Filling In For The Mustache

Continuing a tradition of Donald Trump going "This marginally qualified person would be great for the job because they are loyal to me!" and filling White House vacancies caused by firing people who dared to disagree with him, Trump has named career diplomat Robert O'Brien to the post of National Security Adviser, replacing the fired John Bolton's mustache.

O’Brien was among a list of five contenders Trump named the day before, a list that had apparently been narrowed from about 15 in the days immediately after Bolton’s ouster.
Unlike Bolton, O’Brien is not a big name in the intelligence and national security world — Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s former chief of staff who was also considered for the post, said he knows next to nothing about O’Brien except that he “seems to have pretty good credentials on paper.” 

Asked whether the Senate Intelligence Committee knew anything about O’Brien, an aide said, “nope, not really.” 

O’Brien, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, comes aboard as Trump faces a number of crises in the Middle East, including attempts to broker peace in Afghanistan with the Taliban as well as between the Israelis and Palestinians. 

The administration is also grappling with how to confront an increasingly hostile Iranian regime, on which Trump announced a fresh package of sanctions just moments before revealing that he'd tapped O'Brien for his new post. 

Trump has also thrown out the possibility of a third nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un prior to next year’s election, in addition to the prospect of reaching a new arms deal with Russia and continuing efforts to beat back the Islamic State — all of which will require O’Brien’s involvement. 

Prior to joining the Trump administration, O’Brien served as co-chairman of the State Department's public-private partnership for justice reform in Afghanistan under both President Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He also served as a U.S. Representative to the U.N. General Assembly in 2005, where he worked alongside Bolton. 

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force one Wednesday, Trump praised O’Brien, an aide to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with whom he’s worked with to free Americans held captive abroad, as “fantastic.” 

Trump has frequently touted his administration’s record in freeing American hostages — sometimes referring to himself as “chief hostage negotiator” — at times giving himself an outsize role in efforts to free American hostages. The president recently made a show of dispatching O’Brien to Sweden to assist in the case of rapper A$AP Rocky, who’d been jailed on assault charges.

O'Brien made Trump look smart, and he's familiar with foreign policy, so he gets the job.  Whether he actually wants it as the world is rapidly speeding towards a US shooting war with Iran, is yet to be determined.  Remember: this is still someone willingly working for Donald Trump.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Don't look now, but the "roaring" Trump economy just sprang a $53 billion leak and needed the most repairs since the bad old days of the 2008 Great Recession.

Borrowing rates skyrocketed on Tuesday in a corner of the markets the public rarely notices but that is critical to the functioning of the global financial system. 

The spike in overnight borrowing rates forced the New York Federal Reserve to come to the rescue with a special operation aimed at easing stress in financial markets. 

It was the NY Fed's first such rescue operation in a decade, the last occurring in late 2008. 

"It's unprecedented, at least in the post-crisis era," said Mark Cabana, rates strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. 

On Tuesday morning, the NY Fed launched what's called an "overnight repo operation," during which the central bank attempts to ease pressure in markets by purchasing Treasuries and other securities. The goal is to pump money into the system to keep borrowing costs from creeping above the Fed's target range . 

The first attempt by the NY Fed was canceled because of "technical difficulties." 

Minutes later, the NY Fed successfully injected $53 billion into the system.
The episode demonstrates evidence of emerging strains in financial markets and raises concern that the Federal Reserve could be losing its grip on short-term rates. 

"The funding markets are clearly stressed," said Guy LeBas, managing director of fixed income strategy at Janney Capital Markets. "It's going to require Fed action." 

The NY Fed announced plans late Tuesday to hold another repurchase agreement operation on Wednesday that would aim to repurchase up to an additional $75 billion. 

The rate on overnight repurchase agreements hit 5% on Monday, according to Refinitiv data. That's up from 2.29% late last week and well above the target range set in July by the Federal Reserve, which is 2% to 2.25%. The surge continued Tuesday, with the overnight rate hitting a high of 10% before the NY Fed stepped in. 

Although it doesn't get as much attention as the Dow or the 10-year Treasury rate, this overnight market plays a central role in modern finance. It allows banks to quickly and cheaply borrow money, for short periods of time, often to buy bonds like Treasuries. This market broke down during the 2008 financial crisis. 

However, analysts drew a distinction between the current period of stress and what happened during the crisis. Back then, investors were deeply worried about the financial health of banks. Today, banks are hauling in record profits and balance sheets look sturdy. 

It's unclear what exactly is causing the stress in the overnight market, or how long it will last. 

"No one knows why this is happening," Jim Bianco CEO of Bianco Research, said on Twitter. "If it persists more than another day or two, it will be a problem."

If this all is starting to smell like we're back in 2007, heading for disaster in 2008, there are now a lot of similarities, too many in fact to ignore.  And Donald Trump is in charge of fixing this.  I'll tell you what happened, the markets honestly think Trump is going to bomb Iran and send us all to hell.

Stay tuned.  It's only going to get worse from here.  Much worse.

StupidiNews!

• An 18-year-old Oklahoma woman was arrested after purchasing an AK-47 rifle and making threats about attacking her former high school and killing "400 people" there.
• Pennsylvania GOP state Sen. Michael Folmer was arrested Tuesday and charged with several counts relating to child pornography, a search warrant finding images on his phone.
• Israel's main opposition candidate Benny Gantz is claiming victory in Tuesday's national elections after PM Benjamin Netanyahu, facing bribery indictments, was unable to form a government.
• Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is ruling out bilateral talks with Donald Trump ahead of the annual UN meeting of world leaders unless the US lifts sanctions.
• Comcast is joining the ranks of streaming content providers with its NBC Peacock service, expected to launch in April 2020.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Heads To The Red Suburbs

Millennials are moving away from the big blue cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco because they can't afford to live there.  But as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson notes, they're moving to bluer urban areas of red states, and that's starting to affect voting patterns in places like NC, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

These movers are U-Hauling to ruddier states in the South and West. The five fastest-growing metros of the past few years—Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, and Orlando, Florida—are in states won by Trump. The other metro areas with a population of at least 1 million that grew by at least 1.5 percent last year were Las Vegas; Austin, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Raleigh, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; Tampa, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. All of those metros are in red or purple states.

It’s not just liberals moving to the South. After all, movers to Florida are often retirees who fit squarely in the Fox News demo, and some of the people moving from California to Texas are conservatives. But today’s domestic migrants are often college graduates of the exceeding liberal Generations Y and Z. “The current migration to these suburbs is mostly people in their 20s and 30s, or Millennials, who are more diverse and liberal than the rest of the population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. According to his research, Americans ages 20 to 40 are three times as likely to move as people ages 50 to 70.

This drip-drip-drip of young residents trickling down into red-state suburbs is helping to turn southern metros into Democratic strongholds. (Of course, migration isn’t the only factor pushing these metros leftward, but more on that later.) In Texas, Democrats’ advantage in the five counties representing Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Austin (the “Texas Five” in the graph below) grew from 130,000 in the 2012 presidential election to nearly 800,000 in the 2018 Senate election.

In Arizona, from 2012 to 2016, Democrats narrowed their deficit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, by 100,000 votes. Two years later, in the 2018 Senate election, the county swung Democratic, with Democrats gaining another 100,000 net votes.

In Georgia, from the 2012 presidential election to the 2018 gubernatorial elections, the four counties constituting most of Atlanta and its suburbs—Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett—increased their Democratic margin by more than 250,000.

What’s remarkable about these changes isn’t just their size, but their resemblance to Trump’s 2016 margins. Trump won Texas in 2016 by 800,000 votes. He won Arizona by 90,000 votes. He won Georgia by 170,000 votes. If these states’ biggest metros continue to move left at the same rate, there is every reason to believe that Texas, Arizona, and Georgia could be toss-ups quite soon.

As noted above, migration isn’t the only reason southern metros might be shifting to the Democratic Party: Longtime residents may be switching parties in response to Trump, for instance. Republicans have likely hurt themselves by moving further to the right to galvanize their white exurban and rural base, even as their support has thinned in the suburbs and among working-class white women.

But domestic migration is key. Just look at Texas. CNN exit polls for the state’s 2018 Senate election showed that Beto O’Rourke was buoyed by recent movers, winning more than 60 percent of those who had moved to Texas within the past 10 years. At current migration rates, the “Texas Five” counties could easily add another 200,000 votes from 2016 to 2020, putting more pressure on Trump’s margin in the state. A September poll conducted by Univision and the University of Houston found the top-six Democratic presidential contenders all leading Trump in Texas.

Outside of national elections, the blue flood of the Sun Belt could have other political implications, such as more showdowns between blue cities and red states. As The Atlantic’s David Graham has argued, North Carolina’s GOP-led general assembly has waged war against liberal cities such as Charlotte—for instance, by reversing a local ordinance that banned discrimination against LGBTQ people. This sort of state-city showdown could become a regular feature of southern politics. In the past six months, both the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Observer have run features bemoaning the Californication of northern Texas, with the former noting that “conservatives fear these domestic migrants will bring with them a liberal ideology that would disturb the Texas way of living.”

In 2020, the big three presidential battleground states are no longer Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Florida, NC, and Wisconsin.  Pretty soon, maybe by 2024, that's going to be Florida, Texas, and Georgia.

But don't count out Rust Belt states either.  Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and yes, even Ohio, remain important states that Democrats are going to have to find a way to compete in.  But they're starting to get a hand from people leaving California and New York for places like Columbus, Philly, Detroit, Madison, and the Twin Cities.  Even Iowa and Kansas are getting bluer.

Turns out blue megatropolis areas and their terrible housing markets are actually the thing Democrats needed to be competitive in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt.  Who knew?

But don't worry too much about California.  Their Republicans are heading for the hills anyway.

Spies Like Us, Con't

I can't help but notice that as the Trump regime draws closer to possibly bringing charges against former FBI Director Andrew McCabe for his role in the Mueller probe, we get more and more leaks detailing just how much damage against the US intelligence community Donald Trump is personally responsible for with his criminal relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds — sometimes known as the “dachas” — were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel.

The Obama administration’s public rationale for the expulsions and closures — the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades — was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.

Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation’s capital, according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau’s ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community.

“It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations,” said a former senior CIA official.

American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

These compromises, the full gravity of which became clear to U.S. officials in 2012, gave Russian spies in American cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco key insights into the location of undercover FBI surveillance teams, and likely the actual substance of FBI communications, according to former officials. They provided the Russians opportunities to potentially shake off FBI surveillance and communicate with sensitive human sources, check on remote recording devices and even gather intelligence on their FBI pursuers, the former officials said.
“When we found out about this, the light bulb went on — that this could be why we haven’t seen [certain types of] activity” from known Russian spies in the United States, said a former senior intelligence official.

The compromise of FBI systems occurred not long after the White House’s 2010 decision to arrest and expose a group of “illegals” – Russian operatives embedded in American society under deep non-official cover – and reflected a resurgence of Russian espionage. Just a few months after the illegals pleaded guilty in July 2010, the FBI opened a new investigation into a group of New York-based undercover Russian intelligence officers. These Russian spies, the FBI discovered, were attempting to recruit a ring of U.S. assets — including Carter Page, an American businessman who would later act as an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The breaches also spoke to larger challenges faced by U.S. intelligence agencies in guarding the nation’s secrets, an issue highlighted by recent revelations, first published by CNN, that the CIA was forced to extract a key Russian asset and bring him to the U.S. in 2017. The asset was reportedly critical to the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally directed the interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

In other words, Putin and the Russians were running a long con against the US for nearly all of the Obama administration, with the intent of ultimately manipulating the 2016 presidential election so that Obama's successor in the White House would be their man, someone who would have every reason to hate and distrust American federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Donald Trump was the perfect choice.  And Trump has waged war on the FBI, CIA, and NSA better than Putin ever could have expected in order to protect his own criminal actions.

Yes, Obama's "reset" with Russia was a massive mistake, and the one thing Mitt Romney was right about in 2012 was that Russia was indeed our biggest enemy.  The Snowden operation did untold damage to our intel capabilities and its success was directly responsible for making the 2016 election operation possible.  That failure is absolutely on him.

But as Obama fought to try to close the barn door after those horses got loose and clean up the messes in a post-Snowden era, remember it was Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, that Vladimir Putin wanted in the White House, and he got his way.  And Trump has made sure that everything Obama tried to do to prevent another Snowden was reversed.

What all this means is that Trump has made everything with Russia worse.  Oh yeah, they helped him become president, too.

Meanwhile, Here In Bevinstan...

Cincinnati is down to its last abortion clinic, and the legal fight to keep it open rages on, but with the Trump regime defunding Title IX money for Planned Parenthood, the area is already losing two clinics that didn't offer abortions. 

Now we find out a Kentucky man planned to blow up the abortion clinic in Cincinnati and was stopped by police.

A Kentucky man accused of threatening to blow up a Planned Parenthood facility in Cincinnati was ordered held on $100,000 bond Monday after police found a "homemade destructive device" at his home. 

WXIX-TV reports Daniel Kibler was arrested Sunday after police searched his home in Independence. He is charged with possession of a destructive device, terroristic threatening and eight counts of wanton endangerment. His arrest citation says Kibler admitted to creating the destructive device and storing it in his home he's shared with his wife and seven children. 

A judge revealed during Kibler's arraignment on Monday that the business he allegedly targeted was a Planned Parenthood office in Cincinnati. 

Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio President Kersha Deibel said in a statement Monday that the facility was open to serve patients needing care. 

"We are here for our patients today and we will continue to be here for our patients, no matter what. For the women, men and young people we serve, the care we provide isn't about politics — it's about their well-being, and we remain focused on ensuring our patients are able to access that care safely."

Surprise, more violence by the anti-choicers, egged on by Trump and his ilk.   Stochastic terrorism at its finest, right here in the Bluegrass State.

StupidiNews!

• The White House continues to direct all House Judiciary Committee subpoena targets to refuse to talk to congressional investigators, asserting executive privilege over Corey Lewandowski and two others.
• The Manhattan DA's office has subpoenaed eight years of Donald Trump's federal tax returns in the NY state criminal investigation into Trump's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
• Hong Kong city administrator Carrie Lam says she will begin "dialogue sessions" with protesters this week, but stated again that protests and violence in the city must come to an immediate end.
• China is siding with its Asian rivals over oil prices as the world waits to see what the Saudi and US response will be to Saturday's Abqaiq oilfield attacks.
• Netflix has won the streaming war for exclusive rights to Seinfeld starting in 2021, beating out Hulu's current $180 million deal.

Lat Call For Courting Disaster, Con't

As Greg Sargent points out, the damage Trump has done through the courts will be with us for decades, if not the rest of our lifetimes, and we have to face the very real possibility that the Roberts Court will destroy the remaining paths to fixing climate change and doom all of us, no matter who wins in 2020, according to a new study.

Imagine that a Democratic president and Congress were to enact some sort of Green New Deal-oriented program that includes extensive investments in green energy technologies, and new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions by both industry and the agricultural sector.

Such efforts would be implemented by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture Department. No matter how clearly the statutory commands to these agencies are written, the study argues, “a determined Court can undermine attempts to realize the legislation by reading agencies’ statutory authority extremely narrowly.”  

The study posits that the conservative justices could invalidate climate legislation through a creative reading of the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking private property for “public use” without “just compensation.”

For instance, the study notes, the court might narrowly construe what counts as a “public purpose,” as previous conservative justices have suggested in dissents. In this scenario, the court might strike down legislation dramatically restricting oil drilling as an unconstitutional “taking” from a corporation engaged in it.

“Though oil companies arguably are implicated in wreaking affirmative harm on society,” the study concludes, the court might simply deny that the policy in question would actually serve a public purpose. How? By concluding that it “would not remedy the affirmative harm that climate change poses to society,” or worse, that “climate change does not pose a sufficient harm in the first place.”

Another possibility is that the conservative justices might be animated by a newly emerging doctrine called “regulatory takings.” This doctrine reads not just eminent domain but also certain regulatory acts as “takings” requiring compensation.

Imagine a law that requires new levels of monitoring on fossil-fuel drilling sites to keep extractions below a certain threshold. The study posits that the justices might allow that the regulation does serve a public purpose, so it can stand, but also that it’s still a “taking” and thus requires compensation.

“Requiring the government to pay to regulate could pose problems for the fiscal feasibility of climate change legislation,” the study concludes.

Other possibilities suggested by the study: Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce underpins many environmental laws, but the conservative court could invalidate, say, new regulations affecting natural resources by arguing that the commerce clause does not authorize intrusions into regulatory authority typically reserved to the states.

Or the conservative court could invalidate, for instance, new regulatory standards created for states by concluding that the mechanism to do so runs afoul of an “anti-commandeering doctrine” developed by conservatives to limit the federal government’s ability to exert influence over state governments.

The bottom line subtext of the study: In response to the climate crisis, the federal government is going to have to exercise its powers to a much greater degree — and a major collision between this and the conservative court majority is inevitable.

Once again, you can thank the third party purity scolds, the misogynists, and the "LOL Trump would be a funny president!" idiots for this.  The damage is already done, and putting the ideas of Medicaid for All and a Green New Deal out there to be crushed by the courts will just be a recipe for more disaster, and more Trump.

We're in triage mode now.  Survival is all that matters. 

The Saudis And The Houthis, Con't

In the last 18-24 hours or so, the US and Saudi position on Saturday's attack on the Saudi oilfields of Abqaiq has gone from "Yemeni Houthi rebels made a successful drone attack" to "It was Iranian cruise missiles the whole time" and the Trump regime is all but promising a new shooting war in the Middle East against Iran.

Iran launched nearly a dozen cruise missiles and over 20 drones from its territory in the attack on a key Saudi oil facility Saturday, a senior Trump administration official told ABC News Sunday.

It is an extraordinary charge to make, that Iran used missiles and drones to attack its neighbor and rival Saudi Arabia, as the region teeters on the edge of high tensions.

President Donald Trump warned the U.S. was "locked and loaded" to respond to the attack on Sunday, waiting for verification of who was responsible and for word from Saudi Arabia on how to proceed.

The Trump administration, in particular Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has blamed Iran for the attack since Saturday, but so far, there's been no public accusation that Iran launched missiles.

The Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen claimed responsibility for the assault, which hit one of the world's largest oil processing facilities, hundreds of miles from the Yemen-Saudi border, and sharply impacted global oil supplies.

But a senior U.S. official told ABC News Saturday that was false: "It was Iran. The Houthis are claiming credit for something they did not do."

Pompeo tweeted that there was "no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."

The Saudis are going along with this too.

The Saudi-led military coalition battling Yemen’s Houthi movement said on Monday that the attack on Saudi Arabian oil plants was carried out with Iranian weapons and was not launched from Yemen according to preliminary findings.

Coalition spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said that an investigation into Saturday’s strikes, which had been claimed by the Iran-aligned Houthi group, was still going on to determine the launch location.

“The preliminary results show that the weapons are Iranian and we are currently working to determine the location ... The terrorist attack did not originate from Yemen as the Houthi militia claimed,” Malki told a press conference in Riyadh.

He said authorities would reveal the location from where drones were launched at a future press briefing.

Iran has dismissed as “unacceptable” U.S. accusations that Tehran was responsible for the assault on Saudi oil facilities that cut almost half of the kingdom’s production, or 5% of global oil supply.

Malki said the Gulf Arab state, the world’s top oil exporter, was capable of protecting vital energy and economic sites. “This cowardly act largely targets the global economy and not Saudi Arabia.”

Cool, so we just had our selling point for another two decades of war in the Middle East.  The drums of war are the loudest they've been since 2002.  The governments of Israel, the US, and Saudi Arabia all desperately want a war with Iran to maintain their current political and economic power.

This is bad, folks.  Real bad.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy is apparently on FOX News promising indictments not only against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, but against former FBI DIrector James Comey as well. (Gross FOX News link through Do Not Link)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., promised that guilty parties will be held accountable after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz releases his report on the FBI's alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the Russia investigation, and predicted that former bureau leaders James Comey and Andrew McCabe will face criminal charges after what he described as an attempted "coup" to take down President Trump. 

The report will address concerns with whether or not the FBI acted improperly in obtaining a FISA warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the early stages of their investigation of Russian election interference and possible Trump campaign connections. The Inspector General's office has already turned over a draft of its findings to Attorney General Bill Barr, and a final report is expected in the near future.

"We came the closest ever to this country having a coup, and now we need accountability," McCarthy told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures." "I respect this attorney general so greatly, that the way he has handled this, he believes in accountability, but more importantly, he believes in the rule of law." 

When asked if there will really be accountability, McCarthy promised, "Yes."
James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who were the director and deputy director of the FBI when the Russia probe began, have been the subjects of separate IG investigations, and McCarthy believes they will both face consequences. 

"We will see an indictment," he said of McCabe, who is facing the prospect of federal charges after Horowitz faulted him in a separate inquiry over statements he made during a Hillary Clinton-related investigation. The review found that McCabe "lacked candor" when talking with investigators, but the former FBI official has denied wrongdoing. Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu recommended charges against McCabe after the DOJ rejected his appeal. 

Comey was chastised in a recent report from Horowitz that discussed how Comey improperly maintained records of his conversations with President Trump, and leaked sensitive information about the investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. While the report found that Comey violated department policy, the DOJ opted not to press charges. McCarthy believes that there will be more to come for Comey. 

"In the end, I do not believe that Jim Comey will get off," McCarthy predicted, adding, “Anyone that has had any association with trying to create this coup should be held accountable.”

Of course, as we discussed over the weekend, to get an indictment, you need convince a grand jury.  So far, that hasn't happened, at least not yet.  It could happen of course, and probably will, but unless McCarthy is giving away the scam he's not supposed to know about, he's lying.

Still, this is FOX News feeding red meat of locking up Trump's political enemies.  Everyone should be against this.

StupidiNews!

• Oil futures were trading up as high as 15% early Monday after Donald Trump tweeted that the US was "locked and loaded" to deal with the Saturday attack on Saudi Arabia's largest oilfield.
• As demonstrations in Hong Kong reach their 100th day, police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protests over the weekend after several people tried to attack the city's main government HQ.
• Australian intelligence has determined that China was behind a major cyber-attack in May involving parliament and three of the nation's largest political parties.
• Tens of thousands of General Motors auto workers went on strike at midnight as their contract with the UAW expired, it's the first strike for GM workers since 2007.
• House Judiciary Committee members from both parties are demanding emails from Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon as the House antitrust probe against big tech companies gets underway.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Apparently the US Border Patrol doesn't like being Trump's paid thugs to round up those people and slam them in for-profit detention camps, but hey, they're doing it anyway because they gotta make a buck somehow.

One Border Patrol agent in Tucson said he had been called a “sellout” and a “kid killer.” In El Paso, an agent said he and his colleagues in uniform had avoided eating lunch together except at certain “BP friendly” restaurants because “there’s always the possibility of them spitting in your food.” An agent in Arizona quit last year out of frustration. “Caging people for a nonviolent activity,” he said, “started to eat away at me.” 

For decades, the Border Patrol was a largely invisible security force. Along the southwestern border, its work was dusty and lonely. Between adrenaline-fueled chases, the shells of sunflower seeds piled up outside the windows of their idling pickup trucks. Agents called their slow-motion specialty “laying in” — hiding in the desert and brush for hours, to wait and watch, and watch and wait. 

Two years ago, when President Trump entered the White House with a pledge to close the door on illegal immigration, all that changed. The nearly 20,000 agents of the Border Patrol became the leading edge of one of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns ever imposed in the United States. 

No longer were they a quasi-military organization tasked primarily with intercepting drug runners and chasing smugglers. Their new focus was to block and detain hundreds of thousands of migrant families fleeing violence and extreme poverty — herding people into tents and cages, seizing children and sending their parents to jail, trying to spot those too sick to survive in the densely packed processing facilities along the border.

It's just heart-rending, isn't it.

Ten migrants have died since September in the custody of the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. 

In recent months, the extreme overcrowding on the border has begun to ease, with migrants turned away and made to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed. Last week, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to close the door further, at least for now, by requiring migrants from countries outside Mexico to show they have already been denied refuge in another country before applying for asylum.

The Border Patrol, whose agents have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated, is suffering a crisis in both mission and morale. Earlier this year, the disclosure of a private Facebook group where agents posted sexist and callous references to migrants and the politicians who support them reinforced the perception that agents often view the vulnerable people in their care with frustration and contempt. 

Interviews with 25 current and former agents in Texas, California and Arizona — some conducted on the condition of anonymity so the agents could speak more candidly — paint a portrait of an agency in a political and operational quagmire. Overwhelmed through the spring and early summer by desperate migrants, many agents have grown defensive, insular and bitter. 

The president of the agents’ union said he had received death threats. An agent in South Texas said some colleagues he knew were looking for other federal law enforcement jobs. One agent in El Paso told a retired agent he was so disgusted by scandals in which the Border Patrol has been accused of neglecting or mistreating migrants that he wanted the motto emblazoned on its green-and-white vehicles — “Honor First” — scratched off.

Honor among jackbooted thugs and all.

I have zero sympathy for the folks actively working to be Donald Trump's white supremacist paramilitary police.  You have a choice, and that choice is helping the rest of us get rid of the bastard, or stay with him and face the consequences of that choice.

Rounding up kids and families for semi-permanent detention is repugnant.  You can stop at anytime and resign, you know.

Of course, the people working for Trump never will.

The Saudis And The Houthis, Con't

As I said yesterday, the drone attack that damaged the heart of Saudi Arabia's oilfields on Saturday is a massive issue, because despite Yemeni Houthi rebels claiming responsibility, the Trump regime says Iran is behind the attack.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pinned the blame on Iran for an attack at a Saudi oil field in a pair of tweets Saturday. 

Drone strikes on crucial Saudi Arabian oil facilities have disrupted about half of the kingdom's oil capacity, or 5% of the daily global oil supply, CNN Business reported earlier Saturday. Yemen's Houthi rebels took responsibility for the attacks but they are often backed by Iran. 

But preliminary indications are that the attacks did not originate from Yemen and likely originated from Iraq, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. The same official said the damage was caused by an armed drone attack. 

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen said there have been more than 200 drone attacks launched by Houthi rebels from Yemen into Saudi Arabia, and none have been as effective as Saturday's attack, lending credence to the belief that the attack did not originate from Yemen. 

"Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while Rouhani and Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy," Pompeo tweeted, referencing Iran's president Hassan Rouhani and foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. 

"Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen," Pompeo continued, providing no evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. 

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, rejected the accusation that Iran was behind the attack. 

"Such blind accusations and inappropriate comments in a diplomatic context are incomprehensible and meaningless," he said, adding: "even hostility needs a certain degree of credibility and reasonable frameworks, US officials have also violated these basic principles." 

John Bolton's mustache may be gone, but the Trump regime is still looking for any excuse for war with Tehran, and it finally may have found one.

Sunday Long Read: Knows The Land Like The Back Of His Hand

This week's long read comes as a reminder that while not every US farmer believes in climate change, they all deal with its effects whether they want to or not.

The sun wasn’t even up yet when Ethan Cox tugged his work boots on, along with his old barn coat, the lighter one. He knew he wouldn’t need the heavier one. He didn’t even have to check the local forecast. It was going to be warm that day, low to mid-80s as the day wore on, he guessed, pretty much the same as it had been for quite a while. He glanced out the bedroom window at the sky. It was gray and brittle. It was going to be dry, too. That was no surprise either. The first week of March 2012 had been unusually dry. So had the whole month of February. In fact, the whole winter had been warm and dry. The yuppies and the liberals across the river in St. Louis or up in Chicago or out in San Francisco and New York all talked about that as being evidence that the climate was changing, that the bill was coming due for a century’s worth of pouring all manner of poison into the atmosphere. 

Ethan’s neighbors thought that was kind of amusing. They saw the warm, dry weather as a godsend. After two years of record or near-record flooding, a deluge in 2011 so powerful that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to blow up the levees along the Mississippi River to keep Cairo, Illinois, from being washed off the map and such brutal rainstorms a year earlier that the region suffered $3 billion in losses and crop and infrastructure damage that forced many farmers in the region to the brink of bankruptcy, to them the unseasonably warm and dry spring of 2012 was a sign from above that the worst was over, at least for now. 

Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. They were always warning that something — the weather, the pesticides and fertilizers the farmers used, the very crops they grew, modified by biochemists in some corporate lab someplace — was going to tilt Earth on its axis and unleash all kinds of demonic forces. And it always seemed as if the only solution was to rein in farmers like Ethan, make them toe the line, regardless of what it cost in terms of productivity, regardless of what it cost the rest of the world in terms of slowing down the rate of food production even as the number of hungry mouths to feed skyrocketed around the globe. Not that he was entirely hostile to liberal ideas — he didn’t mind the farm subsidies that came his way. 

Ethan paused in the sleepy kitchen of the White Hall, Illinois, farm where he had been born sixty-five years earlier, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then trudged out the side door, across the yard toward the workshop, a kind of tractor shed and makeshift office that he had turned into the nerve center of the 3,000-acre corn and soy and cattle farm he had built the place into. He was moving a little slower these days. His knees weren’t what they used to be. Neither was his heart. Seemed as if his body was every bit as creaky as the old corrugated metal sliding door to the workshop that grumbled and screeched in protest every time he hauled it open.

No, Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. But he didn’t think much of his neighbors’ unbounded optimism either. Maybe the liberals’ warnings about global warming were overblown, but something was happening. Those two years of back-to-back storms were like nothing he had ever seen, and despite his best efforts to gird his land against nature’s ravages — adopting no-till or strip-till farming to leave a protective cover on the ground and reduce the worst effects of erosion, for example — those storms had taken a toll, even on a farsighted farmer like him. His 2011 crop was a fraction of what it should have been. So was his 2010 harvest. Another year like that, and instead of getting paid, he’d owe money to the corporation that took his corn. 

The thing was, there had been an ever-increasing number of years like that. In the fifty years since Ethan was a teenager, the number of extreme rain events — storms dumping more than three inches of rain on the sprawling farm fields of Illinois — had increased by 83 percent. There were years like 1993 and 2008, years that saw the worst flooding in the Mississippi basin since the 1930s, and years like 2010 and 2011, when one after another, storms of amazing fury threatened to drown the young corn and soy before they got their heads up. 

The good years were getting to be fewer and fewer. Ethan understood that. And as far forward as he could peer into the future, he saw that continuing. 

He also understood in a way that most of his neighbors and even many scientists didn’t yet that the volatility in the weather, those forces that were driving the rains, could—and no doubt would — just as easily shut off the tap altogether, leaving the same fields that only a year earlier had been inundated baking under a relentless, desiccating drought. 

Those clear, warm blue skies that had raised his neighbors’ hopes were, for Ethan, a bit more ominous. All winter long, it had been gnawing at him. Every time he’d head out on his ATV across snowless fields, he’d think back to those days six decades ago when he had been out here with his own father, plowing through axle-deep drifts in the first of several old Jeeps his father had bought — he had fallen in love with the things after a visit to Ethan’s uncle in the mountains of New Mexico in the years after the Second World War, one of the few times Ethan had ever been that far from southern Illinois. That was back in 1954. The old man had figured that a Jeep like that would come in handy; they could use it to chase cattle or to haul back a deer after hunting, and it could even help them earn a couple of extra bucks if he fitted a blade to the front of it and hired himself out to clear his neighbors’ lanes and driveways of snow. His father had been right. He usually was, Ethan thought. Maybe that was part of the reason why Ethan still kept an old Jeep around the place, as a kind of rolling monument to his father’s foresight. 

Of course, Ethan hadn’t really needed the Jeep much lately. The snows just weren’t falling the way they used to. The cold didn’t settle long enough or deep enough to freeze the water lines that snaked from the house his family had lived in for six generations to the livestock pens anymore. It seemed to Ethan that the deep cold and snows of his childhood were now as unusual as January thaws used to be. 

Maybe it wasn’t climate change, at least not the way the liberals talked about it. But something was changing — call it the weather if you like — and it had been changing for a long time. And there was no reason to believe that it wasn’t going to continue. For how long? He didn’t know for sure. 

Ethan was a guy who measured time by the sort of work he did and when he did it, and by that reckoning, they hadn’t experienced the kind of winters that were common when he was a kid, not in any of the years since he had sold a chunk of land to a corporate hog operation and leased it back, with the proviso that he not only would plant 800 acres of hay and 600 of corn on the land, but would also handle snowplowing operations for them for $75 an hour. There hadn’t much snow to speak of since then. That was about fifteen years now. 

That previous winter had been an especially mild one, and all winter long Ethan had been thinking about the lessons his father had taught him — how in those years when the real deep freezes and the snows didn’t come, those years when the water lines never froze and they never had to haul water by hand to the hogs and cows, how those winters were, as often as not, followed by drought. Ethan’s father didn’t know the first thing about interdecadal variations in ocean temperatures, about how El Niño/La Niña cycles in the Pacific Ocean could cause flooding one year in the Mississippi River basin and drought the next. Hell, the old man didn’t even believe that glaciers really existed. But he knew how to read the signs on his own land. And he taught his son how to do the same thing. 

And all winter long, the signs were pointing toward drought.

Of course, 2012 was one of the worst drought years in US history, especially in Texas.  And more years like that are coming.  They're coming fast, along with brutal storms, powerful hurricanes, deadly wildfires, and all with devastating consequences.

Science doesn't require your belief any more than your scorn.

Fighting The Klep-Trump-Cracy

A lawsuit against Donald Trump over the Emoluments clause of the Constitution, previously left for dead, has been revived by an appellate court.

One of three major cases accusing President Donald Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause has been brought back from the dead. A panel of federal appellate judges ruled Friday that a group of restaurants in New York City can move forward with their claim that Trump is unfairly using his position as president to convince foreign governments to spend money at his own properties. The news comes amid a new flurry of questions about how Trump may be profiting from his presidency, with details emerging about the Air Force’s use of a Trump-owned Scottish resort to house service members and Vice President Mike Pence’s taxpayer-funded stay at Trump’s Irish resort—apparently at the suggestion of Trump himself.

When Trump took office, he refused to give up ownership or control of his business empire—which includes restaurants and hotels in New York City and Washington, D.C.—though he said he would no longer maintain day-to-day oversight. It’s an unprecedented situation: No other presidents, at least in recent history, have come to office with such an extensive business operation. Critics claimed that Trump was violating the emoluments clause—a section of the Constitution that prohibits the president from accepting payments from foreign governments—because foreign officials almost immediately began spending at the president’s hotels in New York and Washington.

In December 2017, in one of the first big court cases dealing with the issue, a federal judge in New York threw out a suit brought by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a group of restauranteurs in New York. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs’ argument—that their businesses had suffered because foreign governments were instead patronizing Trump-owned establishments in hopes of currying favor with the president—was too speculative. But in a 2-1 decision Friday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the trial judge, stating that the plaintiffs had a right to attempt to prove their argument. The court noted that numerous foreign officials have said in the press that they booked events at Trump properties to make a good impression. 

Notably, the 2nd Circuit panel also took aim at a ruling made by a different appellate court. In that case, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a separate emoluments cases, arguing that there was little the judicial branch could do to fix the problem. As long as the Trump name remained on his properties and foreign governments knew the president’s family would benefit, issuing an injunction against the president’s involvement wouldn’t help, the 4th Circuit judges reasoned. On Friday, the 2nd Circuit countered that even if the courts couldn’t completely solve the problem, they could still can take steps intended to eliminate any unfair advantage the president might have in encouraging foreign governments to patronize his businesses.

In addition to possibilities such as barring Trump businesses from offering services to foreign governments or requiring the president to set up a blind trust, the new ruling suggested another alternative: sunlight. “A court could require public disclosure of the President’s private business dealings with government officials through the Trump establishments, which may discourage Presidential action that appears to improperly reward such patronage,” the 2nd Circuit panel wrote.

Sunlight and shame is an option, but it won't work. If Trump is openly flouting the Constitution, there's only two remedies, voting him out, or impeachment and removal.

Neither one is anywhere near to being a close thing, either.