StupidiNews!

• Former radical activist Judy Clark has been granted parole after nearly 40 years of imprisonment for her role in a 1981 Brinks armored car robbery that killed three people.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry is planning to leave the Trump regime this year as the Department of Homeland Security has already seen a massive shake-up in the last few weeks.
• An 18-year old woman reportedly obsessed with the Columbine school shooting has been found dead after a manhunt, schools in the Denver area canceled classes as a precaution she might try to attack.
• North Korea has tested a "tactical weapon" according to state media, in what Pyongyang experts believe is a message to the Trump regime about stalled nuclear talks.
• Reviewers getting their hands on Samsung's new Galaxy Fold are discovering the bendable screen is far more fragile than advertised, causing a major ruckus on tech sites.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

The jig on the Barr coverup of the Mueller Report is so far up it's heading for a neighboring galaxy.

Not all of Robert S. Mueller III’s findings will be news to President Trump when they are released Thursday morning.

Justice Department officials have had numerous conversations with White House lawyers about the conclusions made by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The talks have aided the president’s legal team as it prepares a rebuttal to the report and strategizes for the coming public war over its findings.

A sense of paranoia is taking hold among some of Mr. Trump’s aides, some of whom fear his backlash more than the findings themselves, the people said. The report might make clear which of Mr. Trump’s current and former advisers spoke to the special counsel, how much they said and how much damage they did to the president — providing a kind of road map for retaliation.

The discussions between Justice Department officials and White House lawyers have also added to questions about the propriety of the decisions by Attorney General William P. Barr since he received Mr. Mueller’s findings late last month.

Mr. Barr and his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, determined that Mr. Trump did not illegally obstruct justice and said the special counsel found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference. Mr. Barr told lawmakers that officials were “spying” on the Trump campaign, raised ominous historical parallels with the illegal surveillance of Vietnam War protesters and pointedly declined to rebut charges that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were engaged in a “witch hunt.”

Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department declined to comment. Mr. Barr, who plans to hold a news conference at 9:30 a.m. Thursday to discuss the special counsel’s report, refused to answer questions from lawmakers last week about whether the department had given the White House a preview of Mr. Mueller’s findings.

I mean, at this point Barr is literally helping Trump's lawyers prepare a rebuttal to information before that information is made public, and at this point anything that is public should be considered highly suspect.  This is the equivalent of the White House writing its own report on the investigation into itself.  It stinks to hell and back.

And none of Mueller's team will be at the press conference tomorrow morning, let alone Mueller himself.  This is a screw job of epic proportions.

Once Trump and Barr bury this, it's done.  If we don't raise hell here and now, we are done.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The latest feigned outrage by House Republicans where they tell Elijah Cummings, a black Democrat, to know his place, is over Democrats investigating GOP efforts to suppress millions of votes in red states. This of course is something Republicans have to have in order to survive as a party and to keep red states red, so they're pretty upset over this.

House Democrats overstepped their authority by asking state officials for information as part of an inquiry into allegations of voter suppression, top Republicans on the U.S. House’s investigatory committee said Monday.

The Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee voiced their objections Monday in a letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who chairs a subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties. The two Democrats sent letters to officials in Georgia, Texas and Kansas earlier this year asking for documents related to controversial election decisions in 2018.

“We have serious concerns that your letters appear to be an attempt to insert the Committee into particular state election proceedings, for which we do not see a legitimate legislative purpose,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member on the committee, wrote in a letter signed by three other Republicans. “By seeking voluminous records relating to election administration of sovereign states, your investigation offends state-federal comity. In fact, the respective states are already working to resolve any issues with their election administration.”

The U.S. Constitution gives states the authority to determine the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections but also gives Congress the authority to make its own regulations or “alter” state election laws.

The Republicans also wrote directly to the officials in the three states the committee is focused on and suggested the inquiry was not legitimate. One of the state officials, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), told the committee last week he was rebuffing the request for information. GOP Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Jody Hice (Ga.) and Michael Cloud (Texas) also signed Jordan’s letter.

Raskin pushed back on the letter in a statement Monday evening, saying the committee had broad investigative power.

“The U.S. Congress has the power and obligation to enforce the voting rights of the people as spelled out in the 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, and 24th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, a power we have exercised repeatedly in statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Americans with Disabilities Act to shut down state action hostile to democratic participation,” he said in a statement.

Cummings replied in a statement Monday night, “It’s disappointing that Rep. Jordan is so opposed to oversight at so many levels. With a Democratic President, there was no allegation too small to investigate, but now that Donald Trump is in the White House, there is apparently no scandal too big to ignore. Democrats will do everything in our power to investigate reports of voter suppression, and we expect full compliance with the Committee’s requests.”

Kansas, Georgia, and Texas especially are ignoring the requests.  They figure they can tie them up in court until after Republicans win back the House in 2020 and make that permanent in 2022 after the Trump census and redistricting.  It's not a bad plan for them to have and it's very possible that things will work out this way.

The reality is without gaining control of the White House and Senate, Democrats will never be able to fix the Voting Rights Act, and demographics favor Republicans with a near-permanent Senate majority as smaller states get older and whiter as Millennials and Gen Z move out to blue states. 

That's a fight Democrats are going to have to find a way to win down the road, but more immediately, we have to keep the House and win back the White House next year.

Immigration Nation, Con't

The Trump regime plan is to spark an actual immigration emergency in America by breaking the system the processes undocumented immigrants so badly that the regime believes it will have the necessary public outcry to use draconian, fascist measures to "solve" the immigration "problem" once and for all.

Attorney General Bill Barr is doing his part to make the immigration system as busted as he can, ruling Tuesday that the Justice Department will not interfere in ICE slow-walking asylum cases and that the DoJ will effectively deny bail to any and all asylum seekers starting in 90 days.

The Trump administration on Tuesday took another significant step to discourage migrants from seeking asylum, issuing an order that could keep thousands of them in jail indefinitely while they wait for a resolution of their asylum requests.

In an effort to deliver on President Trump’s promise to end “catch and release” at the border, Attorney General William P. Barr’s order directed immigration judges to no longer allow some migrants who have sought asylum to post bail.

The order will not go into effect for 90 days, and is all but certain to be challenged in federal court. But immigrant rights lawyers said it could undermine the basic rights of people seeking safety in the United States.

“They want to send a message that you will get detained,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a deputy director of the Immigrants Rights’ Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s really obscene. We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives, seeking safety. And our response is just lock them up.”

For more than a decade, migrants who are deemed to have a “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries have been allowed to request a bond hearing so they can be released on bail while they wait for their asylum cases to be heard, sometimes months or years later.

A federal judge in Washington State this month affirmed the rights of individuals with a bona fide claim for asylum, saying they must be given the opportunity to seek bail within seven days of a request.

But Mr. Barr’s order came in a case involving an Indian man who crossed into the United States from Mexico and claimed asylum. Mr. Barr, exercising his authority as the top official overseeing the immigration courts, said that migrants in similar cases do not have the right to bail.

Such an immigrant, “after establishing a credible fear of persecution or torture, is ineligible for release on bond,” Mr. Barr wrote in his order, which overrules a previous Board of Immigration Appeals case from 2005.

A migrant seeking asylum could still ask the Department of Homeland Security to be released under a grant of parole, but that is entirely at the discretion of the department, which under Mr. Trump has sharply cut back on such releases.

Mr. Barr’s decision does not affect migrants applying for asylum at one of the two dozen ports of entry along the border with Mexico. It affects people who are apprehended after they cross into the United States illegally in the often vast, rural stretches of the border.

Mr. Barr’s order is the latest effort by the Trump administration to reduce the number of immigrants who are able to seek protection from violence, poverty and gangs by asking for legal status in the United States.

Of course the indefinite detainment policy is designed not to discourage undocumented folks from crossing into the US, it's designed to overload the system to the point where Trump will use "emergency powers" to resolve the situation, and those measures will be absolutely brutal.

Everything the Trump regime has done on the immigration front since the Mueller report was completed has been designed to deliberately shatter the immigration processing machinery in this country and to create absolute chaos on the boder and in ICE facilities.  The solution will be extraordinary use of force against these asylum-seekers and the beginning of a mass detainment and deportation pipeline that will terrorize tens of millions.

And eventually this pipeline will be used against Trump's political foes as well who are already US citizens.

Count on that.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump has issued his second veto of his term, striking down the Yemen War Powers Resolution and stating the US has no military personnel "in or affecting Yemen".
• Disgraced former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has landed on his feet after resigning in scandal, Zinke is now working for a Nevada gold mining company pursuing contracts on federal land.
• French President Emmanuel Macron is vowing that Notre Dame cathedral in Paris will be rebuilt after Monday's devastating fire and that the work will be completed within five years.
• The proposed T-Mobile/Sprint cellular carrier merger is running into steep opposition from the Trump Justice Department, the merger would create the world's second-largest mobile company.
• Five mothers are suing New York City's mandatory vaccination order as the Big Apple is suffering a seven-month outbreak, falsely claiming the vaccine is more of a public health risk than the disease.

Last Call For Faster Than The Speed Of Lies

The alt-right did everything they could in order to tie Monday's devastating fire at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris to "Muslim terrorism" and they did it at record speed thanks to the power of social media.

As a conflagration spread through the ancient timbers of Notre Dame Cathedral’s attic on Monday, a parallel fire was spreading on social media. This one was willfully set, a series of conspiracy theories neatly slotted into preexisting cultural biases. And soon enough, willing believers were aflame with hate.

The conspiracy theorizing began almost as soon as the blaze did, right when people saw the shocking, transfixing video of the cathedral’s spire toppling. While French authorities began to assert almost immediately that the fire was apparently accidental, the brief gap between the startling images’ generation and their explication was enough for far-right figures to exploit with their own sinister insinuations. Their prevailing view was nearly identical and, apparently, completely false: that the fire was deliberate and most probably set by Muslims.

Conservative gadflies on social media were among the first to leap to dark conclusions about the blaze, even as it raged: Matt Walsh, a conservative blogger who identifies himself as a “theocratic fascist” in his Twitter bio, wrote, “I don’t understand how a fire of this magnitude could happen accidentally,” accumulating nearly 9,000 likes. Infowars, a conspiracy-oriented outlet helmed by Alex Jones, immediately publicized unverified rumors claiming the fire had been “deliberately started” and linking the blaze to “anti-Christian attacks.” Katie Hopkins, a racist British provocateur, was far more explicit, claiming that “Jewish and Christian Parisians” are being “hunted out of the city by Islamists, fleeing in their thousands,” and affixing the hashtag #NotreDame.

Many figures on the right took the opportunity to turn Notre Dame into a metonym for Western civilization as a whole, intimating that far more than a cathedral was in peril. Just as the fire hit social media, conspiracy theorist and brain-supplements salesman Mike Cernovich dramatically tweetedthat “The West has fallen.” Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a “monument to Western civilization” and “Judeo-Christian heritage.” Given the already-raging rumors about potential Muslim involvement, these tweets evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is already part of numerous far-right narratives; it was also a central thread in the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the alleged Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter. (On Tuesday, Shapiro called this article “simply gross” and said he called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization “because it is,” not because of “malicious intent.“) Richard Spencer, professional racist and coiner of the term “alt-right,” openly advocated for such warfare, stating (and misspelling) his hopes that the fire would “spur the White man into action — to sieze power in his countries, in Europe, in the world,” and declaring such an insurgence a “glorious purpose.” And, as Buzzfeed’s Jane Lytvynenko reported, other, more oblique figures managed to go even further, from provocation in the abstract to more concrete incitement. A parody account masquerading as Fox News fabricated a tweet from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) that said, “They reap what they sow #NotreDame.”
Omar, under relentless attack by the right — including the president — became something of a totemic figure for those on social media already predisposed to see the fire as a Muslim conspiracy. Blogger David Futrelle, an expert on the worst of the Web, gathered dozens of tweets claiming that Omar was either celebrating the fire (variously “smiling inside,” “happy as a muslim terrorist,” “giddy and laughing”) or, somehow, had caused it. Multiple accounts questioned whether Omar was in Paris and whether her relatives had set the fire or asserted falsely that she was affiliated with a Muslim group that had set it.

It's pretty clear that any disaster like this is going to be repurposed in order to cause the violent right to cause bloodshed, either they inspire another Christchurch or Las Vegas shooter and terrorize the rest of us, or they constantly mark Muslims and their allies on the left for violence.  After a while, the numbing despair exacts a psychic as well and health toll.

They're winning this war.  They have a playbook ready to go for disasters of all shapes and sizes and it will be used again and again and again.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Just so we're all clear, the heavily redacted Barr version of the Mueller report will drop on Thursday, and Trumplandia is totally not packing at all because of course the report totally exonerates Trump and nobody is worried about being exposed as the source of any detrimental information about Trump who is completely innocent of wrongdoing and everything is great.

Some of the more than one dozen current and former White House officials who cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller are worried that the version of his report expected to be made public on Thursday will expose them as the source of damaging information about President Donald Trump, according to multiple witnesses in the investigation.

Some of the officials and their lawyers have sought clarity from the Justice Department on whether the names of those who cooperated with Mueller’s team will be redacted or if the public report will be written in a way that makes it obvious who shared certain details of Trump’s actions that were part of the obstruction of justice probe, people familiar with the discussions said. But, they said, the Justice Department has refused to elaborate.

Of particular concern is how Trump — and his allies — will react if it appears to be clear precisely who shared information with Mueller, these people said.

“They got asked questions and told the truth, and now they’re worried the wrath will follow,” one former White House official said.

Some of those who spoke with Mueller's team, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, witnessed Trump’s actions up close and were privy to key moments in the obstruction investigation and spent many hours with investigators.

One person close to the White House said there is “breakdown-level anxiety” among some current and former staffers who cooperated with the investigation at the direction of Trump’s legal team at the time.

There is also concern that new facts in the report could be disclosed that do not reflect favorably on the president, two people familiar with the discussions said.

“You have a whole bunch of former White House officials and current White House officials, but especially former White House officials, who were told to cooperate,” the former White House official said. “So people went and did that, and now the uncertainty is just how much of that information is going to be in that report and how identifiable to individuals is it going to be. And nobody knows.”

Steve M has a theory on the panic mode.

I don't know how much of the Mueller report we'll actually get to read. I've been assuming that there'll be more redacted than unredacted words in the document released by Attorney General Bill Barr. But I think Barr will leave in just enough mildly negative information about the president and his circle to make it seem, to credulous observers, that he's done an honest job and hasn't engaged in a cover-up.

So if very little much damaging information is made public, the press will need to cover some other aspect of the story -- and what could be more tempting than backstairs gossip? We may reach the point where the press is talking less about the crimes of Russiagate than about boldface names and their proximity to Trump's doghouse.

I hope this doesn't happen, but I won't be at all surprised if it does.

I would suspect that the more likely point of Barr's redactions will be that they are just clear enough that Trump can point to departed staffers and cabinet members and say "See, it was all them. I'm clean".

Barr is going to throw people under the bus by, well, the busload.  His job right now, as Steve M has pointed out, is to collect heads for Trump's wall.  It'll start with the redactions pointing to WH staffers to crucify, and the next step will be going after Obama, Clinton, and DNC staff.

If you thought Trump's scorched earth tactics at State in 2017 or DHS in the last few weeks was bad, stay tuned.

Another Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

And for once it's a Republican, and they're running against Donald Trump as a Republican.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld announced Monday he is officially entering the race for president, becoming the first Republican to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 race. 

"Ours is a nation built on courage, resilience, and independence. In these times of great political strife, when both major parties are entrenched in their 'win at all cost' battles, the voices of the American people are being ignored and our nation is suffering," Weld, who had previously formed an exploratory committee, said in a statement. 

"It is time for patriotic men and women across our great nation to stand and plant a flag. It is time to return to the principles of Lincoln -- equality, dignity, and opportunity for all. There is no greater cause on earth than to preserve what truly makes America great. I am ready to lead that fight." 

In 2016, Weld was the vice presidential nominee on the Libertarian Party ticket with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. He previously served two terms as the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1990s. 

Weld ran for Senate in Massachusetts in 1996 and lost against John Kerry. He later moved to New York and in 2005 unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor. 

Weld told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" that it would be a "political tragedy" and he would "fear for the Republic" if the country had six more years of Trump as President. 

"I really think if we have six more years of the same stuff we've had out of the White House the last two years that would be a political tragedy, and I would fear for the Republic," he said. 

"I would be ashamed of myself if I didn't raise my hand and run," he told Tapper. 

Weld said he will not run as an Independent if he does not win the Republican nomination. 

Trump enjoys a nearly 90% approval rating among Republicans, according to Gallup. When asked about the President's historically high approval rating and whether Weld believes he can beat him in the primary, Weld said, "Yeah, I do."

It's ironic, as the Johnson/Weld Libertarian ticket basically put Trump in the White House in the first place.  The ticket's totals in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania all exceeded Trump's win margins over Clinton (and exceeded Clinton's win margin over Trump in Nevada).

We know that the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 was designed to get younger voters to abandon Clinton in favor of Johnson and Jill Stein, and it worked well enough to give Trump the White House.

You'll excuse me then if I think Johnson's running mate, deciding he's a Republican again, stinks to high heaven.

The larger problem is that Trump is a symptom of the diseased Republican Party, sick beyond recovery.  Replacing Trump with Weld won't make a lick of difference.

StupidiNews!

• Paris officials say that several artifacts have been rescued after Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire on Monday night, the fire is under control but the cathedral's famous wooden spire was destroyed.
• Ecuador says it was inundated with tens of millions of international cyber attacks after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was turned over to UK police last week.
• Both the House Financial Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee have issued subpoenas to Germany's Deutsche Bank and other banks in connection to Trump's finances.
• China's Communist Party is using the internet to test party loyalty with a new mobile app, but some have figured out how the cheat the system and earn "loyalty points" by not doing anything.
• PC DOTA 2 champions Team OG have been dethroned by an OpenAI bot able to play the game better than any team of humans can, the makers plan to allow users to download the bot for free.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump regime is so corrupt that new Interior Secretary David Bernhardt  (and former oil lobbyist, because of course) is already being investigated for ethics complaints after being confirmed just last week by Senate Republicans.

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into ethics complaints against the agency’s newly installed secretary, David Bernhardt.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and agribusiness industries, was confirmed by the Senate last week to head the agency, which oversees the nation’s 500 million acres of public land and vast coastal waters. He has played a central role in writing policies designed to advance President Trump’s policy of “energy dominance” and expanding fossil fuel exploration. He has been dogged by allegations of ethics violations since joining the Trump administration as the Interior Department’s deputy secretary in 2017.

Eight senators, all Democrats, and four government ethics watchdog groups have requested that the Interior Department’s inspector general open formal investigations into various aspects of Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct. Among the chief complaints have been allegations, revealed by three separate New York Times investigations, that Mr. Bernhardt used his position to advance a policy pushed by his former lobbying client; that he continued working as a lobbyist after filing legal paperwork declaring that he had ceased lobbying; and that he intervened to block the release of a scientific report showing the harmful effects of a chemical pesticide on certain endangered species.
In a letter sent Monday to the senators who filed the ethics complaints, Mary L. Kendall, the deputy inspector general of the Interior Department, wrote that she had received seven complaints from “a wide assortment of complainants alleging various conflicts of interest and other violations” by Mr. Bernhardt, adding that she had “opened an investigation to address them.”

Mr. Bernhardt has maintained that he did not commit any ethical violations and, in fact, has worked to strengthen the culture of ethical compliance at the Interior Department, in part by hiring dozens of new ethics specialists.

Mr. Bernhardt’s spokeswoman, Faith Vander Voort, wrote in a statement, “Secretary Bernhardt is in complete compliance with his ethics agreement and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.” She added, “It is important to note that the Department Ethics Office has already conducted a review of many of these accusations at Mr. Bernhardt’s request and determined that Secretary Bernhardt is in complete compliance.”

A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has formally requested investigations into Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct, and who pushed for the delay of his Senate confirmation, wrote in a statement: “This is exactly why I wanted a delay in Bernhardt’s consideration. We now have an Interior Secretary who has been on the job for one full business day and is already under investigation.”

The corruption is baked in, guys.  It's nothing but open grifting and theft and will be long after Trump is gone, because this is what America is now.  They can do whatever they want because we won't stop them.

Nobody will.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Mouth of Sauron Sarah Sanders says nobody in Congress is smart enough to parse Trump's tax returns anyway, so why bother?  Apparently she missed the fact that three House Democrats (and several Republicans) are CPAs.

In attacking the fight to obtain Trump's tax returns, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders argued that members of Congress aren't smart enough to understand them anyway. 

But three Democratic members of Congress are trained as certified public accountants -- professionals licensed by their states to do just that. 

The Congressional Research Service said there are 10 accountants in this Congress, including two senators and eight House members.

As certified public accountants, they had to pass an exam and meet their states' work and education requirements. 

Rep. Brad Sherman of California is a tax law specialist and a CPA, and he was an instructor at Harvard Law School's International Tax Program, according to his biography. He sits on the House Committee on Financial Services. 

Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who was first elected in 1991, was a CPA and small business owner in Detroit Lakes before joining Congress. 

And Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York is trained as an attorney and a CPA and previously worked as an auditor for Arthur Andersen & Co. He is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee -- the committee that writes many of the country's tax laws, and the committee requesting Trump's tax returns.

Suozzi especially may have a big role to play here, being on Ways & Means and having been a professional tax auditor, exactly the kind of smarts needed to understand Trump's tax games.

Meanwhile, Trump is outright threatening legal action against any accounting firms that cooperate with the Democratic subpoena.

President Donald Trump’s attorneys are warning of potential legal action if an accounting firm turns over a decade of the president’s financial records to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Trump attorneys William S. Consovoy and Stefan Passantino are urging Mazars USA not to comply with a subpoena that Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) plans to issue on Monday for Trump’s financial documents, calling it a politically motivated scheme to take down the president.

“It is no secret that the Democrat Party has decided to use its new House majority to launch a flood of investigations into the president’s personal affairs in hopes of using anything they can find to damage him politically,” Consovoy and Passantino wrote to Jerry D. Bernstein, Mazars’ outside counsel.

The attorneys said they were formally putting Mazars ”on notice” — an implicit threat of legal action. They also urged Bernstein to hold off on providing the documents to Cummings until the subpoena can be litigated in court, suggesting that a protracted legal battle is likely to ensue.

“The Democrats’ fervor has only intensified after the special counsel squelched their ‘Russia collusion’ narrative,” the attorneys continued, outlining a series of legal precedents that they argue prevents Mazars from complying with Cummings’ subpoena.

Let the games then begin.  They will take years to play out, and there's a very good chance that Trump's tax returns will be a moot point by the time this is all settled.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Whether or not it's true, Donald Trump is surely acting like Bill Barr made the entire 22-month Mueller investigation go away in a matter of weeks, and as far as Trump is concerned, the country has moved on to his immigration war as the baseline fight for his 2020 reelection campaign.

Mr. Barr’s letter effectively emboldened Mr. Trump, aides said, even as they prepare for new details to emerge from a redacted version of the report — expected this week — that could renew questions about the president’s fitness for office, and even as some of them cringe at Mr. Trump’s choice of the word “exonerate.” (Privately, they admit, they would prefer he use the word “vindicate.”)

But Mr. Trump’s mood has been lighter since the report was filed, people close to him said, even though neither he nor his White House lawyers have seen the full document, or at this point plan to do so before it is released to Congress and to the public. People close to Mr. Trump said they have noticed an increase in his confidence after he spent months feeling weighed down by a loss of control.

“When they began to go after people he knew personally, who had worked for him for years, I think it gnawed at him, and I think he felt helpless,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a confidant of Mr. Trump’s.

But since Mr. Barr issued his letter, the president has felt liberated and has been testing his bounds. He has poked fun at Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president considering a presidential run, for his handsy approach to politics, despite his own troubled history with women. He has floated the idea of a pardon for Kevin McAleenan, now his acting homeland security secretary, if he encountered any legal problems in shutting the southwestern border. And he has heightened his attacks on the press beyond his normal refrain of “fake news,” falsely claiming that journalists are “knowingly” bending the truth.

Now, as Mr. Barr prepares to submit a redacted version of the report, Mr. Trump’s plan of attack, aides said, is to act as if the report itself is extraneous to Mr. Barr’s brief letter.

“The bottom line: The result is no collusion, no obstruction, and that’s the way it is,” the president told reporters on Thursday. He said that Democrats “know it’s all a big scam, a big hoax” and that he believed what they were doing was “actually treason.” Days earlier, en route to Texas, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I don’t care about the Mueller report. I’ve been totally exonerated.”

The framing is simple: Trump beat Mueller, everything else is sour grapes and fake news.  The media has already done 90% of the work for Trump with the NO COLLUSION FOUND headlines from three weeks ago.  Nobody's going to listen to what they have to say.

Mr. Trump is purposefully escalating his language, people who know him said, expressly to enliven his base of supporters and to enrage his political rivals and the news media. He has revived an idea that his administration rejected — sending immigrant detainees to so-called sanctuary cities — in part, people close to him said, to distract from the report.

“The president clearly feels vindicated now that the Mueller report is completed,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host, who recently taped a radio interview with Mr. Trump. “He will continue to remind the American people he was correct about there being no evidence of collusion with Russia.”

Other outside surrogates have been echoing Mr. Trump’s line — that the narrative has already been established and it is too late for new facts to change that — even though members of the special counsel’s team have expressed concern that Mr. Barr’s letter did not accurately portray the contents of the report.

“The facts are that there was no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, no obstruction of justice and President Trump has been fully vindicated,” said Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide who now serves as the chief political commentator for Sinclair Broadcast Group. “No amount of spin by the opponents is going to change that.”

But critics said the strategy is classic Trump — effective with a narrow audience, but ultimately self-limiting. “He will probably have succeeded in setting the narrative for his core supporters and hardening their attitudes, but at the expense of anyone else believing him when the report comes out and inevitably undermines what he’s been claiming,” said Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman under former President Barack Obama. “The same things that solidify his base just prevent him from expanding beyond it at all.”

His base was enough to get him elected.  As long as he keeps it, and the Democrats don't expand their own base, Trump wins again.  Democrats have to get people to vote for them and not just against Trump.  I know voting against Trump should be enough, but it wasn't.  And given the massive GOP voter suppression guaranteed in 2020, Dems will have to work extra-hard in order to get the votes they need to win.

StupidiNews!

• At least seven people have been reported killed by major storms across the Southeast and Ohio Valley over the weekend, hail, tornadoes, and even snow was reported across the Eastern half of the US.
• Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is warning that possible leaks of Mueller report redactions should delay release of any information in the report until Republicans can "defend" it.
• After an 11-year drought, golfer Tiger Woods has reclaimed his first major in over a decade and a fifth green jacket overall winning The Masters at Augusta with a 2-under 70.
• Finland's Social Democrats look to form their first government in 16 years, but face a sharply divided country as the second-place right-wing and anti-immigrant Finns Party says they will not join.
• Washington state will be the fourth state behind Hawaii, California and New Mexico to completely phase out non-renewable energy by 2045.

It's Just Plane Economics

Airlines are having to cancel hundreds of flights daily right now because of grounded Boeing 737 MAX jets, and not enough other planes available to meet regular summer flight demand.

Normally U.S. airlines compete to sell tickets and fill seats during the peak summer travel season. But operators of the grounded Boeing 737 MAX are facing a different problem: scarce planes and booming demand.

The grounding of Boeing Co’s fuel-efficient, single-aisle workhorse after two fatal crashes is biting into U.S. airlines’ Northern Hemisphere spring and summer schedules, threatening to disarm them in their seasonal war for profits.

“The revenue is right in front of them. They can see it, but they can’t meet it,” said Mike Trevino, spokesman for Southwest Airlines Pilots Association and an aviation industry veteran.

Southwest Airlines Co, the world’s largest MAX operator, and American Airlines Group Inc with 34 and 24 MAX jetliners respectively, have removed the aircraft from their flying schedules into August.

Southwest’s decision will lead to 160 cancellations of some 4,200 daily flights between June 8 and Aug. 5, while American’s removal through Aug. 19 means about 115 daily cancellations, or 1.5 percent of its summer flying schedule each day.

Low-cost carrier Southwest, which unlike its rivals only flies Boeing 737s, had estimated $150 million in lost revenue between Feb. 20 and March 31 alone due to MAX cancellations and other factors.

So far airlines have said it is too soon to estimate the impact of the MAX grounding beyond the first quarter, but the extended cancellations signal that they do not expect a quick return of Boeing’s fast-selling jetliner. The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide in March following a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash just five months after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia. All on board both planes were killed.

Economics tells us that when you have scarcity of supply and ineleastic demand,  you can raise prices and keep them there.  If you think airlines are somehow upset that they no longer have to offer discount summer ticket prices this year in order to compete, I have a few airplanes to sell you.

No, as usual in this industry, the big loser is going to be the flying public.  Longer lines, longer flight delays, and a more miserable experience with everyone packed into 100% full planes.  It's going to be the worst summer to fly in several years.

Not for the airlines, though.  They'll be fine.

Sunday Long Read: Death Of A Glacier

John Muir first discovered what was to be known as the Lyell Glacier in 1871, hanging off Mount Lyell, the tallest peak in Yosemite. Some 150 years later, the Lyell Glacier is all but gone, killed by climate change, and its epitaph remains a brutal warning sign as to where life on Earth is headed.

On a cool September morning in 2014, among lodgepole pines under blue mountain sky, Greg Stock shouldered a backpack full of camping gear and scientific equipment. Boyishly slender and athletic at 45, Stock is a climber, caver, and serious reader of books about mountaineering and the natural world. He holds the enviable job title of Yosemite National Park Geologist and mostly loves the work, especially the part he was bound for that day — the study of Yosemite’s last two glaciers.

Stock and several companions started their walk in Tuolumne Meadows, the high-country jewel of Yosemite and everything that I would ever wish to find in the pastures of heaven — many square miles of grass and wildflowers surrounded by white granite domes that reflect sunshine like polished glass. Stock followed the John Muir Trail south out of those meadows into an immense U-shaped gorge called Lyell Canyon, 8 miles long and 3,000 feet deep, carved out of granite by long-vanished glaciers during dozens of ice ages. Evergreens dot the sloped walls of Lyell Canyon — straight lodgepoles down low, bent whitebarks up high.

In that drought year of 2014, dry meadow grasses carpeted the canyon floor in pale gold. Down the middle, the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River trickled through wide, meandering oxbows. The great irrigator of Tuolumne Meadows and drinking-water source for San Francisco, that river thunders deep in spring but flows in autumn thanks to meltwater from Stock’s destination, the Lyell Glacier.

Seven miles into Lyell Canyon, Stock kept an eye out for white rocks in the grass. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would never find those rocks, much less guess they marked a particular spot. When Stock saw them, he turned east off the John Muir Trail and down into the mostly empty channel of the Lyell Fork. He hopped across the shallows and then walked into the center of the canyon.

Stock poked around in the grass for another pile of rocks, which marked the spot where, in 1883, a geologist named Israel Russell looked 4,000 vertical feet up to the jagged summit of Mount Lyell, 13,114 feet above sea level and the tallest peak in Yosemite National Park. Standing right there, Russell took the first known photograph of the Lyell Glacier, which John Muir had found only 12 years earlier. In Russell’s photograph, 13 million square feet of ice spread like a white shawl across Mount Lyell’s black metamorphic shoulders.

Geologists and park employees have been returning to Russell’s photo point — and to the glacier itself — on a more or less regular basis ever since, replicating Russell’s images to create a scientific record 135 years old and counting. Stock has been the keeper of that tradition for over a decade, making the trip through Lyell Canyon more than 20 times to check the glacier’s vital signs. He has put gauges in runoff streams to measure meltwater trickling out of openings at the toe of the glacier. He has studied data from NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, an airplane outfitted with advanced sensing equipment that calculates the water volume in the Sierra snowpack and ice fields. Using much of the same technique that Muir did in 1871, Stock drove stakes into the Lyell to measure the downslope creep of ice that defines a glacier.

Like everyone who has ever studied the Lyell — and pretty much everyone who has ever studied any glacier — Stock documented shrinkage. The Lyell has lost depth and retreated upslope and broken into a smattering of white Rorschach blots that, as of 2014, amounted to about 3 million square feet of ice. In 2012, Stock had collected data showing that the main lobe of the Lyell was not flowing downhill. The pleasure of working in that quiet alpine sanctuary kept him coming back in a spirit of optimism. Still, when Stock looked through his camera’s viewfinder at the largest of the Lyell’s remaining white blots, in 2014, he was surprised to see that a familiar dark patch had grown much larger.

Stock led his companions farther south along the John Muir Trail to where it climbed up through forest toward Donohue Pass. At a wooden bridge across the river, Stock turned west off trail. Up rocky slopes, they came to the shores of an hourglass-shaped blue lake in a bowl of white stone — cooked dinner, slept in sleeping bags. In the morning, after breakfast, they hiked another 1,200 feet up to the main lobe of the Lyell, a broad and steep mass of ice in a quiet cirque of shattered rock. Stock felt like a man coming home after a long absence, comfortable and eager to catch up. He decided to have a close look at that dark patch.

“I remember noticing that it was right under an avalanche chute in the headwall below the summit,” Stock says. Perhaps it was just rock debris from some long-ago slide, embedded in the glacier surface.

The Lyell Glacier hangs at a severe angle off the mountainside. To slip and fall can mean a long, fast plummet. Stock wore crampons on his boots and carried an ice ax as he stepped onto an ice field riddled with sun cups, bathtub-sized depressions that forced him to walk along blade-thin ridges between them. Standing at the edge of the dark patch, Stock got a terrible feeling.

“I just knew. That’s bedrock. Your wishful thinking that that’s debris can’t possibly be right. The next thought was, If that’s bedrock, there can’t be much glacier left.” Letting his eye roam the periphery of the ice and visualizing mountain contours beneath the main mass of the glacier, Stock struggled to form a mental model in which the glacier maintained significant volume. He could not picture more than about 20 or 30 feet of thickness. Given the Lyell’s melt rate, it would disappear in four or five more years of drought. The shock of this realization forced Stock to confront what the data had been hinting at: The Lyell was no longer a glacier at all. Put another way, the Lyell Glacier was already dead, and Stock was the last person ever to study it.

It's a depressing story.  A generation from now, today's kids will, as adults, only wonder what we did wrong.  Hopefully they will vow to never repeat our mistakes.  I fear that they will only choose to make even worse ones.