Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

That didn't take long, did it?

A 55-year-old New York man was arrested Friday for allegedly threatening to kill freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Elmira Star-Gazette reports. 

The man, identified as Patrick W. Carlineo, is said to have called the Democratic lawmaker’s office on March 21 and made threatening comments, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Western District of New York.  

“Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are you working for her, she’s a fucking terrorist. I’ll put a bullet in her fucking skull,” Carlineo allegedly said.  

Omar’s office reportedly immediately reported the call to the United States Capitol Police, Threat Assessment Section, which in turn got the FBI involved.  

While questioned by FBI agents over the call late last month, Carlineo reportedly described himself as a patriot who loves President Trump and hates radical Muslims in public office.  

Investigators also reportedly found a shotgun and a .22-caliber rifle at his home.  

The arrest comes just a few weeks after Fox News host Jeanine Pirro suggested on-air that Omar’s wearing of a hijab might be “indicative” of loyalty to Sharia law, a claim which quickly sparked backlash and saw her show temporarily bumped from the air.

We've already had Gabrielle Giffords and Steve Scalise shot in assassination attempts on House lawmakers in the last decade.  We should be horrified that it very nearly happened a third time.

And speaking of happening a third time...

Three historically black churches have burned in less than two weeks in one south Louisiana parish, where officials said they had found “suspicious elements” in each case. The officials have not ruled out the possibility of arson, or the possibility that the fires are related.

“There is clearly something happening in this community,” State Fire Marshal H. Browning said in a statement on Thursday. “That is why it is imperative that the citizens of this community be part of our effort to figure out what it is.”

The three fires occurred on March 26, Tuesday and Thursday in St. Landry Parish, north of Lafayette. A fourth fire, a small blaze that officials said was “intentionally set,” was reported on Sunday at a predominantly black church in Caddo Parish, about a three-hour drive north.

“But just as we haven’t connected the three in St. Landry, we haven’t connected the one in Caddo,” said Ashley Rodrigue, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Office of State Fire Marshal, on Friday.

Local officials said that they were still investigating the fires, and did not say if they knew of any suspects, a motive, or whether racism was an element.

“There certainly is a commonality, and whether that leads to a person or persons or groups, we just don’t know,” Mr. Browning said at a news conference on Thursday.

The F.B.I. and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are involved in the investigation, said Jeff Nowakowski, a spokesman for the A.T.F.’s New Orleans field division.

Remember, the Homeland Security task force that looked into white supremacist domestic terrorism like this was disbanded by the Trump regime earlier this year because white supremacist domestic terrorism isn't a priority.

Well, stopping it isn't a priority, anyway.

 

A Taxing Move By Trump

Despite the law being clear that House Democratic Ways and Means chair Richard Neal can indeed summon Trump's tax returns from the IRS, the Trump regime is signaling it will delay the request for months or years and fight the release all the way to SCOTUS if necessary.

President Donald Trump continues to hold his ground against Democratic efforts to obtain his tax returns, with one administration official telling CNN that the President and his team are willing to fight the House Democratic request all the way to the Supreme Court. 

"This is a hill and people would be willing to die on it," the official said. 

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal formally requested six years of Trump's personal tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in a letter Wednesday. 

The official added that the administration is "not going to set the precedent" of turning over tax returns for future occupants of the Oval Office, slamming the House Democrat request from Neal as "abuse and overreach by Congress" and asked what's stopping Senate Republicans from seeking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's returns. 

"They have zero right to it," the official said, who added Trump has also made it clear he's not releasing his tax returns. 

Trump has retained Arlington, Virginia-based law firm Consovoy McCarthy Park PLLC to represent him on the matter. 

Lawyer William Consovoy argued in a statement on Friday that the requests for Trump's tax information "are not consistent with governing law, do not advance any proper legislative purpose, and threaten to interfere with the ordinary conduct of audits." 

In the Wednesday request, Neal cited a little-known IRS code. Under IRS code 6103, only the Joint Committee on Taxation, the House Ways and Means chairman and the Senate Finance Committee chairman have the authority to request the tax information of an individual. 

But in a detailed letter to the general counsel of the Treasury Department on Friday, Consovoy said that "the committee's authority is subject to important constraints," which, he said, citing the tax code, "extend to the ordinary taxpayer and the President alike." 

Consovoy said that Neal does not have a "legitimate committee purpose" for obtaining the tax returns, adding that Neal's request "is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics and speech."

America will never see Trump's tax returns for the same reason we'll never see the Mueller report: the information contained within it becoming public would mean the immediate end of the Trump regime.   Trump will fight both until 2021, if not 2023 or more in order to save himself from being forced out of office and then facing enough NY state charges for him and his family to spend a very long time in prison. For Trump himself it would be a life sentence.

Ask not why Trump wants to fight the release.  Ask why he has to stop it using any means necessary...and he will.

He doesn't have a choice.

The War In Yemen, Con't

A bipartisan vote in the House has approved a Senate bill ending materiel support for the US military presence in Yemen, something that will run into a guaranteed Trump veto, but an important vote nonetheless.

The House on Thursday voted to end American involvement in the Yemen war, rebuffing the Trump administration’s support for the military campaign led by Saudi Arabia.

The bill now heads to President Donald Trump, who is expected to veto it. The White House says the measure raises “serious constitutional concerns,” and Congress lacks the votes to override him.

By a 247-175 vote, Congress for the first time invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to try and stop a foreign conflict. The Senate vote was 54-46 on March 13.

“The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy,” said Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He said the humanitarian crisis in Yemen triggered by the war “demands moral leadership.”

The war in Yemen is in its fifth year. Thousands of people have been killed and millions are on the brink of starvation. The United Nations has called the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The top Republican on the committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, acknowledged the dire situation in Yemen for civilians, but spoke out in opposition to the bill, saying it was an abuse of the War Powers Resolution.

“This radical interpretation has implications far beyond Saudi Arabia,” McCaul said. He warned that the measure could “disrupt U.S. security cooperation agreements with more than 100 counties.”

Democrats overcame a GOP attempt to divide the majority party through a procedural motion involving Israel just minutes before the Yemen vote. Republicans wanted to amend the Yemen bill with language condemning the international boycott movement and efforts to delegitimize Israel. Democrats argued the amendment would kill the Yemen resolution, and most of them voted against the Israel measure.

“This is about politics, this is about trying to drive a wedge into this caucus where it does not belong,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said to applause from Democrats. Deutch described the boycott movement as “economic warfare,” but called on lawmakers to vote against the amendment.

“The Jewish community also has a history of standing up against atrocities like the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. My colleagues are trying to block us from standing in support of human rights,” he said.

Democrats saw the trap coming and disarmed it, and now Trump has to veto a bill and break one of his major promises of pulling US troops home.  The reality though is that the Saudis own the Trump family, specifically Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.  If Trump doesn't veto the bill and support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen dries up, the Kingdom would immediately retaliate, possibly in a fashion fatal to Trump's 2020 chances.

Trump knows this.  Everyone knows this.

Now Trump has to explain to his base why American dollars have to go to the Saudis, whom they hate.

Should be fun.

Last Call For The Anti-Social Networks

Clear majorities of Americans in the latest NBC News/WSJ poll see social media correctly as the fake news sinkholes and privacy-destroying monstrosities that they are, but they're not quite ready to call for the government to break them up.

Yet.

The American public holds negative views of social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter, with sizable majorities saying these sites do more to divide the country than unite it and spread falsehoods rather than news, according to results from the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

What’s more, six in 10 Americans say they don’t trust Facebook at all to protect their personal information, the poll finds.

But the public also believes that technology in general has more benefits than drawbacks on the economy, and respondents are split about whether the federal government should break up the largest tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.

“Social media — and Facebook, in particular — have some serious issues in this poll,” said Micah Roberts, a pollster at the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted this survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates.

“If America was giving social media a Yelp review, a majority would give it zero stars,” Roberts added.

According to the poll, 57 percent of Americans say they agree with the statement that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter do more to divide the country, while 35 percent think they do more to bring the nation together.
Fifty-five percent believe social media does more to spread lies and falsehoods, versus 31 percent who say it does more to spread news and information.

Sixty-one percent think social media does more to spread unfair attacks and rumors against public figures and corporations, compared with 32 percent who say it does more to hold those public figures and corporations accountable.

And a whopping 82 percent say social media sites do more to waste people’s time, versus 15 percent who say they do more to use Americans’ time well.

But those numbers also come as nearly seven in 10 Americans — 69 percent — say they use social media at least once a day.

As with the FCC and television, social media desperately needs regulation.  I just don't trust the Trump regime to do it properly at all.

The fact remains though trillion-dollar companies need to be broken up.

Trump Cards, Con't

Another Trump nominee for an executive branch position who is so corrupt, incompetent, and unqualified, not even Mitch McConnell's Senate will confirm him.

The White House on Thursday withdrew the nomination of a longtime border official to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration grapples with a massive increase in Southern border crossings that are straining the system with no easy solution, according to people with knowledge of the move.

The paperwork on Ron Vitiello was sent to members of Congress Thursday, the people said, and the decision was unexpected and met with confusion. Vitiello had been scheduled to travel with President Donald Trump to the border on Friday, but was no longer going, one official said. He will still remain acting director, they said.
One Homeland Security official insisted it was nothing but a paperwork error that had later been corrected. But other, higher-level officials said the move did not appear to be a mistake, even though they were not informed ahead of time.

The people had direct knowledge of the letter but were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Vitiello was nominated to lead ICE, the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law in the interior of the U.S., after more than 30 years in law enforcement, starting in 1985 with the U.S. Border Patrol. He was previously Border Patrol chief and deputy commissioner U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the patrol.

Vitiello took over during a time of unprecedented spotlight and scrutiny for the agency. Part of ICE’s mission is to arrest immigrants in the U.S. illegally, which has made it a symbol of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

He had been acting head since June 2018, nominated in August, had a Senate confirmation hearing in November and his nomination had passed one Senate panel, the people said. But because Homeland Security touches on so many topics, a second committee also had jurisdiction and his nomination was still under discussion there. Some Democrats had concerns, and a union representing some ICE agents had opposed his nomination.

Department of Homeland Security officials referred questions to the White House, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In other words, this guy had no chance at getting 50 Republican Senate votes.

Let that sink in.

Border Line Insanity, Con't

Me, last weekend, on Trump's border-closing bluff:

It's a bluff and everyone knows it.  Closing the border with Mexico would cost the country billions in trade dollars a day and Republicans in Congress aren't about to put up with that.  Trump has already blown a hole in the side of the US economy with his tariffs.  Closing the border with Mexico would only make things worse. 

Donald Trump, Thursday, reminding us "what border closing?"

President Donald Trump backpedaled on his threat to shut down the southern border, saying Thursday that now he doesn't think the US will "ever have to close the border." 

Trump, earlier Thursday, threatened to slap tariffs on automobiles made in Mexico and close the US-Mexico border if the country didn't stop "massive amounts of drugs" coming into the US within one year. 

"We're going to give them a one-year warning, and if the drugs don't stop or (are) largely stopped, we're going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular, the cars ... and if that doesn't stop the drugs, we close the border," Trump told reporters. 

But by Thursday evening, Trump had shifted his position again. 

"I don't think we'll ever have to close the border because the penalty of tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Mexico, at 25%, will be massive," Trump said. 

When asked if his comments suggested that his new auto tariffs mean the southern border will remain open for at least a year, Trump responded: "No, I didn't say that." 

"We would start with the tariffs and we'll see what happens," Trump said. "Now, maybe by the end of this press conference or tomorrow that'll stop. And if that stops we're doing a big tariff deal." 

So we're back to 25% tariffs on autos and parts from Mexico, which would bankrupt US automakers overnight.  And the latest threat deadline would put that right in the 2020 campaign.  Trump is bluffing yet again, because while he is sliding the country towards autocratic fascism with small daily steps, the bigger jumps are, for now, not being made.

Trump is still Trump, a con artist who is 100% bluff when he has no cards.

StupidiNews!

• House Democrats will sue the Trump regime over Donald Trump's emergency border declaration, adding to multiple lawsuits filed by states and NGOs protesting Trump's abuse of power.
• The Mormon Church says it will no longer consider LGBTQ members in a same-sex marriage to be heretics to be excommunicated, reversing a November 2015 decree.
• Donald Trump reportedly will be nominating former GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve, Cain will join conservative pundit Stephen Moore on the board.
• Elon Musk's Boring Co. tunnel-digging enterprise is in talks to operate in Israel, PM Benjamin Netanyahu believes Israel would be a good fit for his proposed Hyperloop transportation technology.
• Coming to your Android-powered Smart TV: Google ads on your streaming services as customers found out this week who are part of a new "pilot program" for on-screen ads.

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

The Trump regime is absolutely coming to destroy the free press, and various media control and regulation schemes will be field tested in the (meth) labs of Democracy first, at the GOP state level in places like Georgia.

Six Republican state representatives in Georgia have moved to create an "ethics board" for journalists that would require news organizations to provide copies of pictures and audio and video recordings of interviews to subjects who request them or risk civil penalty. 

The cost of meeting those requests would be paid by the news organizations.

The proposed legislation, House Bill 734, titled the "Ethics in Journalism Act," was sponsored Tuesday by Rep. Andy Welch, who represents the city of McDonough. 

The bill would create a board of media professionals and academics that would produce"a canon of ethics" and "develop a voluntary accreditation process in journalism ethics," which would also allow for the investigation and sanctioning of journalists. 

The proposed board appears to have little power to punish journalists other than to remove its own accreditation or impose a penalty if the interview request provision is not met. 

Welch also announced that he was retiring from Georgia's legislature at the end of its session on Tuesday, but that the bill would remain available for consideration during the state's 2020 legislative session, according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

And of course, the state could then pass laws that would only allow the state to deal with "properly accredited" journalists, who of course would then have to turn over copies of all interview material to subjects on demand.

It would be the end of investigative journalism and a free press, which is of course very much the point of the "ethics board".  If your immediate response is "no newspaper or TV station would touch a state legislator, cop, or politician with this law in place" then congrats, you see where this is going.

And believe me, Trump is taking notes. This will be sold as "fixing fake news" and news outlets will be expected to play or perish.

We get a little closer to fascism.

Crank More-Pork, Or The Other Other White Meat

The Trump regime engages in pork barrel politics at its finest by planning to cut FDA pork inspectors in half and replacing them with meat processor employees.

The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.

Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.

The new pork inspection system would accelerate the federal government’s move toward delegating inspections to the livestock industry. During the Obama administration, poultry plant owners were given more power over safety inspections, although that administration canceled plans to increase line speeds. The Trump administration in September allowed some poultry plants to increase line speeds.

The Trump administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners. Agriculture Department officials are scheduled next month to discuss the proposed changes with the meat industry.

These proposals, part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing, which developed the 737 Max jets involved in two fatal crashes over the past six months. Federal Aviation Administration certification of the two aircraft involved in the crashes took place under President Trump, but the major shift toward delegating key aspects of aviation oversight began during the George W. Bush administration.

So give it a few years and beef, pork, and chicken will be inspected by the meat companies, and not the government, and who knows if they'll care or if contamination and recalls will even be reported?  I guess if several thousand people all turn up dead maybe.

Enjoy your coming summer cookouts, America.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The NY Times is now running, not walking back its "Mueller Finds No Trump Collusion" story by actually doing some goddamn reporting and asking Mueller's team what Mueller did find, and the resulting story make it very clear that the report is bad enough for Trump that America will never see it.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

We basically suspected if not outright knew this material, but it took out journalistic institutions a couple of weeks apparently to get around to following up with Barr.  Now they're all but accusing him of covering up for Trump, and the fight, as Politico's Darren Samuelsohn describes it, will be the "redaction wars."

House Democrats want to see everything related to the special counsel’s nearly two-year-old investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But their open-book demands stand at odds with the Justice Department’s desire to black out sensitive areas throughout Mueller’s 400-page submission.

The high-stakes chess match will play out on both political and legal grounds, and so far neither side has yet to show any signs of compromise.

As a result, the battle could spill into the courts, setting up a protracted legal confrontation that inevitably causes waves in the thick of the 2020 White House race. For President Donald Trump, the possibility of freshly unveiled Mueller bombshells dropping while he runs for reelection could be devastating. But Democrats are in a tough position: pursuing their legal challenge at all costs could feed the Trump-approved narrative that they’re overzealous, but giving up risks angering their own Trump-hating base.

“It seems to be shaping up as a classic collision of interests by two coordinate branches of government, each with their own respective legitimate interests that may be in conflict with one another,” said David Laufman, who ran the Justice Department’s counterintelligence unit from 2014 to 2018 and had a key role overseeing the early stages of the FBI’s Russia investigation before Mueller’s appointment.

I fully expect Barr to delay  the report for "national security reasons related to ongoing cases" as long as he can get away with it.  But if you ask me, my gut tells me that this story is chin music right past Barr's head.

Maybe a full leak is next unless Barr plays fair.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• In a 313-312 vote, the UK Parliament has voted to force Prime Minister Theresa May to seek an extension of the Brexit process if there is no deal by April 12.
• Indicted NC GOP chair Robin Hayes will hand over day-to-day party operations but will not step down as he heals from "recent health setbacks".
• Ethiopia's Transport Ministry will release its initial report Thursday on the March 10 crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet that killed 157 passengers and crew.
• House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal is formally requesting six year of Donald Trump's tax returns from the IRS, Trump will refuse but the Treasury Department gets the decision.
• An Ohio teen is facing more than 70 counts of "swatting" police departments across the country, triggering armed response teams with fake emergency calls.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The mass deportation era that I've been predicting since Trump's election is almost upon us, and Trump is shifting preparations into high gear with plans to appoint a White House "immigration czar"...our old friend, Kris Kobach.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering adding a “border czar” to his administration, and the individual said to be at the top of the list of potential candidates is Kris Kobach—a Republican who helped author one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in recent history.

“In this administration, it does not surprise me at all. He exemplifies the view of this administration, which is contrary to American history because immigration is very much the story of success in this country,” Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Kobach is anti-immigration in the most mean-spirited way possible. And that’s clearly the policy that this administration has chosen to adopt towards immigrants,” Vance added.

According to an Associated Press report on April 1, the White House is looking for someone to spearhead the president’s immigration initiatives amid a surge in migrants crossing the southern border. On the shortlist of possible appointees is Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, and Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia.

While both men are immigration hardliners, Kobach once lent a hand in the creation of Alabama HB 56. The 2011 law is seen as one of the strictest anti-immigration policies in the nation and was once heralded by state lawmakers as an initiative for people to “deport themselves.”

Remember Alabama's "Papers, Please" law?  Kobach helped write it.

The law, officially titled the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, was aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Its net effect was to make the state inhospitable to undocumented immigrants by essentially creating new immigration-related crimes.

Under HB 56, renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. It required state police officers to investigate or detain people based on a “suspicion” that they may be undocumented. Educators were also told to collect information regarding the immigration status of the students and their parents.

“That, of course, tamped down on school participation and school attendance,” Vance said. “If you’re a 7- or 8-year-old kid missing a year of school while that litigation went on, that’s a huge game-changer for the rest of your life. But that was what it was intended to do.”

Vance was serving as a U.S. attorney during HB 56’s passage and successfully challenged key provisions of the law in court in United States v. Alabama. The Obama administration essentially argued that the state could not create its own immigration law that is contrary to federal policy as it would be a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The law has continued to unravel as many of its most substantial provisions have been blocked in court.

Kobach would be a disaster.  So would Cuccinelli.  Kobach in fact really, really wants to round up the undocumented (and their families) and put them in deportation camps.  Sorry, "asylum seeker processing areas".

But the guy you really have to watch out for is Stephen Miller.

The White House is exploring all executive authorities in existing law that will allow an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration and legal immigration fraud, senior adviser to the president Stephen Miller told The Daily Caller in an exclusive telephone interview.

“There’s going to be an aggressive effort to utilize every existing authority in statute,” Miller announced, explaining that several authorities exist in immigration laws passed by Congress throughout history, including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Miller noted that the White House is “systematically reviewing all authorities that are already on the books, both in terms of cracking down on illegal immigration and […] the abuse of our legal immigration system.” The targeted abuse actions include illegal immigrants who overstay temporary visas, “combatting or addressing legal benefit seeking in the legal immigration system.”

Noting that there are approximately 1 million illegal aliens in the United States with final removal orders that still remain at large — in some cases for several years — Miller gave one example of the type of executive action the administration can take. The presidential adviser noted that existing law has a statute that allows for a “significant financial penalty” for every single day that an alien resides in the country after being ordered removed.
“This law has been on the books for a very long time and has not been utilized. That’s the example of the kind of legal authority that already exists that is the kind of thing we can deploy to restore integrity to the immigration system.”

If you thought concentration camps for undocumented was fun, wait until we have beggar's prison camps for the families who are US citizens who can't afford to pay Miller's fines for their undocumented fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

I'm telling you guys that this is coming.  Trump's big re-election campaign is going to be "Deport them all" and should America grant him a second term, the round-ups are going to come.  Hell, they'll start before that.

The End Of The Never Trumpers

The NY Times has finally realized that the "principled conservative opposition" that materialized to scold Trump was always a ruse, and there's no better example of that then the doomed "Never Trump" movement inside the GOP that disintegrated as soon as he got his Supreme Court picks.  They were always Trump, just not as willing to take to his extreme measures in order to win.  Nowadays there is only Trump.

As Mr. Trump has prepared to embark on a difficult fight for re-election, a small but ferocious operation within his campaign has helped install loyal allies atop the most significant state parties and urged them to speak up loudly to discourage conservative criticism of Mr. Trump. The campaign has dispatched aides to state party conclaves, Republican executive committee meetings and fund-raising dinners, all with the aim of ensuring the delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are utterly committed to Mr. Trump.

To Joe Gruters, who was co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida and now leads the state party, the local G.O.P. is effectively a regional arm of the president’s re-election effort.

“I’ve had probably 10 conversations with the Trump team about the delegate selection process in Florida,” Mr. Gruters said, adding of a potential Republican primary battle, “The base of the party loves our president, and if anybody runs against him, they are going to get absolutely smashed.”

State and local Republican organizations typically operate below the radar of national politics, but they can be vital to the success of a presidential candidate. Party chairmen and their deputies are tasked with everything from raising money to deploying volunteers to knock on doors, and in many states they help choose delegates for the nominating convention.

For Mr. Trump, who prevailed in 2016 as an outsider with little connection to his party’s electoral apparatus, the ability to control the levers of Republican politics at the state level could make the difference in a close election or a contested primary. It also leaves other Republicans with precious little room to oppose Mr. Trump on his policy preferences or administrative whims — on matters from health care to the Mexican border — for fear of retribution from within the party.

Mr. Trump’s aides have focused most intently on heading off any dissent at the Charlotte convention: To that end, two of Mr. Trump’s top campaign aides, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, have worked quietly but methodically in a series of states where control of the local party was up for grabs. They have boosted Mr. Trump’s allies even in deep-blue states like Massachusetts, and worked to make peace between competing pro-Trump factions in more competitive states such as Colorado.

The devotion to Mr. Trump was on clear display Saturday outside Denver, where the state party gathered to elect a new chairman. Though Mr. Trump’s unpopularity helped drive Colorado Republicans to deep losses last fall, there was no sign of unrest: Mr. Trump’s name was emblazoned on lapel pins and a flag toted by one candidate for the chairmanship, and his slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was printed on the red hat from which the candidates drew lots to determine their speaking order.

Mr. Trump himself stayed out of the race, and campaign aides sent the White House a short memo last month urging the president not to pick sides between allies after Representative Ken Buck, a deeply conservative candidate, lobbied administration officials for support.

But when Mr. Buck claimed victory in the race for chairman, he described his mission in terms of unflinching loyalty to the president.

“The key is that we make sure that the voters of Colorado understand the great job the president has done,” Mr. Buck said. “That is what my job is.”

You're either with Trump, or you're an "enemy of the people".  And folks are lining up to be on the side with the orange fascist at the helm.  If somebody's actually expecting John Kasich or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney to show up and "save" the GOP from Trump, it'll never happen.

The Republican Party is the Trump Party and it always has been.

We have to save ourselves.

Clearance Sale At The White House

Bothe the NY Times and Washington Post are reporting that a White House whistleblower came  forth to House Democrats last month in order to report that more than two dozen denials of security clearances were overturned by top Trump regime officials and that the two of the people initially denied security clearances for national security reasons are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.  The NY Times story:

A whistle-blower working inside the White House has told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees for “disqualifying issues” that could put national security at risk, the committee’s Democratic staff said Monday. 

The whistle-blower, Tricia Newbold, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office, told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a private interview last month that the 25 applicants included two current senior White House officials, in addition to contractors and other employees working for the office of the president, the staff said in a memo it released publicly. 

The memo does not identify any of the 25 people. But one of the senior White House officials appears to be Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. 

NBC News reported in January that Carl Kline, who until recently served as the head of the personnel security division and was Ms. Newbold’s boss, had overruled a decision by career security officials concerned about granting Mr. Kushner a clearance.

The New York Times reported in February that President Trump had ordered his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, to grant a clearance last year to Mr. Kushner. The president had earlier said he had no role in the clearance. 

Democrats on the oversight panel are also demanding information from the White House about the process of granting a clearance to Ivanka Trump, among others. Ms. Trump’s final clearance was granted shortly after Mr. Kushner’s. In an interview in February with ABC News, Ms. Trump insisted her father had no hand in either her clearance or her husband’s.

Ms. Newbold told the committee’s staff members that she and other career officials had denied the 25 applications for a variety of reasons, including “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct,” the memo said. 

The denials by the career employees were overturned, she said, by officials with more seniority who, by her account, did not follow the normal procedures meant to mitigate security risks and generally adhered to by other administrations.

The Washington Post story focuses more on Newbold, and gives us a major clue as to a third current WH official.

A White House whistleblower told lawmakers that more than two dozen denials for security clearances have been overturned during the Trump administration, calling Congress her “last hope” for addressing what she considers improper conduct that has left the nation’s secrets exposed. 

Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday. 

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and was retaliated against for doing so. 

Newbold’s allegations intensify pressure on the White House over its handling of security clearances, a controversy that burst into public view last year with the revelation that dozens of staffers had temporary approvals to access sensitive government information while they awaited clearance approval. 

Among them was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials. 

Newbold alleged that 25 individuals were given clearances or access to national security information since 2018 despite concerns about ties to foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems, or drug abuse.

That group includes “two current senior White House officials,” according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. 

The panel did not identify the senior White House officials but asked the White House to immediately provide documents related to the security clearances of nine officials, including Kushner, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and national security adviser John Bolton. 

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House Counsel’s Office that his panel would vote on Tuesday to subpoena Carl Kline, who served as personnel security director at the White House during the first two years of the administration — the committee’s first compulsory move aimed at the White House. 

Newbold alleged that Kline, then her direct manager, overruled her clearance denials and then retaliated against her when she objected.

Yep, our third contestant appears to be John Bolton's Mustache.

And the Clearance Sale continues.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump now says that Democrats must "fix" immigration issues with the southern border using legislation or he will close the border as soon as this weekend.
• Two black Baptist churches have been torched in the last few days in St. Landry's Parish, Louisiana, police are telling black churches to be cautious as they are still looking for suspects.
• Meeting a promise of an April 2 deadline, Democrats have issued subpoenas for the unredacted version of the full Mueller report from the Department of Justice.
• Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot has won Chicago's mayoral runoff election, she will be the Second City's first openly gay black woman Mayor.
• Google is teaming up with Walmart so Google Assistant can order groceries using your voice.