Water You Waiting For, Dude?

I've noticed that nothing brings the apocalypse prepper right and the hipster dirtbag left together quite like the notion that basic infrastructure services provided by the government are actually an evil conspiracy designed to kill millions. Vaccines, REAL ID drivers' licenses, public education, all suspect because if the government provides them, in 2017 they must be bad.

Now I know some of you guys have been around far longer than I have and know of folks who have been pulling the "Tune in, turn on, drop out" slash "off the grid" thing for decades, it's not exactly new stuff to be counter-culture suspicious of the federal government.  Lord knows over the years they have been up to some awful stuff.

But in the era of Trump that takes on a whole new level of meaning, when FAKE NEWS™ is a thing and science experts are dismissed out of hand by guys who Saw The Real Truth On The Google.

That brings us to an oldie but goodie from the NY Times: fluoridated water conspiracies are the new ground zero in California.

At Rainbow Grocery, a cooperative in this city’s Mission District, one brand of water is so popular that it’s often out of stock. But one recent evening, there was a glittering rack of it: glass orbs containing 2.5 gallons of what is billed as “raw water” — unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, $36.99 each and $14.99 per refill, bottled and marketed by a small company called Live Water. 

“It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile,” said Kevin Freeman, a shift manager at the store. “Bottled water’s controversial. We’ve curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm.” 

Here on the West Coast and in other pockets around the country, many people are looking to get off the water grid. 

Start-ups like Live Water in Oregon and Tourmaline Spring in Maine have emerged in the last few years to deliver untreated water on demand. An Arizona company, Zero Mass Water, which installs systems allowing people to collect water directly from the atmosphere around their homes, began taking orders in November from across the United States. It has raised $24 million in venture capital.

What do you get when you cross alt-right conspiracies with granola anti-vaxxers and add a healthy dose of Silicon Valley startup culture?

The "raw water" movement, now coming to disrupt the water market near you!

The founder of Live Water, Mukhande Singh, started selling spring water from Opal Springs in Culver, Ore., three years ago, but it was a small local operation until this year. Marketing materials show Mr. Singh (né Christopher Sanborn) sitting naked and cross-legged on a hot spring, his long brown hair flowing over his chest.

Pure water can be obtained by using a reverse osmosis filter, the gold standard of home water treatment, but for Mr. Singh, the goal is not pristine water, per se. “You’re going to get 99 percent of the bad stuff out,” he said. “But now you have dead water.” 

He said “real water” should expire after a few months. His does. “It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery,” he said. “If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green.” 

Mr. Singh believes that public water has been poisoned. “Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,” he said. “Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” (There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but plenty to show that it aids dental health.)

And so the door to expensive privatization of your water supply cracks open just a little wider.  There's a lot of money to be made by taking water from a basic right to an expensive commodity, and there's all sorts of forces, from GOP billionaire donors to Silicon Valley disruptors who want in on it.

Sabotaging The Census

We've known for a while that the Trump regime was going to us the 2020 Census as a political weapon to help Republicans to advantage Republicans for a decade, now we know how they're going to do it. For the first time in more than a century, Trump is planning to have census-takers ask for immigration status and in order to undercount blue states with large undocumented populations by millions.

The Justice Department is pushing for a question on citizenship to be added to the 2020 census, a move that observers say could depress participation by immigrants who fear that the government could use the information against them. That, in turn, could have potentially large ripple effects for everything the once-a-decade census determines — from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent.

The DOJ made the request in a previously unreported letter, dated Dec. 12 and obtained by ProPublica, from DOJ official Arthur Garyto the top official at the Census Bureau, which is part of the Commerce Department. The letter argues that the DOJ needs better citizenship data to better enforce the Voting Rights Act “and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

A Census Bureau spokesperson confirmed the agency received the letter and said the “request will go through the well-established process that any potential question would go through.” The DOJ declined to comment and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Observers said they feared adding a citizenship question would not only lower response rates, but also make the census more expensive and throw a wrench into the system with just two years to go before the 2020 count. Questions are usually carefully field-tested, a process that can take years.

“This is a recipe for sabotaging the census,” said Arturo Vargas, a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Census and the executive director of NALEO Educational Fund, a Latino advocacy group. “When you start adding last-minute questions that are not tested — how will the public understand the question? How much will it suppress response rates?”

The 2010 census included a handful of questions covering age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, household relationship and owner/renter status — but not citizenship.

“People are not going to come out to be counted because they’re going to be fearful the information would be used for negative purposes,” said Steve Jost, a former top bureau official during the 2010 census. “This line about enforcing voting rights is a new and scary twist.” He noted that since the first census in 1790, the goal has been to count everyone in the country, not just citizens.

There's no doubt that Trump's ICE would use Census immigration status to round up potentially millions, but if people aren't counted, federal dollars, electoral college votes, and entire congressional districts will go elsewhere for a decade, which is what the GOP wants.

Last Call For The Rats Jumping Ship

Republicans control all three branches of government at this point, but they are heading for the exits rather than staying to continue their rule. The reason is that when the Trump regime crashes and takes the GOP with it, these cowards don't want to be anywhere near the crime scene.

A Republican congressman said Thursday while President Donald Trump wasn't the determining factor in his decision to retire at the end of his term, which expires in 2018, he was a part of it. 

Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pennsylvania, said Republican candidates facing re-election would have to surpass challenging hurdles, among them Trump's divisive nature as the figurehead of the party. 

"Well, at least in my case, I would say the President was a factor, but not the factor for me deciding to leave," Dent told CNN's Poppy Harlow, while a "a very challenging midterm environment" also contributed to his decision. 

"The party of the President typically loses 32 seats in a situation like this," Dent told CNN, but "of course then, Donald Trump, you know, complicates that because he's a very polarizing figure, and so I suspect our challenges will be even greater just because of that."

They know what's coming: an ass-kicking of 2010-style proportions and then some.

"One of the challenges our party has faced is it's become, we have a much stronger base with older voters, and white voters, obviously," he said. 

The moderate Republican congressman also criticized the Trump campaign's decision to solidify traditional GOP voters at the expense of newer voting blocs. 

"You clearly alienate a lot of Hispanic voters with (Trump's) comments on Mexicans and Latinos, and of course you have the Charlottesville situation," Dent said, adding that "politics and getting elected is an exercise in inclusion and not exclusion."

Dent is pretending that there's a wing of "moderate Republicans" that have been hiding out or something, and that he's not part of the Party of Trump.

Florida Is The New Alabama

With GOP child molester Roy Moore still refusing to concede the Alabama Senate special election even after Democrat Doug Jones was certified as the winner yesterday, it looks like Moore will be the gift that keeps on giving to blue states in the South.  Having not learned their lesson, Trump and the billionaires who own him are moving on to Florida's gubernatorial contest, where they plan to set up another Roy Moore-style situation in the Sunshine State.

This time, the GOP frontrunner is the state Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who isn't crazy enough for Trump and his megadonors.  They're all getting behind GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis, currently the chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, the right-wing nutjob who's been regularly on FOX News calling for a purge of the FBI and a mass roundup of Democrats since July.

After Donald Trump appeared to endorse Ron DeSantis’ campaign for Florida governor last week, a handful of the biggest and most influential billionaires in Republican politics threw their support behind the three-term GOP congressman, upending the race in the nation’s biggest swing state.

The stable of billionaires and millionaires listed on DeSantis’ “Finance Leadership Team,” obtained by POLITICO, include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mercer, investment tycoon Foster Friess and other donors who have funded the conservative Koch brothers’ network and President Trump’s campaign. Just last week, Trump weighed in on Twitter to say that DeSantis “would make a GREAT Governor of Florida.”

DeSantis has yet to formally announce his 2018 campaign for governor, but his intentions to seek the office became clear in May after he established a state political committee, called the Fund for Florida’s Future, that’s allowed to raise and spend unlimited soft money from corporate contributors.

“This sets DeSantis apart from the rest. He will have the financial resources and the ground game and the Trump base to be an incredible statewide candidate,” said David Bossie, a DeSantis backer, who founded the Citizens United conservative group, served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager and just co-authored the new “Let Trump Be Trump” book plugged by the president.

Putnam doesn't have a chance.  He's the Luther Strange in this equation and he's going to have his career as a Republican ruined because he's not crazy enough.

In a state as big as Florida, where a week’s worth of saturation TV during next year’s general election could cost as much as $3 million, cash is king. And Putnam has so far reigned over both his likely and current Democratic and Republican rivals by raising his money from the major industries that do business in Florida’s Capitol, such as agricultural interests, the healthcare industry, power companies and Disney.

With Tallahassee’s institutional GOP donors behind Putnam, a Republican candidate can only hope to match him with outside money or independent wealth, which was a key to Scott’s success in his unexpected primary win in 2010.

Including his campaign and his Florida Grown political committee, Putnam had a total of about $15 million cash on hand at the end of last month. Corcoran, who is not yet an announced candidate, had $4.7 million in the bank in his Watchdog PAC. DeSantis had about $3.6 million in the bank between his political committee and his congressional campaign, whose donors will need to sign off on re-directing their federal contributions to his state race if he runs.

Surveys conducted by Republican pollsters show Putnam leading the GOP primary with less than a third of the vote. DeSantis, depending on the survey, trails by anywhere from 10 points to 20 points. And Corcoran is polling in single digits. More than half of Republican voters say they’re not sure about whom they’ll choose. But 80-90 percent of them back President Trump, the polls show.

Trump’s deputy campaign manager, Bossie, said Trump’s support for DeSantis and the backing of the top donors should help catch up to Putnam quickly.

So once again, Trump and his donors are setting up a hard-right primary challenge to a state party's preferred candidate, because Trump likes him.  I bet that's going to go over real well in November in Florida, especially with all the influx of voters from Puerto Rico, which has now been without power for 100 days and counting and deep in a humanitarian crisis that this regime is ignoring daily.

Democrats are running both Gwen Graham, the daughter of former Florida Gov. Bob Graham, and Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee. We'll see how this turns out, but I'm guessing that after DeSantis wins the primary for the GOP that he finds out just how much being Donald Trump's favorite is worth in November.

And it won't be much.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump's weakness is his ego.  He can't stop talking, can't stop seeking approval and accolades, he can't stop making news about himself, and most of all, he can't stop making things worse for himself.

President Trump said Thursday that he believes Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, will treat him fairly, contradicting some members of his party who have waged a weekslong campaign to try to discredit Mr. Mueller and the continuing inquiry. 

During an impromptu 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his golf club in West Palm Beach, the president did not demand an end to the Russia investigations swirling around his administration, but insisted 16 times that there has been “no collusion” discovered by the inquiry. 

“It makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump said of the investigation. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”

Asked whether he would order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Trump appeared to remain focused on the Russia investigation. 

“I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said, echoing claims by his supporters that as president he has the power to open or end an investigation. “But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”

Remember, the clinical sign of an egomaniac is that everything has to revolve around him.  Trump could end the Mueller probe, but he chooses not to. The fact that Trump can't actually do that simply doesn't exist in his worldview.

Hours after he accused the Chinese of secretly shipping oil to North Korea, Mr. Trump explicitly said for the first time that he has “been soft” on China on trade in the hopes that its leaders will pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
He hinted that his patience may soon end, however, signaling his frustration with the reported oil shipments. 

“Oil is going into North Korea. That wasn’t my deal!” he exclaimed, raising the possibility of aggressive trade actions against China. “If they don’t help us with North Korea, then I do what I’ve always said I want to do.” 

Despite saying that when he visited China in November, President Xi Jinping “treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China,” Mr. Trump said that “they have to help us much more.” 

“We have a nuclear menace out there, which is no good for China,” he said. 

Mr. Trump gave the interview in the Grill Room at Trump International Golf Club after he ate lunch with his playing partners, including his son Eric and the pro golfer Jim Herman. No aides were present for the interview, and the president sat alone with a New York Times reporter at a large round table as club members chatted and ate lunch nearby. A few times, members and friends — including a longtime supporter, Christopher Ruddy, the president and chief executive of the conservative website and TV company Newsmax — came by to speak with Mr. Trump.

The rest of the wide-ranging interview, again, with no minders present, is here.

And it's a doozy.  I can hear Robert Mueller laughing all the way from here.

Tales Of A Lesser Moore, Con't

What, you didn't think the Roy Moore Senate race saga was over, did you?  Alabama's Republican Secretary of State still hasn't certified Doug Jones's victory in the special election two weeks ago and Jones hasn't been sworn into the Senate yet.  And there's no reason to believe he will be as Moore is now suing the state claiming he has evidence of "systemic voter fraud" in a move that could prevent Jones from being seated at all.

Roy S. Moore, the first Republican to lose a United States Senate race in Alabama in 25 years, moved late Wednesday to block state officials from certifying the victory of his Democratic rival on Thursday afternoon because of “systematic voter fraud.” 

In a complaint filed in the circuit court here in Alabama’s capital, Mr. Moore’s campaign argued that such fraud had tainted the Dec. 12 special election, which Mr. Moore lost to Doug Jones by fewer than 22,000 votes, and that the Alabama authorities had inadequately investigated claims of misconduct. 

If the election is prematurely certified, Mr. Moore’s lawyers wrote, he will “suffer irreparable harm” and be “denied his full right as a candidate to a fair election.”
John H. Merrill, the Alabama secretary of state, has dismissed complaints, from Democratic and Republican critics, of election fraud. In an interview on Dec. 15, Mr. Merrill, a Republican who voted for Mr. Moore, flatly declared: “I have not seen any irregularities or any inconsistencies that are outside the norm.” 

In a text message early Thursday, Mr. Merrill said he did not intend to postpone the certification proceedings that would ultimately allow Mr. Jones to take office.

In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Jones’s transition team said the lawsuit was “a desperate attempt by Roy Moore to subvert the will of the people.”

“The election is over,” the statement added, “it’s time to move on.” 

Whether or not the litigation is successful, it is certain to infuse a strain of drama into a day that state officials had plainly hoped would be procedural and perfunctory. The lawsuit from Mr. Moore, who has been accused of bigotry and sexual misconduct against teenage girls, was certainly late in coming: His lawyers filed the complaint at 10:33 p.m. on Wednesday, and his campaign announced it less than an hour later. Alabama officials are scheduled to certify the results during a 1 p.m. meeting Thursday at the State Capitol.

All Moore has to do is find a friendly judge willing to buy his argument that the certification has to be delayed until his case is heard.

Don't be surprised if this happens later this afternoon.

[UPDATE] Moore's challenge was too much even for the GOP, which certified Doug Jones's victory this afternoon and ended Moore's hopes.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The legal eagles on the right swore up and down earlier this month that Robert Mueller charging former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn with a single count of lying to the FBI was proof that Flynn was small potatoes, that there was no collusion or conspiracy to collude, and that Trump was in the clear because there was nothing for Flynn to testify about as far as information that could damage the White House. Case closed, right?

Of course here in reality, the Trump regime is now scrambling to attack Flynn's credibility as a witness because he's singing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

President Trump’s legal team plans to cast former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn as a liar seeking to protect himself if he accuses the president or his senior aides of any wrongdoing, according to three people familiar with the strategy. 

The approach would mark a sharp break from Trump’s previously sympathetic posture toward Flynn, whom he called a “wonderful man” when Flynn was ousted from the White House in February. Earlier this month, the president did not rule out a possible pardon for Flynn, who is cooperating with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

Attorneys for Trump and his top advisers have privately expressed confidence that Flynn does not have any evidence that could implicate the president or his White House team. But since Flynn’s cooperation agreement with prosecutors was made public earlier this month, the administration has been strategizing how to neutralize him in case the former national security adviser does make any claims.

Flynn is the most senior former Trump adviser known to be providing information to Mueller’s team. The lenient terms of his plea agreement suggest he has promised significant information to investigators, legal experts said.

"He's a great guy but we're going to go after him anyway" is a bold strategy, guys.  Let's see if it pays off!

Trump’s legal team has seized on Flynn’s agreement with prosecutors as fodder for a possible defense, if necessary. In court filings, the retired lieutenant general admitted that he lied to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the December 2016 transition. 

“He’s said it himself: He’s a liar,” said one person helping craft the strategy who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. 

Robert Kelner, an attorney for Flynn, declined to comment. Ty Cobb, the White House attorney overseeing the response to the special counsel investigation, also declined to comment. 

Defense lawyers have said privately that Flynn will be unable to point to White House or campaign records turned over in the probe to bolster any claims of a criminal scheme. None of those records suggest a conspiracy by Trump or his inner circle to improperly work with Russians to defeat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, according to people who have reviewed the documents. 

The private talks about assailing Flynn’s credibility come even as Trump has signaled that a pardon is not off the table. 

“I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet,” the president said Dec. 15. “We’ll see what happens. Let’s see. I can say this: When you look at what’s gone on with the FBI and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.”

He hasn't done anything wrong, but we might pardon him, but he can't implicate Trump, so it doesn't matter anyway, but...

But.

But Trump is in a lot of trouble and he knows it.

Last Call For Money Can't Buy Respect

Gallup's annual poll of the most respected folks on earth is out, and once again Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton top the list.

Americans once again are most likely to name Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as the man and woman living anywhere in the world they admire most, as they have for the past 10 years. The pair retain their titles this year, although by much narrower margins than in the past. Obama edges out Donald Trump, 17% to 14%, while Clinton edges out Michelle Obama, 9% to 7%. 

The 2017 survey marks the 16th consecutive year Clinton has been the most admired woman. She has held the title 22 times in total, more than anyone else. Eleanor Roosevelt is second with 13 wins. Obama has now been named the most admired man 10 times, trailing only Dwight Eisenhower, who earned the distinction 12 times. Obama won all eight years he was president, plus 2008 -- the year he was first elected -- and this year, his first as a former president. 

That's ten in a row for Obama, and 16 for Hillary.  That can't make Donny happy.

Not at all.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Mueller investigation is now moving into the phase where we learn that Trump is far from the only corruption in the Republican party, and it's why so many high-ranking GOP politicians in a Congress they control completely are heading for the exits.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has begun to question Republican National Committee staffers about the party's 2016 campaign data operation, which helped President Donald Trump's campaign team target voters in critical swing states. 

Two sources told Yahoo News that Mueller's team is examining whether the joint RNC-Trump campaign data operation — which was directed on Trump's side by Brad Parscale and managed by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner — "was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate." 

The FBI has been scrutinizing Kushner's contacts in December 2016 with the Russian ambassador to the US and the CEO of a sanctioned Russian bank. 

The special counsel's office declined to comment on its ongoing investigation. Multiple requests to various current and former RNC officials on Wednesday went unanswered. A source close to one of the Trump campaign's data firms said they were "unaware of anyone being questioned." 

It is not surprising that federal investigators have begun to examine the possibility that Russia and the Trump campaign helped each other during the election. Investigators have been looking into whether Russia provided the campaign with voter information stolen by Russian hackersfrom election databases in several states, and whether the Trump campaign helped Russia target its political ads to specific demographics and voting precincts. 

The general counsels for Facebook, Twitter, and Google gave enigmatic replies when asked by the House Intelligence Committee last month whether they had investigated "who was mimicking who" when it came to online ads promoted by both the Trump campaign and Russia during the election. 

The RNC's data operation provided the targeting info for Russian-bought pro-Trump and anti-Clinton ads on social media.  They knew exactly who to hit.

And who was hired to help run the RNC's data operation?  Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon.

Investigators have long wondered whether the data-mining and analysis firm Cambridge Analytica served as a link between the campaign's data operation and Russia.
That scrutiny intensified following revelations that Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in June 2016 asking for access to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's "stolen" emails.

It is still unclear how much Cambridge Analytica actually did for the campaign. Trump campaign aides and even current and former Cambridge employees have consistently tried to downplay its role. 

Parscale was asked about Cambridge during his interview with the House Intelligence Committee in October. The ranking members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees sent him a separate letter that month asking whether his firm received "information from a foreign government or foreign actor" at any point during the election. 

The letter was also sent to Nix and the heads of Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint Consulting, and The Data Trust — firms hired by the Republican National Committee last year to bolster the Trump campaign's data operation. 

You'd better believe the Russians know more about you than you do.  They knew just where to target us to give Trump the Electoral College number he needed to lose the popular election but win the presidency.

If you're wondering what Trump has on the rest of the GOP in order to compel their silence, tug on this thread.  How many other Republicans benefited from this partnership in 2016?

When all this comes out, it's going to be devastating and Trump knows it.  He also knows there's no way he goes down alone.

Just A Steel-Town Fool On A Saturday Night

Lookin' for the Trump of their life
In the real time world no one sees them at all
They all say Trump's crazy...

Four days after his inauguration, Donald Trump signed a handful of executive memos to advance the Keystone XL pipeline and revive the U.S. steel industry. He invited builder TransCanada Corp. to reapply for a permit denied by Barack Obama and ordered up fast-track rules forcing not only Keystone but also all new U.S. pipelines to be made from American steel. “From now on, we’re going to be making pipeline in the United States,” he said.

Made-in-America Keystone was a stunt. Most of its pipes had already been manufactured, a fact the White House grudgingly admitted when it exempted the project from any new Buy American rules a few months later. While some of Keystone’s pipes were made in the U.S., at least a quarter of them came from a Russian steel company whose biggest shareholder is an oligarch and Trump family friend. The company, Evraz North America, supplied Keystone from its steel plants in Canada and for years has lobbied in Washington against Trump-style protectionism.

Ten months after his Keystone event, Trump has yet to deliver on his pledge to boost the fortunes of American steel. Two self-imposed deadlines for trade action, one in June and one in July, have come and gone. Meanwhile, the prospect of tariffs has led to a surge of cheap foreign steel into the U.S., with imports rising 24 percent in 2017, the fastest increase in years. 

As federal and congressional investigators probe Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Evraz North America shows that Russians are also involved in pressing against one of Trump’s main campaign promises. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Evraz Plc, Russia’s second-largest steelmaker. It has two factories in the U.S., in Colorado and Oregon, and four in western Canada, where it produces steel and large-diameter steel pipe. The company’s top shareholder is Roman Abramovich, a billionaire who owns 31 percent of Evraz’s stock. In 2005 he was the first oligarch allowed to sell his oil company to the state, taking in $13 billion in a deal approved by Vladimir Putin.

Abramovich’s ties to the Trumps stem from a decade-long friendship between Ivanka Trump and Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, from whom he announced a separation in August. Jared Kushner and his brother, Joshua, invested in Zhukova’s art collection business. The Russian couple hosted Ivanka and Jared in Russia in 2014, when they shared a table at a fundraiser for Moscow’s Jewish museum. Zhukova went to the 2016 U.S. Open tennis tournament with Ivanka and attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka’s guest.

Dear Steel Country:

You voted for Donald Trump because he promised to make your mill towns and factory cities great again. You voted for him because he was going to make it so your kid, fresh out of high school, could make $90k a year busting his ass at a smelting plant and take pride in it, that you'd be proud of him, that you didn't have to spend $100,000 to get him through four years at Penn State or Michigan or Miami of Ohio for him to get a house and a good job that he could support a wife and kids with so she didn't have to work.

You also voted for him because he was going to send all those job-stealing Mexicans home and keep the blacks in line so that you could afford to send your youngest to Catholic school instead of the public high school with all those people in it. And maybe you could afford to move to a new place away from them and work for another 20 years and retire like your grandpa did when he put in his 35 at the GM plant in Hamtramck.

I'm here to tell you Donald Trump flat out lied to you.  Not only did he lie to you, he sold you out to the goddamn Russians.  He sold you out so that Putin's cronies could make pipelines using imported steel from Asia.  That big infrastructure plan Trump has?  It's a gift to the guys who really got him elected.

You got played for fools, but you had a choice and you made it.

Now we all have to live with the consequences of 2016.

The good news is you can help make it right in 2018 and 2020.

Think about it.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Once again the Trump regime is signaling that it expects the Mueller investigation to be over very soon, despite all evidence to the contrary involving such a detailed, meticulous criminal probe by a career law enforcement official who rose to become FBI director and his hand-picked team of criminology field experts.  As I have said before, this isn't a prediction that the investigation will end soon as much as it is an open threat that it will be ended.

President Trump's legal team is standing by its prediction that a central part of the probe into Russia's election meddling will conclude quickly. 

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow reasserted in an interview Monday with The Wall Street Journal that the parts of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe involving Trump would end soon, though he did not mention specific dates. 

"I know we, collectively, the lawyers, are looking forward to an expeditious wrapping up of this matter," Sekulow told the Journal. 

A spokesman for Mueller's team declined to comment for the newspaper's report.

Experts have said it is unlikely that the special counsel's probe will wrap up anytime soon, given the scope of the investigation that has reached into the upper echelons of the White House.

Nobody expects this to "conclude quickly" except for the guy who can fire the Deputy Attorney General who appointed Mueller in the first place.  Funny, that.

Of course, they've been predicting this for a while now, first it was Thanksgiving and then January.  So far that hasn't come to pass.  Yet.

But they are certainly continuing to prepare for it coming to pass.

Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.) on Tuesday called for a "purge" of the FBI, warning of "deep state" figures at work in the agency. 

Rooney said during an interview on MSNBC that the American people have "very high standards" for the country's government agencies, and suggested they aren't being met.
He was pressed during the interview on whether he is trying to discredit the Department of Justice, and by extension the investigation into Russia's election interference.

"I don't want to discredit them. I would like to see the directors of those agencies purge it," he replied. 

"And say, look, we've got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here, those are the people that I want the American people to see and know the good works being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state." 

When pressed further he specifically mentioned Peter Strzok, a top FBI agent who worked on the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of State. 

Stzok had been a member of special counsel Robert Mueller's team, but was removed this summer over text messages he sent that were critical of President Trump.

 And of course there's nobody who would love to see a mass firing of career FBI, NSA< CIA and DIA agents than Vladimir Putin.  There's a reason they keep using the phrases "purge" and "deep state".

Down The Hatch

The Salt Lake Tribune delivers a backhanded barrage to GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch, naming him 2017 "Utahn of the Year" not for his accomplishments, but for the sheer amount of destruction he has caused in the lives of the people of the state.

These things are often misunderstood. So, lest our readers, or the honoree himself, get the wrong impression, let us repeat the idea behind The Salt Lake Tribune’s Utahn of the Year designation.

The criteria are not set in stone. But this year, as many times in the past, The Tribune has assigned the label to the Utahn who, over the past 12 months, has done the most. Has made the most news. Has had the biggest impact. For good or for ill.

The selection of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch as the 2017 Utahn of the Year has little to do with the fact that, after 42 years, he is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, that he has been a senator from Utah longer than three-fifths of the state’s population has been alive.

It has everything to do with recognizing:

• Hatch’s part in the dramatic dismantling of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
• His role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in passing a major overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
• His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.

Each of these actions stands to impact the lives of every Utahn, now and for years to come. Whether those Utahns approve or disapprove of those actions has little consequence in this specific recognition. Only the breadth and depth of their significance matters.

As has been argued in this space before, the presidential decision to cut the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half and to slash the size of the brand new Bears Ears National Monument by some 90 percent has no constitutional, legal or environmental logic.

To all appearances — appearances promoted by Hatch — this anti-environmental, anti-Native American and, yes, anti-business decommissioning of national monuments was basically a political favor the White House did for Hatch. A favor done in return for Hatch’s support of the president generally and of his tax reform plan in particular.

And, on the subject of tax reform: For a very long time indeed, Hatch has said that his desire to stick around long enough to have a say in what indeed would be a long-overdue overhaul of the nation’s Byzantine tax code is the primary reason he has run for re-election time after time.

Last week, he did it.

And with that "accomplishment" the paper calls for Hatch to retire from the Most August Deliberative Body™.

It would be good for Utah if Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him. 

Hatch, in either a failed effort to play along or a mind-numbing bout of cluelessness, posted the following on Twitter:

He's "grateful for this great Christmas honor" he says.  Which, frankly, sums up Hatch's nearly 42 years in office.

Last Call For Putin On A Puppet Show

Meanwhile, Trump's good friend Vladimir is making sure there are no surprises in store for him just in case the US decides to return the favor from 2016 as far as election meddling goes: it's hard to lose an election when you're basically the only candidate.

Russian election officials on Monday formally barred Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny from running for president, prompting calls from him for a boycott of next year’s vote.

The Central Election Commission decided unanimously that the anti-corruption crusader isn’t eligible to run.

Navalny is implicitly barred from running for office because of a conviction in a fraud case which has been viewed as political retribution. He could have run if he was given a special dispensation or if his conviction was cancelled.

Incumbent Vladimir Putin is running for a fourth term in office and is widely expected to win the March 18 election.

Over the past year, Navalny has mounted a grassroots campaign which reached out to the most remote corners of Putin’s heartland.

Navalny is the most serious challenger that Putin has faced in all his years in power, and the court cases against him have been viewed as a tool to keep him from running for office.

In a pre-recorded messaged that was released minutes after the Election Commission handed down the decision, Navalny called on his supporters to boycott the vote.

“The procedure that we’re invited to take part is not an election,” he said. “Only Putin and the candidates he has hand-picked are taking part in it.”

“Going to the polls right now is to vote for lies and corruption.”

You'd better believe Trump is taking notes.  Putin convicted and jailed Navalny on a bogus "fraud" charge and now all the guesswork has been taken out of the elevtion in March.  I guarantee you that Trump is asking if "his" Justice Department can't find a charge to hang on some Democrats to keep them from running.

Those "Lock her up!" chants aren't just for show, guys.

Heart Of Coal

The Trump regime is cutting the UN budget by $300 million for 2018 because really, Trump is a terrible landlord.

The U.S. Mission to the United Nations announced Sunday that it negotiated a major reduction in the U.N.’s budget for the upcoming fiscal years.

According to a statement from the mission, the 2018-2019 U.N. budget will have a $285 million reduction from the previous two years.

“In addition to these significant cost savings, we reduced the UN’s bloated management and support functions, bolstered support for key U.S. priorities throughout the world, and instilled more discipline and accountability throughout the UN system,” the statement reads.

One of the Trump administration’s goals has been to reduce the amount of contributions that the U.S. makes to the U.N. The U.S. currently provides for about 22 percent of the annual budget, or about $3.3 billion per year, according to PolitiFact.

The U.N. General Assembly previously approved a $5.4 billion operating budget for 2016 and 2017. The regular budget is separate from the body's budget for its sprawling peacekeeping operations, which totaled $7.8 billion for 2017 alone.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said that the budget cut announced Sunday is a “big step in the right direction” for the U.S., and that she will continue to pursue “ways to increase the UN’s efficiency‎ while protecting our interests."

“The inefficiency and overspending of the United Nations are well known,” Haley said. “We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of or remain unchecked. This historic reduction in spending – in addition to many other moves toward a more efficient and accountable UN – is a big step in the right direction.”
Conservatives have long criticized the U.N. as not being in the U.S.’s interests, and many have amplified their concerns after the global body overwhelmingly voted for a resolution last week to oppose President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

No doubt in my mind that this happened in retaliation for last week's vote, but this is the American leadership this country chose to elect out of racism, hatred, and fear. And note Haley's words that this is only a step: more cuts are coming, I guarantee it.

Merry Christmas!

I have the flu unfortunately, but I have some time to take care of myself.

Limited posting this week, but I'll have my predictions for 2018 up soon.

Have a good holiday season and thanks for being with me another year!