Primary Evidence, Con't.

In Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana, primaries went pretty much according to plan.  Former Obama Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Richard Cordray will face off against GOP AG Mike DeWine for Ohio governor, Convicted WV con man Don Blankenship finished third in his primary to take on Joe Manchin in November, and Mike Pence's brother Gary will be running for Mike's old House seat.

But in North Carolina, things got pretty surprising last night as NC-9 GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger is out after losing his primary to challenger Mark Harris.

Former Charlotte pastor Mark Harris defeated Rep. Robert Pittenger in Tuesday's primary in North Carolina's 9th District, making him the first incumbent in the country to lose this year.

Pittenger also became North Carolina's first member of Congress in memory to lose a primary to a nonincumbent opponent.

"I've called Mark Harris, I've conceded the race and I wish him the best," Pittenger told supporters at what was expected to be a victory party.

Harris said, "I invite the congressman and his supporters to join our journey as we focus on keeping the 9th District red in November, ensuring the hard-working people of the 9th District have a congressman who is focused on representing them and their values ... "

The 9th contains Monroe and the southwest Charlotte suburbs and the counties east along the border with SC, up into Fayetteville, along where US Highway 74 and Interstate 74 cross, out to Interstate 95.  It's arguably the most boring part of the state I grew up in, nothing much out that way but tobacco farms and Lumberton (where David Lynch set Blue Velvet) and it's still a good hour and change to the coast.  Believe me, made the trip out through here several times over the years.  You're not missing much. 

But Pittenger going down means the Dems have a real shot in what's now an open district.

With nearly 95 percent of the precincts counted, Harris had 48.5 percent to Pittenger's 46.2 percent. A third candidate, Clarence Goins of Cumberland County, had 5.3 percent.

Harris enjoyed leads in Union and Bladen counties that had offset Pittenger's lead in Mecklenburg.

Pittenger, a former state senator first elected in 2012, was seeking a fourth term in the district that extends from southeast Charlotte east to Bladen County. In 2016 he defeated Harris by 134 votes, one of the country's closest congressional races.

Harris cast the primary as a battle for "the heart and soul of the Republican Party." He ran as much against the GOP-controlled Congress as against Pittenger. He said Pittenger was part of the Washington "swamp."

Pittenger had the backing of Washington's GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wrote a testimonial, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who visited for a fundraiser. Vice President Mike Pence shared a Charlotte stage with him.

Harris sided with mavericks, once suggesting he'd support a co-founder of the conservative Freedom Caucus for speaker.

In TV ads and on the stump, each candidate portrayed himself as President Donald Trump's more loyal supporter.

Here's the thing through, NC-9 has a significant black and Native American population.  It's R+8, which is exactly the kind of district the Dems would need to win in order to take back the House, and in a wave year, this would be a district that would go blue.  It's one of the districts that got redrawn twice in in the last five years over the state's GOP gerrymandering fight.  The Democrat in the race is Dan McCready.

Democrats compare McCready, a Marine combat veteran, to Conor Lamb, the Democrat who won a special election this year in a Pennsylvania district that had gone for Trump by 20 points. McCready has attempted to steer toward the middle of the road, saying he would not support Nancy Pelosi for Democratic leader.

These are the red state districts Dems will have to win and keep in order to take the House, guys.  Until things can get redrawn in 2021, Republican-leaning districts like this are going to be the key.

StupidiNews!

• Trump's crackdown on Iran comes as oil prices have hit a nearly four-year high, the average family will pay $200 more this summer at the pump in higher gas prices.
• Award-winning international journalist Chrstiane Amanpour will take over Charlie Rose's PBS show in July, Amanpour will also continue her work as CNN's chief international correspondent.
• Saudi Arabia's government says it intercepted two ballistic missiles over Riyadh, state security officials are blaming Iranian-armed Houthi separatists for the attempted attack.
• A technical failure aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the costliest carrier in the fleet, forced the ship back to port in January as the Pentagon is pushing for dozens of new ships by 2035.
• New NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says America will return to the moon within ten years, but the big questions on whether NASA will use commercial rockets are still unanswered.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time

There's the theory on the left, mostly fronted by a certain Vermont independent senator, that the Stormy Daniels story is worthless and that there's no reason for Democrats to pay attention to it, because it's not important.  

Only, well, we keep finding out more and more about the man Trump used to try to make the Daniels story go away, his longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, and just how bad Cohen is at his job, and how looking deeper into Cohen and his business affairs reveals things like payments Cohen apparently arranged for Donald Trump for a lot of things besides just hush money to porn stars.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, faced explosive claims about his business dealings on Tuesday, prompting AT&T and a company with ties to a Russian oligarch to acknowledge retaining him after the 2016 election.

The companies disclosed the business relationships after lawyer Michael Avenatti claimed they made payments to Essential Consultants, a company Cohen also used to make a hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels just weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

In a seven-page document he distributed online, Avenatti claimed that the same Cohen bank account was involved in transactions totaling more than $4.4 million and made from October 2016 through January 2018. Those transactions included $200,000 from AT&T and some $500,000 in deposits from Columbus Nova, a company linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who was sanctioned last month by the U.S. as punishment for Kremlin meddling in the U.S. election. The company on Tuesday said Vekselberg was not involved in the transactions.

POLITICO could not independently confirm some of Avenatti’s allegations, but if they prove true, they could show links between the Daniels affair, which is under investigation by prosecutors in New York, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. They also appear to show businesses seeking intelligence on how to operate under a Trump administration.

“Michael Cohen should not be selling access to the president of the United States. I mean, this is a big deal,” Avenatti told CNN.

The money from AT&T appeared to be unrelated to the investigations but came as the Trump administration announced it would seek to block an $85 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

So the same shell company Cohen set up for the Daniels payments was apparently the same shell company used to set up other payments, including from AT&T, and from other parties.  It wasn't just the $130,000 for Daniels, it was millions in slush fund goodness.

In other words, everything Trump accused "Crooked Hillary" of doing, Trump was actually involved in.  Oh yeah...and some of the money came from the goddamn Russians.

And hey, of course Mueller knows about it.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators have questioned a Russian oligarch about hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments his company's US affiliate made to President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, after the election, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

Viktor Vekselberg, chairman of asset manager Renova Group, is an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, and last month the Trump administration placed him on a list of sanctioned Russians for activities including election interference. The purpose of the payments, which predate the sanctions, and the nature of the business relationship between Vekselberg and Cohen is unclear. 

The scrutiny of the payments could add to the legal troubles for Cohen, whose home and office were raided last month as part of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. In court documents, the prosecutors said at least part of their inquiry stemmed from a referral from Mueller's office. 

The questions asked of Vekselberg suggest that Mueller investigators have been examining some of Cohen's business relationships as part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Vekselberg is one of two Russian oligarchs the FBI stopped earlier this year after their private jets landed in New York-area airports as part of Mueller's investigation. 

Investigators also asked Vekselberg about donations the head of his US affiliate made to Trump's inaugural fund and campaign funds, sources said. 

I mean, let's recap here: Cohen's shell company is used to launder money for Trump.  Cohen handles the money, and bam, companies and individuals get access to Trump.   Some of these individuals were reportedly Russian oligarchs.

I mean, guys?  Hello?

Stay tuned.  This one's going to end up being big.

Iran It All Down The Drain

And it's official: Donald Trump is scrapping years of US and EU, Russia, and China allied diplomacy and immediately slapping punitive sanctions on Iran, something that will almost certainly lead to disaster.

The president said he is removing the U.S from the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and will reimpose economic sanctions on Iran at "the highest level of economic sanction" and target "any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons" with sanctions, too.

Trump announced his decision at the White House after a last-ditch effort by European allies to urge Trump to stay in the agreement and build upon it. Trump instead argued the deal was so bad that it had to be discarded to move forward.

"It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement," Trump said. "The Iran deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen."

The nuclear deal was negotiated and agreed to by Iran and the P5+1 – the U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia, and Germany – in 2015, granting Iran sanctions relief and returning frozen assets in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program and international inspections.

The Saudis are the big winners here, as is Israel, and as with the TPP trade deal, the US will simply be excluded while Iran deals with Russia, China, and the EU. 

As to what happens next, well certainly Iran will resume its nuclear program if a deal can't be worked out with the remaining powers, who of course will be directly threatened by Trump if they don't back him.  I fully expect new sanctions will be announced on top of the penalty sanctions in the nuclear deal, which will of course cause Iran to leave the table. Either way, America's credibility is shot for a generation. 

The good scenario is that our stupidly self-forced isolationism ends in 2021 and we can get back to mending bridges that Trump burnt.  The bad scenario, well, there's plenty of them, and a lot of them involve the words "regime change".

We'll see where all this goes, but I think this is going to be one of those generational things that defines the Trump regime's lasting damage upon this earth.

Primary Evidence

Voters go to the polls today for primaries in Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, and West Virginia, where the race to watch is whether or not Republicans will nominate a convicted felon of a mine owner whose safety practices were so bad they killed 29 miners. 

The last-minute push to scuttle Blankenship’s bid — including Trump’s tweet on Monday — is a good barometer of GOP concern. While there’s been no public polling in the final two weeks of the race, internal surveys indicate Blankenship has bounced back into contention for the Republican nomination after an initial GOP barrage knocked him off his perch in April.

There’s also concern that the two other major candidates — Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey — will split the anti-Blankenship vote evenly. Trump’s tweet notably did not take sides, instead urging voters to back either alternative.

Blankenship’s baggage is obvious: He was convicted of violating safety standards after the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, which killed 29 miners, and was only released from jail a year ago. After his release, he settled in Nevada, not West Virginia. More recently, he’s referred to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) in television ads as “Cocaine Mitch” and made racially charged comments about McConnell’s family.

Manchin has won five statewide elections in his career: one for secretary of state, two for governor, a special election for Senate and a full term two years later. Seeking reelection in a state Trump carried by a whopping 42 percentage points, Manchin could be in the fight of his political life — unless the GOP nominates the wrong candidate.

In Ohio, there are primaries for Governor and for the special election to replace GOP Rep. Pat Tiberi, who up and quit last year to take a lucrative lobbyist job.

A proxy battle between former House colleagues has stirred up the special election to replace Rep. Pat Tiberi in Ohio, pitting old foes against each other in this Republican primary.

Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, has lined up behind Melanie Leneghan in the Republican primary, while Tiberi is boosting Troy Balderson, a state senator. Multiple outside groups are involved on both sides, and Jordan and Tiberi appeared in dueling TV ads for their endorsed candidates. Tim Kane, a first-time candidate and veteran who’s self-funding his bid, could also win, having avoided the increasingly bitter back-and-forth between Balderson, Leneghan and their allies.

But Balderson backers say that if Leneghan gets the GOP nomination, she’ll put Ohio’s 12th District — a Republican seat for decades — at risk in the Aug. 7 special election, by alienating suburban Columbus voters in a district that President Donald Trump won by 11 points in 2016.

Republicans are closely watching the Democratic primary, where Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor led the pack in fundraising. O’Connor told POLITICO in March that he wouldn’t be supporting Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, a move that mirrors Rep. Conor Lamb’s strategy in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Like it or not, Nancy Pelosi isn't too popular here in the Rust Belt.  Conor Lamb showed you can run against her as a Dem and still win, although all that ended up doing for Lamb was to open the door for Republicans calling on him to switch parties.  The real race here is the Democratic primary for Governor though.

The Democratic gubernatorial primary in Ohio has basically come down to two contenders: Richard Cordray, the buttoned-up former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief, and Dennis Kucinich, the left-leaning former congressman. Cordray has support from a broad range of “establishment” Democrats as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and he has talked up his time protecting Americans’ wallets at the CFPB, but Kucinich has framed himself as the only candidate who can energize grassroots progressives in the primary — and blue-collar voters in the general. A number of Bernie Sanders backers have jumped behind Kucinich, including the nonprofit group Our Revolution.

Both candidates have hit each other for various progressive apostasies — Cordray’s old “A” rating from the NRA, Kucinich’s words of praise for Trump in the past — but the primary has largely been a contest about which type of populism best fits the political moment in the Democratic Party, and whether the candidates can muster sufficient enthusiasm from general election voters to give Democrats a new foothold in the heart of the Midwest this November.

Cordray has more money, more endorsements, and more support in the sparse public polling that’s been available — but Kucinich has lurked within striking distance.

Kucinich is a freight train full of toxic waste, and the fact that Bernie and Nina Turner and Our Revolution are backing him -- despite the fact that he openly thinks DOnald Trump is right on a number of "economic anxiety" issues -- tells me everything I need to know about how utterly worthless Kucinich, Sanders, and Our Revelution all are.

I hope Cordray wins by 90 points, because there's zero way ol' Dennis the Menace here doesn't hand the state back to the GOP for another four years.  Cordray will probably not win in November, but Kucinich will lose guaranteed.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is widely expected to announce his decision to decertify the Iranian nuclear deal this afternoon, leaving the agreement in tatters and prompting outrage from Tehran and US allies.
• Senate Democrats want the Trump regime to declassify more information on Trump CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel's work at the agency overseeing the agency's 9/11-era torture programs.
• The White House wants $15 billion in budget cuts, including $7 billion cut from the Children's Health Insurance Program, because the funds have not been spent yet.
• Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical is making a $62 billion offer for British rival Shire, the largest ever acquisition by a Japanese company would create the world's ninth-largest drugmaker.
• Nintendo is launching an online gaming subscription service for its Switch console for $20 a year starting in September, the service will offer cloud data saving an online multiplayer.

Another #MeToo Moment For America

A sobering reminder tonight that it's not just high-profile Republicans who have been exposed by reporting and the #MeToo movemnet, but multiple Democrats and Democratic party donors as well.  

Of course, Harvey Weinstein was the tip of the iceberg, and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken resigned in disgrace, but it seems overdue justice has now come for New York's Attorney General, Eric Schniederman.

At least four women have come forward detailing physical sexual assault by Schniederman. He claims it was consensual roleplay, but what the women coming forward to Ronan Farrow and the New Yorker are describing is nothing short of sadism, and there was nothing consensual about it.

Manning Barish says that she fell quickly for Schneiderman and was happy to be involved with someone who seemed to share her progressive idealism and enjoy her feistiness. Page Six chronicled the romance, calling her a “ravishing redhead” and noting that, at a fund-raiser, the television producer Norman Lear had introduced her as Schneiderman’s “bride-to-be.”

But Manning Barish began to see signs of controlling and abusive behavior. Soon after she started dating Schneiderman, he told her to remove a small tattoo from her wrist; it wasn’t appropriate, he said, if she were to become the wife of a politician. The process of having it removed was painful and expensive. In retrospect, she says, it was the first step in trying to control her body. “Taking a strong woman and tearing her to pieces is his jam,” she says.

About four weeks after they became physically involved, she says, Schneiderman grew violent. One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open-handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”
She finally freed herself and got back on her feet. “I was crying and in shock,” she says. She recalls shouting, “Are you crazy?” To her astonishment, Schneiderman accused her of scratching him. At one point—she can’t remember if it was at this moment or in a later conversation—he told her, “You know, hitting an officer of the law is a felony.”

After the incident, Manning Barish left the apartment, telling him that she would never come back. “I want to make it absolutely clear,” she says. “This was under no circumstances a sex game gone wrong. This did not happen while we were having sex. I was fully dressed and remained that way. It was completely unexpected and shocking. I did not consent to physical assault.”

Again, two of the four women are 100% going on record with their identities to accuse Schneiderman, and their storeis are very similar.  Schnierderman would hit women because he believed they liked it.

Tanya Selvaratnam is the author of “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock,” which explores infertility issues; she is also an actor and a film producer, as well as a supporter of feminist and progressive social causes. She, too, is divorced. In 2016, she attended the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, where Schneiderman introduced himself to her. She says that their first encounter felt “like kismet.” They had both gone to Harvard: she as an undergraduate and a graduate student, he as a law student. She was impressed when he expressed an interest in meditation and Buddhism. They had both studied Chinese, and, when he asked, in Mandarin, if she spoke the language, she answered, “Wo shuo keshi bu tai liuli”—“Yes, but not fluently.”

They began dating, and appeared to be a happy couple. Selvaratnam all but lived in his apartment, attending political functions and dinners with his friends and donors, and brainstorming with him on speeches and projects. But, as she puts it, “it was a fairy tale that became a nightmare.” Although Schneiderman often doted on her, he demanded that she spend more and more time with him, and he began physically abusing her in bed. “The slaps started after we’d gotten to know each other,” she recalls. “It was at first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder.” Selvaratnam says, “It wasn’t consensual. This wasn’t sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior.”

When Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands. “He was obsessed with having a threesome, and said it was my job to find a woman,” she says. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit me until I agreed.” (She had no intention of having a threesome.) She recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.” Selvaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin, and she recalls that “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was ‘his property.’ ”

The abuse escalated. Schneiderman not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back and forth, with his open hand; he also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually, she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.” In her view, Schneiderman “is a misogynist and a sexual sadist.” She says that she often asked him to stop hurting her, and tried to push him away. At other times, she gave in, rationalizing that she could tolerate the violence if it happened only once a week or so during sex. But “the emotional and verbal abuse started increasing,” she says, and “the belittling and demeaning of me carried over into our nonsexual encounters.” He told her to get plastic surgery to remove scars on her torso that had resulted from an operation to remove cancerous tumors. He criticized her hair and said that she should get breast implants and buy different clothes. He mocked some of her friends as “ditzes,” and, when these women attended a birthday celebration for her, he demanded that she leave just as the cake was arriving. “I began to feel like I was in Hell,” she says.

This guy is an abuser, point blank.  If this is true, and there's every reason to believe it is, then he needs to go.  I don't care how much of a crusader for justice he is if he's an abusive law-breaking jackass who needs to cool his heels in prison for a while.  Nothing justifies this in the short or long run.

And as expected, he has resigned.

Schneiderman Resigns. pic.twitter.com/OVm2oXVxgg

— Laura Nahmias (@nahmias) May 8, 2018

Bye, Eric.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

There's no such thing as a truly "safe" suburban Republican House district anymore.  Increasingly, either there's a hefty challenge from the Democrats who are outraising you, a primary challenge from the right forcing you to split your resources, or both.  The heavily gerrymandered suburban Charlotte districts in North Carolina's are a good example.

Republican Rep. Ted Budd opened the calendar on his iPhone during a campaign day last week to reveal a jam-packed schedule — wake up at 4:55 a.m., breakfast with veterans, an opioid discussion in another county — and yet he was worried that it wasn’t enough.

“I’m getting nervous because of the white space I see,” said Budd, pointing to the few blank lines on the schedule.

Across the country, dozens of House Republicans who previously coasted to victory are for the first time facing credible and well-financed Democratic opponents — and working furiously to find a strategy for survival.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) delivered a stern message last month to the rank and file after a surprisingly narrow special election win in a reliably Republican Arizona district: Wake up, because Democrats are motivated.

Many newly vulnerable Republicans represent suburban communities such as Budd’s, where Donald Trump won in 2016 but has since lost popularity.

Budd is one of two GOP incumbents in this region of North Carolina being targeted by Democrats, with pollsters and independent handicappers saying the races could be competitive. 

The two GOP incumbents have adopted slightly different strategies for self-preservation, largely out of necessity.

While Budd has been able to focus on the general election by talking at times about how he has bucked his party, Rep. Robert Pittenger has been grappling with a bitter Republican challenge ahead of Tuesday’s primary election here that has led him to move to the right in ways likely to complicate his message to voters in the fall.

Democrats had largely ignored the districts in this decade after Republicans redrew the state’s congressional boundaries to their advantage. Budd’s district, which stretches from Democratic-leaning Greensboro to the northern suburbs of Charlotte, backed Trump by 9 percentage points. Voters in Pittenger’s district, which rolls from Charlotte nearly to the state’s coastline, supported the president by almost 12 points.

In 2016, Budd and Pittenger survived primaries, then sailed to victory over Democrats who raised less than $100,000. This election, Democrats recruited Kathy Manning, a philanthropist and longtime party donor who has raised $1.3 million to Budd’s $832,690. Dan McCready, a business executive and veteran, has raised $1.9 million to Pittenger’s $1.1 million.

Don't get me wrong, these are the districts that the GOP has to win in order to keep the House, and they know it.  But they're so scared at this point that like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they are starting to do things in swing districts like "Admit Obama was right".

Candidates rarely admit being wrong about anything.

It’s even more rare for a candidate in a Republican primary to say he was wrong and former President Barack Obama was right. But it happened during Saturday night’s Florida Family Policy Council dinnerwhen moderator Frank Luntz asked U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who’s running in a GOP primary for governor against Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, to provide an example of a time he’s changed his mind about something.

“Actually, I think the one time that I was wrong in the Congress was when we had the breakout of Ebola and I thought we’ve just got to shut everything down, we can’t take any risks,” DeSantis said of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and concerns about its spread to the U.S.

“Obama didn’t do that and I criticized him a lot for doing that. A lot of my Republican colleagues criticized him for doing that but, you know, I look back at it – it was handled well,” DeSantis said. “I was just wrong about that. I think that the way the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and some of the folks in government handled it was actually an example of government getting the job done. So I’m totally willing to just be honest and admit if I call it wrong. Just admit that you were wrong and people appreciate that. Because we’re going to make mistakes in this line of work, that’s just the bottom line.”

Damned if you run as a Trumpie, damned if you don't.

Collusion Of A Different Kind

Josh Marshall connects the dots on what looks like a orchestrated attempt by the Trump regime to use an Israeli private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on the previous administration's foreign policy people in order to discredit the Iran nuclear deal.

Yeah, that's a mouthful.  Yes, the evidence is there to support the theory.

We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.

Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation – not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.

Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.

Black Cube is now vehemently denying it was hired to spy on or run dirty tricks against Rhodes or Kahl. It’s not clear to me whether that denial came before or after Rozen uncovered the apparent link between the two cases. The denial seems to be unambiguous. But it is very hard to believe that two separate operations would stumble on the same name for a front operation. Conceivably, two different firms worked in concert with yet another firm that was running this front operation. But that’s a very far-fetched hypothetical in contrast to a very straightforward explanations. It was Black Cube working for Weinstein and the Trump aides and they’re simply lying about their involvement.

Ronan Farrow has a new piece up on Black Cube to reflect these developments.

A month before Norris received her e-mail, Rebecca Kahl, a former program officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of the former Obama Administration foreign-policy adviser Colin Kahl, had also received a puzzling e-mail. A woman named Adriana Gavrilo claimed to be the head of corporate social responsibility at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Gavrilo told Kahl that her firm was launching an initiative on education and that she wanted to meet to discuss the school that Kahl’s daughter attended, at which Kahl volunteered. Kahl referred Gavrilo to school staff members, but Gavrilo repeatedly refused to speak to anyone but her. Gavrilo’s firm would “not be able to make the necessary due diligence” on the school employees, she wrote. Rebecca Kahl, who said she “worried I’m strangely a target of some sort,” eventually stopped responding to Gavrilo.

Adriana Gavrilo and Eva Novak appear to be aliases. LinkedIn pages for both Gavrilo and Novak at one point showed a slim blond woman advertised as fluent in Serbian. Shortly after The New Yorker contacted Black Cube about this story, Novak’s LinkedIn page was deleted. The e-mail addresses listed by both women do not work. Calls to the phone number Novak listed went unanswered. The Web sites for Reuben Capital Partners and Shell Productions have been taken down, but both were bare-bones pages constructed through the free site-building tool Wix. The addresses for both companies led to shared office spaces; there is no evidence that Shell Productions or Reuben Capital Partners had ever operated there.

The documents show that Black Cube compiled detailed background profiles of several individuals, including Rhodes and Kahl, that featured their addresses, information on their family members, and even the makes of their cars. Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information about them, including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had worked closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one of the Obama staffers responsible for “unmasking” Trump transition officials who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an affair.

The campaign is strikingly similar to an operation that Black Cube ran on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, which was reported in The New Yorkerlast fall. One of Weinstein’s attorneys, David Boies, hired Black Cube to halt the publication of sexual-misconduct allegations against Weinstein. Black Cube operatives used false identities to track women with allegations, and also reporters seeking to expose the story. In May, 2017, a former Israel Defense Forces officer, who had emigrated to Israel from the former Yugoslavia, was working as an undercover agent for Black Cube. The woman contacted the actress Rose McGowan, claiming to work for Reuben Capital Partners but using the identity of a Diana Filip. Filip’s e-mails to McGowan displayed the same tactics as those in the e-mails sent to Norris and Kahl, and in some cases used almost identical language. (Filip also wrote to me from Reuben Capital Partners, and again used similar language.)

In a statement, Black Cube said, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work.” The statement also read, "Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal." The firm also said that it "always operates in full compliance of the law in every jurisdiction in which it conducts its work, following legal advice from the world’s leading law firms.”

In the Iran operation, as in its operation for Weinstein, Black Cube focused much of its work on reporters and other media figures, sometimes using agents who posed as journalists. The company compiled a list of more than thirty reporters who it believed were in touch with Obama Administration officials, annotated with instructions about how to seek negative information. Transcripts produced by Black Cube reveal that the firm secretly recorded a conversation between one of its agents and Trita Parsi, a Swedish-Iranian author. The conversation, which began as a general discussion of Iran policy, quickly devolved into questions about Rhodes, Kahl, and whether they had personally profited off of the Iran policy. “I’ve had the first part of the conversation five hundred times,” Parsi recalled, of his conversation with the agent, who claimed to be a reporter. “But then he started asking about personal financial interests, and that was more unusual. He was pushing very, very hard.”

The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran. (A Trump Administration spokesperson declined to comment to the Observer on the allegations.)

There are a lot of people who want to see the Iran deal go up in smoke, not just the Trump regime.  Remember, Rudy Giuliani flat out said this week that Trump was not only going to rip up the Iran deal anyway, but that Trump was also 100% committed to regime change in Iran.

It doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here, and what the end game is going to be.

We're heading for war with Iran at breakneck speed.

StupidiNews!

• Trump's nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, reportedly sought to withdraw her nomination on Friday because of the difficulty in getting her nomination through the Senate.
• House GOP Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes says he will hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress unless Sessions complies with subpoenas on wiretaps.
• Negotiations by Mexico, Canada, and the US on NAFTA enter a critical juncture this week as all three countries want a hand in revisions to the free trade agreement going forward.
• Iran, Israel, the EU, and US lawmakers are making their final pitches this week to Donald Trump as the deadline for decertifying the Iran nuclear deal is this Saturday.
• US brewery giant Anheuser-Busch is purchasing 800 hydrogen fuel cell trucks from Tesla competitor Nikola by 2025 for use along its busiest shipping routes.

The New Robber Barons

Amazon has done more than any other company to contribute to Seattle's affordable housing crisis.  Now the city is coming to collect Amazon's share, and as a result Amazon is now openly threatening to leave its new downtown building unfinished and take 7,000 jobs elsewhere if Seattle makes the company pay a dime.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced the company would halt the construction of a new building in downtown Seattle it was planning to build, jeopardizing some 7,000 jobs.

Why? Because the company opposes a tax being considered by the City Council.

The tax targets 500-600 businesses in the city that gross at least $20 million a year. The companies would be charged a “head tax” at $500 per employee. In 2021, the head tax would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax. The payroll tax would windup costing Amazon more than the initial head tax, considering Seattle Amazon employees are paid about an average of $110,000 per year, according to data from job-reviews site Glassdoor.

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” a spokesperson for Amazon told The Seattle Times.

The city council is expected to vote on the tax on May 14.

The city estimates the tax would raise an estimated $75 million annually, with Amazon paying roughly $20 million in 2019 and 2020. One might think for a company that pulled in $1.6 billion last quarter, they could afford to help out the city of Seattle and its most vulnerable residents, especially considering the extent to which Amazon’s presence in the city has exacerbated the housing crisis there.

Since 2010, when Amazon opened its first headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, housing costs have skyrocketed.

The median cost of a single-family home has more than doubled to $820,000, and rents have increased 64 percent, according to the Seattle Times. The average two-bedroom home in Seattle costs more than $2,000 per month. Only a third of condominiums in Seattle are priced below $500,000.

Amazon is willing to wreck everything over $20 million a year, and why shouldn't it be this obnoxious when dozens of cities are willing to destroy their local economies just to get Amazon's second corporate HQ?

Here's an idea.

Maybe stop shopping at Amazon?  Maybe cancel your Prime subscription?  Maybe let them know they already have more money than Walmart or Target ever had and that that they're too big to be allowed to continue?

Just a thought here in the feudal tech era.

Sunday Long Read: That Kansas Tornado Again

Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback is on his way out as the state's chief executive, but his legacy of economic destruction will continue for a generation as the combination of red state austerity policies, production-at-all-cost agriculture, and rural-to-urban population shift has left the state's farm counties all but completely broken. The New Food Economy's Corie Brown:

My journey began last December, with a journalistic lead—a story I felt sure would confirm my belief in the power of good food.

I’d learned that a group of nonprofits led by the Kansas Health Foundation had spent years studying the depopulation of rural Kansas. Their research had yielded one central finding: local food stores selling fresh produce help to stabilize struggling communities. Last November, the consortium unveiled an initiative implemented by Kansas State University that could deliver up to $10 million through a mix of grants and loans to support such stores (the majority of those dollars will be provided in loans). 

The spark for this initiative came from Marci Penner, a self-starter in Inman, Kansas (population 1,353) who publishes state guidebooks through her Kansas Sampler Foundation. After twice visiting each of the state’s 626 incorporated towns—half of which have fewer than 400 people—she has doggedly tracked the success of their food stores. In her view, a town’s ability to survive hinges on whether residents can buy healthy food there. 

Penner’s goal is to get urban Kansans out to rural areas to support these struggling communities. “No one knows how to wrap their heads around these little towns. We are invisible,” she told me. “It’s time someone said, ‘I’m from Kansas. I’m sticking up for this state.’” 

My bags were packed the minute I got off the phone. A story about Kansans determined to keep America’s breadbasket from becoming a food desert would write itself, I thought. But it was also an excuse to go back home. A fourth-generation Kansan on both sides, I found myself looking for a reason to return, and longing to drive through parts of the state I haven’t visited in decades. I could almost smell the Flint Hills wildflowers and see the wind’s invisible fingers moving through that ocean of bluestem grasses. 

With a list of Penner’s favorite stores in hand and my daughter along to share the journey, I flew home. 

We sensed the missing plot points in Penner’s folktale early on. Too many storeowners knew nothing about the grants. When we asked rural officials about the importance of grocery stores, they shrugged. Affordable housing, jobs, schools and hospitals topped their lists. Everyone wanted to talk about Kansas’s depopulation crisis, but a lack of healthy food, they all agreed, was not why people left. 

Reality snapped into focus the morning we drove into Downs (population 844). I’d been in a close friend’s wedding there in the 1980s, and the tiny, one-street downtown had teemed with life back then. My friend’s father owned, edited, and published the local newspaper. Another friend’s dad ran a successful real estate company. It took those girls forever to walk anywhere; everyone wanted to stop and chat. Downs had 1,324 residents in 1980—36 percent more than it has today. 

Thirty years later, the blank faces of empty storefronts line the main drag. Oddly, one of the last remaining businesses we found was a well-stocked grocery store, though no one was shopping inside the brightly lit aisles. When we asked where we could get a cup of coffee, the cashier directed us to the gas station outside of town on the two-lane state road. A pot of brown water on a quick mart hot plate was the best the town had to offer.
Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it. 

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Some 90% of Kansas's land is devoted to production of food.  Farms are massive automated systems that produce hundreds of acres of grain.  There's nothing but the local economy, and the local economy is dying.  The closest Mickey D's or Starbucks is 60 miles away from Downs.

This is exactly why red states in particular need more of a safety net on some issues, especially basic infrastructure, than more urban blue states.  But Republican austerity policies have robbed them of even that.

Kansas has so super-specialized with agriculture that it's increasingly tough to get businesses to move there or people to stay.  In a sense it's like a desert.  The state doesn't need to serve Big Ag the way it does, but it does anyway.

It may not be the code cubes of Silicon Valley or the mines of West Virginia, but the farms of Kansas can be just as much a corporate profit sweatshop.

Last Call For Coaled Comfort

West Virginia's GOP Senate primary is Tuesday, and the state's Republicans are about to nominate a screamingly racist convicted miner-killing felon to lose to Democrat Joe Manchin in November.  Needless to say, a replay of Roy Moore in Alabama has the party in 100% panic mode.

There is growing concern among Republicans that Don Blankenship, a bombastic coal baron who has spent time in prison, is surging ahead of Tuesday’s West Virginia Senate primary — and a last-minute campaign is underway to stop him.

As the tight contest hurtles to a close, four Republicans said they’d reviewed polling conducted in recent days showing Blankenship, who spent a year in jail following the 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine that killed 29 workers, moving narrowly ahead of his more mainstream GOP rivals, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

The Republicans cautioned that the surveys, designed to offer a snapshot of the race, were conducted over a brief period of time and may be overstating Blankenship’s support.

Still, Blankenship’s rivals and other Republicans are alarmed. Many are convinced that a Blankenship win, coming just months after the disastrous Alabama Senate race, would destroy the party’s prospects of defeating Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November.

Some Republicans involved in the race said they were hoping the White House would intervene ahead of the Tuesday primary, though it remains unclear whether it will do so.

On Thursday, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., sent out a tweet asking “the people of West Virginia to make a wise decision and reject Blankenship.”

“No more fumbles like Alabama,” he added. “We need to win in November.”

Republicans are sinking millions into the race to stop Blankenship, and it's not working.  It's not working at all, because Blankenship is putting his own fortune into winning, and he's running against the most hated man in the state:  Mitch McConnell.

National Republicans have sought to prevent Blankenship from winning the nomination. An outside group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mountain Families PAC, has spent $1.3 million on a TV ad campaign targeting the former prisoner. On Friday afternoon, the group began a digital advertisement telling West Virginians, “Don’t vote Don Blankenship.”

The offensive bears similarities to the ultimately unsuccessful one the party launched against former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore in last year’s Alabama Senate race. Moore beat back the national GOP campaign against him and went on to lose the general election to Democrat Doug Jones.

Blankenship has responded in kind, launching a slash-and-burn campaign targeting McConnell.

His scorching attacks have veered into deeply personal, even racially-charged territory.

This week, Blankenship began airing a TV commercial labeling McConnell “Cocaine Mitch,” an apparent reference to a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by the family of McConnell’s wife, Taiwanese-born Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Then, a few days later, Blankenship began airing another spot declaring that McConnell’s “China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.”

Believe me when I say Republican primary candidates are paying attention to Blankenship's attacks on McConnell as a path to victory.  It's a free-for-all and everyone's a target now.

The Handmaid's Tale Stage Spectacular

Iowa GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds has done what Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich won't do: signed into law a ridiculously unconstitutional "fetal heartbeat" abortion ban that will eliminate more than 90% of abortion procedures and will immediately be challenged in court.  Maureen Shaw explains:

Dubbed the “heartbeat bill,” the law will prohibit doctors from providing abortion care once a fetal heartbeat is detected. But heartbeats can be detected as early as six weeks after gestation (i.e., six weeks after a pregnant person’s last period began). Given that many women don’t learn they are pregnant until after that benchmark, Iowa's law effectively makes abortion illegal while depriving women of their bodily autonomy.

Indeed, women typically don’t find out they are pregnant until they are, on average, five to seven weeks along (for a number of reasons). The science is clear on this issue but I also know it to be true from personal experience. In my early 20s, I didn’t suspect I was pregnant until I was seven weeks along. I then had to make an appointment with my OB-GYN to confirm the pregnancy and get a referral for abortion care. Just that one appointment delayed my abortion by a week, putting me at 8 weeks gestation. By Iowa’s standards, I would have been ruled ineligible and deprived of a chance to choose the best option for my health and the health of my family.

According to the Iowa Department of Public Health, of the 3,722 abortions performed in the state in 2016, only 347, or 9 percent of them occurred before six weeks of pregnancy. Based on these numbers, the heartbeat bill will potentially force pregnancy upon the vast majority of pregnant women in Iowa who do not want to have a child.

Previous to this bill being signed, Iowa already imposed numerous restrictions on abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions after 20 weeks gestation are banned in the state unless the woman’s life is endangered, and public funding is available for abortion only in cases of life endangerment, rape, incest or fetal anomaly. The governor must approve each Medicaid-funded abortion. Women are also forced to undergo an ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion, and a pregnant minors’ parent or parents must be notified before the procedure can be performed.

In this context, Iowa’s heartbeat bill isn’t entirely unexpected. But it is unlikely to go into effect in light of judicial precedent. Federal courts have already thwarted similar attempts to ban abortions in Ohio, North Dakota and elsewhere.

So what’s the endgame here? As Robyn Marty has previously noted: “Anti-abortion groups no longer fear that the Supreme Court, given its current and future mix of justices, will uphold Roe if another case makes its way there.” In other words, they’re attempting to use this bill as a test case to get the issue in front of the Supreme Court, where they hope a post-Trump court will gut abortion rights nationwide.

Indeed, state Sen. Rick Bertrand (R-Sioux City) publicly declared as much during the bill’s floor debate: "Today we will begin this journey as Iowa becomes ground zero nationally for the life movement and the starting line back to the Supreme Court. I believe this bill will be the vehicle that will ultimately provide change and provide the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade."

Bertrand’s “opportunity” is a dystopian nightmare for women. Imposing such a punitive law would decimate women’s self-determination by eliminating the ability to plan their families. And make no mistake: low-income and financially overburdened women have been shown to suffer the brunt of other, similar abortion bans (as those with financial resources are better able to travel out of state to seek abortion care).

We're one new Trump-appointed justice away from losing essentially every court-based civil rights, reproductive rights, and equality-based protection gained in the last 60 years.  The clock is not on our side, and if Trump gets re-elected, the game is essentially over.

I'm not sure what it's going to take in order to get people to realize this, but we're already well on the road to things being far too late.

A Fairbanks-Weather Friend

Now that GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that no legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller will ever get a vote in the Senate, let alone a Trump signature, useless "moderate Republicans" like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski are more than happy to sign on to an effort that requires nothing on their part.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said this week that the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III should be allowed to proceed to its natural end and that she would support legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to protect the inquiry.

Murkowski, in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News-Miner editorial board Wednesday, also praised the FBI and said the agency has a "a serious and significant role" in the investigation.

"I have said all along that Mueller should be allowed to take this investigation wherever it takes him and his team," she said. "And I said that at the beginning and I repeat that, because I believe very, very firmly in that. And I think any efforts to thwart that are dangerous.

"If the investigation takes them to an additional turn that needs to be followed, I think this is what we're asking for when we ask for an independent investigation," she said. "That means that the president can't meddle. That means that the attorney general can't meddle. That means that the United States Senate can't meddle, and I just firmly believe that they should be able to take it where it goes."

Murkowski added, however, that she doesn't want to see the investigation go on indefinitely — "You know, this is going to be years and years and years" — and that the probe eventually must reach its natural end.

"And I think you have people of goodwill and good faith that are working to do just that," she said.

"I do not subscribe that this is some kind of a witch hunt," she said, referring to President Donald Trump's oft-repeated criticism of the special counsel inquiry into alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election and that now appears to have spread to other matters involving Trump and his associates.

Murkowski doesn't face Alaska voters until 2022, and by then Trump will either have his second term or will be gone, so either way Murkowski, like the rest of the GOP senators elected in 2016 along with Trump, doesn't have to do anything at all.

It's easy for Murkowski to say whatever she wants about Trump, but expecting her to do anything is ludicrous.  No Republican will lift a finger to stop Trump or to protect Mueller and/or Rod Rosenstein when the time comes, and it pisses me off to see Murkowski try to take credit for something that she'll never actually act upon.

All of the GOP has to go.