StupidiNews!

• Despite Donald Trump's insulting remarks about Duchess Meghan Markle, Queen Elizabeth II is expected to host the Trumps for an official state visit this week.
• Canada is temporarily closing its embassy in Venezuela after a diplomatic row with President Nicolas Maduro refusing to certify several diplomats critical of the Maduro regime.
• Mexico and the US are preparing for trade talks Monday as Donald Trump continues to threaten the Obrador government with tariffs if Mexico does not halt the flow of immigrants to America.
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government has been dealt a major blow as the leader of her main coalition partner party has resigned after losing support.
• NASA plans to contract with three commercial space exploration companies to launch missions to the moon in 2020 and 2021.

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Politico 2.0 notes that if Trump goes through with those 5% Mexico tariffs he threatened on Friday, it will be a massive tax hike on American consumers at the checkout counter.

If Trump's 5% tariff on Mexican goods takes effect later this month, the president's trade policies would constitute a bigger tax hike than Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

By the numbers: Tariffs already in place against Mexico will increase revenues by $69 billion, the Tax Foundation estimates — or about 0.32% of GDP. Add in the threatened 5% tax on Mexican imports, and that rises to about 0.40% of GDP.

That’s more than Clinton’s tax bill in 1993, which brought in revenues of about 0.36% of GDP after the first year, and just shy of George H.W. Bush’s increase in 1990, which amounted to 0.41% of GDP after year 1.

What to watch: If Trump follows through on his threats — 25% on all Chinese and Mexican imports — those revenues would amount to 1.45% of GDP. You’d have to go back to the 1968 tax hike for a bigger revenue measure, per data compiled by the Treasury Department.

That means 1.45% of GDP would be about $300 billion in new taxes on American consumers, or $1000 bucks per American.  That's a recipe for a GOP wipeout at the polls.

It’s no coincidence that most of the Republican senators who spoke out against Trump’s move late last week are up for reelection next year. Even many reliable Trump allies came out with rare expressions of opposition, knowing their own political survival is on the line.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, representing a state whose farming industry has already been hit by Trump’s trade policies, was one of the first Republicans to call foul on his latest tariffs. "While I support the need for comprehensive border security and a permanent fix to illegal immigration, this isn’t the right path forward," Ernst said in a statement. "The livelihoods of Iowa farmers and producers are at stake.”

Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who stood with Trump throughout her ill-fated 2018 campaign before being appointed to the state’s other seat, finally had enough. “While I support the President's intention of stopping unchecked illegal immigration, I do not support these types of tariffs, which will harm our economy and be passed onto Arizona small businesses and families,” she said.

The move is especially awkward for McSally, coming just days after the administration’s petty request for the Navy to keep the USS John McCain warship out of the president’s sight during his recent trip to Japan. McSally, who holds McCain’s seat, has been trying to win back moderates alienated by Trump’s actions without losing support from his sizable base of supporters back home.

Even in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn looks to be in solid shape, the senator isn’t taking any political chances. Mexico is Texas’s top foreign trading partner, and the state would face the equivalent of $27 billion in taxes if all the threatened tariffs were implemented. “Senator Cornyn supports the president’s commitment to securing our border, but he opposes this across-the-board tariff which will disproportionately hurt Texas," a spokesman for the senator told The Dallas Morning News.

What’s notable about these defections is that two of the senators hail from border states, where fighting illegal immigration is a top priority. When a bipartisan majority of senators rebuked Trump for overreaching his authority to declare an emergency at the border, McSally and Cornyn both stuck with the president.

This time, however, the economic pain threatens to be so significant that they’re no longer willing to stand pat. With their political careers at stake, there wasn’t enough benefit to blindly stick with the president.

Again, I predict Trump will fold on these tariffs when Mitch McConnell makes it clear that even if should Trump somehow survive, he'll face a Democratic House AND Senate in 2021, and that's the end for Donald.

Democrats should already be running commercials in swing states over this.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The major Middle Eastern leader pushing for US war with Iran isn't actually Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia, but his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed.  And MBZ, as he is known by, definitely wants Trump and the US to go to war with Tehran and is using his considerable political influence to move Trump towards the cliff.

Prince Mohammed is almost unknown to the American public and his tiny country has fewer citizens than Rhode Island. But he may be the richest man in the world. He controls sovereign wealth funds worth $1.3 trillion, more than any other country.
His influence operation in Washington is legendary (Mr. [Richard] Clarke got rich on his payroll). His military is the Arab world’s most potent, equipped through its work with the United States to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders.

For decades, the prince has been a key American ally, following Washington’s lead, but now he is going his own way. His special forces are active in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Egypt’s North Sinai. He has worked to thwart democratic transitions in the Middle East, helped install a reliable autocrat in Egypt and boosted a protégé to power in Saudi Arabia.

At times, the prince has contradicted American policy and destabilized neighbors. Rights groups have criticized him for jailing dissidents at home, for his role in creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and for backing the Saudi prince whose agents killed the dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi.

Yet under the Trump administration, his influence in Washington appears greater than ever. He has a rapport with President Trump, who has frequently adopted the prince’s views on Qatar, Libya and Saudi Arabia, even over the advice of cabinet officials or senior national security staff.

Western diplomats who know the prince — known as M.B.Z. — say he is obsessed with two enemies, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Trump has sought to move strongly against both and last week took steps to bypass congressional opposition to keep selling weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“M.B.Z. has an extraordinary way of telling Americans his own interests but making it come across as good advice about the region,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, whose sympathy for the Arab Spring and negotiations with Iran brought blistering criticism from the Emirati prince. When it comes to influence in Washington, Mr. Rhodes added, “M.B.Z. is in a class by himself.”

Prince Mohammed worked assiduously before the presidential election to crack Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and secured a secret meeting during the transition period with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The prince also tried to broker talks between the Trump administration and Russia, a gambit that later entangled him in the special counsel’s investigation into foreign election interference.

Today, at least five people working for Prince Mohammed have been caught up in criminal investigations growing out of that inquiry. A regular visitor to the United States for three decades, Prince Mohammed has now stayed away for two years, in part because he fears prosecutors might seek to question him or his aides, according to two people familiar with his thinking. (His brother, the foreign minister, has visited.)

The United Arab Emirates’ Embassy in Washington declined to comment. The prince’s many American defenders say it is only prudent of him to try to shape United States policy, as many governments do, and that he sees his interventions as an attempt to compensate for an American pullback.

But Prince Mohammed’s critics say that his rise is a study in unintended consequences. The obscure young prince whom Washington adopted as a pliant ally is now fanning his volatile region’s flames.

Did you catch all that?  Non only is MBZ up to his neck in the Iran problem, but he tried to broker talks between Trump and Russia and the counter-intelligence investigation into the Emirati side of the Trump-Russia collusion train is still ongoing.

There's still a lot to work through, folks.  It's not over by a mile.

By arming the United Arab Emirates with such advanced surveillance technology, commandos and weaponry, argued Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former State Department official and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We have created a little Frankenstein.”

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The battle over impeaching Donald Trump continues for the Democrats with the focus shifting to the biggest blue state of them all, California.  This weekend marks the state's 2019 Democratic convention, and on Saturday it quickly turned into Nancy Pelosi versus everyone else.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was just moments into her speech Saturday when a man shouted out from the back of a convention hall stuffed with thousands of delegates to the state Democratic Party convention.

“Impeach Donald Trump!” he screamed, uttering a battle cry Pelosi has rebuffed, despite growing demands from her party’s activist wing.

“President Trump will be held accountable for his actions,” she said. The I-word never left her lips.

Less than an hour later, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) stepped to the same podium to deliver a very different message. “We need to begin impeachment proceedings!” the presidential candidate bellowed. The crowd roared.

The party’s deep divisions, refreshed when last week’s remarks by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III raised new questions about whether Trump had committed impeachable violations, played out time and again during the first full day of the weekend convention as they have across the nation.

Democrats’ dueling messages highlighted the dilemma confronting the party’s congressional leaders and presidential hopefuls: how to balance the demands of a fervently anti-Trump activist base without alienating the more moderate voters who helped hand them the House in 2018 and could deliver the presidency in 2020.

Saturday was the first of two days that in total will feature speeches by 14 Democratic presidential candidatesin the self-styled home of the Trump resistance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) electrified the crowd with a fiery address that appeared to take a swipe at former vice president Joe Biden, who did not attend. Three of the candidates are scheduled to speak Sunday, rounding out the largest gathering of 2020 presidential contenders to date.

Among activists, fury with Trump reached the boiling point after Mueller reiterated Wednesday that he could not clear the president of obstructing justice in his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s defiant attitude toward congressional oversight has stoked further anger.

“That’s adding salt to the wounds,” said Maria Elena Durazo, a Democratic National Committee vice chair and California state senator.

It has also opened a fissure between Democratic congressional leadership and the party’s White House hopefuls, who were once largely united in opposition to impeachment. After Mueller’s comments, the list of presidential candidates calling for impeachment grew, even as House Democratic leaders stood firm.

Pelosi and her top lieutenants are seeking to persuade Democrats that the best action is to stay the course they have charted — to continue to investigate Trump and rely on the courts to intervene when they are stonewalled by the administration.

“Our investigations are breaking through the Trump administration’s coverup to get the truth. We want the truth for the American people,” Pelosi said Saturday. She noted two recent court victories and Mueller’s public statement. 

I understand that activists and convention delegates hardly represent the rank and file of Democratic voters across the country.  Many of us just want Trump gone and we want the person most likely to beat him as the 2020 candidate.

I understand that betting against Nancy Pelosi is a sucker move.

But I also understand that Mitch McConnell is running the show now, and that Pelosi is losing the battle with him.  House Democrats have passed dozens of progressive bills, and McConnell has killed every single one in the Senate, refusing to vote on anything Pelosi has gotten through.

The case for impeachment is strong, and I still tend to side with Pelosi: unless there's an ironclad case, impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.  Trump will only turn to increasingly bellicose actions in order to get hearings off the front pages.

I don't know what the answer is, and it's increasingly frustrating.

Sunday Long Read: Hate The Game, Not The Players

Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio takes a long look at the state of esports in 2019 and finds that increasingly, the multi-million dollar competitions and leagues popping up around competitive PC games looks more and more like the excesses of the dot-com bubble from 20 years ago.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There’s big money in esports, they say. You’ve heard the stories. Teenaged gamers flown overseas to sunny mansions with live-in chefs. The erection of $50 million arenas for Enders Game-esque sci-fi battles. League of Legends pros pulling down seven-figure salaries. Yet there’s a reason why these narratives are provocative enough to attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

“I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,” Frank Fields, Corsair’s sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields’ face as he continued. “Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.” Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, “as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.”

Fields is not the only longtime esports veteran who is worried the industry is a bubble, or more accurately, an industry comprised of several bubbles. Seventeen other experts on the North American esports industry shared similar concerns with Kotaku, some describing it merely as “inflated” and others as “completely unsustainable.” Several spoke on the controversial topic because they love esports and want to see it succeed organically, in a sustainable way. There is, of course, a genuine love shared by thousands of people for playing games competitively. Right now, many who spoke to us for this story said, the stuff that makes the esports industry seem like a tantalizing investment rests on unsubstantiated claims—or blunt-force lies.

As investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the ballooning esports industry, many feel their way forward with statistics that indicate that paydirt is just around the corner. “League of Legends Gets More Viewers Than Super Bowl,” reads one 2019 headline from CNBC, glossing over the fact that they’re comparing apple viewership metrics to coconut viewership metrics. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report leaked to Kotaku claimed that, in its first year, the Overwatch League could conceivably generate $720 million in revenue, about the same as World Wrestling Entertainment. By 2022, says Goldman Sachs, viewership of pros playing competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may be on par with the National Football League’s viewership today. But according to many people Kotakuspoke to with knowledge of the industry, a lot of these statistics are at best rosy-eyed and, at worst, inflated, unverified, or misleading.

For 12 years, Twitter never posted a profit, and until it went public, Uber lost $4.5 billion in one year. One quirk of the world of startups is that investors love investing in unprofitable companies or industries. Yet longtime esports professionals don’t want to see their beloved livelihood go the way of the dotcom bubble. The esports industry is held together with wax and string, which, sources say, hasn’t stopped it from flying too close to the sun.
Frank Fields is, to put it lightly, skeptical of the numbers that supposedly show how big the esports industry is. With an increasing sense of unease, Fields has seen stranger and stranger numbers come across his desk at the hardware manufacturer Corsair, where he handles several million dollars’ worth of outbound sponsorships. As he watched investors dump tens or hundreds of millions at once into the esports organization du jour, Fields has become concerned they’re “jumping the gun.”

“It doesn’t make sense to put that much money into an industry that’s not making that much,” he said. “The sooner we recognize that we’re fooling a bunch of non-endemic people, the better off we’ll be long-term. We’ll be able to fix this bubble before it pops.”
He’s already seen an esports bubble inflate—and burst. At 32 years old, Fields has been in esports for over half of his life, which is most of the history of esports’ existence. Speaking over the phone after GDC, Fields recalled hauling his gaming rig on a 17-hour drive from Ohio to Dallas for a Dota side event at a 2006 Counter-Strike tournament. The prize pool was $1,000, a pittance compared to last year’s $25.5 million prize pool for Dota 2’s biggest tournament, The International. It was at that event, however, that Fields noticed that entire hotels had been rented out to house Counter-Strike pros. For the first time, he could fathom the growing infrastructure of the esports industry. Prior to that, esports events were empowering conferences of high-skill fans, but undoubtedly smaller in scope. Tournaments for PC games like Quake and Starcraft were held in computer cafes in North America and Asia, especially South Korea; fighting game tournaments for games like Street Fighterwere largely held in arcades.

It was also around the mid-2000s that the first bubble of esports began to bloat. David Hill, a former president of Fox Sports, had caught a whiff of competitive gaming fever after noticing his grandson’s fierce fandom for it, according to a Dot Esports feature. Two years after joining DirectTV in 2005, Hill launched the Championship Gaming Series. It was a worldwide sports league, but for video games—a pretty cutting-edge idea at the time. This level of organization for esports was unprecedented, as was its tremendous funding. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. injected it with a huge $50 million investment in 2007, Dot Esports reported.

As it turns out, it was a little too huge. According to Dot Esports, one commentator for the first-person shooter Quake received a $300,000 salary in exchange for live commentary that was poorly received. Counter-Strike players received a reported $2,500 a month plus housing in Marina Del Rey. That added up to about $1.8 million in salaries per year. “I know from firsthand experience running a team that a lot of these teams have never even made that much in revenue,” Fields said.

The Championship Gaming Series burned bright and fast, only lasting until 2008, around the financial crisis. “We invested wholeheartedly in the venture and presented viewers with a top-notch production, but the economics just didn’t add up for us at this time,” it said in an announcement posted to its website. Investor confidence in esports plummeted.

“This was the first bubble of esports,” Fields says. “Players couldn’t get jobs, because the companies supporting them went bankrupt.”

And it looks like we're headed that way again, only this time there's a few more zeroes at the end of the numbers, and when it blows, it's going to be ugly.  I'd like to see esports saved from itself, I enjoy playing PC games like Overwatch and League of Legends with my friends and watching really good players compete, but the level of money thrown around has me convinced that it's going to take a major meltdown to get people to be serious. 

I was just starting my IT career when the first dot-com bubble blew and I recognize the signs.  I hope Fields is right about fixing the industry.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Last month a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over transcripts of former Trump National Security Adviser (and convicted felon) Michael Flynn's wiretaps involving his dealings with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

The Justice Department said no and directly refused a judge's order.

Federal prosecutors rebuffed a judge’s order to release by Friday highly classified transcripts of discussions that Michael T. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

The transcripts between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, formerly Russia’s top diplomat in the United States, were expected to show that they talked in December 2016 about sanctions that the Obama administration had just imposed on Russia. Mr. Flynn initially denied those exchanges about sanctions both to Trump administration officials and the F.B.I. in the weeks after the discussions.

The conversations prompted concerns among senior Obama administration officials about whether the Trump transition team was flouting norms about holding off on making policy until after taking office. The phone calls were also at the center of the scandal that eventually prompted Mr. Flynn’s ouster just weeks into President Trump’s term.

The order this month from the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, was unusual. The transcripts came from a secret F.B.I. wiretap of Mr. Kislyak, and their release would have provided an extraordinarily rare look at the fruits of the government’s eavesdropping. Agents routinely listen to wiretaps of foreign officials, but they remain among the government’s most closely held secrets.

The calls between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak were referenced repeatedly in court documents and the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference but never released, and prosecutors have not acknowledged the existence of the wiretap. Judge Sullivan, who is overseeing Mr. Flynn’s case, ordered that audio recordings of his conversations with Mr. Kislyak be made public along with a voice mail message made by the president’s lawyer.

The Justice Department’s refusal to comply with the judge’s ordermade clear that prosecutors had no interest in confirming the wiretap, which was approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“This would be a rare step to make public” such intelligence collection, said Joshua Geltzer, a former Justice Department official. “What you see in today’s filing is the government trying to avoid disclosing that material.”

Instead, prosecutors asserted that they did not need to provide the transcripts because they were, in the end, not vital to the prosecution of Mr. Flynn. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. after agents interviewed him about what was said on those calls.

“The government further represents that it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part of the sentencing record,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing responding to Judge Sullivan’s order.

Please spare me the "Obama administration defied federal judges too!" stuff as well.  Yes, the Obama administration was at best 50-50 when it came to losing federal cases before the courts, and it defied judicial orders (or dragged their feet on compliance for years) when it came to immigration and climate change.

But not when it came to obstructing justice in an investigation into itself.

Checking The Tech Wreck Spec

It's definitely one of those "the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but is serving a purpose" things here, but the Trump regime is coming to break up Google.

The U.S. Justice Department is preparing an investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google to determine whether the tech giant broke antitrust law in operating its sprawling online businesses, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Officials from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission, which both enforce antitrust law, met in recent weeks to give Justice jurisdiction over Google, said the sources, who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The potential investigation represents the latest attack on a tech company by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has accused social media companies and Google of suppressing conservative voices on their platforms online.

One source said the potential investigation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, focused on accusations that Google gave preference to its own businesses in searches.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said he could not confirm or deny that an investigation was being considered. Google declined comment.

Early in 2013, the FTC closed a long-running investigation of Google, giving it a slap on the wrist. Under FTC pressure, Google agreed to end the practice of “scraping” reviews and other data from rivals’ websites for its own products, and to let advertisers export data to independently assess campaigns.

Google’s search, YouTube, reviews, maps and other businesses, which are largely free to consumers but financed through advertising, have catapulted it from a start-up to one of the world’s richest companies in just two decades.

Along the way, it has made enemies in both the tech world, who have complained to law enforcers about its market dominance, and in Washington, where lawmakers have complained about issues from its alleged political bias to its plans for China.

Now let's be honest here, the Trump regime is coming for Google solely because they don't want to share the kind of data manipulation power that it has with a company that it doesn't control.  It's taking out a threat to Trump's autocratic rule of our crumbling republic.

Having said that, Google is far too powerful and is definitely violating antitrust rules on its search engines and ad business.  Google is far from being alone in a world with trillion-dollar tech giants like Amazon and Apple, but breaking it up is a nice start.

Last Call For The Grift Wall Games

The Trump regime is of course turning a blind eye towards efforts to build a private border land wall near Mexico, because in a couple of centuries they might even be done with it.  And of course, Kris Kobach is neck deep in the con job.

Down a bumpy dirt road, past a dozen “No Trespassing” signs, two amateur sentries in neon safety vests guarded the way to a giant symbol of Trump-era politics rising up from the Chihuahuan Desert.

After one of the guards Armando asked our business and radioed someone called Viper, telling him to “stand down,” we were waved through a makeshift checkpoint and onto the site where supporters of President Donald Trump have built hundreds of yards of border wall on private land overlooking the Rio Grande.

What began in December as a quixotic online crowdfunding effort to get Trump’s promised “big, beautiful wall” built has turned into a physical barrier constructed under the direction of influential right-wing immigration opponents. On Wednesday, its backers demonstrated the wall to a handful of reporters, showing off the structure in all its steel-and-concrete glory ahead of an official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

Its organizers insist their version of the wall is a feasible model for securing hundreds of miles of southern border. Its critics call it a xenophobic scam. The fact that the effort has gotten to this point at all suggests a different and broader truth: That in the Trump era, the line between a surreal stunt and an important political development can be extremely blurry.

On Wednesday, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach offered a tour of the wall — at one point scrambling over crumbling hillside to demonstrate the difficulty of passing the terrain — while negotiating with local officials over a permitting issue that threatened to derail construction.

At the same time, Kobach has been overseeing legal aspects of the project, now housed under a nonprofit called We Build the Wall, he has been negotiating with the White House over a possible appointment as the nation’s actual “immigration czar,” a potential new post that could give him vast influence over the federal bureaucracy.

Last week, The New York Times reported a list of Kobach’s conditions for accepting the job, which included 24/7 access to a government plane and were reportedly viewed as presumptuous by some inside the administration. On Wednesday, Kobach defended those conditions. “If you're serious about solving this problem you've got to have a position that has the authority and the tools to solve the problem,” he told me.
He also said he is “99 percent” certain he knows who leaked the list, though he did not offer any names.

Kobach said he last spoke to Trump about the wall project in the Oval Office three weeks ago, and that the president drilled him on the technical specifications, expressing special interest in their model’s anti-climbing features, a set of horizontal steel plates covering the tops of the wall’s vertical slats. “Are you going to paint it?” Kobach recalled the president asking him.

The wall stands on the same stretch of border where an armed militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, was recently detaining migrants as they enter the United States. Kobach and other leaders of the wall project said they are not associated with the militias and do not condone armed vigilante action. They argue that putting up walls will put such groups “out of business.”

But his disavowals have not been entirely embraced by the movement. “I don’t support that sort of activity—yet,” said conservative pundit David Clarke, a former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, who works on public outreach for the project. “I’m real close,” said Clarke, who said that if there is not a more significant migration crackdown by the end of Trump’s first term, he would endorse vigilante action.

There also appears to be some intermingling of the militia group and the wall efforts. We Build the Wall has shared footage shot by the group online, and people associated with the group continue to make appearances at the site of the private wall project, despite intense scrutiny of the militia’s activities.

Everybody in the GOP wants in on the grift, and Kobach is leading the charge.  Never forget that the GOP is all about enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

White Supremacy, Naturally

There should be screaming alarm bells across the country after yesterday's statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on "rethinking" the concept of human rights.

The Trump administration plans to launch a new panel to offer "fresh thinking” on international human rights and “natural law,” a move some activists fear is aimed at narrowing protections for women and members of the LGBT community.

The new body, to be called the Commission on Unalienable Rights, will advise Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a notice the State Department quietly published Thursday on the Federal Register.

“The Commission will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” states the notice, which is dated May 22.
Several human rights activists said Thursday that they were surprised by the move and trying to learn details. Some privately said they worry that talk of the “nation’s founding principles” and “natural law” are coded signals of plans to focus less on protecting women and LGBT people.

The word “natural” in such context is often interpreted to mean “God-given,” a phrasing that is less common in modern human rights literature but which could signal a religious component, experts said.

Activists and former U.S. officials noted that the Trump administration’s record on human rights so far is spotty at best.

“Many in the human rights community will welcome an opportunity to advise the Trump Administration on where its policies contradict America’s founding principles. There will be much to discuss,” said Rob Berschinski, a top official with Human Rights First.

The State Department already has an entire bureau devoted to the issues of human rights, democracy and labor, and it was not clear whether officials in that bureau were involved or even aware of the plans for the new commission.

The top State Department contact listed on the notice was Kiron Skinner, Pompeo's director of policy planning. Her team acts like an in-house think tank that considers long-term foreign policy strategy.

Skinner drew criticism recently for seeming to suggest that China, a rising power, is such a fundamentally different culture from the United States that arguments about human rights may not have much effect in dialogue with Beijing. Skinner’s defenders have argued she is a serious thinker who probably simply stumbled in trying to articulate her point.

State Department officials were not able to offer details about the planned commission on Thursday.

But in remarks to reporters after this article was first published, Pompeo said the goal of the panel was to sort out “how do we connect up what it is we’re trying to achieve throughout the world, and how do we make sure that we have a solid definition of human rights upon which to tell all our diplomats around the world.”

Let's be frank here. "Natural law" means the Trump State Department getting ready to tell the world that it will no longer comply with international human rights treaties and agreements where they differ from the platform of the Trump regime on civil rights.  If you thought we were going backwards at breakneck speed on abortion rights and climate change, wait until Pompeo gets recommendations from this "panel".

It will very soon be the official position of the United States government that "natural law" supersedes international law, and that the US will no longer go along with protections for people who aren't white Trump voters.

If you thought it was a travesty when we dropped out of the Paris climate accords and nuclear agreements with Russia, wait until we decide that the United Nations has no business telling the US what to do, and that we will no longer honor international human rights norms.

We're this close to declaring White Supremacy as the official religion of the country.  We will be even more of an international pariah than we already are, and the rest of the world will maybe decide that something has to be done to contain us.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Because somehow Trump doesn't think his trade war is tanking America's economy quickly enough, he announced a plan to ratchet up tariffs on all Mexican import goods by 5% per month until our neighbors south of the border are facing 25% tariffs or Mexico stops all undocumented and asylum seekers from entering America through the country.

President Donald Trump, incensed by a surge of illegal immigrants across the southern border, vowed on Thursday to impose a tariff on all goods coming from Mexico, starting at 5% and ratcheting higher until the flow of people ceases.

Trump’s move dramatically ramped up his battle to control a tide of immigrants that has swelled despite his efforts to build a border wall and halt the thousands crossing from Central America through Mexico to the U.S. border.

The president’s decision, abruptly announced on Twitter and in a subsequent statement, was a direct challenge to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and appeared to take the Mexican government by surprise.

It raised the risk of deteriorating economic relations between two neighbors heavily dependent on the cross-border flow of goods. It also opened up a new front on trade as the Trump administration struggles to conclude a trade deal with China.

Higher tariffs will start at 5% on June 10 and increase monthly until reaching 25% on Oct. 1, unless Mexico takes immediate action, he said.
“If the illegal migration crisis is alleviated through effective actions taken by Mexico, to be determined in our sole discretion and judgment, the tariffs will be removed,” Trump said.

The announcement rattled investors who feared that worsening trade frictions could hurt the global economy. The Mexican peso, U.S. stock index futures and Asian stock markets tumbled on the news, including the shares of Japanese automakers who ship cars from Mexico to the United States.

“We’re in a good moment building a good relationship (with the United States) and this comes like a cold shower,” said Mexico’s deputy foreign minister for North America, Jesus Seade.

U.S. officials said 80,000 people are being held in custody with an average of 4,500 arriving daily, overwhelming the ability of border patrol officials to handle them.A senior White House official said Trump was particularly concerned that U.S. border agents apprehended a group of 1,036 migrants as they illegally crossed the border from Mexico on Wednesday. Officials said it was the largest single group since October.

Most likely this will never be implemented, as somebody will sit down with Trump and explain to him just how many US jobs in red states will be lost over this, and how many people will blame Republicans in those states for not stopping Trump.  It will be a bloodbath come next year.

This is Trump manufacturing both an immigration crisis and an economic crisis, both of which he thinks he will be able to exploit in order to justify use of unprecedented "emergency powers".

The bitter reality will strike home on this very quickly, and Trump will fold soon.  The one thing keeping people from flooding the streets to get rid of the GOP right now is the singular fact that they haven't comepltely tanked the economy yet.  The second that happens, it will be carnage.

StupidiNews!

• The 92nd Scripps National Spelling Bee ended Thursday night in a shocking eight-way tie as all eight final contenders lasted twenty increasingly difficult rounds with no spelling errors.
• Born at just 23 weeks old, the world's smallest surviving baby, nicknamed "Saybie" and her mother are recovering in California after five months in the neonatal ICU.
• At least seven people have been killed or injured after a car bomb targeted an NGO convoy in Kabul, Afghanistan early Friday, there has been no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
• North Korea has reportedly executed the country's former top nuclear envoy along with four other foreign ministry officials after the failed summit earlier this year between Trump and Kim Jong Un.
• Health officials in Hawaii are warning tourists to avoid eating snails, slugs, and other mollusks as they could be infected with a potentially deadly parasitic worm.

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Suddenly, the FBI investigation into Andrew Gillum's term as Mayor of Tallahassee, which had nothing to do with Gillum himself or his 2018 campaign for Governor, now magically has everything to do with Gillum's 2018 campaign for Governor.

Andrew Gillum is a focal point of a recently issued federal grand jury subpoena that demands information on the former Democratic candidate for governor, his campaign, his political committee, a wealthy donor, a charity he worked for and a former employer.

The subpoena, obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and previously unreported, could reflect a new level of federal inquiry into Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee who narrowly lost to Republican Ron DeSantis last year.

Throughout his campaign last year, Gillum insisted he was not a target of a sprawling FBI investigation of Tallahassee City Hall, which has taken at least three years and resulted in three arrests. Last year, he told the Tallahassee Democrat: “Twenty-plus subpoenas have been issued and not one of them has anything to do with me.”

But the recent one does. Previously, the investigation had centered on corruption inside Tallahassee government, including during Gillum’s time as mayor. The newer subpoena is more focused on Gillum’s 2018 campaign and people and organizations with clear ties to him, but with less obvious connections to Tallahassee City Hall.

Gillum, now a CNN contributor, declined to answer specific questions about the subpoena or say whether a subpoena was issued to him. In a statement to the Times, Gillum said: "We stand ready to assist any future review of our work, because I am confident we always did the right thing and complied fully with the law.”

“We ran an open and honest campaign. A campaign powered by thousands of volunteers and supporters. A campaign that captured imaginations and earned over four million votes,” Gillum said. “When you run a campaign that puts the power in the hands of the people, and fights for change, it inevitably invites close scrutiny, regardless of the facts.” 

Gillum ran into trouble after accepting tickets for Hamilton from the FBI in a sting operation. The state of Florida nailed him for a $5,000 ethics violation fine on that last year and that was that.

But that was before Bill Barr.

Now there's a grand jury investigating Gillum's campaign.

You do the math.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Although it won't surprise a single reader of ZVTS, it turns out that the Trump regime's plan to make citizenship the primary question of the 2020 Census (and of course, lying on a Census form is punishable by law) is indeed an effort to disenfranchise millions of undocumented living in America.

The Trump administration’s controversial effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was drawn up by the Republican Party’s gerrymandering mastermind, who wrote that it “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This bombshell news, revealed in newly released legal documents, suggests that the Trump administration added the question not to better enforce the Voting Rights Act, as it claimed, but to benefit Republicans politically when it came to drawing new political districts.

A case challenging the citizenship question is currently before the Supreme Court, and the new evidence significantly undercuts the Trump administration’s position in the case.

Tom Hofeller, who passed away last year, was the longtime redistricting expert for the Republican National Committee. He helped Republicans draw heavily gerrymandered maps in nearly every key swing state after the 2010 election. In some of those places, like North Carolina, the new lines were struck down for discriminating against African Americans.

In 2015, Hofeller was hired by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, to study the impact of drawing state legislative districts based on citizenship rather than total population, which has been the standard for decades. Hofeller’s analysis of Texas state legislative districts found that drawing districts based on citizenship—a move he conceded would be a “radical departure from the federal ‘one person, one vote’ rule presently used in the United States”—would reduce representation for Hispanics, who tended to vote Democratic, and increase representation for white Republicans. But Hofeller said that a question about citizenship would need to be added to the census, which forms the basis for redistricting, for states like Texas to pursue this new strategy.

Hofeller then urged President Donald Trump’s transition team to add the question about citizenship to the 2020 census. He urged the team to claim that a citizenship question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, even though Hofeller had already concluded that it would harm the racial minority groups that the act was designed to protect. That argument was then used by the Justice Department in a December 2017 letter requesting that the Commerce Department, which oversees the census, include a citizenship question.

Hofeller’s documents were discovered on hard drives found by his estranged daughter and introduced into evidence in a separate trial challenging gerrymandered North Carolina state legislative districts drawn by Hofeller. On Thursday, lawyers challenging the citizenship question cited them in federal court. They suggest that members of Trump’s team may not have been fully forthcoming in their testimony under oath. Neither Trump transition team member Mark Neuman nor John Gore, the former assistant attorney general for civil rights who wrote the Justice Department letter, mentioned Hofeller’s involvement in the letter when they were deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit by New York and 17 other states challenging the citizenship question.

We'll see what effect this has on NC's gerrymandering and Census citizenship question, both before SCOTUS.  Decisions could be coming on these cases in less than a month.

The reality is though that we now have proof the goal of Republican gerrymandering over the last decade is to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

The question is will Democrats actually take action to stop this?

Gaslighting The Gas Company

America under Trump is just one big, stupid, loud, obnoxious commercial.

The Department of Energy issued a press release on Tuesday that quoted officials praising “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom.”

The statement begins with a relatively milquetoast announcement on new exports of natural gas produced in Quintana Island, Texas.

Then the release quotes U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark Menezes as saying: “Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy.”

After which Steven Winberg, the assistant secretary for fossil energy, says: “With the U.S. in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world.”

Our government is very much a kakstiocracy , a government run by the worst possible people fpr the job at every single imaginable turn.

StupidiNews!

• At least 7 people are dead and 19 missing as a sightseeing boat capsized in the Danube River in Budapest after colliding with another tourist boat.
• Emails have emerged confirming a Wall Street Journal story that the USS John McCain was sent off duty while Donald Trump was in Japan last week to keep from angering him.
• Disney CEO Bob Iger says it will be "very difficult" for the entertainment giant to continue to do business in Georgia if the state's anti-abortion law signed this month takes effect.
• Embattled Canadian PM Justin Trudeau says he will bring up the US "backsliding" on abortion access with US VP Mike Pence during his state visit this week.
• Astronomers have spotted evidence that two white dwarf stars could collide and form a neutron star before fading away.