Mississippi Turning

There's still one more Senate race to be decided next week, the runoff in Mississippi between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic candidate Mike Espy, and we could very well have another Doug Jones/Roy Moore situation in the works.

A U.S. Senate runoff that was supposed to provide an easy Republican win has turned into an unexpectedly competitive contest, driving Republicans and Democrats to pour in resources and prompting a planned visit by President Trump to boost his party’s faltering candidate.

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith stumbled recently when, in praise of a supporter, she spoke of her willingness to sit in the front row of a public hanging if he invited her — words that, in the South, evoked images of lynchings. She has struggled to grapple with the fallout, baffling members of her party and causing even faithful Republicans to consider voting for her opponent, former congressman Mike Espy.

That Espy is attempting to become the state’s first black senator since shortly after the Civil War made her remarks all the more glaring. It has positioned him to take advantage not only of a substantial black turnout but of a potential swell of crossover support from those put off by Hyde-Smith’s campaign.

Espy remains the underdog in the conservative state, but Republicans with access to private polling say Hyde-Smith’s lead has narrowed significantly in recent days. Republicans need only to look to next-door Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones pulled out a surprise win last year, to stoke concern.

For Republicans, the Nov. 27 runoff is a chance for a slight expansion of their majority in the Senate, their one bright spot in this year’s midterm elections. If Hyde-Smith wins and Gov. Rick Scott keeps his lead in the Senate race in Florida, Republicans would have a senate majority of 53 to 47. A loss in Mississippi would give the GOP a 52-to-48 majority, only one up from the current razor-thin margin.

Trump’s campaign announced Saturday that he would hold rallies for Hyde-Smith in Tupelo and Biloxi the night before the election. The Republican National Committee, meantime, has two dozen staffers in Mississippi and plans to send more. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is also sending reinforcements and last week made a $700,000 ad buy.

The GOP is in full panic mode here and will most likely lock the state down as they did with Tennessee and Sen. Marsha Blackburn cruising to a easy win.  But -- and it's a big caveat here -- Hyde-Smith was appointed earlier this year and Mike Espy is a former Congressman, there's more than a bit of name recognition on Espy's side.

Republicans will almost certainly keep this seat, but it won't be a double-digit runaway win, either. 

If you're in the Magnolia State, you can make a difference next week!

Sunday Long Read: We Gotta Face The Face

 With all due respect to Pete Townshend...

You must have heard the cautionary tales
The dangers hidden on the cul-de-sac trails
From wiser men who've been through it all
And the ghosts of failures spray-canned up on the wall

Sheryl Sandberg was seething.

Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company.

But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos’s briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.

“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present.

The clash that day would set off a reckoning — for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest-ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500.

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook’s reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism.

This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook’s cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation.

Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform.

Facebook really does need to be shut down, or at least, Zuckerberg and Sandberg need to be summarily fired and replaced by people who actually care about Facebook's users.  But this NY Times piece makes the strong case for the former, that Facebook isn't salvageable, and that they've done more damage to the US as a whole than just about any other corporate cancer in this country.

House Democrats really do need to come down on Facebook, and hard.

Meat The Press, Con't

With the CIA now firmly pointing the finger for the murder of Saudi dissident journalist and Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it appears that at least one Trump regime official has resigned over the White House's complicity in Khashoggi's grisly death.

A top White House official responsible for American policy toward Saudi Arabia resigned on Friday evening, a move that may suggest fractures inside the Trump administration over the response to the brutal killing of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

The official, Kirsten Fontenrose, had pushed for tough measures against the Saudi government, and had been in Riyadh to discuss a raft of sanctions that the American government imposed in recent days against those identified as responsible for the killing, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Specifically, she advocated that Saud al-Qahtani, a top adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, be added to the list, and he ultimately was.

The exact circumstances of her departure are murky, and it is unclear whether her advocacy for a hawkish response to the killing angered some in the White House. When she returned to Washington, according to the two people, she had a dispute with her bosses at the National Security Council, where she had served as the director for the Persian Gulf region.

A representative for the council declined to comment. Ms. Fontenrose did not reply to messages seeking comment.

It gets worse, as the Turks are understandably pissed about having the Saudis run US hit squads in their back yard, and the White House is now trying to appease them as well.

President Donald Trump on Saturday declined to say whether American intelligence officials had implicated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, following reports the CIA had concluded the crown prince ordered Khashoggi's assassination.

"They haven’t assessed anything yet. It’s too early,” the president told reporters when asked if the CIA had assessed the crown prince's involvement, according to a pool report.

“It’s a horrible thing that took place, the killing of a journalist,” Trump said. “We’ll be having a very full report over the next two days, probably Monday or Tuesday.”

Trump said that report will convey what members of the intelligence community "think the overall impact was, and who caused it, and who did it.” Trump also said he spoke with CIA Director Gina Haspel earlier in the day.

Upon departing the White House on Saturday morning for a trip to survey damage from wildfires in California, Trump heralded Saudi Arabia as a “spectacular ally” — two days after his administration leveled sanctions against 17 Saudi officials for Khashoggi's death. The president demurred on any potential involvement by the crown prince.

“As of this moment we were told that he did not play a role,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to have to find out what they have to say.”

Trump also rejected a Thursday report by NBC News alleging that his administration is considering extraditing exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen in the hope of dissuading Turkish President Recep Erdogan from punishing the Saudis for Khashoggi’s murder.

“It’s not under consideration,” Trump said, adding that “we’re having a very good moment with Turkey,” and citing Erdogan’s release of American pastor Andrew Brunson in October.

Needless to say, this is a full-blown diplomatic nightmare and Trump is bending over backwards to make both Riyadh and Ankara happy, while each one would love for the US relationship with the other to crumble.  It also means somebody at the CIA definitely wants the Trump regime to dump the Crown Prince as the result of the leaked report late last week.

Trump is dithering on the report's contents, but it's pretty clear that the Crown Prince is responsible.  What happens from here is anyone's guess.  Say what you will about the CIA leaking for political reasons, but Trump has gone out of his way to piss off the intelligence community, and they were always able to make his life miserable.

They did just that this week.  There's a lesson there for Trump.

Last Call For Hell Fires

The wildfire situation in California has grown exponentially worse.  While the death toll confirmed from the Camp and Woolsey fires is now in the dozens, the number of people missing and unaccounted for now ranges over a thousand souls. 

The death toll from the Camp Fire in Northern California has increased to 71 while 1,011 people are unaccounted for, the Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said Friday. He cautioned the list is "dynamic" and will fluctuate.

The blaze is now 50 percent contained after consuming more than 145,000 acres.

In Southern California, just outside of Los Angeles, the Woolsey Fire is 78 percent contained after burning 98,000 acres.

Now, dense smoke from the fires is smothering parts of the state with what has been described as "the dirtiest air in the world."

Firefighters have been racing against time, with a red flag warning issued for Saturday night into Sunday, including winds up to 50 mph and low humidity. Rain was forecast for mid-week, which could help firefighters but also complicate the challenging search for remains.

"It's a disheartening situation," Honea said. "As much as I wish we could get through this before the rains come, I don't know if that's possible."

The other issue is the dry air has turned the smoke and ash from the fires into a massive and dangerous air quality problem for millions in the Bay Area.

The wildfires that have laid waste to vast parts of California are presenting residents with a new danger: air so thick with smoke it ranks among the dirtiest in the world.

On Friday, residents of smog-choked Northern California woke to learn that their pollution levels now exceed those in cities in China and India that regularly rank among the worst.

In the communities closest to the Paradise fire, an apocalyptic fog cloaked the roads, evacuees wandered in white masks and officials said respiratory hospitalizations had surged. Nearly 200 miles to the south, in San Francisco, the smoke was so thick that health warnings prompted widespread school closings. Even the city’s cable cars were yanked from the streets.

And researchers warned that as large wildfires become more common — spurred by dryness linked to climate change — health risks will almost surely rise. “If this kind of air quality from wildfires doesn’t get people concerned,” said Dr. John Balmes, a pulmonologist at the University of California at San Francisco, “I don’t know what will.”

At fault, researchers say, is a confluence of two modern events: More people are moving to communities in and around wooded enclaves, pushed out by factors like the rising costs of housing and the desire to be closer to nature — just as warming temperatures are contributing to longer and more destructive wildfires.

Wood smoke contains some of the same toxic chemicals that city pollution does. While humans have long been around fire, they generally inhale it in small doses over cooking or heat fires. Humans have not, however, evolved to handle prolonged inhalation of caustic air from something like the Paradise blaze, Dr. Balmes said.

In other words as deadly wildfires become more frequent in the US, so will killer clouds of smoke, smog, and ash from fires burning hundreds of thousands of acres and causing billions of dollars in damage to both property and people's health. 

The larger problem right now is that there's a very good chance that the final death toll from these fires will be over a thousand, we're talking about people who have been missing for over a week now.  Unless they've been gathering someplace that firefighters and rescue personnel haven't been able to reach, odds are both slim and grim.

The coverage of this has been minimal to say the least, the assumed death toll would put this just behind Katrina in the list of deadliest US natural disasters, and Trump is puttering around saying this is California's fault.

This is terrible and it will only get worse.

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.