Last Call For The Injustice Department

Three big stories on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump Department of Injustice today, first, the AG is rescinding a 2013 DoJ policy on marijuana and is now leaving prosecution of state legalized pot (both medical and recreational) up to individual US attorneys.

In a seismic shift, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce Thursday that he is rescinding a trio of memos from the Obama administration that adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws, according to a source with knowledge of the decision. 

While many states have decriminalized or legalized marijuana use, the drug is still illegal under federal law, creating a conflict between federal and state law. 

The main Justice Department memo addressing the issue, known as the "Cole memo" for then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole in 2013, set forth new priorities for federal prosecutors operating in states where the drug had been legalized for medical or other adult use. It represented a major shift from strict enforcement to a more hands-off approach, so long as they didn't threaten other federal priorities, such as preventing the distribution of the drug to minors and cartels. 

The memo will be rescinded but it's not immediately clear whether Sessions will issue new guidance in its place or simply revert back to older policies that left states with legal uncertainty about enforcement of federal law. 

The decision had been closely watched since Sessions was sworn in. He told reporters in November he was examining a "rational" policy.

That policy is now "Whatever the US attorney for the federal district wants to pursue" which could indeed lead to massive raids of state-legal pot shops and state-licensed growers across the country.  I would suspect the first targets would be in blue states like California rather than say, Arizona or Montana but then again many of the states that do allow pot are pretty blue.

So far, Congress has put an amendment in appropriations bill that prevents the Justice Department from spending money on busting people in states where pot is legal.  Ohio has a medical marijuana bill on the ballot in 2018, and Kentucky has long been trying to do the same.  But if that amendment in appropriations goes (and Sessions has asked for that) I'm guessing this will have a big effect on that vote if feds start raiding dispensaries as "major drug-related financial crimes" and whatnot.

And speaking of feds raiding, that brings us to story number two, as I predicted earlier this week, the gap between Trump's "lock her up" tweets and Justice Department prosecution is rapidly closing. BUT HER EMAILS, THE REVENGE!

Justice Department officials are taking a fresh look at Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, The Daily Beast has learned. 

An ally of Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is familiar with the thinking at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters described it as an effort to gather new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material. Officials’ questions include how much classified information was sent over Clinton’s server; who put that information into an unclassified environment, and how; and which investigators knew about these matters and when. The Sessions ally also said officials have questions about immunity agreements that Clinton aides may have made. 

A former senior DOJ official familiar with department leadership’s thinking said officials there are acutely aware of demands from President Donald Trump that they look into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state—and that they lock up her top aide, Huma Abedin. 

For instance, Trump tweeted on Dec. 2, “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails? No justice!” 

The former official said tweets like this present two challenges for department leadership: looking into the matter in a way consistent with normal Justice Department approaches, and trying to avoid the appearance that they are trying “to put Huma in jail.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment for this story. 

It’s an open question as to whether Justice Department officials would have the same level of interest in Clinton’s server without a political directive from the White House, the former official said.

So Sessions is going after pot, and he's going after Trump's political enemies, and it's just Day 4 of 2018.  Both are instances where Republicans are going after political enemies, in this case Clinton and California.

But then again, Sessions may not be around much longer, as we get to the third story.

Republican Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan said Thursday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should step aside "now," citing the Justice Department's handling of the investigation into President Donald Trump's campaign ties to Russian operatives and intelligence leaks to media as key concerns with his performance. 

In a joint opinion piece published in the Washington Examiner, Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman and former chairman, respectively, of the influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, decried the "manufactured hysteria" over the probe into Russian election interference, faulting Sessions — who has recused himself from the inquiry — for allowing revelations about the investigation to reach the press.

Meadows and Jordan said that "in spite of the constant headlines, rampant speculation, and overshadowing of accomplishments, a simple truth remains: There is no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians." 

The two GOP lawmakers also questioned why the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently did not interview George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, until January 2017. A New York Times report published over the weekend said Papadopoulos was aware of Russian intelligence on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which played a key role in the bureau opening a probe in July 2016 into Russian efforts to influence the U.S. elections. 

"If Sessions can't address this issue immediately, then we have one final question needing an answer: When is it time for a new attorney general? Sadly, it seems the answer is now," the two GOP lawmakers wrote.

Going after Sessions from the right like this for failing to stop Mueller is pretty awful, the GOP has finally learned that the best way to get Trump to do something is raise enough of a stink to get it on FOX and Friends in the morning for him to watch.

This will certainly make the list.

Gonna be a long, long year.

The Mind Of Trump

At long last Congress is starting to ask serious questions about Trump's mental fitness for the position of Chief Executive of the United States and invoking the 25th Amendment as a possible solution.

Lawmakers concerned about President Donald Trump’s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior. 

In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on Dec. 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers — all Democrats except for one Republican senator, whom Lee declined to identify. Her professional warning to Capitol Hill: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.”

In an interview, she pointed to Trump “going back to conspiracy theories, denying things he has admitted before, his being drawn to violent videos.” Lee also warned, “We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.” 

Lee, editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which includes testimonials from 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assessing the president’s level of “dangerousness,” said that she was surprised by the interest in her findings during her two days in Washington. “One senator said that it was the meeting he most looked forward to in 11 years,” Lee recalled. “Their level of concern about the president’s dangerousness was surprisingly high.” 

The conversation about Trump’s fitness to serve is ongoing — and gaining steam after Trump’s tweet this week taunting the leader of North Korea with my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours bravado. 

“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” the president wrote online Tuesday night. 

The tweet resuscitated the conversation about the president’s mental state and the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president from office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet deem him physically or mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

I'm not a mental health professional by any means (although the Zandarparents both are.)  I've been around dementia and mental decline enough to recognize it in family.  Trump doesn't look well physically or mentally, and for even one GOP senator to attend a meeting on the President's health is something significant.

How far a 25th Amendment plan would go, I have no idea.  It's never been done and it would take the agreement of the Vice President plus the majority of the Cabinet to deem Trump unfit under Section 4 of the amendment, something that I don't see happening.

Still, the issue is that Trump isn't fit for the office for a number of reasons, and keep in mind that in many ways Mike Pence would be worse.

The End Of The Voter Suppression Commission, But Not The Fight

I've talked about Trump's Voter Suppression Commission throughout 2017, the efforts by the GOP to create a national voter ID standard and database that would force all states to implement onerous rules to restrict voting as much as possible and disenfranchise millions, possibly tens of millions of poor, elderly, and college voters across the country, mostly Democrats. 

The commission, headed by VP Mike Pence and Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was designed to force states to hand over all voting data to Trump so that the regime could design national legislation to disenfranchise Democratic voters across the country.  But even red states told Kobach to go to hell, first blue states said no way, then red states admitted that the Russians had compromised our election process and decided handing stuff over to Trump was unacceptable.  When it became clear that the effort was about massive voter suppression of Democrats through a federal Jim Crow background check voting law, it became too much for even the GOP to handle. Even red states refused to drop their lawsuits.

And yesterday evening, Trump quietly pulled the plug on Kobach's commission.

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

The fight is far from over however.

But Mr. Kobach insisted in an interview that the commission’s work would not end but rather would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring election integrity and one that he said critics would find more difficult to target.

As a White House commission, the voter-fraud panel was subject to public-disclosure requirements and other restrictions that Mr. Kobach said opponents of the inquiry had seized on in “a determined effort by the left” to hamstring its investigation. At last count, he said, the panel faced at least eight lawsuits accusing it of ignoring various federal requirements, including one from a commission member, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, that claimed he had been illegally excluded from its deliberations.

“It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Mr. Kobach said. “Think of it as an option play; a decision was made in the middle of the day to pass the ball. The Department of Homeland Security is going to be able to move faster and more efficiently than a presidential advisory commission.”

Kobach at least will be busy running his campaign for Kansas Governor to replace GOP Gov Sam Brownback, so we may have dodged a bullet for now.  But this isn't going to go away.  I'm betting the goal now is to have voter suppression tactics come down as Homeland Security directives. How quickly that can be accomplished, well, we'll see.

The commission is done, but not the war on voting.  Trump tweeted about the need for national voter ID laws again today, and the effort to protect voting access cannot let up.

We still have a long fight ahead.

StupidiNews!

• A major nor'easter is dropping up to 18 inches of snow on Boston and New England today, blizzard warnings are posted as far south as North Carolina.
• Control of Virginia's House of Delegates will be decided today after the final race from last November was declared a tie, officials will draw a random winner today.
• The Turkish government is furious at the conviction of a banker with ties to President Erdogan, calling it an "unprecedented interference" in Turkey's affairs and vowing retaliation.
• Congressional leader from both parties met this week on averting a budget shutdown in two weeks, but another stopgap spending bill may be needed before January 19.
• Two major security flaws in Intel chips are leading to a flurry of security patches worldwide for servers as hackers could exploit virtual memory to deliver payloads of malware.

Last Call For The 2018 Races Begin

The 2018 elections are more than 300 days and ten months away, but it means that we're still getting candidates for House, Senate, and gubernatorial seats coming into races, and at least on the Republican side some of these individuals running for office are real doozies. Arkansas is no different, the state that gave us Bill Clinton 30 years ago now has open bigots like Jan Morgan running for his office.

A Hot Springs Republican has entered the governor's race and will challenge Gov. Asa Hutchinson in the GOP primary in May. 

Jan Morgan, 54, announced her candidacy in a new release sent Sunday night and at an event in Hot Springs. 

She owns the Gun Cave shooting range in Hot Springs. In 2014, she drew national media attention by declaring her gun range a "Muslim Free Zone," saying that she was concerned about the safety of other customers if Muslims patronized her business. 

In her campaign's news release, Morgan said she traveled the state for six months talking to Arkansans before making her decision to run. 

"As we embark on the dawn of a new day and new year in Arkansas, I am excited about the future potential of our beautiful state and her people," she was quoted as saying. 

Morgan has criticized Hutchinson as someone who "campaigns like a conservative Republican but governs like a liberal Democrat." If elected, Morgan would become Arkansas' first female governor. 

Last year, she was an opponent of legislation that Hutchinson signed into law aimed at barring concealed-carry permit holders, even those with up to eight hours of extra training, from Razorback Stadium and other locations hosting college sporting events.

In a normal universe, Morgan would be laughed out of politics and possibly business, as even GOP Second Amendment purists would realize that denying sales of firearms to people based solely on religion would in fact be a massive violation of the Constitution.

Sadly, Islamophobia is now not only proper impetus to propel Morgan into state GOP politics, but I'd dare say that it makes her the frontrunner to succeed Hutchinson. 

Hutchinson by the way is a doctrinaire tea party Republican who happily signed into law a raft of terrible anti-choice abortion bills and scrapped Medicaid expansion.  He's now a "liberal Democrat" according to Morgan.

If only.

Immigration Nation, Con't

One of the many state laws that went into effect in California (besides legalized recreation marijuana) is that it's now the first "sanctuary state" for undocumented immigrants. The Trump regime issued a nasty warning to the state through ICE this week as a result.

Donald Trump’s pick to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a chilling warning to California to “hang on tight” as he threatened a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, also suggesting politicians who back sanctuary status should be charged with crimes.

The department’s acting director Thomas Homan on Tuesday evening spoke of a crackdown on places that have so-called sanctuary status, meaning there is a limit on how far local law enforcement will aid ICE officials. 

In particular, Homan pledged California would see more ICE agents following its governor's October decision to give the entire state such status.

“We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court, and we gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes," Homan said in an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, explaining he believed politicians who pushed sanctuary city legislation should be held "personally accountable” for their actions.

Autocracy a-go-go.

His comments came during a discussion on the move by California Governor Jerry Brown to sign into state law a bill giving the whole of California sanctuary status, in a move that appears to have infuriated immigration hardliner Homan. 

“I think it’s terrible–you got the state of California that wants to put politics ahead of public safety, ahead of officer safety. What they have done is forced my officers to arrest dangerous criminals on their turf, in their homes and places of business, rather than arresting them in the safety and security of a county jail. It’s ridiculous to annoyingly and intentionally put law enforcement at risk,” he said. 

“If he thinks he’s protecting immigrant communities, he’s doing quite the opposite because if he thinks ICE is going away, we’re not. There’s no sanctuary from federal law enforcement. Matter of fact we’re in the process now… I’m going to significantly increase our enforcement presence in California, we’re already doing it.” 

“California better hold on tight. There’s about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation hours in the state of California,” he added.

So we've got a sitting federal executive law enforcement agency director using the phrase "There's no sanctuary from federal law enforcement" in the context of an open threat against a state that has one-seventh of America's population.

Gosh, that's not chilling or anything as America takes one step closer to fascist dictatorship.

How long before Homan makes good on his threat to start rounding up mayors, city council members, county commissioners, and state lawmakers that defy the Trump regime? Will ICE become the new Brownshirts?

Why are we having to ask these questions?  Jesus hell.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent asks the million-dollar question on Trump and Russia: when Mueller issues his expected scathing report on the Trump administration, to what extent was the collusion aided and abetted by congressional Republicans?

As we head into 2018, one big, looming unknown is this: Just how far will congressional Republicans go to prevent a full accounting of Russia’s interference in our election and any possible Trump campaign conspiracy with it?

Certain House Republicans are already working to frustrate the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation. Do Democrats have any recourse? The answer is yes — but within limits.

In an interview with me, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut — the No. 2 Democrat on the House intel committee — said that Democrats are seriously exploring the possibility of issuing a minority report that details (among other things) the degree to which Republicans tried to impede a full investigation, should that end up happening. In this scenario, the public would at least have a clear sense of just how far Republicans went to protect President Trump and his top officials from accountability.

“It’s in both the Democrats’ and the Republicans’ interests to … write a report based on a common set of facts,” Himes told me. “It would be a tragedy if the report has a minority section that says, ‘Look, we wanted to talk to these two dozen witnesses and weren’t able to do so.'”

The focus is on GOP House Intel Chair Rep. Devin Nunes of California, who recused himself on the Russia investigation only to try to start a new investigation of the FBI and Clinton. Nunes has been killing Democratic subpoenas.

Democrats want to ask Trump Jr. about a phone call he held with his father about his June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer, which he took in the expectation of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton supplied by the Russian government. Trump Jr. and his dad discussed this meeting just after news of it broke in July 2017. When questioned about this call by committee Democrats, he invoked attorney-client privilege. Democrats want to subpoena Trump Jr. to compel his testimony, which could shed light on what happened at that meeting and how far Trump has gone to prevent the truth about it from coming out.

It appears Nunes may have killed that effort. Meanwhile, Nunes’s investigative zeal is directed elsewhere: Politico recently reported that Nunes is quietly leading a group of House Republicans in an effort to build a case that senior Justice Department and FBI officials improperly handled the explosive “Steele dossier,” which describes links between Trump and Russia.

These are pretty explosive allegations, intimating that Nunes is part of an effort to obstruct justice by preventing investigations into the Trump regime.   The problem for Nunes is the Mueller probe. If Mueller finds out the information that House Intel Democrats are looking for and were blocked by Nunes from getting, it's not going to look good for Nunes in particular from a, you know, legal standpoint.

Meanwhile, over in the NY Times, the founders of Fusion GPS, the political opposition research firm that gave us the Steele Dossier, have penned a scathing op-ed demanding Congress release their testimony on Trump.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

It's the second-to-last paragraph that's the doozy. If the Steele Dossier corroborated what the FBI investigators already had, rather than instigating the investigation, the Republicans are in far more trouble than previously reported.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

Again, very explosive allegations.  Fusion GPS is saying that the Steele Dossier (and their testimony to Congress about it) confirms that the Trump regime was working with the Russians in order to get Trump elected.  That's about as big as it gets, guys.

Oh, but it gets worse for the Trump regime.  Today the Guardian unlimbered their preview of Michael Wolff's tell-all book of the Trump campaign, and it's nothing short of amazing.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him. 

Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language. 

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.” 

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. 

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.” 

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

Where we go from here, I don't know, but the House and Senate investigations into the Trump regime just got turned up to 11.  And Bannon is now running around covering his ass and throwing Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner under the bus.

Bannon certainly believes there's something to the Russia collusion story. He just admitted to the massive long con that he was using Breitbart to cover for Trump's denials for months.

This just got real interesting.  Welcome to 2018, Day 3.

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.