StupidiNews!

• Winter storm warnings have been issues from Florida to Boston as a major nor'easter is expected to drop ice, freezing rain, and snow along the eastern seaboard today and tomorrow.
• With Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch announcing his retirement at the end of the year, the speculation is that Mitt Romney will run for Hatch's open seat.
• North Korea has reopened its border hotline with South Korea after ending the practice in 2016, Donald Trump responded by boasting about the "size" of his "nuclear button".
• The White House is demanding Democrats agree to end to "chain migration" and fully fund a southern border wall in exchange for saving DACA as a government shutdown looms.
• The advent of solid-state lidar sensors could be the key to making autonomous vehicles vastly less expensive and safer in the future.

Last Call For The Enemies List

Didn't even take a day for Trump to start out 2018 with calls on Twitter for the Justice Department to round up and arrest his political opponents.

President Trump on Tuesday appeared to suggest that Huma Abedin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, should face jail time, days after the State Department posted emails found on her estranged husband's computer that included confidential government information. 

In a tweet, Trump also urged the Justice Department to act in prosecuting Abedin and former FBI director James B. Comey, who the president fired in May amid the mounting investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election and contacts between Moscow and Trump's campaign.

The State Department, responding to a lawsuit from Judicial Watch, posted online copies of Abedin's emails from her nongovernment address that had been discovered on the laptop of her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, during an FBI investigation. 

In his tweet, Trump appeared to be reacting to a report in the Daily Caller that found Abedin had forwarded State Department passwords to her personal Yahoo account before Yahoo faced high-level hacks that affected all account-holders. 

Trump has previously accused Comey of leaking sensitive information after the former director testified that he had asked a friend to pass on notes he had taken of his interactions with Trump to a reporter for the New York Times in hopes of securing a special prosecutor to take over the Russia investigation. Ethics experts said Comey's actions appeared to be legally protected, provided he did not disclose classified information.

In his tweet, Trump referred to the “Deep State Justice Department,” an apparent reference to the president's contention that some elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have attempted to undermine his election. Trump has said there is no evidence that he colluded with Russian agents during the campaign.

At some point very soon these tweets about jailing Clinton campaign officials are going to become orders to start jailing Clinton campaign officials, and then things are going to get a lot darker around here very quickly.

The End Of The Peace Process

We're only beginning to see the real consequences of Donald Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of Israel. Frankly, it's the beginning of the end of the two-state solution era and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Israeli hardliners are now moving to make its end effectively permanent.

An emboldened Israeli right wing is moving quickly in the new year to make it far more difficult to create a Palestinian state, signaling its intention to doom hopes for a two-state solution to the conflict.

The actions have come on multiple fronts, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party for the first time has urged the annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the nation’s top legal officers pressed to extend Israeli law into occupied territory.

In addition, the Israeli Parliament, after a late-night debate, voted early Tuesday to enact stiff new obstacles to any potential land-for-peace deal involving Jerusalem, while abandoning at the last minute a measure that would have eased the way to rid the city of several overwhelmingly Palestinian neighborhoods.

Coming on the heels of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in defiance of decades-old United States policy and international consensus, the moves showed that the Israeli right senses a new opening to pursue its goal of a single state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

“We are telling the world that it doesn’t matter what the nations of the world say,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told more than 1,000 members of Likud’s central committee on Sunday. “The time has come to express our biblical right to the land.”

And that's really the crux of the issue.  There will be no sharing of Jerusalem with the Palestinian people.

But Palestinians and Israeli supporters of a two-state solution said the moves revealed the true colors of the country’s ascendant right wing.

“We hope that this vote serves as a reminder for the international community that the Israeli government, with the full support of the U.S. administration, is not interested in a just and lasting peace,” Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said Monday, adding that he would respond by revisiting the authority’s existing agreements with Israel. “Rather, its main goal is the consolidation of an apartheid regime in all of historic Palestine.”

Daniel Seidemann, director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, which focuses on the Holy City’s fate in a potential two-state solution, said that “what was winked and nodded about before is now being acknowledged publicly: ‘We have no intent of sharing this land with anybody else except as a barely tolerated minority.’”

And that tolerance will almost certainly end with another Palastinian uprising and a swift and utterly brutal, overwhelming response from the Israeli military.  Only this time around the Israeli military won't be holding back. The incalculable damage from Trump's foreign policy in just 2017 will be felt for decades, if not generations.

With Customary German Efficiency

Germany's new law on social media hate speech went into effect on Monday along with the new year. Apparently the new legislation already has its first high-profile political violator in less than 24 hours.

Germany has started enforcing a strict new law around hate speech on social media — and has already launched a criminal investigation into a far-right MP who called Muslims "barbarians."

The new law, known locally as NetzDG or the Network Enforcement Act, forces social media sites to delete offensive posts. It came into effect on January 1, and covers Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and YouTube, but excludes LinkedIn and WhatsApp, according a report in Deutsche Welle.

Beatrix von Storch is the deputy leader of far-right party AfD and is under investigation by the police for recent inflammatory Facebook and Twitter posts describing Muslims as "barbarians." In a now-deleted tweet, she complained that Cologne police were tweeting season's greetings in Arabic and claimed this was trying to appease "gang-raping" Muslims.

According to reports, she was temporarily blocked from Twitter but has now been reinstated.

Von Storch reposted the same message on Facebook on December 31 as a kind of test to see whether it would be deleted. Her post remains live on Facebook as of Tuesday morning.

In addition to criminal investigations, the law allows for substantial fines for social media companies (up to a whopping 50 million euros!) if they don't investigate and delete hate speech in a very timely manner.  Needless to say, free speech advocates are warning of massive overreaction by Facebook and Twitter.

Not everyone is happy about the change. Reporters Without Borders said in July that the "Facebook law" would have a negative impact on press freedom.

"The short deadline for removal, coupled with the threat of heavy fines, will very likely drive social networks to remove more content than is legally justified. Even journalistic publications will face a real danger of being affected by this kind over-blocking without due process," said the organisation's executive director for Germany, Christian Mihr, at the time.

Something like this would never pass constitutional muster in the US, which is yet another reminder that free speech advocates here stateside really don't know the difference between "The government is censoring me" and "The company whose social media platform I use can make its own terms of use."  Germany's social media law is definitely an example of the former.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump says the US will withhold more than $250 million in promised military aid to Pakistan until the country takes "decisive action" against terrorist networks on its own soil.
• California pot smokers are celebrating the first sales of recreational marijuana in the state as new laws went into effect Monday legalizing its use.
• Police in Iran have arrested more than 450 protesters in the capital of Tehran over the last three days as government crackdowns against anti-regime demonstrations are intensifying. 
• Americans are expected to consume a record amount of red meat and poultry in 2018 as lower prices and plentiful supply meet rising demand for protein.
• The Federal Trade Commission says Americans made 4.5 million consumer complaints about robocalls last year, up nearly a third from 2016.

Last Call For Blue Genes

2018 may be the year the gene editing technology known as CRISPR starts becoming reality in human trials, and while there are some very ambitious plans out there for the science, I'm thinking this is another case of eyes being too big for the task at hand, and there's going to be some sort of political and ethical movement to clamp down on CRISPR if it's as powerful as the proponents say. 

Ever since 2012, when researchers first discovered that bacterial immune systems could be hijacked to edit DNA in living creatures, CRISPR has been hailed as a maker of revolutions. This was the year that prediction felt like it was starting to come true. U.S. scientists used the CRISPR gene editing technique to treat a common genetic heart disease in a human embryo. Many more diseases were successfully treated in mice using CRISPR. Hell, a particularly enthusiastic biohacker even spontaneously injected himself with muscle-growth genes while giving a talk at a conference.

But if 2017 was the year that the potential of CRISPR began to come into focus, 2018 may be the year that potential begins to be realized.

Next year, the first human trials of CRISPR-based treatments in the U.S. and Europe are slated to begin.

This month, biotech firm CRISPR Therapeutics became the first to submit a clinical trial application to European regulators. Tests are set to begin next year for its therapy that combines CRISPR gene editing and stem cell therapy to treat the blood disorder beta thalassemia. CEO Samarth Kulkarni told Gizmodo that the company also plans to file an application to conduct a clinical trial using a similar therapy to treat sickle cell disease in the first half of 2018. “In 2018, the first human is going to get dosed with CRISPR in the clinic,” Kulkarni told Gizmodo. “And we’re going to be the first ones to do it.”

Both disorders are genetic, caused by mutations to the genes that produce hemoglobin, a protein essential to ensuring that red blood cells ferry oxygen throughout the body. Without that oxygen, people can suffer from severe anemia, developmental delays, damage to organs, and pulmonary hypertension. The idea is extract stem cells from patients’ bone marrow and correct the faulty genes with CRISPR, a gene-editing technique that allows scientists to cut and paste tiny snippets of genetic code. Then those edited cells would be infused back into the body, where they would multiply, eventually outnumbering the diseased cells. Sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia are good candidates for CRISPR because in many cases, they are caused by a mutation to one single DNA letter.

At Stanford, a different spin on using CRISPR to treat sickle cell disease is also moving toward clinical trials. Matthew Porteus, who heads the research, said that his group expects to file a clinical trial application with the FDA by the end of 2018 and begin trials in 2019. “Our New Year’s resolution for 2018 is to gather the data so we can file a [trial application] by the end of the year, so we can start a clinical trial in 2019,” Porteus told Gizmodo. “We just need to check off all the boxes.”

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, used CRISPR for the first time on a human in 2016, and conducted a second human trial this year, setting off a biomedical duel between the U.S. and China and sparking concerns that the trials were irresponsibly premature. The first U.S. human CRISPR trial was slated to begin this summer at the University of Pennsylvania, after receiving a regulatory stamp of approval to proceed last year. It is unclear what has caused that trial’s delay.

Porteus said that he expects 2018 will bring many more preclinical studies demonstrating how CRISPR might be used to treat different diseases. In 2017, there were several such studies, addressing devastating diseases and conditions such as Huntington’s disease, Lou Gherig’s disease, and an inherited form of hearing loss in mice.

“There is going to be a lot of behind-the-scenes work of turning those into a real clinical protocol,” Porteus said. He also predicted 2018 will see applications for more clinical trials, though most likely ones the involve simply deleting a problematic gene rather than correcting it.

If anything, I expect ridiculous legal limitations on the science just to protect the profit margins on the treatment.  Gene therapy clinics may be a near future sci-fi staple plot point these days in both novels and games, but this is what we're looking at if the CRISPR people are right, and man that's a huge, huge "if" we're talking about.

Rarely does that kind of technology end well in the stories. Either it's way too dangerous, or made impossible to afford for everyone except the ultra rich, and you'll excuse me if I don't believe the current administration would be capable of recognizing the potential social and ethical dangers.

But then again, the future of CRISPR may very well be not up to America at all.

New Year, Same Dear Leader

So good news and bad news on North Korea as we begin the new year. The good news is that Kim Jong Un seemed pretty eager to talk to South Korea as the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang are only six weeks away and the Olympics seems to be a good excuse to get together and talk stability on the peninsula.  The bad news is Kim's bragging about the new "nuclear button" installed on his desk at work.

Kim Jong Un on Monday warned the United States that he has a “nuclear button” on his desk ready for use if North Korea is threatened, but offered an olive branch to South Korea, saying he was “open to dialogue” with Seoul.
After a year dominated by fiery rhetoric and escalating tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Kim used his televised New Year’s Day speech to declare North Korea “a peace-loving and responsible nuclear power” and call for lower military tensions on the Korean peninsula and improved ties with the South.

“When it comes to North-South relations, we should lower the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula to create a peaceful environment,” Kim said. “Both the North and the South should make efforts.”

Kim said he will consider sending a delegation to the Winter Olympics Games to be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February.

“North Korea’s participation in the Winter Games will be a good opportunity to showcase the national pride and we wish the Games will be a success. Officials from the two Koreas may urgently meet to discuss the possibility,” Kim said.

South Korea said it welcomed Kim’s offer to send a delegation to the Pyeongchang Games and hold talks with the South to discuss possible participation.

“We have always stated our willingness to talk with North Korea any time and anywhere if that would help restore inter-Korean relations and lead to peace on the Korean peninsula,” a spokesman for the presidential Blue House said.

“We hope the two Koreas will sit down and find a solution to lower tensions and establish peace on the Korean peninsula.”

Lee Hee-beom, president of the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee, said the organization welcomed participation by the North Koreans.

“The (organizing committee) will discuss relevant matters with the South Korean government as well as the International Olympic Committee,” he said in a statement.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has said North Korea’s participation will ensure safety of the Pyeongchang Olympics and proposed last month that Seoul and Washington postpone large military drills that the North denounces as a rehearsal for war until after the Games.

At least it's something.  Lord knows South Korea can't count on the US anymore, so I'm sure they're eager to take full advantage of Pyongyang's overtures on this.  Hell, if I were Kim, I'd rather talk to Seoul than Washington anyway.  Maybe this will end up a good thing in the long run.

We'll see where this goes.

Starting Off The New Year Right

It's January 1, meaning a whole host of changes to state laws take effect today, among them 18 states are bumping up their minimum wages.

Many of the wage hikes are phased-in steps toward an ultimately higher wage, the product of ballot initiatives pushed by unions and workers rights groups over the last few years.

The minimum wage in Washington state will rise to $11.50 an hour, up 50 cents and the highest statewide minimum in the nation. Over the next three years, the wage will rise to $13.50 an hour, thanks to a ballot measure approved by voters in 2016.

Mainers will see their minimum wages rise the most, from $9 an hour to $10 an hour, an 11 percent increase. Voters approved a ballot measure in 2016 that will eventually raise the wage to $12 an hour by 2020.

Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont will see their minimum wages increase by at least 50 cents an hour. Smaller increases take effect in Alaska, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio and South Dakota.

Jared Bernstein, a former chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden and a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said states have been more willing to raise minimum wages because those who take low-wage jobs are more likely to be better educated now than they were in the past, a sign of an economy where fewer high-wage jobs are available.

"As the population of low wage workers has become a bit more upscale, many places are willing to adjust their minimum wages, especially given the pervasive research that supports moderate increases," Bernstein said in an interview. "States and localities have been increasingly willing to raise their own minimum wages as the federal value has been stuck at $7.25."

Well, mostly blue states, at least.  Around here, Kentucky and Indiana remain stuck at $7.25, Ohio will edge up from $8.15 to $8.30.  Plenty of cities will see boosts to wages, mostly on the West Coast, while half of US states as of today now have laws preventing cities from raising minimum wages above state figures.

Ohio is getting a minimum wage increase ballot initiative, as is Michigan, that could be on the ballot in November.  We'll see.  But at least some states recognize that $7.25 an hour isn't a livable wage.

Last Call For 2017

I'll leave you this year with a pretty solid article from Politico Magazine editor and author Joshua Zeitz, who delves into the age old question of whether working class white voters rallied for Trump agaist their own self-interests.  Before you roll you eyes and say "But white supremacy is in their self-interest" not only does Zeitz agree, but he cites W.E.B. Du Bois asking this same question decades previously.

The same dynamic that Du Bois grappled with is on display today. In breaking for Donald Trump and the GOP, working-class white voters are manifestly undercutting their economic self-interest. To be sure, Trump didn’t campaign like an archetypal GOP plutocrat. He railed against free trade and immigration, policies that many white working-class citizens believe, with some justification, have hurt their communities. He promised to bring back manufacturing and coal mining jobs, eliminate generous tax loopholes for wealthy families like his own, and—like Andrew Jackson, after whom he has patterned his presidency—privilege the many over the few. 

But Democrats and Never Trump Republicans shouted at the top of their lungs that Trump’s campaign promises either weren’t possible or that they wouldn’t help working-class voters as much as he pledged. And they appear to have been right. The president recently signed into law a tax bill whose benefits, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Congressional Budget Office, accrue principally to corporations and super-rich individuals; many middle-class and working-class families will ultimately face a tax hike. The administraton and its congressional supporters have also taken steps to make health care less affordable or altogether inaccessible, destabilize retirement security for working-class families, and allow industrial polluters to despoil the air they breathe and the water they drink. Despite what Trump said on the campaign trail, his agenda does little to help and much to hurt struggling white families. 

Of course, whiteness still delivers other dividends—as it always has. It makes one less likely to be killed by a police officer during a traffic stop. It enables white men to carry assault weapons (including long guns) in places of public accommodation, while a black man might be shot and killed by law enforcement officials merely for picking up a BB gun displayed on a sales rack at Walmart. It affords working-class white families the peace of mind that the government won’t invade homes or hospitals in pursuit of undocumented children or grandparents. Whiteness, in other words, continues to pay tangible benefits, and for right or wrong, it makes some sense that its primary beneficiaries are loathe to support candidates who expressely promise to disrupt this privileged status. 

Yet Trump has also, arguably more than any other candidate for president in the last hundred years (excepting third-party outliers like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace), played to the purely psychological benefits of being white. From his racially-laden exhortations about black crime in Chicago and Latino gangs seemingly everywhere, to his attacks on an American-born federal judge of Mexican parentage and Muslim gold star parents, he has paid the white majority with redemption and revanchism. Trump might be increasing economic inequality, but at least the working-class whites feel like they belong in Trump’s America. He urged them to privilege race over class when they entered their polling stations. 

And it didn’t just stop there. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, Trump swept almost every white demographic group, forging a “broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.” It’s not just blue-collar white people who seem blithely willing to sacrifice economic rationality for racial solidarity. After all, it arguably took a special kind of stupid for upper-middle class suburbanites in high-tax states to support a party that just raised their taxes. (No, this wasn’t a bait-and-switch. The GOP leadership has talked openly about eliminating deductions for state and local taxes since 2014.) Unless, that is, you account for the wages of whiteness.

If there's a sentence that sums up 2017 politically, it's "It’s not just blue-collar white people who seem blithely willing to sacrifice economic rationality for racial solidarity."

This is why "Democrats must push the class argument" will never work and it's the best argument that I've heard this year as to why Democrats need to stick with voters of color and stop chasing blue-collar whites at the expense of voters of color. It hasn't worked in the past, it won't work now. Class arguments, pocketbook politics, dinner-table finance discussions, these don't work in 2017 as long as a majority of white voters ignore them in favor of racial solidarity.

And as you've seen so many times, I end with this from Lyndon Johnson, who knew what was up almost 60 years ago when he spoke to a young staffer by the name of Bill Moyers in 1960 during a motorcade in Tennessee:

“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Onward to 2018.

Zandar's 2018 Predictions

Welp, another year and we head into Year Ten of ZVTS: 2018.  I never imagined I'd still be writing at this date, let alone having regular readers like yourselves.  So, without further ado, it's time for my ten predictions for news events in 2018, and I'm going to go big:

1) Robert Muller recommends impeachable offenses for Donald Trump.  I know, this is a huge bet: that Trump won't fire Mueller, that Mueller will complete his investigation this year, and that he will find something that warrants an official recommendation to Congress that articles of impeachment be voted on.  But I see it happening.  There's just too much self-reinforcing evidence at this point to ignore, unless you're a Republican in Congress, in which case...

2) Trump will wait until after Mueller's report is delivered in order to issue pardons.  More indictments in 2018 by Mueller are as close to a guarantee as you can get at this point.  There are so many targets, too.  But Trump will wait until the investigation ends in order to start dishing out pardons.  Furthermore...

3) The GOP-led Congress will take no action on Mueller's recommendations.  Not in 2018, at least.  They will wait for midterm elections, hoping that either Mueller spares them by continuing the investigation into 2019, or that Trump ends it for them.  But Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House, will never let impeachment articles come to a floor vote, which leads me to...

4) Democrats will take control of the House in 2018 midterms.  Yes, I know all this is dependent on a media that is already attacking Democrats for their sure-to-be failures on getting anything signed into law by Trump and the Senate remains a tough road...but I think it will happen. I'll even go one step further, because I need a serious goal to help shoot for...

5)  Dems will take the Senate back in 2018 too.  They would have to hold their Trump state incumbents and win Nevada and Arizona, but it's not impossible.  And if it's truly a 2018 blue wave year, I think there are a lot fewer safe red states than the GOP is willing to even think about.

6) A Trump miscalculation leads to a military incident with North Korea.  I don't mean war, but I do mean a US ship or airplane is destroyed, or US soldiers captured, something along those lines.  I don't believe it will lead to a larger exchange yet, otherwise all bets are off for everyone.  Trump needs something he can rally his base around ahead of midterm elections, especially as Mueller closes in.

7) America will fall victim to a significant cyber-attack.  I don't want to be right about this one either, because I don't know how Trump would react to it.  But I'm betting that something along the lines of a major computer virus or infrastructure blackout will affect a major portion of the US for some time.  Frankly, we're long overdue for this one.

8)  Trump's complete failure in Puerto Rico helps turn Florida blue.  I think Rick Scott will be succeeded by a Democrat in November 2018 at the minimum.  I don't know how feasible it is for the state's heave GOP majority in Tallahassee to flip, but the Dems will at least make major gains. In lighter news...

9)  Marvel's 2018 films will make $250 million at the US box office.  Black Panther, Avengers 3, Ant-Man and The Wasp and Deadpool 2 are easily going to hit that, and there's a good chance that Venom will too, but I'll put a marker down on the first four, no contest.

and finally 10) ZVTS will make it through its tenth year and into 2019.  Here's hoping.  I've basically spent my entire 30's blogging, so we'll see how it works out now that I'm older and wiser.

Thanks for staying with me on this ride.

Zandar's 2017 Scorecard

It's the final day of 2018, so that means it's time to review my 2017 predictions to see how I did.

1) President Trump's average approval rating as of the end of 2016 according to Real Clear Politics's average is 44% favorable, 48% unfavorable, and 43% favorable-48% unfavorable according to Huffpost Pollster average. My prediction is that he's at or below 44% favorable by this date next year.

Correct: FiveThirtyEight has Trump's average at 37.7% approval, Real Clear Politics has him at 39.8% as of 12/31.

2) At least one of Trump's cabinet selections will be rejected by the Senate. My money's on Rex Tillerson, but the Senate will not confirm all of Trump's picks. It will be a move by Republicans to let off the growing pressure on them to rein Trump in, but in the end somebody just as bad as Tillerson will be confirmed. I'd love for Democrats to make this a nasty mess however.

Correct: The Senate made it clear that Trump's initial choice for Labor Secretary, Carl's Jr/Hardee's CEO Andrew Puzder, was never going to be confirmed so Puzder withdrew in February.

3) Republicans are already fleeing from repealing Obamacare. I'll go out on a limb and predict that no repeal bill will pass in 2017. Republicans are just too far apart on a solution. I'll take the split here if a repeal bill passes but the actual repeal part doesn't happen until after the 2018 election. I'll take full credit though if that repeal date should be after the 2020 election, which is definitely possible.

Correct: The tax bill may have sunk the individual mandate, but ObamaCare lives on.

4) Harry Reid left the Dems the option to Bork a Trump Supreme Court pick. I expect that will happen at least once(remember Harriet Miers?) I'll take the split if a second pick is confirmed before the end of the year, but Trump won't get his first pick.

Incorrect: Never underestimate Mitch McConnell's evil. Not only did Trump's first pick,  Neil Gorsuch sail through, but he did because McConnell eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, meaning the Bork maneuver is officially dead going forward.

5) All this shouting about the United Nations won't change anything: the US will continue to fund the UN as normal. I could see a symbolic cut, but nothing about ending funding to the UN, it's simply too important.

Partial: Trump did indeed announce cuts to UN funding in 2018.

6) Likewise, all of Trump's bankster choices for his cabinet and advisors means the debt ceiling will be raised on time. That will happen quickly.

Correct: The debt ceiling was raised earlier this month as part of the continuing budget resolution.

I expect plenty of new GOP legislation out before the end of the year:
7) A national 20-week ban on abortions will make it through the House.

Correct: The House passed this in October, so far the Senate has no acted on it.

8) National Voter ID will make it through the House at least.

Incorrect: Indiana GOP Rep. Luke Messer introduced the Election Integrity Act of 2017 in April, but it has yet to go anywhere. 

9) Medicare and Social Security "reform" will also make it through the House. I expect all of these to die in the Senate.

Partial: Medicare and Social Security cuts were rolled into the GOP tax bill.

10) And as always, ZVTS will make it too. It wasn't a gimme as it has been in the past, I've considered hanging it up, but decided that Trump was just too much of a threat to stop this place.

Correct: And that remains true.

Final score:  6 correct, 2 partial, 2 incorrect, for 7/10.  Better than I did in 2016 at least, by a hair.
I'll have my 2018 predictions up tonight.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Trump's defenders, leading the attack on Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation of Trump's Russian collusion, are fixated on the Steele dossier, the opposition files put together by Trump's GOP primary opponents and handed over to the Clinton campaign and the DNC.  The Trumpies are convinced that since the dossier is political and was somehow responsible for the Trump/Russia investigation, the investigation is political as well.

The reality, as the NY Times reveals today, is that the Mueller probe came about because former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos can't keep his mouth shut.

During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. 

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign. 

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role. 

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired. 

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation. 

While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt. 

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election? 

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

That should slam the door on the attacks on Mueller, and indeed, Republicans are starting to get skittish as they realize just how much trouble Trump is in, and how much damage he'll do bringing everyone down with him.

A growing campaign by President Trump’s most ardent supporters to discredit the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the law enforcement agencies assisting his investigation is opening new fissures in the Republican Party, with some lawmakers questioning the damage being done to federal law enforcement and to a political party that has long championed law and order. 

A small but vocal group of conservative lawmakers, much of the conservative media and, at times, the president himself have launched a series of attacks to paint not only Mr. Mueller but institutions once considered sacrosanct to Republicans like the F.B.I. and Justice Department as dangerously biased against Mr. Trump. One of them, Representative Francis Rooney of Florida, called on Tuesday for top F.B.I. and Justice Department officials to be “purged.”

Now some Republican lawmakers are speaking out, worried that Trump loyalists, hoping for short-term gain, could wind up staining the party, dampening morale at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, and potentially recasting Democrats as the true friends of law enforcement for years to come. 

Straddling both camps is Mr. Trump, who in an interview on Thursday with The New York Times lavished praise on Republican congressmen who have defended him from a “witch hunt” and expressed confidence that Mr. Mueller would “treat me fairly.” 

It is not uncommon for members of the president’s own party to defend their leader against investigations. When President Bill Clinton was investigated and impeached in the 1990s, Mr. Clinton’s associates and many left-leaning Democrats on Capitol Hill waged war on Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel.

But Republican moderates in both the House and Senate with little loyalty to Mr. Trump and a Republican cadre of former law enforcement officials fear that their colleagues have reacted to specific and credible concerns about the F.B.I. with indiscriminate attacks. 

“As an institution we have to make it clear that we are dealing here with a scalpel not a sledgehammer,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who sits on the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees. “Because you can’t have a situation where people say, ‘Oh, you can’t trust the F.B.I.’ That creates a spirit of anarchy.” 

Of his fellow Republicans pressing a public case against the agencies, Mr. King said, “I think some of them have been too strong on that.”

If even Peter King is running from this, the internal polling numbers for the GOP must be pointing towards a complete wipeout in 2018.

And they know it.  But it also means that the Papadopoulos angle of the story is far more important than has previously been reported. It also means that Mueller has been on to the truth for months now, and that the reckoning is coming.

It also means that Papadopoulos knew the Russians had hacked the DNC emails two months before that information went public, and that the Trump campaign was well aware of it, and yet took no action whatsoever to inform anybody about it.

Stay tuned.  2018 is going to be a wild ride.

Iran Into The Streets

The largest Iranian protests against the ruling theocracy in years are happening in the streets right now, and while things are tense and hundreds have been arrested, it hasn't devolved into full-scale violence yet. Everyone appears to be taking a wait-and-see attitude because nobody on the outside is too sure of what's going on, as former Newsweek correspondent and one-time regime prisoner Maziar Bahari weighs in.

On Dec. 10, President Hassan Rouhani presented his budget, which essentially would make life more expensive for citizens and, at the same time, include generous allocations for religious organizations in Iran and elsewhere. The slogan “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, I Give My Life for Iran” was repeated in the protests across different cities. Many Iranians regard their government’s generous help to the Palestinian Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, Syrian Assad regime and Yemeni Houthis as unnecessary and even treasonous. 

Despite people’s passion and energy, no one knows what is happening in Iran. Analysts are confused and mostly silent. And the people on the streets are not supporting any individual or group; they have chanted slogans against Rouhani and Khamenei, but unlike in 2009, there are no leaders to guide them. 

Rouhani has, at the time of this writing, reportedly gathered his ministers and advisers to assess the situation. So far, Rouhani’s government has managed only to blame the demonstrations on its conservative critics. Rouhani’s vice president has impliedthat the hard-liners are using people’s economic problems to bring down the government. Some hard-liners have been happy about the anti-Rouhani slogans, but many of them have chastised protesters for chanting slogans against the supreme leader, who is supposed to be a sacred being. 

Hundreds of people have been arrested in cities around Iran in the past 48 hours. No one has been released as of this writing. It would be interesting to know what their interrogations have been about and what charges are being brought against them.
The demonstrations have shown the dissatisfaction of Iranians with the regime as a whole — both the so-called pro-reform Rouhani and the conservative Khamenei. Dealing with this outbreak of hatred may unify the regime for a short while, but, inevitably, the factions will start their infighting again. Rouhani and Khamenei have different interests and bases of support. They cannot coexist peacefully and simultaneously cater to their constituencies. 

Rouhani cannot ignore the destructive role of the ayatollah’s cohorts in the Revolutionary Guard and their firm grip on the economy. The Guards practically run Iran’s policies in the wider region — including supporting Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah – and they have made a mockery of Rouhani’s attempts at rapprochement with Iran’s neighbors and the West. 

The supreme leader, in turn, cannot satisfy millions of Iranians who want prosperity and freedom and also maintain the support of his fanatic die-hard supporters who have been enjoying power for the past four decades. 

Is it a revolution? Not yet. Iran’s government is its own worst enemy and the Iranian people know it. Economic woes leading to infighting can bring down this corrupt and brutal system. Different factions within the government will, most probably, and just the same as always, choose to dismiss the genuine economic grievances of the Iranian people and blame the protests on foreign agents and an international imperialist-Zionist conspiracy.

The Iranian people have learned, after living almost 40 years under the Islamic Republic, to gradually and intelligently raise their voices in peaceful protests that will provoke the government to tear itself apart. Iran’s rulers may choose to blame foreigners and Zionists — but they hardly realize that the true danger to their power is right at home.

So it's not another Green Revolution like in 2009, it's something different and more organic.  But it's also a strong signal that Iran may not remain stable for long.

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.