email sent to the Trump campaign.

A May 2016 email to the campaign adviser, Rick Dearborn, bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, the N.R.A. member said he wanted the advice of Mr. Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, then a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and Mr. Dearborn’s longtime boss, about how to proceed in connecting the two leaders.

Russia, he wrote, was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and would attempt to use the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Louisville, Ky., to make “‘first contact.’” The email, which was among a trove of campaign-related documents turned over to investigators on Capitol Hill, was described in detail to The New York Times.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, secured a guilty plea on Friday from President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for lying to the F.B.I. about contacts with Moscow’s former ambassador to the United States. But those contacts came after Mr. Trump’s improbable election victory.

The emailed outreach from the conservative operative to Mr. Dearborn came far earlier, around the same time that Russians were trying to make other connections to the Trump campaign. Another contact came through an American advocate for Christian and veterans causes, and together, the outreach shows how, as Mr. Trump closed in on the nomination, Russians were using three foundational pillars of the Republican Party — guns, veterans and Christian conservatives — to try to make contact with his unorthodox campaign.

I'm beginning to think all these ridiculously overt connections to Putin were insurance for Trump making good on his quid pro quo to remove US sanctions on Russia, because otherwise there would be no way that Trump could hide them if he was exposed.

Both efforts, made within days of each other, centered on the N.R.A.’s annual meeting and appear to involve Alexander Torshin, a deputy governor of the Russian central bank and key figure in Mr. Putin’s United Russia party, who was instructed to make contact with the campaign.

“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” the N.R.A. member and conservative activist, Paul Erickson, wrote. “He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election. Let’s talk through what has transpired and Senator Sessions’s advice on how to proceed.”

It is not clear how Mr. Dearborn handled the outreach. He forwarded a similar proposal, made through Rick Clay, an advocate for conservative Christian causes, to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a top campaign aide. Mr. Kushner rebuffed the proposal at the time, according to two people who have seen Mr. Kushner’s email.

Mr. Sessions told investigators from the House Intelligence Committee that he did not recall the outreach, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Dearborn did not return requests for comment, and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with matters related to the investigations, declined to comment. Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Erickson were not successful.

Intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia, on orders from the highest levels of its government, undertook a sophisticated campaign to hack Democratic computers, spread propaganda and undermine the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The repeated outreach around the N.R.A. convention, where Mr. Trump accepted the group’s endorsement, came just weeks after a self-described intermediary for the Russian government told George Papadopoulos, a campaign aide, that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton. And just weeks later, the president’s eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about the would-be Democratic nominee.

“The Kremlin believes that the only possibility of a true reset in this relationship would be with a new Republican White House,” Mr. Erickson wrote to Mr. Dearborn, adding, “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

There's no longer any doubt that Trump was working for Russia.  The question has always been if the rest of the GOP would give a damn about it, and the answer so far is a resounding "hell no, we're getting what we want from him."  They don't believe it, and even if they believed it, they don't care.

And why should they?  They've all but won a multi-generational battle that will destroy 80 years of classic New Deal liberalism and have returned America into a new Gilded Age where the quarter of Americans who vote Republican every election year in local, state, and federal elections are the proxy that rules the other 75% of us, the vast majority of that group composed of people who just don't give a damn either because they've never been convinced that government can ever be used for good.

We don't care enough to remove the GOP.  There's no bottom limit, no nadir for what they can get away with now.

No wonder we have Trump.

Automatic For The People, Con't

Another set of alarm bells over automation and jobs, this time by McKinsey, finds that job losses due to automation will take out anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the current global workforce by 2030.

As many as 800 million workers worldwide may lose their jobs to robots and automation by 2030, equivalent to more than a fifth of today’s global labor force.

That’s according to a new report covering 46 nations and more than 800 occupations by the research arm of McKinsey & Co.

The consulting company said Wednesday that both developed and emerging countries will be impacted. Machine operators, fast-food workers and back-office employees are among those who will be most affected if automation spreads quickly through the workplace.

Even if the rise of robots is less rapid, some 400 million workers could still find themselves displaced by automation and would need to find new jobs over the next 13 years, the McKinsey Global Institute study found.

But of course there will be new jobs, with new skills to learn.

The good news for those displaced is that there will be jobs for them to transition into, although in many cases they’re going to have to learn new skills to do the work. Those jobs will include health-care providers for aging populations, technology specialists and even gardeners, according to the report.

“We’re all going to have to change and learn how to do new things over time,” Michael Chui, a San Francisco-based partner at the institute, said in an interview.

Then again if you don't have the money or education to learn these new skills, well, then you'll have to do other things like Be Poor And Unemployed.   McKinsey by the way finds that as many as 75 million American jobs are going away to be replaced by...something, in the next 12 years.  And tens of millions of us won't have the resources to change careers, especially should that odious GOP tax bill become law.

A lot of us aren't going to come out on the other side on this one, guys.

Taxing Our Patience, Con't

The Senate GOP has passed their version of the awful tax heist bill in the middle of the night, giving a multi-trillion dollar tax cut to corporations and the wealthy, which will be funded in part by mandatory cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and will cost 13-15 million people health insurance, and on top of all that, the measure will add a whopping $1.47 trillion to the national debt just by itself. 

The Senate passed the most sweeping tax rewrite in decades early Saturday, with Republicans lining up to approve an overhaul that will touch almost every corner of the United States economy, affecting families, small business owners and multinational corporations, with the biggest benefits flowing to the highest-earning Americans.

Senators voted 51-49, as Republicans approved the nearly 500-page bill in the early morning hours after lawmakers received a rewritten version, which contained significant changes from the original bill that passed two Senate panels last month along party lines. The last-minute revisions prompted an outcry from Democrats, who said it was impossible — and irresponsible — for lawmakers to read and digest a significant piece of legislation in such a short period of time.

Speaking on the Senate floor ahead of the vote, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called the Republican approach “a process and a product that no one can be proud of and everyone should be ashamed of.”

He went on to warn that changes made to the bill “under the cover of darkness” would “stuff even more money into the pockets of the wealthy and the biggest corporations while raising taxes on millions in the middle class.”

And GOP senators were bribed into voting for the bill with amendments that were literally penciled in as the final bill was voted on only 2 hours after being finished.

Many of the changes stemmed from a series of last-minute agreements reached to convince a handful of holdout Republican senators, including Susan Collins of Maine and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to throw their support behind the legislation. One of those Republican holdouts, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, voted against the legislation.

Early on Saturday morning, Mr. Pence provided a tiebreaking vote to pass an amendment offered by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, that would allow people to use up to $10,000 a year from tax-advantaged 529 savings accounts to fund tuition at private and religious K-12 schools or certain educational expenses for home-schooled students. Right now, such accounts can only be used to pay for higher education.

So how did GOP deficit hawks all vote for the bill (except for Bob Corker)?  It's simple, they simply don't believe the analysis that the bill will destroy the US economy.

Democrats opposed the tax bill as a bloc, saying it was meant to help the wealthy and not the middle class. With the Senate split 52 to 48, Republicans barely had votes to spare. But the bill’s passage was made possible by a near-complete Republican embrace of the idea that about $1.5 trillion of tax cuts will pay for themselves, by producing enough economic growth and additional federal revenue to offset their costs to the Treasury.

That belief was contradicted by several studies, including one from Congress’s official economic scorekeeper, which Republicans dismissed as overly pessimistic.

Mr. McConnell waved off any deficit concerns. “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a revenue producer.”

The House and Senate will now work quickly to resolve the differences between their bills and deliver a plan to President Trump’s desk, with the aim of delivery by Christmas.

The last time the GOP passed a tax cut bill was 2003, and five years later we had the worst recession in generations.  Now the GOP has passed an even more ridiculous bill that, when it fails to produce the growth it claims it will be in order to be revenue-neutral, will automatically trigger trillions in austerity cuts.

If this gets through the House and reconciled and onto Trump's desk, even if Trump was impeached and removed from office in January by some miracle, we'd still have a guaranteed financial collapse just in time for Democrats to have to clean up in 2020 or so, and years of "kick the can" austerity to follow.

It'll take decades to fix the damage from this bill, and some of us won't be around to see that happen directly because of the cuts.  It's still possible that the bill could fail in conference, but we'd need a massive, massive effort to stop it.

We'll see.

Last Call For Black Hawk Down 2: Electric Mogadishu

One of the major problems of the Trump regime's constant stream of outrageous, immoral and illegal behavior is that is sucks all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to the debate over major international military incidents like last August's apparent massacre of ten civilians in Somalia by US special forces.

THE U.S.-LED OPERATION on Aug. 25 would result in the death of 10 civilians, including at least one child, and become the largest stain on U.S. ground operations in the country since the infamous Black Hawk Down incident in 1993. 

In the operation’s aftermath, hundreds of people in the nearby town Afgoye flooded the city’s streets demanding justice for those killed, and survivors on the farm refused to bury their dead until the Somali government recanted its allegations that they were members Al Shabaab, and offered an apology. 

The Daily Beast conducted an investigation into the Bariire operation and its aftermath, interviewing three of the operation’s survivors over the phone from Mogadishu and meeting in person with the Somali National Army Commander in charge of the Somali soldiers who assisted in the operation under the command of soldiers from U.S. Special Operations Forces. 

The Daily Beast also met in Mogadishu with over two dozen Somali intelligence officers, political analysts, local leaders, and former and current government officials familiar with the incident. Two of these individuals are also involved in an ongoing local, non-government-sponsored investigation into the incident. 

The Daily Beast also met in person with the commander of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces whose purview under the mandate of the United Nations peacekeeping force includes Bariire, and who was approached by the Americans about their plan to re-capture and hold Bariire. 

The vast majority of these sources preferred to speak anonymously, either because they were not authorized to discuss the incident or because they feared possible retribution from either the Somali Federal Government or the Americans for doing so. 

The details that emerged paint a damning picture of at least one U.S. ground operation in the African nation. This includes U.S. Special Operators firing upon unarmed civilians, using human intelligence from sources widely considered untrustworthy to Somalis in the region as well as government officials, and instructing their Somali counterparts to collect weapons that were being stored inside a home—not displaced on the field in the course of the firefight—and placing them beside the bodies of those killed prior to photographing them. In the aftermath of the incident, according to our sources, American diplomats also pressured the Somali government to bury the unfavorable findings of a Somali Federal Government-led investigation. 

Hours after the operation, AFRICOM released a statement noting that it was aware of allegations of civilian casualties in the operation and that AFRICOM was “conducting an assessment into the situation to determine the facts on the ground.” The AFRICOM press release also stated that “the Somali National Army was conducting an operation in the area with U.S. forces in a supporting role.” 

Yet a majority of bullet casings collected from the farm that was attacked, which were seen by The Daily Beast, were from American—not Somali National Army—weapons. This appears to confirm that the Special Operations team did not command SNA while remaining behind during the operation, as the AFRICOM statement would have the public believe, but rather were responsible themselves for firing upon and killing unarmed civilians. 

According to Maj. Audricia Harris, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, “this incident remains under investigation” and the DOD cannot comment on any specifics of the employment of U.S. Special Operations forces. She noted that U.S. Special Operations “take all measures during the targeting process to avoid or minimize civilian casualties or collateral damage and to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict.”

The details surrounding the planning of this incident collected by The Daily Beast suggest, however, that the Special Operations Forces involved in this mission did not sufficiently vet the information they were presented with prior to carrying out this operation. 

The Daily Beast's Christina Goldbaum does an excellent job of chasing this story down.  Not that this kind of thing didn't happen under Obama, Bush 43, or Clinton, because it most certainly did, from Bosnia to Iraq to Yemen. But it's still wrong when it happens, and it needs to investigated.  At bare minimum ten people are dead, and their deaths were systematically covered up trying to portray them as terrorists.  Hey, we're pretty good at planting guns here in America next to dead black people, why not export those valuable skills?

After all, we spent three, almost four years neck deep in House hearing on Benghazi. Surely Republicans will want to get to the bottom of this tragedy and apparent cover-up as well, right?

Right?

The Mask Slips Again...

...and Republicans accidentally tell the truth about their plans for America.

Advocates for seniors and the middle class have been warning for weeks that the Republican drive to cut taxes for the wealthy is the prelude to a larger attack on Social Security and Medicare. 

In a videotaped interview with two Politico reporters Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the quiet parts out loud. Asked by interviewers Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman how to address the federal deficit, he replied: “We have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.” (A video of Rubio’s appearance is here, with his remarks on Social Security and Medicare beginning at the 21:45 mark.) 

The only thing that’s new here is the explicit admission by a Republican officeholder that this is the GOP’s master plan to eviscerate the welfare and retirement of American workers. Budget analysts have seen it coming with all the subtlety of a freight train. As we reported earlier this month, the damage begins with the so-called Paygo law (for “pay as you go”), which requires Congress to offset any increase in the federal deficit with spending cuts. The law limits Medicare cuts to 4% of its budget per year, or $25 billion of its $625-billion budget. 

But $25 billion a year is a drastic cut that “would undermine the delivery of care to the 57 million seniors and disabled Americans who depend on the program,” Max Richtman, head of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said a couple of weeks ago. 

The progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities observed that the Senate’s plan, which would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, would “create pressure for future cuts.” That’s confirmed by Rubio’s remarks to Palmer and Sherman.

Following up the GOP tax bill with trillions in ugly, painful and racist austerity cuts was always going to be the plan, in what will be the biggest, most brazen robbery in human history.  Republicans are planning this in broad daylight, and most Republican voters still don't believe that the GOP would ever hurt them personally, and the ones that do know the cuts will hurt Obama coalition voters more.  They're all okay with what's coming.

We're running out of time.

BREAKING: It's Mueller Time, Con't

As largely expected, we now know the fruits of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn's lawyers meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller: a plea deal where Flynn will cop to a single charge of lying to the FBI, in this case about his meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

President Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, is expected to plead guilty on Friday to lying to the F.B.I. about two conversations with the Russian ambassador last December during the presidential transition. 

The charges were the latest indication that Mr. Flynn was cooperatingwith the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Flynn was scheduled to appear in federal court in Washington at 10:30 on Friday morning. 

A plea deal with Mr. Flynn brings Mr. Mueller’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s inner circle. A plea agreement suggests that Mr. Flynn provided information to prosecutors, which may help advance the inquiry. 

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers recently told the president’s legal team that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation as they had been — a sign that Mr. Flynn had decided to cooperate with the prosecution. 

Mr. Flynn was charged with making false statements to F.B.I. agents about two discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak.

As I've long said, for Mueller to agree to a pleas deal given the sheer magnitude of potential charges Flynn (and his son Michael Jr.) were facing, Flynn would not only have to give up pretty much everything,  the quality of Flynn's information would have to be solid pure platinum and not just gold-plated rumor.

The single charge of lying the the FBI bears all that out.  Flynn has absolutely rolled on somebody big.  If I'm Donald Trump, I'm going to have a bad time.

[UPDATE] ABC News's Brian Ross is saying that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump directed him to contact the Russians.

JUST IN: @BrianRoss on @ABC News Special Report: Michael Flynn promised "full cooperation to the Mueller team" and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians." https://t.co/aiagnvr8eS pic.twitter.com/r8u2LWAd0O

— ABC News (@ABC) December 1, 2017

If that's true, that's the ball game.

Privatize The Spies, Guys

The Trump regime is more than happy to privatize pretty much every other government function so that corporations like the Trump Organization can ring up the profits, so why wouldn't we farm out the CIA's intel gathering services to private companies (who we can totally trust to keep our data safe)?

The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals. 

One of the proposals would involve hiring a private company, Amyntor Group, for millions of dollars to set up a large intelligence network and run counter terrorist propaganda efforts, according to the sources. Amyntor’s officials and employees include veterans of a variety of US covert operations, ranging from the Reagan-era Iran–Contra affair to more recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Amyntor declined to discuss the proposals, but a lawyer for the company said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the type of contract being contemplated would be legal “with direction and control by the proper government authority.” 

Another proposal presented to US officials would allow individuals affiliated with the company to help capture wanted terrorists on behalf of the United States. In keeping with that proposal, people close to the company are tracking two specific suspects in a Middle Eastern country, the sources said, for possible “rendition” to the United States.

A source speaking on behalf of the company stressed that while Amyntor officials are aware of and involved in the rendition plan, the company itself would not be involved.
People involved in the highly unusual project have asked BuzzFeed News not to name the country or the targets because of concerns about the safety of operatives who, they say, are on the ground. They say that the people involved have the information and capabilities to snatch the two suspects and transport them to the US or a third country. 

The proposals sound like a convoluted movie plot, but two of the sources familiar with the project say discussions have been held recently with top national security officials.
The CIA declined to comment, but a US government official downplayed the proposals' significance. “The idea they are pitching is absurd on its face,” he said, “and it is not going anywhere.” 

A spokesperson for the National Security Council said that Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser, and other officials were not aware of the proposals. 

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has publicly promised that the agency would become “much more vicious” and aggressive. He said in one speech that the administration “is prepared to engage in activities that are different from what America has been doing these past few years.”

I'm sure this is going to be a great idea and nothing can possibly go wrong from having private companies doing CIA bag jobs in foreign countries in the Trump era.

The only thing that would make this better is if the Amyntor Group has financial ties to Putin.  I'm sure we'll find that out down the road.

StupidiNews!

• A last -minute rewrite of the GOP Senate tax bill is leaving the final product unknown and Republicans nervous as GOP leaders are still looking to vote on the bill this weekend.
• The expected exit of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the end of the year may only be the tip of the iceberg as a large number of Trump appointees and staffers could leave by early 2018.
• The acquittal of an undocumented immigrant in a San Francisco murder trial has enraged Donald Trump, who attacked the verdict on Twitter demanding justice for the victim, Kate Steinle.
• "Angel investor" Shervin Pishevar has been accused by at least five women of sexual misconduct, the billionaire Uber investor allegedly used his status to pursue women since 2014. 
• Elon Musk's Boring Company is looking to put a Hyperloop bid to cover Chicago's planned express train route from O'Hare airport to downtown.

Last Call For Ain't Nothin' Gonna Breaka My Stride

Steve M. notes that the tenor of the disastrous Trump regime is changing in the media again.  It's looking considerably more likely than just a week ago that both the GOP tax bill and Roy Moore will be big victories for the Republicans in December, and that means Trump will be able to end 2017 on a high note.

How can Trump possibly become worse than he's been?

By openly embracing Nazism? By unleashing goon squads to beat up journalists and other critics? It could happen, but I remain skeptical. Trump still seems willing to push the envelope only so far. His administration is doing horrible things, but it's doing them using conventional levers of government -- pushing an unspeakably awful tax bill, putting up unqualified extremists for judgeships, politicizing the oversight of mergers. It's like a national version of the Scott Walker or Sam Brownback governorships. It's not Hitler, even though it's appalling.

Trump seems to have grasped his role in all this: He says and tweets outrageous things that mostly have nothing to do with the governing process, we all react, he gets ego gratification, heartland white voters get thrills up their legs and remain loyal to the GOP -- and Congress works with his White House team to radically transform America. It's taken a year, but the key players on the GOP side have found their niches. 

I'd have to agree.  Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have finally gotten their shit together long enough to get all their ducks in a row, and should the tax bill become law, it will cap arguably the worst year for Democrats in generations.  Even if Trump resigned on December 31st, 2017 would mark a first year in office that will take the rest of my lifetime to fix, if ever.

And the fun part?

2018 will somehow be worse.

Trump's Year-End Clearance Fail

Looks like long-suspected rumors that the Trump regime is going to reshuffle the deck chairs on the Trumptanic over the holidays are shifting into a much likely action phase with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's plans for an brand-new, even worse cabinet for 2018.

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday. 

Mr. Pompeo would be replaced at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who has been a key ally of the president on national security matters, according to the White House plan. Mr. Cotton has signaled that he would accept the job if offered, said the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations before decisions are announced. 

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump has given final approval to the plan, but he has been said to have soured on Mr. Tillerson and in general is ready to make a change at the State Department. 

John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, developed the transition plan and has discussed it with other officials. Under his plan, the shake-up of the national security team would happen around the end of the year or shortly afterward. 

The ouster of Mr. Tillerson would end a turbulent reign at the State Department for the former Exxon Mobile chief executive, who has been largely marginalized over the last year. Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson have been at odds over a host of major issues, including the Iran nuclear deal, the confrontation with North Korea and a clash between Arab allies. The secretary was reported to have privately called Mr. Trump a “moron” and the president publicly criticized Mr. Tillerson for “wasting his time” with a diplomatic outreach to North Korea.

And let's be honest about exactly what getting rid of Rex Tillerson and replacing him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo means (and backfilling Pompeo's job with avowed racist asshole Tom Cotton), it means any hope of a diplomatic, non-military solution to North Korea and/or Iran goes up in smoke (or in cruise missile contrails).

Tillerson is a horrendous Secretary of State who gutted America's diplomatic corps in less than a year and his promises to increase diversity at State in August turned into a massive purging of top black and Latino and women diplomats in November.  I'm not sorry to see him gone, but Pompeo at State would be the end of US diplomacy period, and Cotton at the CIA would be fundamentally worse.

In other words, Trump would have the people he wants on hand to start the wars he'll need in order to stay in office after Mueller drops the hammer.

You though 2017 was bad?  Stay turned for 2018, now just a month away.  The odds of us being in a major war before the end of next year just went up substantially.

All The News That's Fit To Fake, Con't

So it turns out there's a lot more to the story of the bafflingly moronic attempt by James O'Keefe and Project Veritas to knowingly con the Washington Post into running a story using an obviously false Roy Moore accuser as part of a "sting operation" to discredit the paper.

Much more as it turns out, because Jamie Phillips, the woman recruited by O'Keefe as the false Moore accuser, has worked for Project Veritas for a while now and has been involved in a concerted months-long effort to try to discredit multiple major news outlets.

The failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story about Senate candidate Roy Moore in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York, according to interviews, text messages and social media posts that have since been deleted.

Starting in July, Jaime Phillips, an operative with the organization Project Veritas, which purports to expose media bias, joined two dozen networking groups related to either journalism or left-leaning politics. She signed up to attend 15 related events, often accompanied by a male companion, and appeared at least twice at gatherings for departing Post staffers.

Phillips, 41, presented herself to journalists variously as the owner of a start-up looking to recruit writers, a graduate student studying national security or a contractor new to the area. This summer, she tweeted posts in support of gun control and critical of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants — a departure from the spring when, on accounts that have since been deleted, she used the #MAGA hashtag and mocked the Women’s March on Washington that followed Trump’s inauguration as the “Midol March.”

Her true identity and intentions were revealed only when The Post published a story on Monday, along with photos and video, about how she falsely told Post reporters that Moore had impregnated her when she was a teenager. The Post reported that Phillips appeared to work for Project Veritas, an organization that uses false cover stories and covert video recordings in an attempt to embarrass its targets.

Phillips’s sustained attempt to insinuate herself into the social circles of reporters makes clear that her deception — and the efforts to discredit The Post’s reporting — went much further than the attempt to plant one fabricated article.

Phillips’s encounters with dozens of journalists, which have not been previously reported, typically occurred at professional networking events or congratulatory send-offs for colleagues at bars and restaurants. She used three names and three phone numbers to follow up with Post employees, chatting about life in Washington and asking to be introduced to other journalists.

In one case, Phillips kept a conversation going for five weeks with a Post employee over text message, repeatedly asking whether she and her husband could meet Phillips for dinner. After the employee shared that she was experiencing a family tragedy, Phillips wrote: “Let me know if I can do anything to help, even if just to talk or something small. We’d like to send flowers or a donation… Thoughts & prayers.” 

In other words, Jamie Phillips used amateur spycraft techniques over several months in order to try to befriend and recruit reporters from more than one national newspaper.  When the time was right, she would "come forward" as a fraudulent "major source" to a reporter she had targeted in order to try to get them to run her false claims.  Then, Project Veritas would expose the newspaper's story as false.

And if any of the reporters and editors from the Washington Post or NY Times or any other major news outlet had fallen for Phillips's long con without checking out her story, they would have deserved to have been destroyed by O'Keefe's clowns.  Fortunately, they did not fall for it and realized they were being played.

To their credit, the Post staff turned the con around and got the real story: how activists like O'Keefe are trying to deliberately destroy the news media in order to help Republicans like Roy Moore. Even if they were bad at it, Project Veritas still takes in money from political donors in order to try to wreck the Fourth Estate.

And as I said earlier this week, all Project Veritas has to do in order to greatly damage, if not destroy, what's left of our barely functional media is get one fake story past the goalie and into the net.  Remember, these guys have spurred Congress to act before.  Imagine the huge outrage if the Moore story had gone live.  There would have been hearings in the Senate for sure, and possibly even legislation limiting the powers of the free press.

All so the Trump regime could set up de facto state-run right-wing media as the "only credible source".  Even without the legislation, the right would have been yelling about THE FAKE ROY MOORE ABORTION STORY for decades.

Believe that.

StupidiNews!

• Former Bosnian Croat general Slobodan Praljak is dead after apparently swallowing poison from a small bottle as a UN tribunal at the Hague upheld his 20-year sentence for war crimes. 
• US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is warning North Korea's ruling regime will be "utterly destroyed" should Pyongyang push the US into a war that Washington "does not want".
• After passing a cloture vote yesterday, Senate Republicans are set to take a final vote on a GOP tax bill late tonight or early Friday that many analysts believe will lead to economic disaster.
• House Republicans are moving a new national concealed carry firearms bill through that will allow gun owners with a concealed carry permit from one state to cross state lines with it.
• Apple has patched a bug in macOS High Sierra that allowed users to log into a Mac as admins without a password.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Turns out America's journalists and pundits may have finally figured out that Trump isn't mentally deficient or suffering from dementia, he's really an awful racist narcissist manipulative asshole who knows exactly what he's doing with his tirades: stoking the flames of rage in order to save his ass from prison.

Over the past 24 hours, President Trump has delivered a concentrated dose of misinformation, self-sabotage, hypocrisy, and bigotry that stands out even by the standards of his short and eventful political career.

The president blew up negotiations to fund the government with a tweet attacking Democratic congressional leaders. He retweeted inflammatory and misleading anti-Islam videos from a bigoted far-right British politician. He joked about presenting a “Fake News Trophy” to media networks. He called attention to Matt Lauer, the NBC host fired on Wednesday for sexual misconduct, despite Trump’s own past admissions of sexual assault. He baselessly implied that NBC host Joe Scarborough, a onetime informal adviser, might have been involved in the death of an intern years ago in Florida. And several outlets reported that the president privately continues to claim preposterous things, including that it wasn’t him on the Access Hollywood tape and that Barack Obama really wasn’t born in the United States.

It’s unclear what precipitated the meltdown. Trump was having a decent stretch in office, including relatively smooth progress for the GOP tax bill. Taken individually, none of these examples is all that unusual for Trump. His bigotry toward Muslims has been on display for years. He has blown up budget negotiations before. He frequently passes along unverified and false information. His hypocrisy about sexual-harassment allegations is not new. He has a weakness for conspiracy theories.

Taken together, however, they offer yet another display of poor judgment and divisive leadership from the putative leader of the free world, and they again cast doubt on his fitness for his office. They are also further evidence that Trump’s hypocrisy, bigotry, and dishonesty are not an act. He means it all.

On Tuesday, North Korea launched what appears to be its most powerful rocket yet, one it claims is capable of reaching the East Coast of the United States. There’s no time when it’s safe for a nation to have a leader who cannot grapple with reality, but it is especially dangerous at a moment when a nuclear adversary is brandishing ever more powerful rockets at the United States.

The videos that Trump retweeted were from Jayda Fransen, the leader of the far-right political party Britain First. Fransen was convicted last year of harassing a Muslim woman for wearing a hijab. The three videos that Trump retweeted are a mixed bag. The first, labeled, “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” depicts an attack by supporters of the deposed Islamist president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, on a young man; his killer was later hanged. The second is labeled “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” According to Dutch media reports, however, none of the people involved are Muslims. The provenance of the third, labeled “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” is unclear; it shows a man crushing a ceramic statue, and has no apparent point beyond inflaming anger at Muslims. The office of British Prime Minister Theresa May condemned Trump for retweeting the videos.

Trump has no hesitations about inflaming anger toward Muslims, and in fact he revels in it. But while some supporters wrote off such behavior as politicking during the campaign, Trump’s persistence now indicates a more deep-seated bigotry. His continued provocations also hurt his cause. His tweets about the “Muslim ban” on immigration have already caused judges to rule against the order in court, and Neal Katyal, a lawyer arguing against the ban, suggested Wednesday that he’ll use the latest tweets against Trump as well.

He doesn't care. He believes he will ultimately be vindicated as the greatest leader in human history. But if you want to know what set this tirade off, you don't have to look far at all.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team has postponed an anticipated grand jury testimony linked to his investigation into Michael Flynn amid growing indications of possible plea deal discussions. 

Additional witnesses were expected to be questioned soon including a public relations consultant hired by Flynn's lobbying firm who was given an early December date deadline to appear before the grand jury, according to a person at the company. 

Ahead of the delay, the impression was that the testimony needed to happen soon, the source said. 

"Time seems to be of the essence," said the source at Sphere Consulting, the PR firm where the consultant worked. 

The grand jury testimony was postponed, the person said, with no reason given. There could be many reasons for a delay, including scheduling issues.

Every time it seems there's another story about Robert Mueller closing in on Trump, he blows up.  The more scared Trump is, the worse the meltdown, and this is the worst tirade Trump has been on yet.

Sphere's government relations arm, SGR LLC Government Relations and Lobbying, is one of several companies Flynn Intel Group hired to work for Inovo BV, a Netherlands-based company owned by Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin, according to filing made by Flynn Intel Group under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Inovo hired Flynn to research Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric who Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused of being behind the 2016 attempted military coup to overthrow him, the filing said. 

Inovo paid Flynn's group $530,000 for the research, which was supposed result in a video documentary but it was never finished. Sphere's SGR was paid $40,000. 

Sphere has been cooperating for months with the investigation. The inquiry was originally opened before the appointment of the special counsel, according to the source. Sphere, which was subpoenaed around June, was described as "a cooperating witness at best." Sphere has not been accused of any wrongdoing. 

Interviews conducted by special counsel investigators have included questions about the business dealings of Flynn and his son such as their firm's reporting of income from work overseas, two witnesses interviewed by the team told CNN. The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires people acting as agents of foreign entities to publicly disclose their relationship with foreign countries or businesses and financial compensation for such work.

There's no doubt that Flynn and his son are looking at a lifetime behind bars here...unless they can offer Mueller up a bigger fish.  It's very possible that fish is Jared Kushner or Jeff Sessions, but I'm betting it's Trump himself.

Today's behavior by Trump, given the stories this week of Flynn's plea deal, makes total sense.  He's scared out of his mind and lashing out as everyone he hates, Muslims, the media, North Korea, you name it.  He knows what's coming.

So does Mueller.

Stay tuned.

Lauer Lauer On The Radio

The Great 2017 Housecleaning Of Garbage Men In Media™ continues as NBC fired Today Show host Matt Lauer overnight over sexual misconduct claims.

The reckoning over sexual harassment in the workplace claimed another leading television personality on Wednesday when NBC fired its leading morning news anchor, Matt Lauer, over a sexual harassment allegation. 

“On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer,” Andrew Lack, the NBC News president, said in a memo to the staff. 

He said the allegation against Mr. Lauer “represented, after serious review, a clear violation of our company’s standards. As a result, we’ve decided to terminate his employment.” 

“While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident,” Mr. Lack said. 

Ari Wilkenfeld, a civil rights lawyer with the firm Wilkenfeld, Herendeen & Atkinson in Washington, said he represented the woman who made the complaint to NBC, but declined to publicly identify her. In a statement provided to The New York Times, he said: 

“My client and I met with representatives from NBC’s Human Resources and Legal Departments at 6 p.m. on Monday for an interview that lasted several hours. Our impression at this point is that NBC acted quickly, as all companies should, when confronted with credible allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace. 

“While I am encouraged by NBC’s response to date, I am in awe of the courage my client showed to be the first to raise a complaint and to do so without making any demands other than the company do the right thing.” 

The Times met with the woman Monday afternoon, but she said she was not ready to come forward and tell her story publicly. 

Page Six is reporting that the complaint involved Lauer sexually assaulting an NBC employee during the network's coverage of the 2014 Sochi games.

Matt Lauer allegedly sexually assaulted a female NBC staffer during the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, sources told Page Six. 

An NBC insider said Lauer’s alleged victim complained to HR on Monday: “This happened so quickly. She didn’t go to the media, she made a complaint to NBC’s human resources, and her evidence was so compelling that Matt was fired on Tuesday night. The victim says she has evidence that this has also happened to other women, but so far we don’t have evidence of that.” 

Another source tells us that the decision to fire Lauer was made late Tuesday night by NBC News chairman Andy Lack. 

Lauer’s firing comes amid rumors that several news outlets were working on stories about his alleged sexual misconduct. 

Reporters for the New York Times had been investigating Lauer for several weeks, according to sources who had been contacted by the paper, CNN reported.

I'm sure that NBC knew that the NY Times and Variety were going to drop these stories soon, so the HR complaint became the reason to pro-actively fire Lauer before the stories hit the airwaves, but let's not pretend like they're the good guys.  NBC happily employed now fired pundit Mark Halperin as a contributor as well as Donald Trump himself, and Lauer's long list of creepy rumors has been around for years now.

Also, NBC had no problem hiring Megyn "New Black Panther Party is really scary you guys" Kelly away from her state media job at FOX News, so yeah, NBC had no choice but to get rid of him sooner rather than later.

Lauer won't be the last media figure to lose their job over a career filled with sexual misconduct, either.  More are coming, guaranteed.  The floodgates are open and the garbage is getting washed away...and that brings us to today's other media firing, Minnesota Public Radio's Garrison Keillor.

Garrison Keillor, the former host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” says he’s been fired by Minnesota Public Radio over allegations of improper behavior. 

Keillor told The Associated Press of his firing in an email. In a follow-up statement, he says he was fired over “a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version MPR heard.” 

He didn’t give details of the allegation. Minnesota Public Radio didn’t immediately respond to messages. 

Keillor retired last year from his longtime radio show, but still produced “The Writer’s Almanac” for syndication.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik confirmed the story on Twitter this afternoon.

Minnesota Public Radio has confirmed it has severed all ties with Keillor and his enterprises, will pull repeats featuring him & rename "Prairie Home Companion" - one that helped define that broadcaster

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) November 29, 2017

Considering NPR has its own problems with sexual harassment in the workplace, I'm not surprised at Keillor's firing at all.

2017 has been a garbage year full of garbage people, but let's not forget that the biggest sack of manure remains in the Oval Office.

It's Nobody's Business But The Turks, Con't

Looks like the part of the DoJ that's still doing its job has latched on to a major international case involving Turkey, Iran, gold, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader at the center of an international corruption case, is set to tell a New York jury the “inside story” of a plot to evade American sanctions on Iran that reached the highest levels of Turkey’s government, a prosecutor said.

Zarrab is the U.S. government’s star witness in the prosecution of Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a deputy chief executive officer at Turkiye Halk Bankasi AS, who is accused of conspiring with Zarrab to launder money and funnel Iranian funds through the U.S. financial system. Zarrab, who has pleaded guilty after being charged with Atilla, is likely to take the witness stand later on Tuesday or on Wednesday.

"Atilla and his lies played a crucial role in giving Iran access to U.S. dollars and U.S. banks,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David William Denton Jr. told jurors at the start of the case. “Iran did not need soldiers. Iran needed a banker.”

The disclosure of Zarrab’s cooperation, minutes before the lawyers addressed jurors on Tuesday, roiled markets in Turkey, as the Lira fell as much as 1.7 percent and Halbank shares dropped 7.9 percent. Yields on 10-year bonds have surged to records above 13 percent.

The revelation ends weeks of mystery after the gold trader suddenly stopped participating in the defense. With the U.S. expected to present evidence of corruption at the highest reaches of the Turkish government, the case has sparked outrage from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claims the prosecution is a plot to undermine his country’s economy. 

Zarrab was arrested in the U.S. last year on charges that he helped bank executives and others in Turkey to help Iran disguise hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions that went through the U.S. financial system. Now, instead of standing trial, Zarrab will testify against Atilla, 47, and recount the alleged scheme.

Hmm, a DoJ international money laundering investigation and Turkey's corrupt Erdogan government, now who do we know that's connected to both of those things? Oh that's right, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's alleged plan to forcibly extradite a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania is now a part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. 

Why it matters: Flynn had previously done consulting work on behalf of the Turkish government, which he failed to disclose before joining the Trump administration. This meeting would have taken place during the transition and after he had accepted his position as Trump's national security advisor, which occurred on November 18. 

The details: Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn, Jr., reportedly met with Turkish representatives in New York in December to discuss delivering cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is living legally in the United States in exile, to Turkey in exchange for as much as $15 million. The plan would have involved transporting Gulen to a Turkish island prison via a private jet. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Gulen of fomenting 2016's failed coup attempt against him. 

And it's not the first time this plan came up as Flynn held a similar meeting with high-level Turks, including Turkey's foreign minister and Erdogan's son-in-law last September. Former CIA Director James Woolsey attended that meeting, telling the WSJ that the plan then involved "a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away." Woolsey later turned down his consulting fee for the meeting and alerted then-Vice President Joe Biden about its content.

Is it any surprise that a day after Flynn's lawyers met with Mueller's team that suddenly we have a major announcement in another huge federal case involving Turkey's government and money laundering?  I don't believe in coincidences that large, folks, and neither should you.

What does Flynn know about Zarrab, and what does Zarrab know about Flynn?  What do they both know about Erdogan...and Trump?  I'm betting plenty, and both of them are supposedly cooperating with the Justice Department.

Stay tuned.