Last Call For Warren Terrah, Con't

The man running the resurgent ISIS from the chaos of Syria has killed himself rather than be taken by US special forces as Donald Trump's malignant narcissism manages to infect yet another historic American moment.

President Trump on Sunday announced that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the elusive Islamic State leader, died during a U.S. military operation in Syria, a major breakthrough more than five years after the militant launched a self-proclaimed caliphate that inspired violence worldwide.

“Last night the United States brought the world’s Number One terrorist leader to justice,” Trump said in a televised announcement from the White House. “He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone.”

The president described what he called a “dangerous and daring” nighttime operation by U.S. Special Operations forces in northwestern Syria, which involved firefights and culminated in what he said was a retreat by Baghdadi into a tunnel. There, Baghdadi detonated an explosive vest, killing himself and three of the six children he was believed to have.

The high-risk operation brings a dramatic end to a years-long hunt for the man who spearheaded the Islamic State’s transformation from an underground insurgent band to a powerful quasi-state that straddled two countries and spawned copycat movements across several continents.

Trump said Baghdadi, a longtime militant who was once held in a U.S.-run prison in Iraq, had been tracked over the past two weeks to a compound in Syria’s Idlib province that was laid with tunnels. He said no U.S. personnel died during the operation but that other militants were killed.

The raid comes as the United States scrambles to adjust its posture in Syria in the wake of Trump’s decision to curtail the U.S. military mission there. Trump faced widespread criticism, including from members of his own party, when he declared earlier this month that he would pull out nearly all of the approximately 1,000 troops in Syria amid a Turkish offensive against Syrian Kurdish troops who have been the Pentagon’s main battlefield partner there. But evolving plans now call for a larger residual force that could mean a substantial ongoing campaign.

During his remarks, Trump thanked officials in other nations, including Russia and Turkey, and the Syrian Kurdish forces.

Observations:

1) Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was a monstrous killer and now he is dead, and I won't lose a wink of sleep.  Let's get that out of the way first.

2) Trump thanked Russia a lot during his speech Sunday.  An awful lot, actually, and gave them top billing over US forces and intelligence agencies that made this possible.  It was American military and intelligence that made this possible, right?  I mean, this couldn't possibly be that Putin's boys gave up al-Baghdadi in order for Trump to pull out of Syria, you know?

3) He was golfing when the raid went down Saturday afternoon, supposedly.  Trump lackey Dan Bongino tweeted out a "stern-faced generals in the War Room" picture with Trump and the Joint Chiefs and former Obama admin photographer Pete Souza called bullshit on it.

4) Not a single Democratic member of Congress was informed of the raid until hours after it happened.  Not Pelosi, not Schiff, not Schumer.  Petty, through and through, Trump told the Russians before Pelosi, and Mike Pence all but confirmed it on FOX News Sunday this morning that this is the new normal.

5) The reason al-Baghdadi had a resurgent ISIS to work with in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan is because of Donald Trump.  Oh, and let's remember that Russia said they killed the guy two years ago.

6) Donald Trump is still going to be impeached, even though we're going to hear all this week that the impeachment process has now "failed" with the death of al-Baghdadi and that Democrats should just "move on".  Don't let him do that.

7) ISIS is still out there.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

With the Kentucky governor's race just nine days away and both Donald Trump and Mike Pence headed here to shore up support for GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, it's important to note that nobody has done more damage to Kentucky's manufacturing sector than Trump himself, whose tariffs are now collapsing the commodities market and closing the state's last few steel mills.

Brenda Deborde cried throughout her 16-hour shift at the steel plant here when she received official notice this August that her job was being cut.

Deborde had hoped President Trump’s tariffs could revive this once-mighty mill on a bank of the Ohio River, which for much of the 20th century formed the center of economic life in this part of Eastern Kentucky.

She and her husband, Matt, had traveled to welcome the president as he went to a rally in nearby Huntington, W.Va., waving their Trump flag and “Make America Great Again” hat to the motorcade from the side of the road.

“We really thought the tariffs were going to turn us around — that things would go back to being the way it was. We thought it could be a kind of saving grace,” said Deborde, 58.

It wasn’t. By the end of this year, she and Matt will lose their jobs at the plant after almost two decades. They aren’t sure what they will do next.

Last year, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to try to boost domestic production. It appeared to work, briefly, sending company stock prices higher and leading to more hiring and production.

But that boost now appears short-lived. The industry faces strong head winds threatening to undermine one of the president’s central economic promises ahead of his 2020 reelection campaign.

The stocks of the biggest steel companies — which also rose dramatically when the tariffs first came on — have similarly tumbled over the past year, in some cases by more than 50 percent.

They have been hurt by tepid domestic demand for steel production amid a U.S. manufacturing recession and a global slowdown in economic growth, among other things.

And there are Democrats out here in rural Kentucky who voted for Clinton and prayed the tariffs would save them.

They didn't.

“Everybody here was so excited. I don’t like Trump, but I really thought they would help,” said Kilgore, 48, a union leader who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Now, I see they didn’t.”

The steelworkers in Ashland, including several who voted for Clinton, do not blame Trump for the closure of the plant. Most said they were grateful that the White House imposed the tariffs, which they considered long overdue, to stem the oversupply of steel in the market from foreign producers. Several believe Trump should have gone further and issued even stricter levies on steel imports.

But many also said that their experience gave them insight into the limits of tariffs for the average worker. Jack Young, a Trump supporter who has worked for 20 years as a pipe fitter at the plant, will lose his job next month. Young requires medication for several heart conditions that costs $6,000 a month and does not know how he will afford it once his health insurance is terminated.

“The tariffs — we thought they’d bring some life back,” Young said. “But they just raised the price of steel.”

Now the price of steel has collapsed to pre-tariff levels, and is continuing to collapse as the global economy is tipping into recession.  Nucor's new steel plant is now being delayed. AK Steel is going under after decades, finished off by Donald Trump's greed and an economic downturn made possible by a tax cut package last year that gave trillions to the rich and left devastation in its wake for the other 90% of us.

This is what Trump did to Kentucky.

We can help change that in nine days.

 

Sunday Long Read: The Lost City

Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city, one of the most densely populated places on earth, will soon be a memory.  The seas are rising and in this week's Sunday Long Read Wired's Peter Guest tells us that the city is essentially all but doomed by climate change.

Heading north from the city centre to the coastline, Jakarta seems to be collapsing in slow motion. The Indonesian capital sprawls, its black-glass business district giving way to a low-rise hinterland where the bones of the city jut out; long spines of pale concrete pillars bearing kilometres of knotted overpasses and raised highways. In their shadows are industrial estates in various states of abandonment, stalled construction sites already succumbing to the creep of tropical foliage, sluggish waterways clotted with litter, and thousands upon thousands of houses, from clusters of bare-iron shacks to landed three-storey homes, none the same as its neighbour. 

The chaos runs all the way to the seafront, where waterparks, glossy malls and luxury condos jostle for space with container ports and fishing docks crammed so tight with small boats that from above they look like tangles of rusted wire snagged on the shore.
Some of these docks are now hemmed in by giant walls. At Cilincing – a northeastern suburb of the city made up of scattered fishing communities and industrial ports – five-metre-high concrete pillars have been dropped into the shoreline, supporting a sloping buttress that blocks all view of the sea from the land. Less than 50 metres behind it on the landward side is another wall, constructed less than a decade ago, that is now redundant; between them, fishermen use a placid inlet to tie up and maintain their boats.Twenty kilometres of sea walls have been thrown up around Jakarta Bay in the past three years, along with many more reinforcements along river banks, the first phase of a desperate attempt to fortify the city’s waterlogged northern districts. 

Jakarta, a megacity of 30 million people, is sinking. In places along the coastline the ground has subsided by four metres over the last few decades, meaning that the concrete barricades are the only thing preventing whole communities from being engulfed by the sea. 

Although many coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai, have been forced by the threat of climate change to build high walls to protect themselves, there are few places in the world as vulnerable as Jakarta, where a decades-old problem of land subsidence has intersected with sea level rise caused by global warming, creating an existential threat to the city. 

Such is the concern about Jakarta’s future that the national government is considering bailing out. In April, president Joko Widodo – himself a former governor of the city – announced a public search for a new capital for Indonesia, in no small part because of its environmental problems. 

The city’s new walls have bought it some time, but not much, and possibly not enough. Behind them is an alarming case study in how politicking, greed and vested economic interests can lead to a dangerous inertia – a microcosm of the global failure to address climate change. Whether the city saves itself, or whether it becomes the first megacity lost to environmental catastrophe, will depend on a combination of ground-level social change and engineering works of unprecedented scale to hold back the tide. 

“If we don’t do something, we’re doomed,” says Oswar Mungkasa, the city’s deputy governor. “We will be leaving Jakarta.”

Imagine if the entire populations of Texas and Louisiana lived in New Orleans or Houston proper, and trying to come up with a defense plan to save the city and the people from increasingly awful hurricanes and flooding and pollution, requiring a reclamation, defense wall and drainage project that would cost tens of billions.

That's kind of the starting place of where Jakarta was ten years ago, only the first project failed miserably.

Now imagine having to try to salvage it.

Good luck.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

We've known for some time now that the White House knows full well who the whistleblower is in the Ukraine/Giuliani affair and has known for months.  All the Trump and GOP posturing to "unmask" the whistleblower is just that, posturing.  We know this because that's all Republicans in the depositions over the last several weeks have been asking about, in an effort to discredit them.

Republican lawmakers have used the congressional impeachment inquiry to gather information on a CIA employee who filed a whistleblower complaint, press witnesses on their loyalty to President Trump and advance conspiratorial claims that Ukraine was involved in the 2016 election, according to current and former officials involved in the proceedings.

GOP members and staffers have repeatedly raised the name of a person suspected of filing the whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine to conduct investigations into his political adversaries, officials said.

The Republicans have refrained during hearings from explicitly accusing the individual of filing the explosive complaint with the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general two months ago, officials said.

But the questions have been interpreted as an attempt “to unmask the whistleblower,” whose identity is shielded under federal law, said several officials with direct knowledge of the depositions. Republicans appear to be seeking ways to discredit the whistleblower as well as other witnesses “by trying to dredge up any information they can,” one official said.

Admitting they know they person's identity is illegal, hence the word games and ridiculous gymnastics, but they know full well who the person is and have for some time.  What they are doing is making it clear to Democrats that the person's identity is compromised, and that it will be revealed sooner or later.  It's witness intimidation.

A Republican staffer disputed assertions that Trump allies are seeking to unmask the whistleblower, arguing that those involved in the impeachment inquiry do not know the person’s identity but have suspicions. A separate senior GOP aide argued that exploring the political leanings of the whistleblower and others testifying before impeachment investigators is a legitimate line of questioning, as their political preferences could taint testimony and findings.

“This is an utterly unfair characterization of how Republicans are using their time in the depositions and advances erroneous facts to benefit Adam Schiff’s partisan effort,” the senior GOP official said in a statement, referring to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.). “Our questions have resulted in the unearthing of material that Democrats want to ignore because they run counter to their impeachment quest.”

The first Republican official also argued that Democrats have been asking leading questions and that GOP members feel it is important to highlight facts they believe will be exculpatory for Trump — particularly regarding suggestions that Trump used U.S. aid to Ukraine as an enticement to obtain a political favor. 

As a result, Democrats contend that Republicans are not using the inquiry to uncover facts about the administration’s interactions with Ukraine. “There’s been zero interest [among the GOP] in actually getting to the conduct of the president,” a Democratic lawmaker said. “It’s not the subject of their questioning at all.”

The GOP laying the groundwork now for the screw-job later is important when the hearings move to the televised stage, perhaps as early as next month.  It's why Democrats are moving away from the whistleblower's testimony being vital in the wake of the recent depositions.  After all, if the dumbest Republican Congressman knows who the person is, it's definitely the worst-kept secret in DC.

But trashing the whistleblower as part of the "Deep State conspiracy" against Dear Leader was always going to be the plan and still is.

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

Donald Trump ordered Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to sink a $10 billion Pentagon IT contract for Amazon over the fact CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, according to a new Mattis biography out on Tuesday.

A new biography of former Defense Secretary James Mattis reports President Donald Trump personally got involved in who would win a major $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon, according to the website Task & Purpose, which writes about military issues. 

That hotly contested contract was awarded to Microsoft on Friday evening over Amazon in a months-long battle. 

Task & Purpose reports the new book, "Holding The Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon with Secretary Mattis" by former Mattis speechwriter and communications director Guy Snodgrass recounts that Mattis always tried to translate Trump's demands into ethical outcomes. 

According to Snodgrass' book, Trump called Mattis during summer 2018 and directed him to "screw Amazon" out of the opportunity to bid on the contract. 

Task & Purpose obtained an advanced copy of the book. CNN has not yet seen the book. 

For several years Trump has voiced his displeasure with Amazon and Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. He has accused Amazon of taking advantage of the Postal Service although independent investigations have disagreed with that contention. He also has linked his unfavorable view of Washington Post reporting to Amazon although the Post makes clear it is run separately. 

"Relaying the story to us during Small Group, Mattis said, 'We're not going to do that. This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically,'" Snodgrass wrote according to Task & Purpose. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

As the story says the contract was put on hold a few months ago by new Defense Secretary Peter Esper after Mattis resigned at the end of last year, and lo and behold, this week Microsoft won that contract.

I'm not sad to see the obnoxious Bezos take a $10 billion hit considering how awful his corporate empire is.  Maybe his shareholders will sue him over this mess and he'll lose his shirt.  But let's not forget that everything Trump does is driven by revenge, and that he's a criminal mobster at heart.  Mattis wouldn't do what Trump wanted, so he was forced out and Trump found someone who was more than willing to hurt Bezos over his news stories.

Things haven't changed much since the Gilded Age, have they.

Greed Is Always In Fashion

Having a Treasury Secretary like Stephen Mnuchin, former Hollywood producer and Wall Street ace, basically guaranteed that Trump's tax scam was going to make everyone already rich even richer, even if they are convicted Reagan-era scumbags like Michael Milken.

These days, the Milken Institute is a leading proponent of a new federal tax break that was intended to coax wealthy investors to plow money into distressed communities known as “opportunity zones.” The institute’s leaders have helped push senior officials in the Trump administration to make the tax incentive more generous, even though it is under fire for being slanted toward the wealthy.

Mr. Milken, it turns out, is in a position to personally gain from some of the changes that his institute has urged the Trump administration to enact. In one case, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, directly intervened in a way that benefited Mr. Milken, his longtime friend.

It is a vivid illustration of the power that Mr. Milken, who was barred from the securities industry and fined $600 million as part of his 1990 felony conviction, has amassed in President Trump’s Washington. In addition to the favorable tax-policy changes, some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers — including Mr. Mnuchin, Jared Kushner and Rudolph W. Giuliani — have lobbied the president to pardon Mr. Milken for his crimes, or supported that effort, according to people familiar with the effort.

While the Milken Institute’s advocacy of opportunity zones is public, Mr. Milken’s financial stake in the outcome is not.

The former “junk bond king” has investments in at least two major real estate projects inside federally designated opportunity zones in Nevada, near Mr. Milken’s Lake Tahoe vacation home, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times.
One of those developments, inside an industrial park, is a nearly 700-acre site in which Mr. Milken is a major investor. Last year, after pressure from Mr. Milken’s business partner and other landowners, the Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on how to select opportunity zones and made the area eligible for the tax break, according to people involved in the discussions and records reviewed by The Times.

The unusual decision was made at the personal instruction of Mr. Mnuchin, according to internal Treasury Department emails. It came shortly after he had spent time with Mr. Milken at an event his institute hosted.

“People were troubled,” said Annie Donovan, who previously ran the Treasury office in charge of designating areas as opportunity zones. She and two of her former colleagues said they were upset that the Treasury secretary was intervening to bend rules, though they said they didn’t realize at the time that Mr. Mnuchin’s friend stood to profit. The agency’s employees, Ms. Donovan said, “were put in a position where they had to compromise the integrity of the process.”

The opportunity zone initiative, tucked into the tax cut bill that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, has become one of the White House’s signature initiatives. It allows investors to delay or avoid taxes on capital gains by putting money in projects or companies in more than 8,700 federally designated opportunity zones. Mr. Trump has boasted that it will revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods.

But the incentive, also championed by some prominent Democrats, has been dogged by criticism that it is a gift to wealthy investors and real estate developers. From the start, the tax break targeted people with capital gains, the vast majority of which are held by the very richest investors. The Treasury permitted opportunity zones to encompass not only poor communities but some adjacent affluent neighborhoods. Much of the money so far has flowed to those wealthier areas, including many projects that were planned long before the new law was enacted.

The Trump era, where the greed of the Reagan 80's and the grifts of the Clinton 90's meet to form the new hotness in kleptocracy.  But what did everyone expect from the Trump tax scam?  It's already tanking the economy and we're positing trillion-dollar deficits that suddenly don't matter.

Trump's looting the economy on the way out, and the next crash will have to be dealt with by whatever Democrat's in charge in 2021.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

House Judiciary Dems are trying to score testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn, and if they're smart, they'll call the Trump regime's bluff on wanting a "completely transparent process" and put McGahn on TV.

Negotiations to make former White House counsel Don McGahn available for a House interview have been active throughout October, the Justice Department indicated Friday, revealing that it has had discussions with the Judiciary Committee five times since Oct. 8.

Those talks — on Oct. 8, 11, 15, 21 and 24 — came despite an Oct. 8 letter from McGahn's successor, Pat Cipollone, declaring that the White House would refuse to cooperate with Democrats' ongoing impeachment inquiry.

"Although the Speaker of the House has announced publicly that, in her view, the House has now commenced an impeachment inquiry ... the Administration remains open to continued discussion of a possible Committee interview, under appropriate terms and conditions, of Mr. McGahn," Justice Department attorneys wrote in a brief filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., in response to Democrats' efforts to enforce a subpoena requiring McGahn's testimony.

House attorneys have argued that they're at an impasse with the Justice Department over obtaining McGahn's testimony, which they have been seeking since special counsel Robert Mueller revealed in April that he was a central witness to potential obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. McGahn refused to comply with a subpoena for his testimony in May and the Judiciary Committee filed suit in July, declaring that his testimony is crucial to determine whether the House should file articles of impeachment against Trump. Since then, sporadic talks with the Justice Department have reached no conclusion.

DOJ argues that the House's impeachment inquiry is "different" than the Judiciary Committee's pursuit of McGahn, even though Pelosi has blessed the panel's pursuit of potential articles of impeachment based on Mueller's findings.

The Justice Department's suggestion that talks were ongoing in October is misleading, a source briefed on the discussions told POLITICO.

"We have an obligation to try to reach an accommodation, even now," the source said, "but the White House has only ever discussed terms they know are unacceptable to us."

Of course, the White House position that the impeachment inquiry "doesn't count" got a whole lot more untenable on Friday.

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Justice Department must turn over former special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, a groundbreaking victory for Democrats in their effort to investigate whether President Donald Trump should be impeached for obstructing the long-running Russia probe.

In a double victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Judge Beryl Howell — the chief federal judge in Washington — ruled that the impeachment inquiry Democrats have launched is valid even though the House hasn't taken a formal vote on it. The decision rejects arguments by DOJ and congressional Republicans that a formal vote is necessary to launch impeachment proceedings.

"Even in cases of presidential impeachment, a House resolution has never, in fact, been required to begin an impeachment inquiry," Howell determined, dismissing GOP arguments as unsupported.

Republicans had claimed that the House Judiciary Committee cannot begin impeachment proceedings without a formal vote of the House — and that even if it could, Pelosi is not empowered to simply grant that authority to the Judiciary Committee. But Howell rejected the arguments out of hand.

"These contentions are, at worst, red herrings and, at best, incorrect," ruled Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

In her ruling, Howell ordered the DOJ to provide by Oct. 30 "[a]ll portions of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election that were redacted pursuant to" grand jury restrictions.

The order also requires the Justice Department to provide "any underlying transcripts or exhibits referenced in the portions of the Mueller Report that were redacted" pursuant to those restrictions.

“The court’s thoughtful ruling recognizes that our impeachment inquiry fully comports with the Constitution and thoroughly rejects the spurious White House claims to the contrary,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.)

Needless to say, the DoJ will have to appeal this one pretty quickly the the DC Circuit Court since the deadline is Wednesday.  I'm not sure how quickly it will move after that, and I'm still not 100% sure that the White House wants to push this to SCOTUS, but giving Mueller grand jury info to the House Judiciary means that things covered up by Barr could see the light of day, and that could be fatal for Trump.

They'll fight this all the way, as they don't have a choice.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Some Saturday deposition action today in DC as justice works a weekend, but State Department official Phil Reeker isn't expected to drop any huge new information blockbusters, but rather to corroborate what other State Department officials have said over the last two weeks.

The top State Department official overseeing US policy in Europe and Eurasia is expected to become the latest witness in the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry.  

Ambassador Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees on Saturday. As has been the case for all the other State Department officials who have testified in the probe, Reeker will likely be subpoenaed to appear. 

He is well-regarded among those who know him, with multiple officials pointing to his smarts. 

"He is one of the more creative and independent-minded people you will find in the State Department," a former State Department official who knows him told CNN. "He is a problem-solver." 

However, sources suggest he won't be bringing any bombshells to his testimony. 

"I have a feeling his testimony will simply be repeating what other people said," the former State Department official said, noting Reeker's status as an acting secretary. 

"He is in a tenuous position. I do not think he is in a position to go to bat for the foreign service because if he puts up a stink I am not sure he will stick around for much longer," a State Department official said. "They could reassign him at moment's notice." 

Reeker has served in the role in an acting capacity since March following the departure of A. Wess Mitchell in February. He has known former US Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, who was an early witness in the impeachment inquiry, for decades. According to the former State Department official, the two would check in with each other, and Volker wanted to keep Reeker in the loop on what was happening with US-Ukrainian relations. That official said they did discuss President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and that Volker had told Reeker about when he met with Giuliani. Reeker seemed to indicate he did not want to get involved with the matter, according to the official. 

Fine with me, it would be nice to have a day or two without a brand-new impeachable offense by Trump, but the weekend is young, and Reeker could have a shocker or two.  Who knows?

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The most damaging deposition yet against Trump's Ukraine perfidy is on the docket for Thursday and Halloween may be the day that the Trump regime is scared to death.

Tim Morrison, a National Security Council official who has been identified as a witness to one of the most explosive pieces of evidence unearthed by House impeachment investigators, plans to testify Thursday even if the White House attempts to block him.

“If subpoenaed, Mr. Morrison plans to appear for his deposition,” his attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, said.

A slew of high-profile witnesses have defied White House, State Department and Pentagon orders not to cooperate with the impeachment probe. In each case, lawmakers have issued a subpoena, which the officials have relied on to justify testifying over the administration’s objections.

Morrison, however, would be the first currently serving White House official to testify. He’s also the first official believed to be on a July 25 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during which Trump pressed his counterpart to investigate former vice president Joe Biden.

Morrison was also a crucial figure identified Tuesday by Trump’s ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, as a witness to Trump’s effort to withhold military aid from Ukraine in order to bend Zelensky to his will.

Taylor testified that on Sept. 1, Morrison told him about a conversation he witnessed between Trump's E.U. ambassador Gordon Sondland and a senior Ukrainian government official. In that conversation, Taylor said Morrison told him, Sondland informed the official that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Ukraine were dependent on the opening of political investigations.

Taylor also said Morrison spoke to him on Sept. 7 about another conversation with Sondland. In that conversation, per Taylor's recounting, Sondland revealed he had spoken directly with Trump about Ukraine and that Trump insisted that Zelensky should publicly declare the political investigations himself, rather than leaving it to subordinates. According to Taylor, Morrison said he then relayed details of the call to then-national security adviser John Bolton as well as NSC lawyers.

Tim Morrison may be the man that brings down Donald Trump, guys. 

There's no "but it's hearsay/second-hand" defense, he was on the call.  There's no "Democrat working for Schiff" defense, he's a White House employee.  There's no "not qualified to comment" defense, he's on the National Security Council.  And he's coming forward despite White House threats.

Buckle up.  The shenanigans we saw this week from the GOP will pale to what we see next week in order to get Morrison off the front page on Thursday and next Friday.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Bill Barr has gone the full Bork, as the investigation into the origins of the Russia probe is now being considered a criminal one.

For more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. Now, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William P. Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John H. Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry. House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.

The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.

Mr. Barr’s reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated C.I.A. torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice.

It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. In May, Mr. Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that the F.B.I. officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason.

“We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president,” Mr. Trump said. He has called the F.B.I. investigation one of the biggest political scandals in United States history.

Things have now gotten much scarier in the US.  We're on the verge of something very dark, where Bill Barr indicts and arrests Russia investigators, and Republicans use that as the excuse to block any impeachment proceedings.  The green light has been given by Donald Trump to Bill Barr to use the Justice Department to arrest political enemies.

And they will not stop at the Russia investigators.

The timing of this leak of course was to knock the Ukraine story and the GOP SCIF revolution off the front pages.  It will, and it is of sufficient import to do so, but you won't see a single Republican speak up about this monstrous abuse of power.  They will say of course that "Durham must be allowed to finish his investigation" and furthermore, I almost guarantee you that Republicans will throw around the notion that impeachment has to stop until the Durham investigation is done, which is 100% horseshit.

This is very grim, and America is in dire, dire straits today.

StupidiNews!

• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been found in contempt of court by a federal magistrate over violation of a court order to stop collecting on loans from a now defunct for-profit college.
• Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard will not run for re-election for her House seat in 2020, the Hawaii congresswoman says she will be concentrating on her 2020 Democratic presidential run.
• Walmart, CVS Pharmacy, and Rite Aid are pulling Johnson & Johnson baby powder off store shelves after a company recall of the product due to possible asbestos contamination.
• Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that will allow Americans to trade in gas-powered vehicles to get them off roads by 2040.
• On World Polio Awareness Day on Thursday, World Health Organization officials announced that the second of three wild strains of polio have been eradicated.

Last Call For Poor Unfortunate Souls

I confess I don't know what the point of articles like this are.

The opening statement of Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, is "reverberating" on Capitol Hill among Republicans, according to GOP Hill sources, who told CNN that Taylor's testimony is a game changer in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. 

A senior Republican source on Capitol Hill told CNN that Taylor's statement was so detailed, so specific and that he is so respected that it is having an impact. 

"It points to quid pro quo," the GOP source told CNN. 

There is an ongoing conversation among GOP members on Capitol Hill about the impact of Taylor's testimony, but it remains a question whether it will move Republicans closer to considering impeachment. 

In a closed-door deposition Tuesday, Taylor said he had been told by Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, that "everything" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted, including a White House meeting and military aid to the country, would be held up until he publicly declared investigations sought by Trump. Taylor's statement undercut the White House's defense that there had been no quid pro quo offered on the call, as well as Sondland's previous testimony to Congress, but it corroborated many of the claims made by the intelligence community whistleblower whose complaint prompted the impeachment inquiry. 

While most Republicans have sided publicly with the President, they've been privately grumbling that they're "fed up and tired" of being asked to defend him in the impeachment investigation. 

Republican sources on Capitol Hill told CNN there's a "growing unease that there is no defense" of the President's actions. 

"How do you defend the indefensible?" one source told CNN. "We can't defend the substance, all we can do is talk about process."

But no Republican wants to come out and say anything.  The one Republican who did, Justin Amash, was run out of the party in under 30 days.  Nobody will follow suit.  Nobody.

Impeachment will still happen.  But I don't get what the Republicans are leaking about.  Trump will crucify any Republican who defies him, Republicans don't have a choice now, they're drowning on the Titanic as it goes down, so who does a leak like this serve?

I have no clue.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

House Democrats are ready to move ahead to the open impeachment hearings phase of the process in two or three weeks, according to the Washington Post.

House Democrats are preparing to move their largely private impeachment inquiry onto a more public stage as soon as mid-November and are already grappling with how best to present the complex Ukraine saga to the American people.

Over the past three weeks, a parade of current and former Trump administration officials have testified behind closed doors, providing House investigators with a compelling narrative of President Trump’s campaign to extract political favors from Ukrainian officials. But on Wednesday, after conservative lawmakers stormed the hearing room and delayed the proceedings for five hours, some Democrats were feeling pressure to advance public hearings in hopes of avoiding further disruptions.

Among the witnesses Democrats hope to question in open session are the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., and his predecessor, former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Both are seasoned diplomats who, in earlier House testimony, effectively conveyed outrage over a White House plan to withhold much-needed military aid from Ukraine, a long-standing ally battling pro-Russian separatists.

In testimony Tuesday, Taylor also directly contradicted Trump’s account of his interactions with Ukrainian officials, making clear that Trump demanded that President Volodymyr Zelensky order an investigation of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family in exchange for the release of nearly $400 million in military aid and a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office.

Another top priority for many Democrats is John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, who made known around the White House his visceral opposition to the campaign to pressure Zelensky, a campaign directed in part by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Testimony from Bolton could be particularly devastating for the White House, though it was unclear whether Democrats would subpoena him or when. After Bolton resigned last month, he told The Washington Post that he would “have my say in due course.”

Democrats have long been expected to shift to public hearings, which offer the opportunity to build the case against Trump while also building support among American voters.

“It’s going to be the difference between reading a dry transcript and actually hearing the story from the people who were in the room,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I think the story needs to be told, you know, the story of the abuse of power. . . . People like the various ambassadors who have come to testify need to come tell it."

I'm all for this.  Republicans have been screaming on FOX State TV about "closed-door" hearings and yesterday's ridiculous (and illegal!) SCIF stunt, which should have two dozen plus Republicans cooling their heels in federal prison through next spring, is only a taste of what's coming as the Trump regime faces the music.

The time to get this on TV, 10 hours a day for a couple weeks as Americans gather for the holidays, is very close and it will make all the difference.

Meanwhile in Bevinstan...

Yet another poll shows Matt Bevin has now tied up the Kentucky Governor's race with Andy Beshear with under two weeks to go, and Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Joe Gerth wonders what it's going to take for KY Dems to learn how to close a race they led for months against arguably the most unpopular Governor in America.

Democrats across Kentucky must be banging their heads against the wall and mumbling to themselves, “Not again.”

As has been the case in recent elections, Democrats have fielded a candidate for major statewide office who comes screaming out of the gate with a lead in the polls, only to see it wither away in the final month or so before the election.

Some early internal polls had Attorney General Andy Beshear with nearly a double-digit lead over Gov. Matt Bevin after he dispatched House Minority Leader Rocky Adkins and former state Auditor Adam Edelen in May.

But a Mason Dixon poll released last week has the race as a tie, with momentum clearly on Bevin’s side as we hit the last two weeks before Election Day.

We saw the same phenomena in 2015, when Jack Conway led Bevin in mid-summer polling only to see it turn as brown as the trees by November. Bevin won by nine percentage points.

We saw it in 2014, when Alison Lundergan Grimes had a four-point lead over Sen. Mitch McConnell, according to the Bluegrass Poll, only to see it evaporate. McConnell won by 15 percentage points.

In 2008, Bruce Lunsford pulled within a point of McConnell, only to lose in November by six percentage points.

Democrats say their internals still have Beshear ahead of Bevin, and Republicans say their polls actually have their candidate leading.

Either way, the race has tightened, and we’re seeing the same pattern emerge that has meant doom for Democrats in recent years. That’s not to say Beshear still can’t pull this out, but if he does, he’s going to have to sweat it out on election night.

It ain’t gonna be easy.

Bevin has run the last six weeks on ending abortion in Kentucky and ads about scary MS-13 gang members invading Kentucky from Mexico, and he's probably going to win because of it.

I'm tired of KY Dems blowing leads time and time again.  Another four years of Bevin and Kentucky will be dead last in education, teacher pay, health care, environmental safety, and will become the first state without a single abortion provider.

And my neighbors are either going to stay home or vote for this prick to take everything from us.  It infuriates me to no end.  Bevin straight up lied about Medicaid, he lied about teachers, he lied about everything, and he dumped the state's first black statewide officer off the ticket since Reconstruction because she was a drag with his white supremacist base.

But he's a 50-50 shot to win.

Amazing.

We deserve the destruction this asshole will bring.

StupidiNews!

• Some 25,000 teachers in Chicago remain on strike for a sixth day as Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared "there is no more money" to meet teachers' union demands for more support staff and higher pay.
• A new Washington Post investigation finds the Trump regime charged more than $100,000 for food and drinks for Irish police providing security for Trump's recent trip to Ireland.
• Fire officials in Auckland, New Zealand say a massive blaze that engulfed the city's new half-billion dollar international convention center construction site has been contained after nearly 48 hours.
• Donald Trump says he will veto a House Democratic bill that requires campaigns to report contact with foreign nationals, calling it "overly broad" and warning that will "ensnare" US citizens. 
• A new study finds ant colonies are extraordinarily efficient and organized when it comes to thousands of ants foraging for food to avoid traffic jams and other logistical obstacles.