Meat The Press, Con't

Masha Gessen at The New Yorker argues that a media boycott of the Trump White House in the wake of the clear setup of CNN's Jim Acosta to be stripped of his press credential would be a complete and total victory for the Trump regime.

What should the media do now? On the CNN Web site, the British journalist Jane Merrick advocates for a boycott: “The entire White House press corps should walk out. Deny him coverage. Take him off the air. Cancel his series. Leave him to rage into Twitter's echo chamber, which is all he deserves.”

There are good arguments in favor of a boycott. It would feel good and righteous to stop rebroadcasting the messages of a corrupt, lying, hateful Administration. A walkout would serve as a clear demonstration of professional solidarity, and solidarity is an absolute value. Reducing the amount of Trump on the air and in print would also probably be a good thing. The media scholar Jay Rosen has long argued for downgrading the prestige of the White House assignment proportionately to the quality of information that emerges from the Administration. “Put your most junior people in the White House briefing room,” he has written. “Recognize that the real story is elsewhere, and most likely hidden.”

But there is a counterargument. The White House is a lousy source of information about itself, but it is also the best available source. The real story of Trumpism is probably found not in the White House or even in Washington but in Ohio, in Texas, along the Mexican border, in refugee camps the world over, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, and in the Palestinian territories. But the story of how the Administration functions must still be observed up close. Walking away would give this White House exactly what it wants: less contact with the media, less visibility, ever less transparency and accountability. Walking away would feel good, but it would ultimately be a loss. Would the loss in information be greater than the gain in solidarity? That’s a hard question, but my guess is that the answer is yes.

The Trump Administration has the media in a vise. On the one hand, most of what comes out of White House mouths is poison to the public conversation: because it’s a lie, or an expression of hate, or both. Simply reporting Trump’s lies and incendiary comments, however critically, serves to entrench his world view as a part of our shared reality. At the same time, he is the President. His Twitter pronouncements find a sympathetic audience among tens of millions of Americans. Refusing to engage with his words would mean refusing to engage with Trump voters and with the Trump Administration itself. It would mean walking away from politics altogether, which, for journalists, would be an abdication of responsibility.

As for that responsibility, it warrants some reflection. Americans, including those who claim to have no use for the media that Trump calls “fake,” expect the press to perform a public function. The media is the fourth estate of the political system, and the only one expected to earn its own keep, independent of how well it performs its service to the public. With significant but limited exceptions—such as NPR, ProPublica, and the Marshall Project—American media producers are rewarded not for how well they inform the public but for how many sets of eyes they can draw to advertising. The correlation between these two measures is tenuous, if it exists at all. In the end, the decision about whether to walk out of the White House, report the latest tweet, or publish an anonymous Op-Ed is made on the basis largely—if not solely—of market factors: How will it play against the competition, and how many people will be drawn to read it? That’s the sort of logic that makes perfect sense to Trump, who believes that the world turns on the profit motive. But Americans may want to reconsider the wisdom of entrusting the fourth estate to the laws of the commercial marketplace.

It's a very lofty argument and one with merit.  Meanwhile, Trump continues to specifically attack black women journalists now that Acosta is gone, targeting them for his rage and ire and threatening them specifically with the loss of their press credentials as well.

This week, he hit a trifecta, singling out three African American women who are journalists. The women — Abby Phillip, April Ryan and Yamiche Alcindor — earned his contempt apparently just for asking him questions.

Trump called one of Phillip’s questions “stupid,” described Ryan as “a loser” and brushed off Alcindor, saying her question was “racist.”

Phillip, a CNN reporter and former Washington Post journalist, drew Trump’s wrath on Friday, after she asked whether he hoped Matthew G. Whitaker, Trump’s appointee as acting attorney general, would “rein in” special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Trump’s presidential campaign.

“What a stupid question that is. What a stupid question,” Trump snapped. He didn’t answer the allegedly “stupid” question, but he did pour more contempt on Phillip. “I watch you a lot,” he said. “You ask a lot of stupid questions.”

He suggested he was considering pulling other reporters’ press credentials to cover the White House, as he did with CNN reporter Jim Acosta on Wednesday.

Among those he brought up in that context was Ryan.

“You talk about someone who’s a loser,” Trump said of Ryan, a reporter for American Urban Radio Networks and a contributor to CNN. “She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing. She gets publicity and then she gets a pay raise, or she gets a contract with, I think, CNN. But she’s very nasty and she shouldn’t be. You’ve got to treat the White House and the office of the presidency with respect.”

Trump’s “loser” comment came two days after he admonished Ryan at a White House news conference.

“Sit down! I didn’t call you,” Trump commanded after Ryan tried to ask him about alleged voter suppression in the midterm elections. “Such a hostile media, it’s so sad,” Trump added as Ryan pressed him. “You rudely interrupted him,” Trump told her, referring to another reporter.

A few moments later, Alcindor asked Trump about his recent characterization of himself as “a nationalist” and whether that label was “emboldening white nationalists.”

Trump interrupted her and responded, “I don’t know why you say that, that is such a racist question.” He repeated that characterization — “racist” — two more times.

The National Association of Black Journalists is at least coming to defense of all three, but if anyone thinks Trump is going to moderate his racist behavior, or cool his assaults on a free press, there's no hope for you.  At some point, that balance Gessen mentioned has to tip in the favor of a total boycott.

Of course, Trump could save the media the trouble and just ban the press.  I'm betting that's far more likely than the media deciding on a boycott.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Greg Sargent looks down the road to the inevitable fight between incoming House Democratic majority and the Trump White House over the Mueller probe and comes up with four possible paths:

House Democrats can investigate the firing of Sessions. The question of whether Trump fired Sessions or whether Sessions merely resigned is critical. If Trump fired Sessions, it might not be legit that Trump replaced him with an acting attorney general (Whitaker) who didn’t require Senate confirmation (which Trump may have wanted to do to insulate the replacement from questioning from senators about his intention toward the Mueller probe). Mueller could conceivably challenge the appointment in court if Whitaker does try to shut down or severely constrain the probe.

Sessions was definitely fired, but I don't believe this alone will fix the problem.  It's a part, sure, but it can't be the only attack from the Democrats.

Subpoena Sessions himself. House Democrats can try to question Sessions himself, both about the circumstances surrounding his firing and, more broadly, about private meetings in which Trump raged at Sessions for failing to protect him from the investigation. Sessions would likely assert executive privilege regarding his conversations with Trump.

It's that last part that will make this drag on, and again, it won't solve the issue.

Subpoena Mueller’s findings. Under the regulations governing the special counsel, he is to provide a “confidential” report explaining his conclusions to the person overseeing the probe — who would have been Rosenstein but now will be Whitaker. It is Whitaker who is then supposed to provide a report to the bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate judiciary committees, which gives him a great deal of discretion to decide how much to put in that report.

Whitaker could theoretically report little to nothing, in effect covering up what Mueller learned. “Democrats could subpoena Mueller’s findings,” Chafetz tells me. “But expect the White House to put up a fight in response to the subpoena.” Other legal experts think that if the White House defied such a subpoena, the courts would rule against them, meaning Congress would get Mueller’s findings.

This is probably the best of the possible paths to take.  Even better, leaking all this to the NY Times or Washington Post becomes another Pentagon Papers fight, but once this is all out there, that becomes moot.

Impeach the acting attorney general. This is a far-fetched scenario, but it’s not an impossibility. As it is, Whitaker has publicly opined that Mueller has gone too far in probing Trump’s finances and has openly suggested that one option is to de-fund the investigation. On these grounds, Democrats have called for his recusal.

Here an irony kicks in. A handful of House Republicans loyal to Trump tried to impeach Rosenstein earlier this year on grounds so specious that even many Republicans, including the leadership, rejected it. It’s hard to say what circumstances might justify such a move against Whitaker, if any, but if he shuts down the Mueller probe without good cause, that might be seen as extremely serious misconduct — far more serious than what Republicans alleged against Rosenstein.

Again, possible, but only the third option above actually gets the Mueller probe info into the public eye.

Having said all this, the absolute best option is for Mueller to start raining down indictments like a biblical monsoon as well as allow the state investigations underway, especially those in NY, come to fruition.  Trump can't avoid or shut those down.

The wild card however remains the Supreme Court.  At some point, all this will go to the nine justices, five of which have been appointed by Republicans, two by Trump himself.  There appears to be clear law here and precedent to follow, but anyone counting on the Roberts Court to stop Trump needs to understand that it may very well not happen.

The fate of the Republic is still very much in doubt.

A Peek Into The Future

Yeah, I know, I don't want to start in on 2020 already while votes are still being counted for 2018 (and Democrats are now heading for 40+ House seats and could limit Senate net losses to just two or even one if they get both recounts) but the fact of the matter is we can't afford not to think about it.  Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report mentioned the new battleground map on Friday:

If Dems are winning GA/TX, they’ve already won. New reality: CO/VA aren’t swing states; they’re solid blue states. IA/OH aren’t swing states; they’re solid red states.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 9, 2018

So what does that map look like?  Here's my approximation of that:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Six states, 101 EVs up for grabs. This is where we start in 2020, and this is where Dems need to be thinking about.
Huge, huge bonus for Dems: four of these six battleground states have Democratic governors now, with a recount underway for Florida for the fifth.  That is a powerful tool.  If the Democratic candidate wins those four states, that's the ballgame, Florida/Arizona become irrelevant.  That's why Scott Walker's loss in Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer's huge win in Michigan were both critical this week.  And even if Trump wins NC, well, then PA, MI, and WI are enough to give the Dems the win.

Bottom line: Any three of those six states, Dems win, Trump needs at least four and one of them has to be Florida, otherwise he needs all five of the remaining states to win.  What happened in 2016 is that Trump got five of those six including Florida, an easy EV win despite a popular vote loss of 3 million, and WI, PA, and MI Trump won by less than 80,000 total.

And as Wasserman mentioned, should Dems get ahead in Georgia or Texas, Trump is done.

Onward.  2020 Elections tag now active.  We'll check back in on this post in two years, hopefully.

Malibu Beach Nightmare

I wanna stay in the sun,
I gotta have my fun,
When the work is done
Down The Malibu Beach

A wildfire has destroyed most of a Northern California town of 27,000 people. At least nine people were killed by the so-called "Camp Fire" in Paradise, authorities said Friday evening. The victims have not been identified.

The fires across the state have forced 157,000 people from their homes, officials said. Evacuation orders included the entire city of Malibu, which is home to 13,000, among them some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

"There was really no firefight involved," Capt. Scott McLean of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said of the blaze near Paradise. He said crews gave up attacking the flames and instead helped people get out alive. "Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed. It's that kind of devastation."

This one is bad, guys.  Even by California wildfires in the advancing climate change era, this is bad.

At least nine people were killed by the Camp Fire in Northern California, Butte County officials said Friday evening. The fire has burned more than 90,000 acres and destroyed 6,700 structures. 

Nurses and patients have recounted their dramatic escapes from a hospital in Paradise that was devastated by a ferocious wildfire. Nurse Darrel Wilken told the Chico Enterprise-Record newspaper that the fire came so quickly that he and other coworkers used their own cars to evacuate patients from the Adventist Health Feather River Hospital.

Wilken said he took three patients in his car and that two of them were in critical condition. He said he battled gridlocked traffic on a road surrounded on both sides by fire.

Cody Knowles said his wife, Francine, was having gallbladder surgery Thursday morning.

When the evacuation was announced, she was still asleep from anesthesia. He waited until she woke up and they escaped in a hospital employee's car. The hospital said it evacuated 60 patients to other facilities.

These are only going to get worse in the future.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

In the last 48 hours, Donald Trump has canned Jeff Sessions and installed a crony Attorney General to interfere with if not end the Mueller probe, declared an effective end to asylum cases for anyone crossing the US border illegally, banned a CNN reporter by using a doctored Infowars video as propaganda to justify attacking the press, intimated that Democrats are stealing elections, and took off for Paris to meet his boss, Vladimir Putin.  He did all this because Republicans lost the House and he knows winter is coming. 

Now we know Trump used his media connections to kill stories hostile to him in 2015 and 2016.

As a presidential candidate in August 2015, Donald Trump huddled with a longtime friend, media executive David Pecker, in his cluttered 26th floor Trump Tower office and made a request.

What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., offered to use his National Enquirer tabloid to buy the silence of women if they tried to publicize alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.

Less than a year later, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Pecker to quash the story of a former Playboy model who said they’d had an affair. Mr. Pecker’s company soon paid $150,000 to the model, Karen McDougal, to keep her from speaking publicly about it. Mr. Trump later thanked Mr. Pecker for the assistance.

The Trump Tower meeting and its aftermath are among several previously unreported instances in which Mr. Trump intervened directly to suppress stories about his alleged sexual encounters with women, according to interviews with three dozen people who have direct knowledge of the events or who have been briefed on them, as well as court papers, corporate records and other documents.

Taken together, the accounts refute a two-year pattern of denials by Mr. Trump, his legal team and his advisers that he was involved in payoffs to Ms. McDougal and a former adult-film star. They also raise the possibility that the president of the United States violated federal campaign-finance laws.

The Wall Street Journal found that Mr. Trump was involved in or briefed on nearly every step of the agreements. He directed deals in phone calls and meetings with his self-described fixer, Michael Cohen, and others. The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has gathered evidence of Mr. Trump’s participation in the transactions.

On Thursday, the White House referred questions about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the hush deals to the president’s outside counsel Jay Sekulow, who declined to comment.

That's just the start, of course.  All this information is now with federal and state investigators.  Shutting down Mueller won't save Trump.   The full winter storm is now about to hit.

To abide by Justice Department rules, Mueller went silent for almost two months before the midterms, to avoid any appearance of election interference, but the Special Counsel’s office is now renewing the public side of their investigation. Team Mueller is reported to be working on the final draft of their report on the president and his Russian ties in 2016. Whatever that report says, it’s not likely to be flattering to Team Trump.

Worse for the White House, Mueller’s prosecutors are widely believed to be closing in on two people close to the president, Roger Stone and Donald Trump, Jr. Stone, the self-proclaimed Republican “ratf*cker,” has spoken openly of his fears of impending indictment over his links to WikiLeaks in 2016. Don Jr. is reported to be concerned as well, since he appears to have lied to Federal investigators about the fateful June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian intelligence officials.

Indictments of Stone, a friend of the president since the 1970s, or worse Trump’s son and namesake, seem certain to push the White House into greater paroxysms of rage. What might happen then is anybody’s guess. Trump’s desperation to shut down the Mueller inquiry before it cuts very close to home is therefore understandable.

It’s also a fool’s errand. In truth, it’s far too late to shut the Special Counsel down altogether. Mueller and his staff, veterans of Beltway wars, were not surprised by this week’s events. They were prepared. Any efforts by Acting AG Whitaker to block indictments will go public quickly and throw Washington into deep crisis. For Trump, there are no exits or off-ramps left.

When Mueller informs the public of more indictments is an open question. That they are coming, however, is not. And there are lots of them. The Special Counsel has been at work for almost 18 months now. An Intelligence Community official who assisted the Special Counsel’s investigation told me this week that Team Mueller is holding “dozens of sealed indictments” of people associated with the president, his 2015-16 campaign, and his administration. “Nobody who’s close to the Russians is getting out of this,” said the IC official. When will those indictments start being unsealed? Watch this space.

Maybe Schindler is full of garbage.  On this, I expect he's closer to the truth.  Mueller has the third act of this penned and ready to go.  There are too many wheels in motion, too much evidence, too many players for Trump to stop the avalanche.

Get ready.

It's Mueller Time.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Trump's new Emergency Inflatable Attorney General™ Matt Whitaker made his first major (and unconstitutional) move, declaring that the Trump regime can deny any and all asylum applications from anyone who has crossed the border illegally (despite international law saying otherwise) and that Dear Leader Trump has the final say in who is eligible to apply.

The Trump administration on Thursday rolled out a fast-track regulation that will restrict the ability of certain migrants to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border — a move that’s almost certain to trigger legal challenges and humanitarian backlash.

The administration issued an interim final rule that will bar certain migrants caught crossing the border between ports of entry. The regulation will be paired with a presidential proclamation that outlines the migrants subject to the asylum bar, administration officials said on a call with reporters. The officials would not detail who could be subject to the ban, but said more information likely would be revealed Friday.

The regulation seeks to “channel inadmissible aliens to ports of entry, where they would be processed in a controlled, orderly, and lawful manner,” according to a notice posted online Thursday afternoon.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has fixated on a group of Central American migrants trekking through Mexico en route to the United States. During a speech last week, Trump called the caravan an “invasion” and said asylum seekers would be turned away.

"This isn't an innocent group of people,” he said of the group, which includes many women and children. “It's a large number of people that are tough.”

Republican voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections cited immigration as one of the most important issues facing the country, according to exit polls. The announcement Thursday suggests Trump won’t ease up on his immigration crackdown, which dominated his first two years in office.

A senior administration official on Thursday said asylum seekers who cross between ports of entry are “choosing to break our laws as their first act upon entering the country“ and “depriving legitimate asylum seekers of a chance to have their cases heard.”

The official called the current influx of asylum seekers a “massive … almost historically unparalleled abuse of our immigration system.”

The plan is simple, round up everyone who crosses the border, deny them asylum, detain them in camps, and deport them.  It's cruel and illegal, period.  Trump doesn't care, because House Dems won't be in charge for another two months, Republicans in the House and Senate don't care, and the whole point is for this to go fast-track to SCOTUS where five Republican-appointed justices are waiting to sign off on it.

There is one wrinkle, however, and that is Matt Whitaker isn't eligible to be Acting AG in the first place.

Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.

If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.

Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.

What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys. 

As former Attorney General Jeff Sessions's Chief of Staff, Matt Whitaker was never subject to Senate confirmation.  Therefore, Matt Whitaker cannot serve as Acting AG.  It reall is this simple, but again, Trump doesn't care.  This issue too will go before the Supreme Court, but I expect by then Trump will have an AG lined up (Kris Kobach, Trey Gowdy, and Chris Christie are some of the names I've heard) that will pass any confirmation tests with the GOP's even larger majority in January in the Senate with no problem.

The real issue is that Whitaker's job is to serve as the lightning rod to allow the worst of Trump's excesses to come to pass in the lame duck session, including all the moves against Mueller, since he knows Whitaker actually would have issues getting confirmed.  What becomes of the acts Whitaker authorized the DoJ to take, well, that will conveniently become moot when the new AG arrives.  All of it neatly becomes standard practice, Trump's picks to the Supreme Court will see to that.

And the whole mess will lurch forward.

StupidiNews!

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is recovering after fracturing three ribs in a fall in her court office Wednesday night.
• Multiple protesters gathered in hundreds of American cities last night to demonstrate against Donald Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, widely seen as a move to stop the Mueller probe.
• US Attorneys have filed a lawsuit against Swiss banking giant UBS for securities fraud related to the 2008-2009 mortgage crisis, UBS rejected a $2 billion offer to settle federal charges.
• A new study finds more than a fifth of China's urban housing sits empty as citizens have not heeded President Xi Jinping's call to move from rural areas to 50 million vacant apartments and houses.
• Pennsylvania is subpoenaing the new domain provider of right-wing social media service Gab, the site went down after being connected with last month's Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooting.

Last Call For The Recount Account

Recounts in Georgia and Florida are underway as evidence piles up of massive voter suppression in both those states by Republicans in order to steal both gubernatorial races and the Florida senate race. Georgia's Brian Kemp should go to prison for this.

Republican Brian Kemp’s campaign declared victory in the race for Georgia governor on Wednesday, even as election officials continued counting thousands of absentee and provisional ballots, narrowing his lead and prompting Democrat Stacey Abrams to insist she could have the votes to force a runoff election.

As the vote-counting continued, voting rights advocates accused Kemp — who as secretary of state is Georgia’s top election officer — and local officials of disenfranchising thousands of voters on Election Day. Hundreds of complaints flooded in about hours-long lines brought on by broken equipment, a shortage of voting machines and insufficient quantities of printed provisional ballots.

On Wednesday evening, Kemp was ahead with 50.3 percent of the vote to Abrams’s 48.7 percent. Abrams and the Libertarian candidate would need to gain at least 25,000 votes more than Kemp to bring his share of the vote below 50 percent and trigger a runoff.

Today the state is counting absentee, and provisional ballots and Abrams is suing to make sure those ballots are counted.  Kemp has stepped aside as Secretary of State, something he has to do under state law.  There are a lot of ballots -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- that still need to be counted.  But it gets worse:

Another problem was the limited number of voting machines in some locations. More than 1,800 machines sat idle in storage in three of the state’s largest and most heavily Democratic counties. In Fulton County, according to figures provided by elections director Rick Barron, the ratio of machines to registered voters was lower than it had been in 2014, despite predictions that turnout was likely to break records for a midterm election.

While some voters waited in hours-long lines in Fulton County, 700 of those machines sat in stacks in a warehouse in downtown Atlanta, Barron said. The machines were sidelined because they are evidence in a lawsuit alleging the equipment had been exposed to the threat of hacking in 2016.

The federal judge in the case had ordered state and local election officials — including Kemp — and the plaintiffs to weigh the demands of upcoming elections in deciding how many machines to set aside.

Kemp dragged his feet to make sure those machines couldn't be used.  It's purposeful voter suppression of black Democratic votes, period.  The legal struggle continues in Georgia, but the odds of a recount in Florida for not one but three races seems guaranteed now by state law.

Two of the highest profile races in the country -- both in Florida -- are likely headed to a recount soon. 

Sen. Bill Nelson's re-election bid is likely headed to a hand recount given that the incumbent Democrat now trails Florida Gov. Rick Scott by 17,000 votes, within the .25% margin required for a hand recount. Nelson's campaign aides believe he will emerge victorious once all the ballots are counted. 

And on the governor's side, Democrat Andrew Gillum -- after conceding the race on Tuesday evening -- has grown more supportive of a recount of late, in part because his deficit to Republican Ron DeSantis is down to 38,000 votes, within the .5% needed for a machine recount. Campaign aides, though, remain clear eyed about the the long odds that Gillum can make up that deficit. 

Recounts, which have not officially been authorized in either race, put the outcome of two of the most closely watched races of 2018 on hold, with Democrats hoping for a miracle that could get both Gillum, a candidate who garnered considerable attention in his campaign against DeSantis, and Nelson, an incumbent who Democrats had thought would win his seat going into Tuesday night, over the finish line with a win. 

"On Tuesday night, the Gillum for Governor campaign operated with the best information available about the number of outstanding ballots left to count. Since that time, it has become clear there are many more uncounted ballots than was originally reported," Gillum's communications director Johanna Cervone said in a statement. "Mayor Gillum started his campaign for the people, and we are committed to ensuring every single vote in Florida is counted." 

At no point in the statement, though, did Gillum's campaign withdraw the concession and sources close to the mayor highlight that his outlook hasn't changed since his Tuesday night speech. It it is important to Gillum, these sources said, that his supporters know they are fighting for every vote. 

"We want every vote counted, we believe that there are still votes out there for Mayor Gillum and we want to make sure his supporters know we are fighting for every vote," one source said.

The third race is where Democrat Nikki Fried is a few hundred votes ahead of Republican Matt Caldwell for the state's Agriculture Commissioner, a powerful office in the state of Florida because it handles the state's gun licenses and enforces firearms legislation.

We'll know more in the days ahead, but Democrats could win all four of these races and need to fight for every single vote to be counted.

Stay tuned.

The Blue Wave Vs. The Red Wall

One state where the Blue wave faltered badly was North Carolina, which kept its illegal, unconstitutional partisan gerrymander through the 2018 election thanks to some help in foot-dragging from the Trump regime.  It paid off, too.  Republicans kept their 10-3 seat edge despite Democrats winning the popular vote in the state yet again.

“The blue tide did not breach the gerrymandered sea wall that exists because of the broken redistricting process we have in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause NC. “That was what we were watching for. We were waiting to see, does anything change? Gerrymandering does provide a protective sea wall for those districts.”

Across the state, Republican candidates for Congress won 50.3 percent of the vote and Democrats won 48.4 percent of the vote, according to a News & Observer analysis of vote totals. Democrats did not have a candidate in Eastern North Carolina’s 3rd district, won by Republican incumbent Rep. Walter Jones.

But Republicans kept their 10-3 edge in the state’s House delegation.

Republican Rep. George Holding defeated Democratic challenger Linda Coleman 51.2 percent to 45.8 percent in the 2nd district, which includes suburban Wake County.

Republican Rep. Ted Budd defeated Democratic challenger Kathy Manning 51.5 percent to 45.5 percent in the 13th district, which includes part of suburban Greensboro.

And Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready 49.4 percent to 48.7 percent in the 9th district, which includes parts of suburban Charlotte. All results are unofficial until certified by the state.

A three-judge panel has twice ruled the congressional districts are unconstitutional because of excessive partisan gerrymandering, with the latest ruling coming in August. The judges, which allowed Tuesday’s elections to proceed under the maps, said no future elections could use the districts as drawn. The ruling has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of the authors of the maps had a different view of the results.

“The fact that the Democrats competed so heavily in the seats means that they were very confident they could win those seats,” said state Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican who helped draw the districts.

“If they are very confident they could win those seats, it proves the seats were not drawn to keep them out of the process ... Any person who has looked through their mailbox or watched TV or gone on the internet or opened a newspaper knows these seats are in fact competitive.”

Don't count on the 2020 map being any better.  Yes, Democrats shorted out the supermajority that the GOP had in the state legislature and now governor Roy Cooper can actually veto things.  The worst abuses are on the way out.  But the ruling on NC's districts is now going before the Roberts court, and the only issue is whether Chief Justice Roberts will be the fifth vote to overrule the lower court.  Considering Roberts was more than happy to gut the Voting Rights Act, I fully expect SCOTUS to block the order despite the screaming racism involved in the gerrymander in the first place.

Cooper will have a tough re-election battle ahead to keep his governor's seat in 2020 too.  Like it or not, the Red Wall is here to stay in North Carolina, and in several other states in the South and Midwest.

But one of those states where Democrats are having the same problem is Ohio, and unlike North Carolina, Ohio is only getting older and whiter.  ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis has been covering Ohio politics for a while now, and this thread on Ohio Dems in 2018 is pretty sobering.

Yes, Sherrod Brown won reelection, which shows the enduring appeal of his rumpled brand of economic populism. (Though his flawed opponent got almost 48% despite getting relatively little party/outside backing.)

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 8, 2018

Outside of Sherrod Brown, the Buckeye State is basically a lost cause for Dems in the Trump era.  Unless they want to permanently cede it to the GOP along with Indiana and Kentucky, Ohio Dems need to figure out how to win in a state that is tailor-made for the politics of white resentment.

I don't know if they can. The Red Wall is definitely protecting Ohio, and unlike NC, I don't see a way over, around or through it.

Meat The Press, Con't

If the Trump regime wanted to get the headlines off of yesterday's firing of Jeff Sessions in an effort to interfere with the Mueller probe and tie the media up in knots, the White House definitely accomplished that last night by revoking the press credentials of CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta after falsely accusing him of assaulting a White House aide at a Trump post-election press conference Wednesday.

In a stunning break with protocol, the White House said Wednesday night that it's suspending the press pass of CNN's Jim Acosta "until further notice." 

The move came just hours after Acosta, CNN's chief White House correspondent, drew the ire of President Donald Trump and his allies by asking multiple questions at a post-midterms news conference. Trump insulted Acosta and called him a "terrible" person. 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced in a statement that Acosta would be stripped of what's known as a "hard pass," which gives him access to the White House grounds. 

CNN said in a statement that Acosta has the network's full support. 

The revocation of his pass "was done in retaliation for his challenging questions at today's press conference," the statement said. "In an explanation, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders lied. She provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened. This unprecedented decision is a threat to our democracy and the country deserves better. Jim Acosta has our full support." 

In the 7 p.m. hour on Wednesday, Acosta was stopped at the White House's Pennsylvania Avenue gate where reporters usually enter. He was heading back to the White House for a live shot on "Anderson Cooper 360." 

The real reason of course was that Acosta asked one question too many about the Racist-in-Chief, and Trump finally lost his temper as the walls of the Mueller probe are closing in.  I don't expect Acosta to get his press pass back either, if he does, I will be very surprised.   Trump is fully committed to the media as "enemies of the people" narrative after this week's loss of the House to Democrats, and Acosta is only the first of what I expect to be many casualties.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders went on a Twitter tirade, posting a long string of garbage about Acosta's unacceptable behavior with a doctored video that conveniently popped up on right-wing sites a couple of hours after the news conference and that he owed the White House aide a formal apology after "putting his hands on her" as she was taking the mic out of his hand while asking a question of Dear Leader Trump.

Trump needs a distraction right now to give his new Acting AG Matthew Whitaker time to torpedo the Mueller probe, and crucifying Jim Acosta definitely has the media on the defensive, and his base is baying for blood.  I don't expect any of Acosta's colleagues will do more than whine, either, because they know they will be next.

What they should do is as a whole refuse to cover Trump until Acosta gets his credentials back, but the press only cares about access, so it will never happen.  Acosta will be disappeared and replaced by another CNN reporter, which is what Trump wants. And Actually, Acosta's egregiously unfair punishment is exactly what Trump needs to get his failures off the front page.  Judging from the headlines this morning, it's working.

Until the press walks out on Trump, nothing will change.

StupidiNews!

• At least 13 are dead and 12 more injured at a mass shooting in a dance club in Thousand Oaks, California early Thursday, the shooter is believed to be among the dead.
• Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is officially apologizing on behalf of Canada for Ottawa's refusal to accept a 1939 refugee ship carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees.
• British PM Theresa May is pushing a draft UK Brexit deal this week ahead of plans to finalize a compromise with the EU by the end of this month.
• Democrats are warning that Donald Trump could delay release of his tax returns subpoenaed by a Democratic House committee for months, if not years, in a fight that could stretch beyond 2020.
• Samsung is teasing a phone that unfolds into a tablet for a 2019 launch as the manufacturer gets its annual developer conference under way this week.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom

People keep telling me that the Trump regime isn't a bunch of white supremacists, but for some weird reason, admitted white supremacists keep ending up at the White House.

The leader of a white nationalist group whose members marched in the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville visited the White House on Wednesday, according to pictures he posted online.

Patrick Casey, who heads the group Identity Evropa, posted the pictures to Twitter, in which he is seen posing on the White House grounds on what he described as a visit to “pay my respects.”

“Evropa has landed at the White House!” Casey tweeted.

Three sources familiar with how the Trump White House operates tell The Daily Beast that Casey could not have reached the location directly in front of the White House’s south front by himself or on a tour. Casey, the source said, likely would have had to be escorted by a Trump administration staffer wearing an official badge to get that kind of access.

Identity Evropa is a highly controversial group. Several of its members marched with other white supremacists in Charlottesville, and its previous leader was found guilty in a misdemeanor trial for his role. Since taking over Identity Evropa late last year, Casey has sought to distance the group from that fatal rally by adopting a public image focused on white “identitarianism.”

The group’s motto, “You will not replace us”, both refers to the idea that non-white groups are intent on eliminating white Americans and echoes the “Jews will not replace us” slogan that white supremacists chanted in Charlottesville.

The pictures from Casey’s White House visit were tweeted on the same day that President Donald Trump held a press conference in which he bristled at a reporter who questioned whether his embrace of “nationalism” encouraged white nationalists. Trump responded by claiming that the question itself was “racist.” The reporter who asked the question, PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor, is African American.

This is Trump's base, people.  This is the leader of the tiki torch carrying assholes that led a white pride parade through an American city, and then got invited to the White House grounds.  One day after midterms and the guy fires Jeff Sessions, puts a crony in charge of Mueller, and has the local white ethno-state racist asshole over for giggles and selfies.

If you're still a Republican after the last two years, I'd tell you that you needed to do some soul searching, but it's obvious you have no soul.  But hey, guess what, now you're supporting the party that wants to embrace people who want to forcibly relocate and/or kill people like me, and you expect me to accept that the person in the White House and his party are both okay with that?

I'm not ready to make nice with violent racists who want me gone, or the party that supports those racists.  Dig?

 

The End Of The Session(s), Con't

As widely expected, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is resigning at request of Donald Trump, just hours after Trump earlier today at a press conference said that he'd rather discuss that prospect at another time.  Apparently that "other time" was on Twitter this afternoon.

Jeff Sessions resigned from his role as attorney general at President Donald Trump’s request on Wednesday.

Sessions was an early supporter of Trump’s campaign and one of the first people nominated to his Cabinet. But the president grew publicly frustrated with Sessions’ leadership of the Justice Department, specifically his March 2017 decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and alleged coordination with the Trump campaign. Shortly afterward, in May 2017, deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the FBI’s Russia investigation ― a decision that also angered Trump.

Trump’s frustration with Sessions became undeniable in late May of this year, when Trump tweeted that he wished he hadn’t named Sessions as head of the Justice Department.

The president’s remarks came a day after The New York Times reported that he’d asked Sessions to reverse his recusal from the Russia probe shortly after the attorney general announced it. Trump later pushed back, claiming that Sessions never told him he planned to recuse himself.

So at this point, we see what happens.  I told you two months ago this was coming. Sessions will be replaced by his Chief of Staff, Matthew Whitaker, as acting AG, which automatically means Rod Rosenstein is no longer overseeing the Mueller probe because Sessions was recused.  Whitaker apparently has no such qualms and is now in charge.

If you have any doubt as to what's about to happen, before becoming Sessions's Chief of Staff, Whitaker authored this CNN piece saying Rosenstein should rein in Mueller.

Any investigation into President Trump's finances or the finances of his family would require Mueller to return to Rod Rosenstein for additional authority under Mueller's appointment as special counsel. 

If he were to continue to investigate the financial relationships without a broadened scope in his appointment, then this would raise serious concerns that the special counsel's investigation was a mere witch hunt. If Mueller is indeed going down this path, Rosenstein should act to ensure the investigation is within its jurisdiction and within the authority of the original directive.

've prosecuted several financial crimes at the federal level and I've also defended plenty in my private practice. From this unique vantage point, I can understand how a motivated prosecutor, in a broad investigation into the financial affairs of high-profile individuals, can become overzealous toward the targets of such probes -- with calamitous results. While no one is above the law, in situations such as this, any seasoned prosecutor must use discretion both judiciously and expertly. 

It is time for Rosenstein, who is the acting attorney general for the purposes of this investigation, to order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation to the four corners of the order appointing him special counsel. 

If he doesn't, then Mueller's investigation will eventually start to look like a political fishing expedition. This would not only be out of character for a respected figure like Mueller, but also could be damaging to the President of the United States and his family -- and by extension, to the country.

Expect Whitaker to move very quickly on reining in Mueller.  There's no need to fire Rosenstein with Sessions resigning, he can do with Mueller whatever he wants.

That hammer will fall quickly and Mueller knew it was coming.  He has made preparations.  We're about to find out what they are.  Worst case scenario,the new Democratic House majority subpoenas Mueller's materials and continues from there.

Stay tuned.

The Blue Wave Crested The Red Wall

The Blue Wave happened last night, guys.

Democrats won the popular vote in the House last night by about seven points, they will end up with about 35 pickups, maybe a few more.  This is 100% unalloyed good news.  There were a couple of surprise wins for the Dems like Oklahoma's 5th, South Carolina's 1st and New York's 11th that were long shots, and the Dems basically will end up splitting the 30 tossups evenly while winning all the races they were favored in.

Having Democrats in charge of House committees in January means Donald Trump will be truly investigated.  Even if Trump fires Mueller today, Democrats will finally conduct real oversight of Trump and his criminal actions, and Trump knows it.

On the governor's side, Dems picked up seven Governor's seats, unfortunately Florida wasn't one of them, and Stacey Abrams hasn't conceded in Georgia yet, but she has a major legal battle ahead against Brian Kemp's cheating.  Still, Kris Kobach went down in flames in Kansas.  The Brownback nightmare is over.   And Scott Walker lost, finally.  The upper Midwest is shifting blue again after 2016.

And that brings us to the Senate.  The good news, Dems picked up Nevada as Dean Heller lost.  Confederate racist Corey Stewart got 1.3M votes in Virginia and got crushed anyway by Tim Kaine's 1.8M plus. The bad news: Heitkamp, Donnelly, and McCaskill all lost, and Bill Nelson and Jon Tester are both behind in races that could go to recounts, and Arizona is still too close to call this morning, if Kyrsten Sinema does end up losing, it will be because of the Green party candidate, and that really pisses me off.

Still, it could have been worse. Medicaid was expanded in Nebraska, Utah, and Idaho.  That's a big win that will help hundreds of thousands. We knew the Senate was going to be long odds, and it was.   But Democrats won the House back, guys.  We won some big races and seven governor's seats back.  This is good, good news.  It's not fantastic, but winning the Senate was, well, fantasy. 

The reality is still pretty damn awesome.

StupidiNews!

• French law enforcement have arrested six in connection with a plot to assassinate French President Emmanuel Macron, all six suspects have connection to the far right.
• Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee say they will subpoena Donald Trump's tax returns in January.
• Hungary's government plans to create a new system of administrative courts overseen by Justice Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi, a move the opposition calls a judicial power grab.
• Boeing is close to issuing a safety warning for its 737 Max jets after last week's fatal plane crash in Indonesia killed 189.
• After AT&T's purchase of Time Warner earlier this year, the cable and mobile giant is cracking down on copyright infringement and suspending the broadband accounts of egregious violators.