If You Come For The Queen, You Best Not Miss

Once again we have the conservative white male flank of the House Dem Blue Dogs causing problems before the Dems can even take over in January, and once again the race is on to "defeat" incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with...well nobody seems to actually have applied for the job. Never fear however, Reps. Tim Ryan and Seth Moulton are convinced that if Pelosi loses a floor Speaker vote (because she must be punished after...the largest Democratic midterm gains since Watergate) that magic will happen and a new champion will emerge, or that's the plan anyway if they actually had a plan.

What’s remarkable about the block-Pelosi play is that there is no Candidate B — no other Democrat has yet stepped forward to publicly challenge Pelosi for the post. According to a Democratic representative close to the effort, the idea behind the letter announcing an anti-Pelosi bloc is to demonstrate that she cannot win, and force Pelosi to withdraw rather than suffer an “embarrassing” defeat on the House floor. With Pelosi clearing the field, the theory goes, new candidates would emerge and the Democratic caucus would shake up its staid leadership ranks.

Moulton is not trying to become Speaker himself: “I’ve been very clear I’m not running,” he told Rolling Stone in June. The anti-Pelosi bloc is trying to recruit another woman to compete for the post. “There’s plenty of really competent females that we can replace her with,” Ryan told the New York Times. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is reportedly mulling a run against Pelosi. “Congress needs a new leader. Period,” Moulton tweeted, backing 66-year-old Fudge: “I have full faith in her ability to lead our new Congress to its fullest potential.”

The insurgency has been brewing, quietly, for months. When Rolling Stoneasked Pelosi about Moulton and Ryan in May, she dismissed them as “inconsequential,” adding: “I have great support in my caucus. I’m not worried about that. And I’m certainly not worried about them.” In recent days Pelosi, has expressed “total confidence” she will regain the Speaker’s gavel.

Rolling Stone has been talking with both Moulton and Ryan on and off for the past year-and-a-half, seeking to understand their motives. What do these men want?

Ryan, who hails from post-industrial Youngstown, was blunt in his assessment of the Democratic Party this week: “We need a brand change.” He tells Rolling Stone that he wants a less coastal Democratic Party, pointing out the lack of House leaders from the middle of the country. “It’s a pretty large swath of the country to completely ignore,” he says. “How in God’s name do we expect to win the House, have a significant majority, hold it, have a party brand that’s connecting to people, and have nobody in the Midwest at all?”

In past interviews, Ryan has lamented his party’s turn toward political correctness. “We can’t have these purity tests,” he said, before listing a few key characteristics all Democrats should have. “You can’t be racist. You can’t be sexist. You can’t be homophobic — you’ve got to check those boxes — and then be economically progressive,” he said. “Other than that, we’ve got to be a big-tent party.” Ryan said he wants Democrats to come up with an umbrella economic agenda that can unify the party’s diverse coalition: “A robust economic message that all of those different groups could hear and go, ‘Yeah, you know, That’s me. I’m in on that.’”

Mouton has also voiced a centrist view of Democratic ideals. “It means someone who cares about the middle class, who truly believes that we are a nation of equal opportunity. That does not mean it’s a nation of equal results,” he told Rolling Stone. “We have a free-market system that we love and embrace.” Moulton seemed most concerned about America’s global leadership: “We need to talk about how to have a strong and smart national security strategy while Trump is being reckless across the globe. And not just complain about Trump, but talk about what Democrats will do.”

Moulton, in particular, railed against Pelosi’s leadership. “It’s not about ideology, it’s much bigger than that,” Moulton said. “It’s about having a vision for the future. We’ve become a party that’s just anti-Trump and doesn’t have any vision itself.”

Moulton was unsparing in his assessment of how Pelosi has managed the caucus — and in particular about what he sees as a lack of opportunity for younger members to advance in a Democratic House dominated by 70- and 80- somethings. “We need to have leadership that has the confidence to build our party’s bench, not discourage newer or younger or members from running or contributing… that’s what our party does right now.” If a private company, Moulton said, blocked the rise of young talent and “didn’t have any vision for how to take that company forward, you would never keep the same leadership.”

I don't get it.  First, the Republicans have "younger, newer leadership" and they're basically a bunch of incompetent dipsticks.  Paul Ryan will go down as the most embarrassingly inept House Speaker in modern history.  Pelosi on the other hand is really, really good at running the Dem caucus as a united front, which is the Speaker's job for the majority party.  It's one thing to say "Pelosi needs to go because we lost a bunch of House seats" and that vote failed.  It's another thing entirely to say "We need to get rid of Pelosi because we won a bunch of House seats."

Second, nobody else wants the job at all, really.  Marcia Fudge's name has been thrown around the most, and as a result Pelosi has done the smart thing and met with her on Friday.  Fudge came away admitting that Pelosi asked her what Fudge's concerns were and how she could address what Fudge thought were problems with Pelosi's leadership, including Pelosi agreeing to only serve two more years while Democrats can decide on a new leader.  That's the kind of thing leaders do.

Third, Moulton really needs to stop because at this point, he's coming across as a hater if not a Republican plant.  Even Republicans were smart enough to have a replacement already to go, even if they were the incompetent torch-passing goobers that went from Boehner to Ryan to now Kevin McCarthy.

This whole fight is stupid, plus the media loves DEMS IN DISARRAY stories no matter how much of a dumpster fire the GOP is.  Why play into it?

Oh wait, Moulton is pals with GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, who happily helped spew Trump's lies on the "caravan" of refugees before the election.

All starting to make sense now, huh.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Stacey Abrams has relented in the Georgia governor's race and Brian Kemp will win, having overseen his own election to the office.  There's every reason to believe that Kemp won by disenfranchising tens, if not hundreds of thousands of black voters in the state as Ari Berman at Mother Jones reports.

Georgia was the epicenter of Republican voter suppression tactics in 2018. As secretary of state, Kemp instituted a series of suppressive policies that Abrams said allowed him to “tilt the playing field in his favor.” These efforts uniquely hurt voters of color, who formed the backbone of the Abrams base, while having a much smaller effect on white voters, who strongly supported Kemp.

Kemp began by shrinking the electorate. Under his leadership, Georgia purged 1.5 million voters from 2012 to 2016, twice as many as in the previous four years, and removed an additional 735,000 voters from the rolls over the past two years. On one evening in July 2017, Georgia purged 500,000 voters, in an act the Atlanta Journal Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.” Some voters were removed legitimately, because they had died or moved, while others were purged for more controversial reasons, such as not having voted in the previous six years. More than 130,000 of those purged had registered to vote in 2008, when Barack Obama first ran for president, and nearly half were voters of color.

Registration problems were widespread in Georgia. Weeks before the election, the Associated Press reported that Kemp’s office had put 53,000 people on a pending registration list because information on their voter registration forms did not match state databases. Seventy percent were African American and 80 percent voters of color, in a state that’s 60 percent white. Though these people remained eligible to vote, the list led to widespread confusion, and there were reports on Election Day of hundreds of people on the pending registration list being forced to cast provisional ballots or leaving the polls without voting, even though they should have been given regular ballots. Three thousand naturalized US citizens—who were disproportionately Latino and Asian American—were put on the list because their citizenship status didn’t automatically update in state databases when they become citizens.

The 22,000 provisional ballots cast in 2018 far exceeded the number of provisional ballots in 2014 (12,000) and 2016 (17,000). Based on data from past elections, rough half of these ballots will be rejected, according to election officials. A federal court found that the increase in provisional ballots was “likely to have been the result of persistent problems and/or errors in the State’s voter registration system and ineffective administration of the provisional balloting scheme.”

Days before the election, Kemp falsely accused Georgia Democrats of “cyber-crimes” for uncovering vulnerabilities in the secretary of state’s website. Georgia was one of only five states that used electronic voting machines with no paper backups, and Kemp repeatedly resisted efforts to secure the state’s voting system, accusing the federal government of trying to “subvert the Constitution” when it offered to help safeguard against Russian hacking in 2016.

“The number of people who cast provisional ballots,” says Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, “doesn’t even come close to the number of people who were disenfranchised.” The Abrams campaign heard from 25,000 people who had problems voting. Henderson helped oversee election protection efforts for nonpartisan voting rights groups and said “our phones in the command center were ringing off the hook.”

Long lines at the polls were another big problem. The average wait time on Election Day was three hours in metro Atlanta. One largely African American precinct outside Atlanta saw four-and-a-half-hour lines. There were no similar reports of long lines in Republican-leaning areas. It’s impossible to know how many people left without voting because of the lines. Georgia had the second-longest voting wait times of any state in 2016, and the problem only got worse in 2018.

Long lines were compounded by the fact that Georgia had closed 214 polling places since 2012. “One-third of Georgia’s counties,” reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “have fewer precincts today than they did in 2012.” More than half of the counties with closed voting locations had African American populations of 25 percent or higher. Though the decisions were made by individual counties, Kemp’s office advised them on how to close polling locations.

A series of court decisions before the election rebuked Kemp’s actions, finding that he violated laws such as the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, and Help America Vote Act. (More voting rights lawsuits have been filed against Georgia than any state except for Texas since 2011.) In five court decisions, judges instructed Georgia to count absentee ballots rejected because of mismatched signatures or missing birth dates; ordered counties to give voters more time to have their provisional ballots counted; and said that naturalized citizens should be given the opportunity to vote if they brought proof of citizenship to the polls. But it’s unclear how many of the orders filtered down to poll workers or everyday voters, who remained confused by the dizzying number of voting restrictions and last-minute court rulings.

When he was running for reelection as secretary of state in 2014, Kemp warned: “Democrats are working hard registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines. If they can do that, they can win these elections in November.” Kemp did everything in his power to make sure that didn’t happen in 2018—and that’s a big reason why he, and not Abrams, will be Georgia’s next governor.

Kemp has shown the GOP the path to victory in any state close to being purple: relentless and repeated purging of black voters and then making it as difficult as possible to vote in majority black precincts.   When it takes nearly five hours to cast a vote, that is suppression on a massive scale. It is criminal and Brian Kemp should be impeached if not in jail, but this will only get worse as the GOP grip on power in states like Georgia loosens.

You will never convince me that Brian Kemp didn't outright steal this election, and Democrats need to be ready to fight this all the way, because it will absolutely happen again.

The Little Domestic Terrorism Problem Of Ours, Con't

A major law enforcement drug sting operation on a group of white supremacist terrorists in Florida (natch) yielded scores of guns, a couple of pipe bombs, and an actual rocket launcher.

Thirty-nine members of the United Aryan Brotherhood and Unforgiven neo-Nazi groups were arrested in a Florida drug trafficking sting — and one had functional pipe bombs in his home.

Tampa’s WFTS-TV reported that the multi-agency sting codenamed “Operation Blackjack,” a three-year-long investigation, led to the seizure of more than 110 illegal firearms, a rocket launcher and two pipe bombs from the individuals mostly based in Pasco County, Florida.

Authorities also seized “several pounds” of meth and fentanyl.

Prosecutors accused one man, 31-year-old Richard Mormon, of having “at least two fully functional pipe bombs” though authorities were unsure what he planned on doing with them.

The United Aryan Brotherhood is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s oldest prison-based white supremacist group. The Anti-Defamation League reported that Unforgiven is a Florida-based neo-Nazi prison group whose insignia “consists of an interlocking Iron Cross and swastika, with SS lightning bolts in the center.”

We're not that far away from the point where one of these groups pulls off a massive casualty event on the scope of 9/11 that kills thousands.  I'm of the mind that so far law enforcement has gotten lucky because crime is brutally Darwinian if you don't have the money or power make up the spread.

But I swear Trump is tipping that balance and one of these days, a convention center or office building or outdoor event is just going to turn into a bloodbath because of these creeps. I think it's coming soon, and I hate being this afraid.

You press on anyway, but this is one of those times where the bad guys have to lucky once, and law enforcement has to be perfect, or people are going to die.

Meanwhile, America chooses to deal with this as the new normal:

Bleeding is the leading cause of death at a mass shooting, but one-third of victims can survive if treated within five minutes. The Stop the Bleed program is teaching students how to do it.

NBC News' @DrJohnTorres reports. pic.twitter.com/RzVJrWjAHa

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) November 16, 2018

Welcome to life as a Gen Z teenager, where we teach that you can be comfortable in your own unique expression of sexual identity and accepting of and supporting that expression in others, and also helpful tips in battlefield medic triage.

Last Call For Sing A Song Of Sick Pence, Con't

Trump's "Nixon in the Bunker" routine has gotten so bad now that he's openly questioning if VP Mike Pence is after his job and maybe helping Mueller behind his back or something.

President Trump’s post-midterm election news conference at the White House last week took a surprising turn when a reporter asked about locking down his 2020 ticket.

“Mike, will you be my running mate?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Pence, who stood up, raised his hand, and nodded.

“Will you? Thank you. O.K., good,” the president said. “That was unexpected, but I feel very fine.”

But in private Mr. Trump is apparently not feeling so fine. In recent weeks, with his electoral prospects two years from now much on his mind, Mr. Trump has focused on the person who has most publicly tethered his fortunes to him. In one conversation after another he has asked aides and advisers a pointed question: Is Mike Pence loyal?

Mr. Trump has repeated the question so many times that he has alarmed some of his advisers. The president has not openly suggested dropping Mr. Pence from the ticket and picking another running mate, but the advisers say those kinds of questions usually indicate that he has grown irritated with someone.

The answers Mr. Trump gets to his question have varied, depending on whom he asks.

Within the White House, most people he has talked to have assured the president that Mr. Pence has been a committed soldier, engaging in activities that Mr. Trump has eschewed, such as traveling to Hawaii to receive the remains of veterans of the Korean War, or visiting parts of the globe that Mr. Trump has avoided.

But some Trump advisers, primarily outside the White House, have suggested to him that while Mr. Pence remains loyal, he may have used up his utility. These advisers argue that Mr. Trump has forged his own relationship with evangelical voters, and that what he might benefit from more is a running mate who could help him with women voters, who disapprove of him in large numbers.

Now perhaps this is just a trial balloon fed to Maggie Haberman by Trump to see if anyone wants Pence's job, maybe it's a test of Pence's loyalty through what's coming, or maybe Trump's just looking for someone to blame for the coming storm and Pence is a novel target.  But maybe Trump is breaking down completely and seeing ghosts in the walls and he's one step short of talking to White House portraits, too.

At this point any of those are real possibilities.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Robert Mueller's flip of two of Trump's biggest fixers, Michael Cohen and George Nader, are the gifts that keep on giving (and we know Rick Gates continues to provide information too).  We've yet to see the real fruits of these efforts but they are coming, Cohen has led to the Trump Organization case currently being run by the AG of New York's office, and Nader's turn has led to some major international players.

On that last front, now we're learning that Nader is leading us to back to the Trump transition team and Republican operatives who are now in boatloads of trouble, starting with Dick Cheney's former national security aide, John Hannah.

Dick Cheney’s former top national-security aide has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, two people with knowledge of the probe tell The Daily Beast. It’s the latest sign that Mueller’s probe has expanded beyond the narrow bounds of Russian interference in American politics.

Mueller’s team has been looking into the communications and political dealings of John Hannah, the former Cheney adviser who later worked on Trump’s State Department transition team. This includes interactions with Lebanese-American businessman and fixer George Nader, who brokered meetings between foreign dignitaries and Team Trump, and Joel Zamel, a self-proclaimed social-media guru with deep ties to Israeli intelligence. The Daily Beast previously reported that the three men met with a top Saudi general in the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration to discuss plans to undermine and overthrow the government of Iran.

Hannah, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, is close with Nader and Zamel, both of whom the special counsel has questioned, according to two people with knowledge of those relationships. Hannah is listed on the website of one of Zamel’s firms, Wikistrat, as a member of its advisory council. Nader worked with Hannah on Iraq policy during the George W. Bush administration, according to four people who worked with the two or who knew of their interactions during the war. Hannah is now a senior counselor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank known for its criticism of the Iranian regime.

Hannah and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The Special Counsel’s Office declined to comment. A representative for Nader declined to comment. And a lawyer for Zamel did not respond to requests for comment.

Nader and Zamel have both been questioned by the Special Counsel’s Office and are reportedly cooperating with its probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Nader has been questioned about his ties to high-level officials in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, his relationship with Zamel, and his interactions with the Trump campaign. Mueller has questioned Zamel about his role pitching top campaign officials on an influence operation to help Trump win the election—which could have broken federal election laws.

Mueller’s interest in Hannah’s communications and interactions with the two suggest the special counsel’s probe is broader than previously understood.

“Mueller might be opening another front here,” said John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA. “His mandate is to examine Russian collusion, but there’s the clause in his mandate that’s very open-ended—to the effect of ‘and any associated matters.’ It could be a separate line of inquiry about efforts to influence the election by foreigners.”

Everyone is expecting more indictments soon.  They could come at any time, but my experience tells me Mueller likes to ruin people's weekends on Friday afternoons.

We'll see.

A Heaping Helping Of Julian Fries, Or Wacky Leaks

The DoJ is coming for WikiLeaks founder (and Russian disinformation peddler) Julian Assange.  And we know this because the Justice Department appears to have...well...leaked...the information.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under seal, prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a recently unsealed court filing — a development that could significantly advance the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and have major implications for those who publish government secrets.

The disclosure came in a filing in a case unrelated to Assange. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing.”

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have long been investigating Assange and, in the Trump administration, had begun taking a second look at whether to charge members of the WikiLeaks organization for the 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents that the anti-secrecy group published. Investigators also had explored whether WikiLeaks could face criminal liability for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cybertools.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also has explored WikiLeaks’ publication of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. Officials have alleged that the emails were hacked by Russian spies and transferred to WikiLeaks. 

So I'm not sure if this was an amazingly dimwitted accident, or something done on purpose to give Assange a major heads up that he should get gone.  If this is the first really big leak out of the Mueller probe, more indictments and charges could be coming, but something about this entire mess stinks.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Broward County Florida failed to reach its recount deadline by 2 minutes, so results will not be recounted for Governor, meanwhile for the Senate race, all votes will be hand recounted.
• Alabama 17th Judicial Circuit DA Greg Griggers is in stable condition after being shot in the face by a former Alabama state trooper, police killed the gunman at the scene.
• The Pentagon has failed its first true comprehensive audit, the $2.7 trillion Defense Department has a long way to go to resolve fiscal issues that could take years to complete.
• UK Prime Minister Theresa May vows to fight on as Tory hardliners are threatening a no-confidence vote over the country's Brexit deal.
• A federal judge in Montana has ruled that Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer is not subject to First Amendment protections in a lawsuit filed by an online harassment victim.

Last Call For Low-Hanging Orange Fruit

Cook Political Report's Amy Walter ran the numbers on the Democratic party's blue wave last week and found that Trump's support may be a mile-wide in districts that he claimed in 2016, but only an inch deep as Trump didn't get 50% of the vote in a lot of districts.  These shallow districts are where the Democrats targeted their House wins, and they peeled the GOP apart like an orange.

Not long after the November 2017 elections, I had lunch with David Petts, a Democratic pollster and longtime veteran of congressional campaigns. He remarked that the Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey performed within one to four points of President Trump in every congressional district in the state. The good news for the Republicans was that they didn’t lose districts that Trump easily carried. The bad news, even a GOPer not named “Trump” did not perform any better in districts Trump narrowly won or narrowly lost in 2016.

Petts handed me a spreadsheet that arranged the GOP-held congressional districts by Trump 2016 vote and argued Democrats should target every single district in which Trump took 55 percent of the vote or less. The theory being that Trump’s vote in 2016 would be the high-water mark for GOP candidates in 2018. As important to note were the significant number of districts that Trump won, but where his margin of victory masked his anemic vote share. Take New Mexico’s 2nd district. Trump won that district by 11 points, yet took just 50 percent of the vote. It was Clinton who underperformed there.

I tacked that chart onto the wall near my computer and watched it closely throughout the year. And, as Trump replayed his 2016 “all-base-all the time” strategy as president, it became clear he wasn’t going to be any more popular in the places that he lost, nor any less popular in the places that he won big. As such, the vote Trump took in a district in 2016, remained an accurate barometer for GOP vote share in 2018 in those districts.

Petts’ theory proved to be prescient. Of the 47 districts where Trump took less than 51 percent of the vote, Democrats have (so far) won 32 of them. If we exclude Utah’s four districts (in which Trump’s vote share was depressed thanks to the presence of third-party candidate and Utah native Evan McMullin), Democrats will have won at least 74 percent of the districts held by Republicans where Trump was the weakest in 2016.

Moreover, thirteen of those 32 districts were ones that Trump carried in 2016. In other words, using the number of seats held by Republicans that Trump lost (25) was the wrong metric. Vote share was the more appropriate standard.

For all the talk that open seats are what doomed Republicans, well-prepared incumbents weren’t any more resilient to the wave than GOP challengers. Only seven (non-Utah) Republicans outperformed Trump in their districts by more than five points. Five of those Republicans were incumbents; two were in open seats. Of those seven, only two of these strong over performers won: Reps. Mario Diaz Balart (FL-25) and John Katko (NY-24).

In two races that are yet to be called, but where the Democrat is favored - ME-02 (Poliquin) and NJ-03 (MacArthur) — Trump took just 51.4%. And, even the three ‘surprise’ wins for Democrats — SC-01, OK-05 and NY-11 — were in districts that Trump won with less than 54 percent.

In fact, at this point, there’s not one district that Democrats won that Trump carried by more than 54 percent of the vote.

Democrats took aim at the widespread weakness of the GOP nationwide and they won.  As as Trump only gets more unpopular as we head towards 2020, expect another tier of House Republican districts to become vulnerable in two years.

That Little Domestic Terrorism Problem Of Ours, Con't

At this point America needs to be asking where and when another synagogue is going to be attacked, because the overt anti-Semitism in this country is getting worse on a daily basis.

A man shouted a pro-Nazi and pro-Trump salute during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre on Wednesday night in an outburst that some audience members feared was the beginning of a shooting.

Audience member Rich Scherr said the outburst happened during intermission. The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”

The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued. But Scherr, 49, said it was hard to focus on the play after that. “My heart was just racing. I didn’t even really pay attention to the second act.”

“Fiddler” tells the story of a Jewish family as it faces persecution in tsarist Russia. It’s based on “Tevye the Dairyman,” a fictional story originally written in Yiddish. The play opened Tuesday and runs through Sunday in Baltimore. A spokesman for the Hippodrome could not be reached late Wednesday.

Scherr, who is a contributing sportswriter for The Baltimore Sun, posted a video from after the incident onto Facebook. 

It's getting worse because there is an entire political party dedicated to making it so in order to try to preserve its dwindling power.

The United States has seen a recent surge in anti-Jewish incidents, including a shooting last month at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 people inside.

Anti-Jewish incidents reported to police in Maryland jumped 47 percent in 2017 to 78 incidents, according to a Baltimore Sun review of records. That was amid a 35 percent increase of overall hate or bias incidents reported to police statewide last year.

Hate crimes are up under the hatemonger in the White House.  Who could have known? White nationalist rallies are now a regular feature of the American landscape.

It’s a biting cold Saturday morning in Little Rock and a hush has descended around the Arkansas State House. The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is in town for a demonstration.

“It’s sad,” an elderly traffic warden says as we wait for NSM’s convoy of minivans and clapped-out SUVs to arrive. “They need the Lord.”

Around two dozen black-clad NSM members eventually show up for this latest rally, supposedly to protest against “Human Rights violations in South Africa,” but police are still taking no chances. The streets surrounding the Capitol have been sealed off, armored MRAPs wait nearby and snipers line a nearby rooftop. Throughout the afternoon, a police helicopter and drone buzz around in the air, monitoring the protest and counter-demonstration.

It could be argued that the heavy law enforcement presence is giving NSM — founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell as an offshoot of the America Nazi Party, and which was present at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — exactly the kind of attention it craves. But when you consider how heavily-armed this group is, as well as its constant threats about being ready to defend itself against the so-called Antifa threat, the police response starts to make some sense.

Actual Nazis, armed, demonstrating in public.  Trump gave them permission. They're his base, after all.

Pretty soon these guys won't stick to just protests.

We live in a country where people have now been conditioned to entertain the possibility, if not expect it, of being involved in a mass casualty shooting to kill black people or Jewish people or just a bunch of people.

Welcome to America in the Trump era.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Everything seems to be pointing to some major indictments very soon in the Mueller probe.  CBS News was reporting that the charges could be unsealed as early as last Tuesday, but so far, it's been 48 hours and nothing new.  We head into Thursday with two stories indicating that when Mueller does drop the hammer, it will be epic.  First up, I keep telling people that Roger Stone is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that's because his friends are idiots.

Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Roger Stone had a text message conversation with a friend about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records obtained exclusively by NBC News.

“Big news Wednesday,” the Stone pal, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”

“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.

“Great,” Credico wrote back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.” 

Credico turned out to be wrong on one count — nothing incriminating about Clinton came out that Wednesday. But two days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.

Stone, a confidante of then-candidate Donald Trump and notorious political trickster, has denied any collusion with WikiLeaks.

But the text messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. In the texts, Credico told Stone he had insights into Assange's plans through a longtime friend, who was also Assange’s lawyer, according to the text messages.

Reached Wednesday, Credico downplayed the text exchanges. “There's absolutely nothing there that I had any knowledge of anything that Assange was going to do because I didn't,” he told NBC News.

"Where's the smoking gun?" he added.

I'll let Robert Mueller handle that.  But trust me when I say Stone will die in prison.  Because if he doesn't go under for being the Trump regime's conduit to the Russian spy operation at WikiLeaks, he's going down for witness intimidation of Credico.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is exploring whether longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone tried to intimidate and discredit a witness who is contradicting Mr. Stone’s version of events about his contacts with WikiLeaks, according to people who have spoken to Mr. Mueller’s investigators.

In grand jury sessions and interviews, prosecutors have repeatedly asked about emails, text messages and online posts involving Mr. Stone and his former friend, New York radio personality Randy Credico, the people said. Mr. Stone has asserted that Mr. Credico was his backchannel to WikiLeaks, a controversial transparency group, an assertion Mr. Credico denies.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are probing whether Mr. Stone had direct contact with WikiLeaks and knew ahead of time about its release of stolen Democratic emails, as he claimed during the campaign and now denies. Mr. Stone says he is angry at Mr. Credico because his ex-friend has “refused to tell the truth” about being his conduit to WikiLeaks.

Filmmaker David Lugo, who knows both men, said in an interview he has testified before Mr. Mueller’s grand jury about a blog post Mr. Stone helped him draft that was harshly critical of Mr. Credico. Another witness, businessman Bill Samuels, said he was questioned by Mr. Mueller’s team about Mr. Credico’s reaction to allegedly threatening messages sent by Mr. Stone.

Prosecutors also are examining messages between Messrs. Stone and Credico that involve the radio personality’s decision to assert his Fifth Amendment before Congress, according to a person familiar with the probe.

Ahh, what tangled webs we weave, when we leave text messages on our phones.

Stay tuned.  Stone's going in a box very, very soon.

StupidiNews!

• Multiple news outlets, including Fox News and CBS News, are filing briefs in favor of CNN's lawsuit against the Trump regime over the pulling of WH reporter Jim Acosta's press credential. 
• A California jury has cleared Johnson & Johnson of all liability in a lawsuit involving a woman's claims the company's talc powder caused her cancer.
• House Republicans have elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy as their new Minority Leader in January, McCarthy takes over for retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan.
• Incoming House Trade subcommittee chair Rep. Bill Pascrell says that the Trump regime will need significant changes to the new Canada/Mexico trade deal before Democrats will support it.
• Kepler telescope data shows one of our closest galactic neighbors, Barnard's star, has a large super-Earth sized planet orbiting it.

Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment, Con't

The awful part (besides the violence towards women here) is that nobody should be shocked by Michael Avenatti's behavior and arrest.

Michael Avenatti, the outspoken attorney who represents porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal battles against President Donald Trump, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in Los Angeles, police said.

The alleged incident occurred Tuesday and a report was taken, police said.

Avenatti was arrested Wednesday by officers with the West Los Angeles station.

The oldest of sins, Avenatti apparently beat his wife and the charges are felony-level domestic violence, in California that usually means with a weapon, unacceptable in any fashion.

Hopefully this is the last we hear from him other than sentencing.

And if you thought for a moment that he was going to "save" the Dems in 2020, reexamine your biases and get your crap together, he was a grifter from square one.

That Little Domestic Terroism Problem Of Ours, Con't

White supremacist and self-proclaimed Nazi Jeffrey Clark was arrested on gun charges only after his family basically told the FBI that he was planning to kill people.

Jeffrey Clark, the 30-year-old man federal agents arrested here Friday after he called the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting a “dry run” and his relatives worried he might try to launch a race war, wasn’t shy about being a neo-Nazi.

In April 2017, when someone asked Clark at a White House rally organized by “alt-right” coiner Richard Spencer whether he considered himself a fascist, he said no ― he considered himself a Nazi. Antifa activists photographed him at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. He has posed for pictures in front of Nazi symbols and holding Nazi memorabilia.

On Gab, the favored social network of racists and anti-Semites, Clark had the username @PureWhiteEvil and called himself “DC Bowl Gang,” a reference to Dylann Roof, the bowl-cut racist who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Many alt-right white supremacists worship Roof, and Clark used an image of the killer and balaclava-clad gunmen as the header for his Gab page. His pinned image was an altered still from the video game “Doom” that depicted Roof executing black people in a church.

This April, Clark threatened a HuffPost reporter, warning that the reporter would be going “feet first into a woodchipper.” The reporter told police about the threat in August. They did nothing at the time. In late October, D.C. police did come to Clark’s house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood after the death by suicide of his brother, Edward, but did not arrest him.

Clark told family members he had been “friended” on Gab by Robert Bowers, the man charged with murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27. Clark, court documents said, told family members the victims “deserved it.” He wrote on Gab that the attack was a “dry run for things to come” and that “the fucking kikes that got shot by the hero #RobertBowers were all active supporters of pedophilia … and every last one of them deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse,” according to court documents. Pedophilia-centric conspiracy theories are popular among members of the far-right; in 2016, a North Carolina man armed with a rifle drove to a Washington, D.C., pizza place he falsely believed was the center of a vast pedophilia ring. No one was injured in the shooting.

It wasn’t until November, after Clark’s own family contacted law enforcement, that the FBI finally found the allegedly illegal weapons that have him facing gun charges. Court documents, as well as photos and videos obtained by HuffPost, suggest Clark’s late brother, Edward Clark, shared a similar ideology. That both men were able to spew neo-Nazi rhetoric, amass an arsenal of weapons, and openly threaten journalists and critics for months without consequence shows just how much freedom far-right extremists have to operate in the U.S. — and how far their behavior has to escalate before law enforcement takes it seriously.

Despite months, if not years of active threats towards people in public and online, Clark was only arrested and his threat was only taken seriously when his family ratted out his illegal weapon collection.  It had to get that far before Clark was considered a threat.

The fact that Clark could have easily used legal and obtainable weapons to slaughter dozens doesn't seem to have registered with anyone.

As with any terrorist, we should be asking where, who, and how behind Clark's radicalization, but of course the answer is America's law enforcement, America's military, and America's executive branch, and we can't take too close of a look at any of that.

The First Lady's Last Nerve

Turns out that First Lady Melania Trump is just as venal, vindictive, and mean as her husband, she just has slightly better impulse control.

A feud with the first lady's office is expected to cost a senior national security adviser her job after she sparred with East Wing staff and other key members of the Trump administration. 

The dispute spilled into public view in extraordinary fashion on Tuesday when the first lady's office released a statement calling for deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel's ouster as reports surfaced that President Donald Trump would fire the official. 

A White House official confirmed to CNN that Trump has told people that Ricardel will be fired. But the official said she has been given some time to clear out her desk. It was not immediately clear when she would officially make her exit. 

"It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that (Ricardel) no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House," the first lady's communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The statement amounted to a stunning public rebuke by a first lady of a senior official serving in her husband's administration. It came after reports surfaced earlier Tuesday indicating Ricardel would be pushed out of her post after less than seven months on the job. 

Neither Ricardel nor spokespeople for the National Security Council responded to CNN requests for comment. 

Ricardel was one of John Bolton's Mustache's sidekicks on Trump's National Security Council.  The fight apparently started when Ricardel's staff accompanied Melania Trump's staff on her utter failure of a goodwill trip to Africa last month, and quickly devolved into an episode of House of Cards.

Not that I'm sad to see of the Mustache's minions get the boot, but Bolton will just replace Ricardel with somebody worse.  The bigger problem is apparently DOnald Trump is willing to fire anyone to keep his wife happy.  I'm trying to recall Michelle Obama being this much of a Disney villain, and of course she isn't and never was.  Lord knows if she had publicly hung up a head on her mantle like this, official Washington would have gone bonkers calling her names.

I don't expect anyone to do the same to Melania Trump.  At least, not to her face.

Methinks Ricardel won't be Melania's last head on a pike, either.  I wonder how much exposure she has to the whole Mueller probe.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A former US Navy captain has plead guilty to criminal conflict of interest charges in connection with the massive "Fat Leonard" bribery scandal, he faces up to five years in prison.
• A federal judge will hear Wednesday CNN's lawsuit against the Trump regime for violating Jim Acosta's First Amendment press freedom rights when the White House pulled his press pass.
• Phermaceutical gian Pfizer has lost its $5 billion patent case in the UK on its pain drug Lyrica, Britain's high court has ruled that the drug's secondary patent as a pain treatment is invalid.
• It's May's way or the highway as UK's Prime Minister Theresa May is asking all cabinet members to back her Brexit plan or resign in protest.
• A California man has plead guilty to causing the death of a Wichita man by "swatting", calling in a false law enforcement threat over a spat over video games.