Last Call For You Can Bet On It

A major decision from the Supreme Court today, as in a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Alito, the court struck down a 1992 law prohibiting sports betting outside Nevada, Delaware, Montana and Oregon as unconstitutional after New Jersey challenged the law in 2012.  The practical upshot: states can now legalize sports betting on professional and college sports as they see fit.

The United States Supreme Court agreed on Monday to allow New Jersey's bid for sports betting at its casinos and racetracks, effectively ending on a prohibition on a $100 billion industry and striking down restrictions on wagering outside of Nevada. 

The ruling could allow as many as 25 other states to seek similar allowances.
The case, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, dealt with if the government had the right to "impermissibly commandeer the regulatory power of States." 

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected New Jersey law in 2016, ruling that the statute violated the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) which forbids state-authorized sports gambling. 

The move in trying to get New Jersey into legalized sports betting started years ago by former governor Chris Christie and other lawmakers, with the state passing a non-binding referendum allowing sports betting in 2011. 

Each of the North American major pro sports leagues and the NCAA filed a lawsuit against the state the following year after Christie signed a sports betting law, suing in 2012 and again in 2014. 

The sports leagues players' unions have said they want to be involved in some facet amid concern about fixing games and point shaving. 

"Given the pending Supreme Court decision regarding the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) ... The time has come to address not just who profits from sports gambling, but also the costs. Our unions have been discussing the potential impact of legalized gambling on players' privacy and publicity rights, the integrity of our games and the volatility on our businesses," the Players Associations said in a joint statement in January. 

Congress did give New Jersey a chance to become the fifth state to allow gambling before the ban was enacted, but the state failed to pass a sports betting law in the time allotted.

In other words, betting on pro and college sporting events is about to become legal in New Jersey, and you'd better believe a whole lot of states are going to follow suit very quickly.  Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Connecticut and Mississippi have already passed laws in anticipation of the ruling, and 14 more states are ready to pull the trigger on sports betting laws, including California, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and of course right here in Kentucky.  Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan will almost certainly get involved as well.  The two big states you can count on not taking bets: Texas and Florida.

Illegal sports betting in states outside Nevada is a $100 to $150 billion a year industry or more, depending on who you ask, and I anticipate dozens of states are going to make it legal and start collecting taxes on it with a swiftness.

Now, Congress isn't just sitting around and is actually ready to introduce legislation that bans sports betting in a way that meets Alito's test, at least in the Senate anyway.

But speaking of Alito, here's the thing: Alito's ruling makes it clear that the federal government can force states to do things by making them illegal but it can't pass laws that prevent state legislatures from allowing things to happen.  Guess what falls into that second, unconstitutional category of "commandeering state legislatures"?

That doctrine, moreover, has implications well beyond the realm of sports betting. Murphy isn’t simply good news for Atlantic City. It also bolsters the legal case against the Trump administration’s crackdown on so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Murphy concerns the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a very odd statute which “makes it ‘unlawful’ for a State or any of its subdivisions ‘to sponsor, operate, advertise, promote, license, or authorize by law or compact . . . a lottery, sweepstakes, or other betting, gambling, or wagering scheme based . . . on’ competitive sporting events.” 

What makes this law unusual is that Congress typically does not forbid state lawmakers from taking a particular action. If Congress wants to ban sports betting, it can simply ban sports betting, and instruct federal agents to enforce that law. Banning state lawmakers from authorizing sports betting is a strangely roundabout way of accomplishing a similar goal. And it is also, as Justice Alito explains, unconstitutional. 

The reason why stems from the Supreme Court’s “anticommandeering” doctrine, which prohibits Congress from effectively drafting states into federal law enforcement. As the Court held in New York v. United States, “we have always understood that even where Congress has the authority under the Constitution to pass laws requiring or prohibiting certain acts, it lacks the power directly to compel the States to require or prohibit those acts.” 

“Where a federal interest is sufficiently strong to cause Congress to legislate,” New York explained, “it must do so directly; it may not conscript state governments as its agents.” 

The core holding of Murphy is that the anticommandeering doctrine applies equally to federal laws requiring state officials to take a particular action and federal laws prohibiting state lawmakers from enacting a particular law. “Congress,” Alito explains, “cannot issue direct orders to state legislatures.”

In other words, this just blew a hole in the Trump regime's sanctuary city claim that state and local government have to allow federal law enforcement officers in to conduct ICE business.

We'll see this in court for sure.

You can bet on that.

Whither Wellstone's Legacy?

I lived in the Twin Cities when Minnesota Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crashed in 2002, and it was a heartbreaking moment, I was convinced Wellstone was going to go far in life as a true progressive champion, and all that ended in an instant.  But Wellstone's legacy lived on and his sons helped to put together a grassroots movement to train the next generation of 21st century liberal leaders after his death.

But now that legacy is in trouble as the eternal, unavoidable question of Democrats in the Trump era raises its head in Minnesota: which matters more in rural America, winning back white Trump voters, or keeping black, Latinx and Asian voters who stuck with the Dems through Hillary?

Founded after Wellstone’s death in a plane crash in 2002, Wellstone Action has trained thousands of progressive candidates, campaign operatives and community organizers throughout the country, with alumni serving in local and state offices and in the U.S. House. In 2016, the last year for which tax filings were available, the group reported providing training to 2,135 data and digital strategists, 723 nonprofit leaders and community organizers, and 854 aspiring political leaders. 

David Wellstone and other Democrats close to his father began objecting last year to what he described as Wellstone Action’s abandonment of disaffected Democrats in the rural Midwest — the rural poor were an early focus of the late senator — with an increasingly narrow focus on gender politics and people of color. 

“I said, ‘After Trump, we’ve got to figure out how we are going to go back after those Democrats that we lost,” David Wellstone said. “We can do all the stuff we do. We do great stuff on communities of color, we’re doing great stuff on gender identity politics. But we need to do some of these other trainings. … Nobody wanted to have a discussion about that.” 

In a prepared statement, Connie Lewis, chairwoman of the Wellstone Action board, said the group’s “mission has not changed.” But the group’s staff and board of directors appeared to suggest a shift in the progressive movement since Paul Wellstone’s death, asserting in a statement on its website that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” and that “the progressive movement also looks different today than it did when we first started.” 

In an early sign of tension at Wellstone Action, then-board member Rick Kahn, Paul Wellstone’s longtime friend and campaign treasurer, raised concerns in an email to a staffer last year about a draft tax filing in which staff proposed changing the group’s stated mission from a “advancing progressive social change and economic justice” to “advancing progressive social change and economic, racial, and gender justice.” 

“I am not remotely questioning the work we do in the realm of racial and gender justice,” Kahn said in the email, one of several documents he provided to POLITICO. “I support it, and applaud it, all of it. That has always been true, and will always remain true. What I am calling into question, and vigorously objecting to, is the strategic thinking in expressly choosing to highlight our work for just those two groups, and no others, in a document posted online, that we share with the entire world.” 

Kahn and other Wellstone allies said the board moved against them only after they began raising questions about the group’s finances. But the exchange reflected a broader undercurrent of discord. Noting Wellstone Action’s other priority constituencies included young people and working-class people, among others, Kahn wrote, “And since the language in question relates expressly to the legacy of Paul and Sheila [Wellstone], if we are willfully choosing to include some groups here, and not others, what about justice for people with mental illness, and victims of domestic violence?” 

Edith Sargon, then-executive director of the group, agreed in an email to use the group’s original mission statement in its tax filing. But she also challenged him in an email, saying, “We added race and gender because they are also part of the bigger goal of working towards social justice. Wouldn’t you all agree?” 

David Wellstone took the language on the group’s website — that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” — as an affront to his father’s legacy. 

“How I read it is Paul Wellstone is no longer relevant. It is the most untrue, un-thought-through and most offensive remark,” David Wellstone said. “When you’ve got people who are hurting and they’re turning to Donald Trump, we’ve got to give them something. … We should be the fighters for all folks who aren’t on top. That’s what my dad always said.”

It's a depressing situation in Minnesota even as the national Democratic platform shaping up for 2018 and 2020 is the most liberal in generations.  If even one of the most progressive organizations in the country is running away from even recognizing the voters that got them there in favor of the "political reality" of 90%+ white states in the Midwest, then who stands for people like me, black and living in Kentucky, or Kansas, or South Dakota, or Minnesota?

It's a question the Democrats better figure out and fast, because time is almost up.  We have less than six months before the 2018 midterms.

Heavens To Betsy, This Is Corrupt

You can make the argument that Trump EPA head Scott Pruitt is the most corrupt member of the Trump regime, at least from a personal perspective, and that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's corruption may be the most far-reaching, stretching all the way from Alaska to Puerto Rico and back.

But there's little argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's corruption has done the most damage to America because of her massive undermining of America's schools and colleges and her relentless efforts to trap millions of young people in a for-profit $1.5 trillion-plus student loan system that threatens to wreck America's entire economy for decades.

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees.

The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked.

During the final months of the Obama administration, the team had expanded to include a dozen or so lawyers and investigators who were looking into advertising, recruitment practices and job placement claims at several institutions, including DeVry Education Group.

The investigation into DeVry ground to a halt early last year. Later, in the summer, Ms. DeVos named Julian Schmoke, a former dean at DeVry, as the team’s new supervisor.

Now only three employees work on the team, and their mission has been scaled back to focus on processing student loan forgiveness applications and looking at smaller compliance cases, said the current and former employees, including former members of the team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from the department.

In addition to DeVry, now known as Adtalem Global Education, investigations into Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corporation, which also operate large for-profit colleges, went dark.

And of course let's not forget the investigation into Trump University, where the corruption goes all the way to the top.  It's obnoxious and severely damaging to the future of our country.  With people under 35 saddled with a trillion and a half dollars in debt, and Gen X still reeling from the Great Recession, how does anyone in my generation or younger afford a house these days?

Of course, working as intended I guess.

StupidiNews!

• The US is set to officially open an embassy in Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel's capital, a move that breaks with decades of foreign policy and could set off another Palestinian uprising.
• Donald Trump says he will Chinese cell phone giant ZTE "get back into business, fast" after the Commerce Department banned US firms from doing business with ZTE over IP theft.
• The Arab League will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the "illegal" move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, member states are considering several possible moves.
• Italy's new government has worked out a populist economic plan that includes a 15% flat tax, guaranteed income for the poor, and lowering the retirement age.
• Researchers have found a vulnerability in S/Mime and PGP email encryption technology that could render both useless, and are advising users to disable the technology in email clients for now.

Last Call For The Year Of Mueller

The one-year anniversary of the Mueller probe rolls around on Thursday and according to the Village, the investigation is running out of time before Trump is able to turn the people against the special counsel.

The sprawling investigations amount to a political anchor as Trump leads the Republican Party into the fall midterm elections. Though few candidates see it as a decisive issue, the probe still sows doubt among some voters about the credibility of Trump’s election and about his conduct in office.

Public opinion surveys have found wide support for the Mueller investigation. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans backing the probe and 25 percent opposing it, though other surveys this spring have shown a modest decline from earlier polls in support of continuing the investigation.

Among the political class, there is a guessing game about whether the special counsel completes its work this summer — sufficiently in advance of the November elections — or presses well past it. The longer Mueller’s work continues, legal analysts said, the more difficult it may be for the special counsel to maintain public confidence, especially with Trump, Vice President Pence and other administration officials calling for the probe to wrap up.

“You don’t have much longer than 18 months to 24 months to get to the heart of the matter and resolve the things that need to be resolved,” said Robert W. Ray, who served as independent counsel toward the end of the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton presidency. “That’s about the length of time that public sentiment is with the investigation.”

The Mueller probe has also brought about a national reckoning on the boundaries of presidential power. Trump is at war with the leadership of his own Justice Department and FBI, has threatened to defy a subpoena to testify and even toyed with ordering the firing of Mueller.

“We want to get the investigation over, done with,” Trump said last month. “Put it behind us.”

The notion that the investigation has to end soon or it will amount to undue interference in the 2018 elections is exactly what the Republicans want to press, and at least with the Washington Post, it's starting to work.  The piece is an outright warning to Mueller to wrap things up by this summer, by Labor Day at the latest.

Expect more pieces like this to start raining down as Mueller gets closer to the truth and the clock gets closer to the GOP.'s reckoning with angry voters.

Sunday Long Read: Orange To Blue

If Democrats have any chance of flipping the House in 2018, the road will have to go through California's last true bastion of Republicanism, the suburbs of Orange County.  It's here, the New Republic's Vauhini Vara argues, that Democrats will have to decide the path between left and center-left in order to win the districts here, and try to win the country back from Trump.

What, in the age of Donald J. Trump, should a Democrat be? It didn’t take long, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, for Democratic officials to descend into a desperate and often acrimonious argument about the future of the party. Did it still rest with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt—those factory workers and retail employees who used to form the core of the Democratic Party but have watched the American dream fall victim to globalization and automation? Would it be comprised of a diverse, urban coalition clustered around cosmopolitan, white-collar cities? And might it be possible—doubtful, perhaps, but possible—that both could be true?

With this fall’s midterm elections fast approaching, the Democratic Party has yet to resolve its internal conflicts or develop a coherent long-term vision. But it has identified a potential path back to power in the immediate term. In order to regain control of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party must flip 23 Republican-held seats. To do so, it has identified 104 GOP-held districts as targets, the biggest number in more than a decade. It is zeroing in, especially, on Republican-held districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump: suburban areas near Miami, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and, especially, Los Angeles, where affluent, well-educated white populations have been joined in recent decades by an influx of immigrants. If Trump’s success in Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania symbolized the Democratic Party’s growing rift with white, working-class Americans, his poor showing in the suburbs has presented an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads in places that, for decades, have been thought of as inexorably conservative. “The battleground is not urban America or rural America, it’s suburban America,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Politico last year. Brian Fallon, a Democratic consultant who worked as a top Clinton aide, said that the path to a Democrat-led House “runs through the Panera Breads of America.”

The question that no one seems quite able to answer, however, is what kind of Democrat can win the Panera demographic. Last June, when Jon Ossoff failed to capture the suburban Atlanta district vacated by Republican Tom Price—in what became the most expensive House race in U.S. history—some in the party argued that Ossoff, with his lack of interest in single-payer health care and taxing the rich, had alienated potential Democratic voters by being too moderate. To win, they asserted, Democratic candidates should tack further to the left, in the mode of Bernie Sanders. In March, however, following Conor Lamb’s narrow victory in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points, pundits argued that Lamb’s careful, centrist positions helped win him the race—and that Democrats shouldn’t write off more conservative Americans as a lost cause just yet.

Going forward, there is no better place to witness the Democratic Party’s strategies play out—and no place where the stakes are higher—than Orange County, California. Wedged along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, Orange County is home to more than three million people, living in a maze of communities ranging from surfer towns to exurbs. Orange County doesn’t offer a sense of place so much as a sense of placelessness, and if it weren’t for the consistently balmy weather, much of it, with its six-lane freeways and big-box stores and strip malls and, yes, Panera Breads, could just as soon be in Illinois or Texas. The county’s orange groves are long gone; if you are in Anaheim, say, and find yourself craving an orange, you drive to Ralphs and buy one. When, on a recent visit, I asked a lifelong resident to take me on a tour, he brought me past his childhood home in a quiet neighborhood of low-slung ranch houses, a 7-Eleven, and a large shopping center.

For decades, Orange County—the birthplace of Richard Nixon, the Crystal Cathedral, and the “Real Housewives” reality-TV franchise—was one of the country’s proudest Republican strongholds. In 2016, though, Clinton beat Trump there by a nine-point margin, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term.

It was a striking upset, but, to those who knew the county well, not an entirely surprising one. Republican sentiment has been eroding in Orange County for years. By 2016, fewer than 38 percent of Orange County residents were registered Republicans, down from 56 percent in 1990. Latinos and Asians now make up more than half the population, slowly replacing the white conservatives who flocked to Orange County in the middle of the twentieth century. “The generation of people who came here from the Midwest, attracted to the agriculture and defense industries, is really just dying out,” said Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Chapman University.

It is here, in these suburbs, that the Democratic Party hopes to return to power nationally. Anti-Trump sentiment in Orange County runs high. The morning after Trump’s inauguration, more than 20,000 people turned out for the Women’s March in Santa Ana, one of the biggest protest marches in the entire state. And the county’s four congressional districts currently held by Republicans—Darrell Issa, Dana Rohrabacher, Mimi Walters, and Ed Royce—are among the 23 districts represented by Republicans that Clinton won nationally. The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists Royce’s and Issa’s districts as leaning Democratic (Issa won by only 1,621 votes in the last election), and Rohrabacher’s is a toss-up. While Walters’s district leans Republican, Clinton nonetheless beat Trump there by a five-point margin, putting it on the Democrats’ map. The party’s hopes soared in January when Royce announced that he would not seek reelection. Just two days later, Issa said he would be retiring as well.

Democrats have made Orange County a particular focus of their organizing and fund-raising efforts. Democratic enthusiasm has swept across Orange County, with more than a dozen candidates signing up to compete for its four Republican-held congressional seats. Last spring, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made the unprecedented decision to open an office in Irvine, in the center of Orange County, to oversee races in the western states, something it had traditionally handled from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s very important to us to win Orange County for the purposes of taking back the House,” Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, California, who is the vice chairman of the DCCC for the western region, told me. Tom Steyer, one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors, is pouring millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote efforts in Orange County and told me he considers the region “critical” to regaining control of Congress. According to the Democrats’ arithmetic—which assumes that the districts where Clinton won are the ripest for flipping—the four Republican-held Orange County districts should be among the 23 easiest targets in the nation. If Democrats can’t win those seats, the path to retaking Congress becomes much narrower. But their investment in Orange County represents much more than a math problem. At a time when the Democratic Party seems lacking in direction, its approach in Orange County, and whether it is successful, could provide more precise answers about the party’s future than its leaders have been willing or able to provide.

The Republican Party has tried to downplay the threat that increased Democratic engagement in Orange County signifies. “It’s a Hail Mary play. It’s desperation,” Fred Whitaker, the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, told Politico earlier this year. “Let the Democrats spend tens of millions of dollars here. Let them die on the hill in Orange County.” Still, in response to the DCCC’s efforts, the National Republican Campaign Committee has opened its own local campaign office in Orange County. And even Whitaker has admitted that retaining control of the county’s congressional seats will be difficult. “We understand what money can do,” Whitaker told me. “Certainly, if the Democrats are going to put money here, there are going to be challenging races.”

Yet even as political headwinds seem to be blowing in their favor, the chances of a Democratic sweep of Orange County are increasingly in question. Given its internal divisions, it has been unclear from the start whether the Democratic Party can harness the energy of its grassroots while also drawing in centrists and Republicans. On top of that, a quirk of California politics—a primary system in which the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party affiliation, advance to the general election—has raised the possibility that some of the Orange County districts will end up with two Republicans, and not a single Democrat, on the congressional ballot in November. What began as a murmur of self-doubt in Orange County political circles has intensified into one of the Democratic Party’s biggest nightmares: Even with all this momentum on their side, are Democrats about to blow their chance at retaking Congress?

That's the question we're about to find out the answer to.  Failure is always an option, but failure here means that GOP control of the House will survive, California jungle primary or not.  I don't buy into the doom and the gloom that the GOP has been pushing after barely surviving in Nevada last month, and I don't subscribe to the "blue wave is dead/special elections don't matter in November" idiocy from the press.  You shouldn't either.

But there are tens of millions of voters out there for whom the Democrats being the anti-Trump party just isn't enough, tens of millions of people who figure life will be fine for them with Trump and the GOP in charge.  They're still not convinced that the Democrats will make their lives better on a daily basis.

Cutting through the noise to make that case needs to be priority number one of the Dems, and so far, I'm just not seeing it. Ultimately the choice is up to us as voters.  But no two voters are the same.

Red State Dems Walk The Knife

I know that it's tough being a red state Democrat, living in Kentucky for over a decade has made it painfully clear just how wide the gulf between "Democrat" and "liberal" can be.  But I can only surmise that the move by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and now Joe Donnelly to support Trump's torture-happy pick for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, is a way to give Republicans like Rand Paul cover for voting no without actually doing so, something I'm sure the GOP will reward both Joes for come November, right?

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) announced Saturday his support for Gina Haspel’s nomination to be CIA director, providing a crucial second Democratic vote that should provide enough margin for confirmation to overcome questions about her role in last decade’s controversial interrogation program.

Donnelly, who met with Haspel on Thursday, said in a statement that he had “a tough, frank, and extensive discussion” with her both about her vision for the agency and its past use of “enhanced” interrogations against terrorist captives, including methods such as waterboarding that are widely considered torture.

During her confirmation hearing, Haspel pledged to abide by current law that forbids those methods and that she would reject an order from President Trump to use those techniques against a terrorist now.

“I believe that she has learned from the past, and that the CIA under her leadership can help our country confront serious international threats and challenges,” Donnelly said in the statement released Saturday morning.

Of course, Haspel's efforts to cover up Bush-era torture should have ended her career anyway.

Haspel, whom under Pompeo became the agency’s deputy director, briefly ran the off-the-books prison in Thailand used as a torture laboratory for the earliest detained terrorism suspects. There, in 2002—including while Haspel oversaw the so-called black site—the man known as Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times; stuffed into a wooden box barely bigger than a coffin; had his body shackled in painful contorted positions; and had his head slammed into walls.
“If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from the past,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the intelligence committee who opposes her nomination, told The Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday.

“Ms. Haspel’s background makes her unsuitable to serve as CIA director. Her nomination must include total transparency about this background,” Wyden added.

Subsequently declassified CIA medical files assessed that Abu Zubaydah was likely willing to cooperate with his interrogators before his waterboarding, as he had with his FBI interrogators, who did not torture him.

Years later, Haspel drafted an instruction to CIA officers in the field to destroy videotapes of torturous interrogations at the site. Though the Justice Department later declined to bring charges, the destruction of the tapes was widely considered in human-rights circles to be a key moment in covering up the torture—and it prompted the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark 2014 investigation, which occurred amid the backdrop of the agency spying on the work product of the Senate investigators.

I would hope that we could get Dems who wouldn't compromise on torture, but it's not as if Obama made any effort to cashier in Haspel either.

This all sucks, and I hate it. And Manchin is in for the fight of his political life.

 

That Economic Anxiety Again

The Russians not only knew where to hit us when it came to maximum damage to our election process (voter registration and Facebook) but they knew us better than we knew ourselves when it came to getting those "economically anxious" voters to the polls for Trump.

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings: 

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device. 

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups. 

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017. 

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Thousands of ads, targeted with pinpoint accuracy, seen tens of millions of times, designed to make white voters angry enough to go to the polls and back Trump and the GOP, and to make black voters angry enough to abandon Clinton and the Democrats.

And it worked.  All it took for Trump to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was a swing of a few hundred thousand votes, a fraction of a percent of total votes cast.

That's how we lost this country.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The FBI has known about Putin pal Viktor Vekselberg for years, and even made the rare move of publicly warning US investors to stay away from his Skolkovo Foundation as it was a Russia front.

The FBI warned four years ago that a foundation controlled by the Russian oligarch who allegedly reimbursed Donald Trump's personal lawyer might have been acting on behalf of Russia's intelligence services. 

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucia Ziobro wrote an unusual column in the Boston Business Journal in April of 2014 to warn that a foundation controlled by Russian energy baron Viktor Vekselberg might be part of a Moscow spying campaign that sought to siphon up American science and technology. 

"The foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation's sensitive or classified research, development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial applications," Ziobro wrote. "This analysis is supported by reports coming out of Russia itself." 

Fast forward to this week: Vekselberg's name has been in U.S. headlines because of allegations about his involvement with payments to Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. 

A lawyer suing Trump and Cohen, Michael Avenatti, released a document on Tuesday charging that Vekselberg might have reimbursed Cohen for the payment he made to Avenatti's client, porn actress Stormy Daniels. Avenatti's document has not been fully verified but important aspects of it have been confirmed. 

Andrey Shtorkh, a spokesman for Vekselberg, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. 

The U.S. subsidiary of the company that Vekselberg controls has acknowledged making payments to Cohen, but it denied that it served as a pass-through for Vekselberg or anyone else outside the United States trying to funnel money to him. 

FBI investigators reportedly stopped Vekselberg on his way into the United States earlier this year to question him. The 2014 column written by Ziobro suggests that Vekselberg has been of interest to U.S. intelligence officials for some time — well before the counterintelligence investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 presidential election.

For 12 months now the refrain from Trump supporters and pro-Russia fellow travelers has been "If the Trump campaign took money from Russia, there would be a smoking gun."

This gun here may not be smoking, but it sure as hell seems to have been pretty recently fired as the barrel is very warm and it still smells of gunpowder, guys. 

The Cohen case is turning into an even bigger cesspool than Mike Flynn or Paul Manafort, and that's really saying something.

Oh, but of course, Cohen may be directly related the the recent resignation of NY AG Eric Schniederman.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was informed about allegations of sexual misconduct by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman around 2013, according to a letter filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

An attorney, Peter Gleason, submitted a letter to the court Friday explaining that two women had come to him a half-decade or more ago with complaints that they were “sexually victimized” by Schneiderman.

Counseling against reporting the allegations to Manhattan’s district attorney based on his past experiences with political corruption cases, Gleason says, he discussed the women’s allegations with a retired New York Post journalist, Stephen Dunleavy.

Dunleavy who offered to discuss the matter with Trump. “Mr. Dunleavy did indeed discuss this very matter with Mr. Trump as evidenced by a phone call I received from attorney Michael Cohen,” Gleason, a lawyer in Mahopac, New York, wrote to the judge. “During my communications with Mr. Cohen I shared with him certain details of Schneiderman’s vile attacks on these two women.”

Schneiderman’s lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, declined to comment. 

Gleason’s letter was the latest salvo in a battle over the records seized by the FBI last month from Cohen’s office and residences and electronic devices. The lawyer requested a protective order to seal all correspondence that Cohen may have had about the women, in part to protect their identities as assault victims. 

Trump’s potential knowledge of allegations against Schneiderman haven’t previously been dislosed, although the men have publicly feuded over Trump’s business practices. Schneiderman sought to sue Trump University in state court in 2012, and filed a complaint the next year in federal court, claiming the for-profit school defrauded students. 

In a tweet on Sept. 11, 2013, Trump took aim at Schneiderman while also referring to New York politicians who’d resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer.

“Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone -- next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner,” Trump tweeted.

He knew, guys.  Not that Schneiderman didn't deserve the boot, he's still a sexual predator and monster who abused women, full stop.  But Trump knew about at least some of the accusations against him and knew about them four years ago.

A lot of people looked the other way on Schneiderman and enabled him to keep his position and to continue to harm women. 

One of those people was Donald Trump.

Kentucky Sucker's Club

Here in Kentucky there's plenty of buyer's remorse over Trump, especially for small businessmen like Eddie Devine.

Eddie Devine voted for President Donald Trump because he thought he would be good for American business. Now, he says, the Trump administration’s restrictions on seasonal foreign labor may put him out of business. 

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” said Devine, owner of Harrodsburg-based Devine Creations Landscaping. “I feel so stupid.” 

Devine says it has been years since he could find enough dependable, drug-free American workers for his $12-an-hour jobs mowing and tending landscapes for cemeteries, shopping centers and apartment complexes across Central Kentucky. 

So for years he has hired 20 seasonal workers, mostly from Guatemala, through the U.S. Labor Department’s H2-B “guest worker” program. Importing these workers for a few months cost him an additional $18,000 in fees and expenses beyond their wages, which must be the same as he pays American workers. But that’s the only way he could serve his customers. 

Restrictions on guest-worker visas, which began during President Barack Obama’s second term as immigration became a hot issue for conservatives, have gotten worse under Trump. And it’s even more of a problem now that the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years. 

Devine says he lost a $100,000 account because he didn’t have enough men to do the job. He’s worried he may be out of business next year if things don’t improve.
He isn’t alone. Cuts in H-2B visas are hurting small businesses across the country that can’t find Americans willing to do hard, manual labor: Maryland crab processors, Texas shrimp fishermen, and Kentucky landscapers and construction companies. 

Nowhere in the article does Devine say he would be willing to 1) pay workers more for backbreaking landscaping work or 2) try voting Democratic in November.

Devine said he believed Trump’s America-first promises. But cutting off a good supply of seasonal foreign labor when Americans won’t take those jobs is only hurting American business owners and the U.S. workers they employ, he said. 

These workers aren’t immigrants, and there is no path to U.S. citizenship. When their seasonal work is done, they return home. That’s why Devine thinks the Trump administration’s stifling of guest-worker programs has more to do with racism than economics. “I think there’s a war on brown people,” he said. 

But what makes him most angry is that Trump’s properties in Florida and New York have used 144 H-2B workers since 2016. “I want to know why it’s OK for him to get his workers, but supporters like me don’t get theirs,” Devine said.

Because Trump got 100% of what he needed out of you: you voted for him and for his party.  Unless that changes Eddie, he owes you nothing.

And nothing is exactly what you'll get out of Donald Trump.  Millions of us saw him for what he was, and you're the reason we're all suffering now.

Man up and help us fix it in November.

StupidiNews!

• VP Mike Pence says it's time for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to "wrap it up" and end the investigation into the Trump regime "in the interest of the country".
• Trump regime Housing Secretary Ben Carson is considering new HUD rules that would reverse Obama-era protections for tenants to sue under the Fair Housing Act.
• US Automakers will meet with Donald Trump at the White House to discuss freezing fuel efficiency standards at 2020 levels and taking on California in court over weakening requirements.
• Italy's new Five-Star Movement government appears to be turning to the right-wing nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant League to form a new populist alliance.
• A new study finds Hurricane Harvey was fueled in part by record heat in the Gulf of Mexico last summer caused by human-created global warming.

Last Call For The Greitens Show On Earth

The saga of Missouri GOP Gov. Eric Greitens continues as the "used his own wounded veterans' charity as a illegal donor list" half of the story just got much, much worse.  Meet former Greitens campaign aide Mike Hafner, who's going public with his story.

Within days after Mike Hafner began work in January 2015 as a full-time campaign staffer for Republican Eric Greitens, Hafner says he was presented with a copy of the donor list for The Mission Continues, the charity that Greitens helped found. 

“We had set a meeting to discuss the donor list, so I could get notes from Eric and build a fundraising plan for his potential candidacy,” Hafner said in an interview Wednesday.
Hafner’s primary job, at that point, was to set up “a master tracking list’’ for Greitens to use to make campaign-related phone calls to the donors who already had given to the charity. 

The donor list was crucial in those early months of fundraising, Hafner said. The Associated Press has calculated that at least $2 million was raised from the donor list for Greitens’ successful campaign for Missouri governor. 

Hafner suspects the tally could be higher, because some of the donors broached early on the idea of forming nonprofit groups so that their contributions could not be tracked. “There was, in the very embryonic stages of the campaign, discussions already being had about C4s and LCs (two types of outside groups) and not disclosing the source of those contributions,” Hafner said. 

At the time, in early 2015, Hafner says he and allied consultants still thought Greitens was exploring a bid for lieutenant governor – not governor. 

Hafner says he also was unaware when he drew up the call list that there could be legal problems with using The Mission Continues donor list without the charity’s specific approval.

And it gets worse.

Hafner said he simply wants to make sure the record is correct about his involvement in Greitens’ early campaign, and why he believes the public should pay attention.
“I do believe in transparency in campaigns,” Hafner said. He contended that Greitens was misleading the public when he appeared on St. Louis Public Radio’s Politically Speaking podcast in January 2016, and declared that his campaign was transparent and his donors would be public. 

Although Hafner was with Brunner’s campaign by then, “I knew what they were already planning’’ with the secret money going to outside groups. 

By Hafner’s calculation, “Eric had (at least) $6 million in untraceable money.” 

Eric has been quite the industrious type, hasn't he?

Hope that serves him well in prison.

The Irreverent Revenant Is Resurgently Relevant

All this talk of Trump's CIA head pick, former 9/11-era torture maven Gina Haspel, and her disastrous confirmation hearing yesterday (so bad in fact that John McCain has turned on her) has had the effect of re-engaging the "debate" of whether or not torturing people is a good idea, and by "debate" I mean the Nameless One has risen from the Void and hungers once more.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said the U.S. should restart its enhanced interrogation techniques — often considered torture — after the issue was thrust to the forefront during Gina Haspel’s confirmation fight to become CIA director.

Yeah, that first sentence is a piece of work by the way.  Thanks, Politico.

 

“If it were my call, I would not discontinue those programs,” he said in an interview that aired Thursday morning on Fox Business. “I’d have them active and ready to go, and I’d go back and study them and learn.”

And feed on their souuuuuuuls.

Cheney has long defended the post-9/11 tactics even as the national climate shifted over the years. Congress has since banned them. 

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

Just a friendly reminder that the GOP was awful and repugnant well before Trump, and white people put them back in power anyway.

Haspel, the acting director, faced a barrage of Democratic questions on the morality of techniques like waterboarding at her Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday. She oversaw a secret CIA facility in Thailand where two suspected terrorists were subject to them — one on her watch — in 2002 and later pushed for the destruction of tapes of the interrogations.

That should have been the end of Haspel's career.  Alas, it was not.

“I think she’d be a great CIA director,” Cheney said. “I think she’s done a great job in terms of the career she’s built, and the people I know at the agency are very enthusiastic about having one of their own, so to speak, in the driver’s seat at the CIA.”

I bet they are.  Hey listen, "Dick Cheney thinks this is a good idea" should be a pretty big disqualifier for everything, but in the Trump era it's a bonus!

By my math, McCain and Manchin are trading places, so Haspel will still get 51 votes and probably more.  If I'm Rand Paul, I'm calling Susan Collins and seeing what I can get out of the White House while I can.

Sing A Song Of Sick Pence

Pocketful of lies, to paraphrase the old rhyme.  It's also the time of year where that broken clock that is George Will is right for once on Pence being Trump's biggest and most vile enabler.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity. Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin. 

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act. 

Noting that Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by Arpaio’s presence, and praisedhim as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

Henry Adams said that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. The audience for his praise of Arpaio was given to chanting “Build that wall!” and applauded Arpaio, who wears Trump’s pardon like a boutonniere. 

Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years — December 1816 to March 1830 — in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require. 

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

And as much as it pains me to say it, Will is 100% correct here.  The Republicans who enabled Trump from the beginning, and Mike Pence is absolutely the chief enabler, are the real villains in America right now. 

Of course, those villains are joined by Will and Jennifer Rubin and Rick Wilson and Ana Navarro and the other "Never Trump" Republicans who loudly and boldly attack Trump, and still manage to do absolutely nothing to stop him, let alone the fact that they agree with 95% of his policies.  These are the Republicans who wish Mike Pence was in charge, as awful as he is.

They may very well get that wish. 

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump welcomed home three American detainees held by North Korea and released this week as part of diplomatic overtures ahead of an historic summit with the US later this spring.
• Senate Democrats grilled Trump's pick for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, on her record of overseeing torture of 9/11-era detainees, but Democrats do not have the votes to block her confirmation.
• Israel launched multiple airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria after Iran reported fired rockets towards Israel, no casualties were reported.
• 15 years after stepping down as PM, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad has scored a shocking win, ending the six-decade rule of former PM Najib Razak's party.
• Senate Democrats are forcing GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to take a vote to block the FCC's plans to abandon net neutrality rules, but the move has long odds in the House.