Last Call For Red Light, Green Light In Riyadh

Donald Trump's destabilization of the Middle East, specifically his allowance of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to run rampant and seize power over the last two years, is diplomatic damage that will reverberate for decades.

Top Saudi intelligence officials close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked a small group of businessmen last year about using private companies to assassinate Iranian enemies of the kingdom, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

The Saudis inquired at a time when Prince Mohammed, then the deputy crown prince and defense minister, was consolidating power and directing his advisers to escalate military and intelligence operations outside the kingdom. Their discussions, more than a year before the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, indicate that top Saudi officials have considered assassinations since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s ascent.

Saudi officials have portrayed Mr. Khashoggi’s death as a rogue killing ordered by an official who has since been fired. But that official, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, was present for a meeting in March 2017 in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where the businessmen pitched a $2 billion plan to use private intelligence operatives to try to sabotage the Iranian economy.

Ahh, but let's not forget that all this is part of a larger scheme.

During the discussion, part of a series of meetings where the men tried to win Saudi funding for their plan, General Assiri’s top aides inquired about killing Qassim Suleimani, the leader of the Quds force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and a man considered a determined enemy of Saudi Arabia.

The interest in assassinations, covert operations and military campaigns like the war in Yemen — overseen by Prince Mohammed — is a change for the kingdom, which historically has avoided an adventurous foreign policy that could create instability and imperil Saudi Arabia’s comfortable position as one of the world’s largest oil suppliers.

As for the businessmen, who had intelligence backgrounds, they saw their Iran plan both as a lucrative source of income and a way to cripple a country that both they and the Saudis considered a profound threat. George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, arranged the meeting. He had met previously with Prince Mohammed, and had pitched the Iran plan to Trump White House officials. Another participant in the meetings was Joel Zamel, an Israeli with deep ties to his country’s intelligence and security agencies.

Both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel are witnesses in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, and prosecutors have asked them about their discussions with American and Saudi officials about the Iran proposal. It is unclear how this line of inquiry fits into Mr. Mueller’s broader inquiry. In 2016, a company owned by Mr. Zamel, Psy-Group, had pitched the Trump campaign on a social media manipulation plan.

A spokesman for the Saudi government declined to comment, as did lawyers for both Mr. Nader and Mr. Zamel.

We've known for months now that the Saudis and Emiratis are deeply involved in Jared Kushner and Erik Prince's little assassination for hire scheme, selling the services of Prince's mercenary connections along with access to Kushner's father-in-law Donald Trump, to the highest bidder.   We know Prince's US assets were used by the Saudis to help eliminate Khashoggi.  And we know Mueller is absolutely on to Prince and Kushner.

It's all connected.

If you want to know why Trump is panicking these days, it's not just Donald Junior who's in real trouble.

Down Goes Dana

California Moscow Republican Dana Rohrabacher is done, down 4% now with all the votes counted, but he's refusing to concede because that's the thing now.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who for decades represented wealthy, Republican-dominated portions of California's Orange County, lost his reelection bid to Democrat Harley Rouda Saturday night.

As votes continued to be counted following Tuesday's vote, Rouda's lead over Rohrabacher continued to grow. By Saturday night, the Democrat was leading the 15-term incumbent with 52% of the vote, compared to 48% for Rohrabacher — an advantage of about 8,500 voters, with all 395 precincts counted.
As of Saturday night, Rohrabacher had not yet officially conceded the race.

Rohrabacher first took office in 1989, campaigning off his experience working as a young speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. He cruised to victory for 14 more terms. Until recently, a Republican win in his district had been considered inevitable, given the region's long history as a conservative bastion in the deep blue state.

But much has changed in the 48th District, and for the first time, pollsters this year put down Rohrabacher's race as a toss-up. Analysts attributed the closeness of the race largely to Orange County’s shifting demographics, noting that more young and Latino voters were rallying around Democrats in what has long been considered a reliably Republican region of Southern California. At play were also Rohrabacher’s entanglements with Russia and his strident support for President Donald Trump — considered a mark against him in a district that narrowly went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Rouda, a real estate investor who once registered as a Republican, campaigned on the promise that he would take a less divisive and partisan approach to representing the district. It was a message that proved popular with some Republicans and independents in Orange County, who didn’t see their values reflected by Trump — and by extension, Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher had felt confident going into Election Day, he told BuzzFeed News on Sunday. But he also forecast that he could blame a loss on Democratic meddling. "We know that … unless we win by a recognized margin that the Democratic Party steals elections,” Rohrabacher told BuzzFeed News. “If you’re, if it’s under 5%, we know that this election could be stolen from us."

It's pretty clear at this point that the Trump regime narrative shaping up for the rest of the year and into January is "Look at all the elections Democrats stole from you".  The GOP wipeouts in New York, New Jersey and especially California will be blamed on imaginary perfidy.

When Trump outright refuses subpoenas from House Democrats next year, he'll say that the committee chairs and Nancy Pelosi aren't legitimately in charge, and that the White House won't cooperate until new elections are held in those states, because of course the elections in states where Republicans kept their gerrymandered House delegations like Ohio and NC are perfectly fine despite winning two-thirds of House districts with 51% of the vote.

Trump will call House Democrats "illegitimate" for the next two years in preparation for 2020.

Watch.

Sunday Long Read: Physicians, Heal Thyself

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Peter DeMarco of the Boston Globe, who recounts the story of the death of his wife Laura two years ago, who drove herself to the hospital as she suffered an asthma attack, and died in a Massachusetts hospital emergency room waiting for somebody, anybody, to help her.

Some 10 minutes passed between the time Laura called 911 and the time she was found, in cardiac arrest following a devastating asthma attack. Those 10 minutes meant her life.

We didn’t know at first how many of those minutes she’d gone without oxygen to her brain, so for most of the seven days Laura spent in the intensive care unit at CHA Cambridge Hospital, where she was transferred, there was a glimmer of hope. If Laura had been conscious after making the 911 call for even three or four minutes, she had a chance to pull through.

Her doctors told us we could only wait, because her brain was swelled, preventing a clear CT scan. Each day, they would lift her eyelids and shine a light straight into her pupils, looking for movement. There was a small flicker early on, but little more.

Laura Levis, the love of my life, my wife, died September 22, 2016. She was 34. Her death certificate says she died the day before, of hypoxic brain injury, but that was just when Dr. Duncan Kuhn brought Laura’s father, my father, and me into a private waiting room in the intensive care unit. In a gesture of humility, Kuhn sat on the floor, looking up at us as he told us Laura wasn’t coming back.

Laura was still on a respirator, still breathing, her hands and body still warm, her hair still soft. Her organ donor surgery couldn’t be scheduled until the next day, which is the day I consider to be her last on this earth. She died minutes after I let go of her hand in the third-floor hallway of that hospital, after a team of doctors wheeled her through a set of double doors into an operating room, cutting into her beautiful body so that others could have life and sight from her gifts, including her heart.

This part of our story, I have shared before. I wrote a letter thanking the doctors and nurses who tried to save Laura’s life that The New York Times decided to publish. “Every single one of you,” I wrote to the medical staff, “treated Laura with such professionalism, and kindness, and dignity as she lay unconscious.” The letter was featured on NBC Nightly News,shared across Facebook, and republished on websites across the world. Less than three weeks after Laura’s death, millions were touched by her life.

But that was not the whole story. Far from it.

As any husband would, I blamed myself for not being with her when the attack struck, for not being able to help my wife in that moment. I asked God, Why? Why? Why?

I knew that one day I would have to find the spot where she collapsed. That I would lie down on that spot, to be with her spirit, to comfort her because she must have been so, so scared.

I have since learned where that spot is. But it did not turn out to be on a street leading to Somerville Hospital, or some obscure location.

Laura made it to the doorstep of the emergency room that day, on her own two feet, just as she said in her dying words. She stared through a plate-glass window into the emergency room waiting area — she could see the red-and-white emergency room sign inside — but she could not get in. To her dismay, the door was locked.

Her attack intensifying, she called 911, telling the operator she was right there but could not get in.

Help was just a few feet away, on the other side of that door.

But, incredibly, that help never came.

This is the story of how my wife’s life was wasted by the actions of people whose job it is to save lives. It is the story of how our entire emergency-response system can completely fail us, from the moment we dial 911 and the satellite GPS “ping” of the cellphone can get our location wrong by hundreds of feet. It is the story of how cracks and flaws not just at Somerville Hospital, but throughout our health care system — communication errors, overburdened staffs, lack of fail-safes — can snowball into someone’s unimaginable death.

And it is the story of how there will be no justice through our legal system for what happened to Laura, as public hospitals in Massachusetts, and throughout most of America, are largely protected by state laws against malpractice and negligence claims, leaving thousands who rely on such institutions little recourse when harmed or lied to.

Even when a 34-year-old woman is left to die outside an emergency room, destroying the lives of the people who loved her.

Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong for Laura Lewis, and she died because of it.  If that sounds like a nightmare scenario for you, well, you're not alone.  It happens to thousands of people every year in this country, because emergency rooms are overloaded, because we make hospital ERs the primary care of tens of millions of Americans who literally can't get health care anywhere else.

Our health care system is broken, and one party wants it that way.

The Recount Account, Con't

Florida's Senate and Governor's races are both going to a state-mandated recount after the counts in Palm Beach and Broward counties narrowed the gaps to under .5% leads for Republican candidates.

The Florida secretary of state is ordering recounts in the U.S. Senate and governor races, an unprecedented review of two major races in the state that took five weeks to decide the 2000 presidential election.

Secretary Ken Detzner issued the order on Saturday after the unofficial results in both races fell within the margin that by law triggers a recount.

The unofficial results show that Republican former U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis led Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by less than 0.5 percentage points, which will require a machine recount of ballots.

In the Senate race, Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s lead over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is less than 0.25 percentage points, which will require a hand recount of ballots from tabulation machines that couldn’t determine which candidate got the vote.

The issue is Broward County.  It's home to Fort Lauderdale, north of Miami-Dade County, and home to two million people.  There's a major undervote issue there, and the recount will determine if people did try to vote for these offices or just left them blank because Broward County's ballot was six pages long this year.  Palm Beach County has 1.5 million, and has a similar issue.

The changing margin is due to continued vote-counting in Broward and Palm Beach counties, two of Florida’s largest and more Democratic-leaning counties. On Thursday evening, the supervisors of elections in the two counties told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that vote counting there was mostly complete. Under Florida law, counties have to report unofficial election results to the secretary of state by Saturday at noon, but Nelson’s campaign is suing to extend that deadline. Scott’s campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are also suing both counties for not disclosing more information about the ongoing count, and Scott called on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate Broward’s handling of ballots.

Unusually, the votes tabulated in Broward County so far exhibit a high rateof something called “undervoting,” or not voting in all the races on the ballot. Countywide, 26,060 fewer votes were cast in the U.S. Senate race than in the governor race.1 Put another way, turnout in the Senate race was 3.7 percent lower than in the gubernatorial race.
Broward County’s undervote rate is way out of line with every other county in Florida, which exhibited, at most, a 0.8-percent difference. (There is one outlier — the sparsely populated Liberty County — where votes cast in the Senate race were 1 percent higher than in the governor race, but there we’re talking about a difference of 26 votes, not more than 26,000, as is the case in Broward.)

To put in perspective what an eye-popping number of undervotes that is, more Broward County residents voted for the down-ballot constitutional offices of chief financial officer and state agriculture commissioner than U.S. Senate — an extremely high-profile election in which $181 million was spent. Generally, the higher the elected office, the less likely voters are to skip it on their ballots. Something sure does seem off in Broward County; we just don’t know what yet.

One possible reason for the discrepancy is poor ballot design. Broward County ballots listed the U.S. Senate race first, right after the ballot instructions. But that pushed the U.S. Senate race to the far bottom left of the ballot, where voters may have skimmed over it, while the governor’s race appears at the top of the ballot’s center column, immediately to the right of the instructions.

In other words, there's a very, very good chance that tens of thousands of voters missed the place on the ballot to actually vote.  On the other hand, the margin is so small that Miami-Dade and Palm Beach recounts -- which will be done by hand for Senate contest -- could save Bill Nelson and send Rick Scott packing.

I feel much less confident about Andrew Gillum's chances in the governor's race versus Pocket Racist™ Ron DeSantis, but again, we're talking about the three counties having more than six million people combined, so anything's possible.

The recount has to be done by Thursday, so we'll know soon.

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.