Last Call For Climate of Disaster, Con't

The Trump regime pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords may be a massive, intractable problem for the world, but the rest of the planet isn't exactly coming together on climate solutions either.

Marathon international climate talks ended Sunday with major polluters resisting calls to ramp up efforts to keep global warming at bay and negotiators postponing the regulation of global carbon markets until next year.

Those failures came even after organizers added two more days to the 12 days of scheduled talks in Madrid. In the end, delegates from almost 200 nations endorsed a declaration to help poor countries that are suffering the effects of climate change, although they didn’t allocate any new funds to do so.

The final declaration called on the “urgent need” to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases in line with the goals of the landmark 2015 Paris climate change accord. That fell far short of promising to enhance countries’ pledges to cut planet-heating greenhouse gases next year, which developing countries and environmentalists had lobbied the delegates to achieve.

The Paris accord established the common goal of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. So far, the world is on course for a 3- to 4-degree Celsius rise, with potentially dramatic consequences for many countries, including rising sea levels and fiercer storms.

Negotiators in Madrid left some of the thorniest issues for the next climate summit in Glasgow in a year, including the liability for damages caused by rising temperatures that developing countries were insisting on. That demand was resisted mainly by the United States.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “disappointed” by the meeting’s outcome.

“The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation and finance to tackle the climate crisis,” he said. “We must not give up and I will not give up.”

“It’s sad that we couldn’t reach a final agreement” on carbon markets, admitted the climate summit’s chair, Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s environment minister.

“We were on the verge,” she said, adding that the goal was to establish markets that are “robust and environmentally sustainable.”

Economists say putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, would allow countries or companies to trade emissions permits that can be steadily reduced — encouraging businesses to transition to low-emission technologies.

The carbon-market failure did not upset everyone. Countries in Europe and elsewhere had said that no deal on how to govern the exchange of carbon credits was better than a weak one that could undermine a dozen or so existing regional carbon mechanisms.

“Thankfully, the weak rules on a market based mechanism, promoted by Brazil and Australia, that would have undermined efforts to reduce emissions has been shelved,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a campaign group.

Helen Mountford, from the environmental think-tank World Resources Institute, said that “given the high risks of loopholes discussed in Madrid, it was better to delay than accept rules that would have compromised the integrity of the Paris Agreement.”

So the world will try again in 2020, as they have for decades, and that too will most likely end in failure.  A quarter-century after Kyoto should have been ratified and put into place globally at the cost of billions, we're now arguing over who will pay for the planetary triage that will cost trillions instead.

I'm a great uncle these days, my brother's daughter gave birth this week to an adorable baby boy, and I'm wondering what world the little one will grow up in. 

When he becomes an adult, what will he think of the world he will inherit from us, and how much will he despise us for it?

It's About Suppression, Con't

Republicans continue to disenfranchise voters across the country, and in nearly every instance it's voters in predominantly black and Hispanic counties. Wisconsin is arguably the most critical battleground state from an electoral college standpoint in 2020, and a Republican judge has just purged nearly a quarter of a million voters from the rolls.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.

The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them. But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.

Before Friday's hearing, Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said in an interview that quickly removing voters from the rolls would cause "clear harm to Wisconsin voters." That's because some people who haven't moved would likely lose their ability to vote, at least for the time being.

"Any time people have to go through extra steps to vote, and certainly re-registering is a significant additional step, the result is that fewer people end up voting," he said. "Fewer people will be registered. A number of people will have to re-register."

Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn't heard from them.

They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn't be.

But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.

"I don't want to see someone deactivated, but I don't write the law," said Malloy, who was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum and has been re-elected by voters.

And of course, the reason these voters are suspect in the first place is because of the state's record system, ERIC.  Wisconsin did the same thing in 2017 with more than a third of a million voters based on ERIC records and found that the vast majority of them had not moved and should have kept their voter registration intact.  Now Wisconsin is doing it again.

Considering we know our Russian friends have broken into state voter registration systems in all 50 states, and that our GOP friends refuse to allow legislation to pass that would strengthen America's defenses against those attacks, it doesn't take a genius to see how it would be easy to de-register and disenfranchise registered Democrats all over the country.

Please check and recheck your voter registration status on a regular basis.  Most states allow you to check online, even Kentucky.

They don't have a flip a single vote if they can keep millions of Democrats from voting at all.

Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

After three years of fighting with the Trump regime over FOIA requests, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has put together an indispensable (and Pulitzer-worthy) series on America's massive 18-year failure in Afghanistan.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. 

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

Part 2 of the series is here, taking a look at the fundamental flaws in America's warfighting strategy from day one.

Afghanistan has been the pervasive American military disaster for my generation and younger.  I know several people who went out into the Sandbox over the years and while all of them came back, they were far from being all there when they returned.  And this entire mess was one huge lie.

It always was, but now we know everyone knew, including and especially our own government, a trillion dollar puppet show that destroyed our credibility and is still ongoing.

Last Call For Ejector Jeff

New Jersey Democratic Rep. Jeff Van Drew is not only coming out against impeachment, he's coming out against being a Democrat and is expected to switch parties to the GOP before the end of the year.

Officials said Saturday that Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, a vocally anti-impeachment Democrat, will join the Republican Party in the coming days, following a Friday meeting with President Trump — delivering a political jolt to Democrats ahead of next week’s expected vote to impeach the president.

Two Democratic officials familiar with Van Drew’s discussions in recent days said they believe he has decided to switch parties. The White House meeting was confirmed by a Trump administration official and one of the Democratic officials.

Van Drew, his chief of staff and his communications director did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.

Van Drew, who won a previously Republican seat in 2018, has been a critical voice opposing impeachment inside the Democratic ranks, saying that the process is too divisive and comes too close to the 2020 presidential election. A member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, Van Drew has positioned himself at the rightmost flank of his party.

It's weird though, Van Drew's voting record is actually really anti-Trump.  His 538 Trump Score is a low 7.1%, putting him to the left of Democrats like Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries.  The DCCC recruited him to run in NJ-2, which was a district Trump carried in 2016 (South Jersey/Atlantic City).  It's rated R+1, and for twenty years the district belonged to Republican Frank LoBiondo.  Van Drew won by six points.

So why is he switching parties?

Because coming out against impeachment killed his re-election chances.

Van Drew and Rep. Collin C. Peterson, a veteran Minnesota Democrat who represents a much more conservative district than Van Drew’s, were the only two Democrats to vote against a House resolution in October formalizing the impeachment inquiry.

Van Drew’s decision to oppose impeachment badly alienated Democratic voters in his district, sparking a primary challenge that threatened his prospects for reelection.

A polling memo obtained by The Washington Post, citing results of a Dec. 7-10 survey of likely Democratic voters commissioned by Van Drew’s campaign, found that only 24 percent believed that he should be reelected, with 58 percent wanting another Democrat nominated for the seat.

Fine with me, saves the trouble of primary challenging him.  Perhaps the DCCC could recruit somebody who isn't going to jump to Trump in the middle of his term.

He's the anti-Amash, but unlike Amash he's skipping the Independent spoiler stage and going full Trump.  And Trump does love Atlantic City...

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

The Senate GOP was never going to convict Trump, but now they are openly mocking the idea of Senate trial, and it's becoming more likely that the entire impeachment process will simply be disposed of with a single vote.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a close ally of President Donald Trump, said he will do everything in his power to quickly end an expected impeachment trial in the Republican-led Senate. 

"This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly," the South Carolina Republican said Saturday during an interview with CNN International's Becky Anderson at the Doha Forum in Qatar. 

The House Judiciary Committee on Friday approved two articles of impeachment against the President, paving the way for a final vote on the House floor expected next week. That will set up the Senate trial, for which lawmakers are now gearing up.

Asked if it was appropriate for him to be voicing his opinion before impeachment reaches the Senate, Graham replied, "Well, I must think so because I'm doing it." 

"I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I'm not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here," Graham said, adding, "What I see coming, happening today is just a partisan nonsense." 

In his opening remarks at the forum, Graham predicted the impeachment process would be over around mid-January.

They're not even pretending anymore that the Constitution exists.  It's whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it.  The Senate oath to be an impartial juror suring a Senate trial?  Meaningless, because they simply don't consider Democrats to have any legitimacy at all.

The Founders were never prepared for villainy of this nature, and so America will suffer, maybe for decades.  There was never any possibility set aside to deal with the notion that an entire political party who controlled the Senate and White House would simply commit mass crimes and that enough people would cheer those crimes on because they figured they would benefit from them, and that the political opposition would be rendered helpless.

I know we're short of the darkest days of American history, but we're pretty close and getting closer.

Hack The Planet, Con't

This year we saw major cyberattacks cripple the city governments of Atlanta and Baltimore, now New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has issued a state of emergency as the city's PC networks were attacked on Friday.

Phishing attempts and suspicious activity were detected on the city's network around 5 a.m., New Orleans chief information officer Kim LaGrue said during a press conference. 

By 11 a.m., technician investigators detected "a cybersecurity incident" and the city's information technology department began powering down servers and city computers as a precaution, the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said in a series of tweets. 

While ransomware was detected, no ransom has been demanded in the cyberattack, Cantrell said. 

At this time, the city does not believe any employee information was compromised during the phishing attempts that occurred. 

The incident is being investigated by the city with assistance from the Louisiana State Police, Louisiana National Guard, the FBI and Secret Service, according to the tweets. 

The city's 911 system was not affected by the attack, the city said. 

Cantrell said the attack is similar to the most recent attack on the state level. In July, several school systems in Louisiana were attacked by malware, prompting the governor to issue a state of emergency.

Expect this to become all the more familiar in the months ahead as we head towards the 2020 elections.  The Trump regime has done everything possible to leave federal, state and local government networks wide open to attack, with Mitch McConnell regularly killing legislation that would strengthen system defenses.

This will only get worse.

It's About Suppression, Con't

A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of precinct closures in predominantly black areas of Georgia by GOP lawmakers and then Secretary of State Brian Kemp ahead of the 2018 elections found that the closures kept as many as 85,000 Georgians from voting last year.

The AJC mapped Georgia’s 7 million registered voters and compared how distance to their local precincts increased or decreased from 2012 to 2018. During that time, county election officials shut down 8% of Georgia’s polling places and relocated nearly 40% of the state’s precincts.

Most of the precinct closures and relocations occurred after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 ended federal oversight of local election decisions under the Voting Rights Act.

The AJC’s analysis, vetted by two nonpartisan statistics experts, showed a clear link between turnout and reduced voting access. The farther voters live from their precincts, the less likely they are to cast a ballot.

Precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots on Election Day last year, according to the AJC’s findings.

And the impact was greater on black voters than white ones, the AJC found. Black voters were 20% more likely to miss elections because of long distances.

Without those precinct relocations, overall Election Day turnout in last year’s midterm election likely would have been between 1.2% and 1.8% higher, the AJC estimated.

“Seems to me, they’re making it harder for us to vote,” said Coleman, who voted in the November election for governor but didn’t cast a ballot in the primary. “I hate that they closed that place down because it was more convenient. Maybe I wouldn’t miss elections if it was still open here.” 

The AJC’s analysis accounted for both large, rural precincts and small, urban precincts by measuring how far voters had to travel as a percentage of their precinct’s geographic area. Both groups were impacted, the AJC found.

The average Georgia voter’s distance to a polling place more than doubled from 2012 to 2018, according to the AJC’s analysis.

While the state made it easier to register to vote, they made it much harder to actually cast that ballot.  And even though Georgia's midterm election turnout was 57% in 2018, it could have been as high as 59 or 60% if the closed precincts had remained open.

The GOP plan is to get people in rural areas registered to vote and make it easier for them to vote, and to do just the opposite in urban counties and predominantly black ones.

Still, the AJC is careful to say that Kemp still would have won, even with the additional turnout, but the racial disparity still remains.

Once freed from federal oversight, precinct closures accelerated in areas previously covered by the Voting Rights Act. At least 1,688 polling places were shut down since 2012, according to the Leadership Conference Education Fund. The AJC reported last year that 214 of those precinct closures were in Georgia, third most of states previously covered by the act’s preclearance provision.

Before the ruling, voters of all races were barely affected by their distance to the polls, accounting for a 0.2% and 0.4% reduction in turnout, according to the AJC’s analysis of election data from 2012. The number of Georgia voters who missed elections because of distance more than quadrupled in 2018 compared to 2012, the AJC found.

Turnout by black voters would have been between 1.3% and 2.1% higher on Election Day in 2018 if they all lived near their polling places.

Overall, black voters are also significantly more likely to live farther from their precincts than white voters, the AJC found. About 30% of black voters must now travel across half of their precinct to reach their poll compared to less than 20% of white voters.

The AJC’s analysis shows the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, said Donald Verrilli Jr., the U.S. solicitor general at the time of the court’s decision in 2013. The court’s majority said the Voting Rights Act covered states based on their history rather than on recent evidence of discrimination.

“This is exactly the kind of updated data the justices in the majority said was lacking,” Verrilli told the AJC. “Exactly the kind of data that suggests that the judgment of the majority of the court — the South has changed — may be in need of amendment. Maybe the South hasn’t changed as much as one would have hoped.”

Voter suppression through precinct closing may not have been the sole reason Kemp won, but it definitely helped.

Last Call For A Supreme Delay

The US Supreme Court will take up the Trump tax cases, but won't hear the cases for another three months, and isn't expected to rule on them until late June.

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether President Trump may shield disclosure of his financial information from congressional committees and a New York prosecutor, raising the prospect of a landmark election-year ruling on a president’s immunity from investigation while he is in office.

Trump asked the court to accept the cases, and they will be heard in March, with a ruling before the court’s session ends in late June. It means that whatever the outcome of Trump’s separate impeachment proceedings, the controversies over investigations into Trump’s conduct will continue into the heart of the presidential election campaign.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and three Democratic-led congressional committees have won lower-court decisions granting them access to a broad range of Trump’s financial records relating to him personally, his family and his businesses. The court on Friday said it would consider all three cases.

Unlike other modern presidents and presidential candidates, Trump has not released his tax returns. He and his personal lawyers have mounted a vigorous effort to keep that information private and defeat attempts to obtain the records from financial institutions and his accounting firm.

“We are pleased that the Supreme Court granted review of the President’s three pending cases,” said Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, in a statement released Friday. “These cases raise significant constitutional issues.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to get involved represents a historic moment that will test the justices and the Constitution’s separation-of-powers design. It is the first time the president’s personal conduct has come before the court, and marks a new phase in the investigations that have dogged his presidency.

The delay means that yes, the ruling will come as the 2020 general election contest begins to heat up.  It also means though that regardless of the ruling, it won't settle the question of House subpoenas of executive branch personnel in time to help the impeachment process.

If the worst-case scenario happens and Mitch McConnell simply holds a vote to acquit Trump on both articles without allowing any witnesses to be called or evidence to be presented, then America as we know it is no longer a Constitutional republic, but an autocracy.

And should the Roberts Court then rule in Trump's favor, well...

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

As the House Judiciary Committee has approved both articles of impeachment ahead of next week's full floor vote, as I noted this morning in StupidiNews, Mitch McConnell is now openly saying the "Senate trial" will be coordinated with White House lawyers, the equivalent of a jury foreman saying he's openly working with the defense team.  There should be open outrage from Democrats at this point, and there's nothing.  Greg Sargent:

Many have sharply criticized McConnell for telegraphing that the trial will be gamed in advance to assure Trump’s acquittal and to make it as politically painless as possible.

That’s true, but it’s worse than this. Note that Hannity treated this not just as utterly unremarkable, but as how things ought to be.

It’s not. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write, the framers designated the Senate for impeachment trials to create an “extraordinary court” composed of “the nation’s leading statesmen,” one up to the gravity of weighing “great offenses against the people.” The Senate would not be prone to factional pressure (senators have six-year terms) and would be independent of the president.

But you cannot watch this McConnell interview without coming away convinced that he is trying to reassure the faction known as Trump and GOP voters that the Senate trial will be conducted in full accordance with Trump’s wishes and needs.

“I’m going to take my cues from the president’s lawyers,” McConnell said. “I’m going to coordinate with the president’s lawyers.” And: “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”

It has been reported that McConnell wants a quick, un-circus-like trial, whereas Trump wants it to be weaponized against potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden. Here McConnell is plainly trying to put the Fox News audience at ease: The GOP Senate’s interests are 100 percent joined with Trump’s.

We knew this was going to happen, because McConnell is just as corrupt as Trump is, maybe even more so.

The important point here, however, is that this nonsense is necessary to reverse-justify McConnell’s naked corruption of the process. In the disinformation bubble that is Hannity’s show, millions of Trump and GOP voters are now reassured that McConnell will shape the trial entirely in sync with Trump’s political needs, and that Democrats have rendered it the correct and justified thing to do.

This interview belongs in a time capsule. It will benefit future generations who study the impeachment and all-but-certain acquittal of Trump, and the degree to which Trump’s defenders corrupted our discourse and political system to make that outcome possible.

It's depressing as hell, and completely true.  There's no effort to hide the corruption anymore.   It's being done out in the open, and America no longer cares.  Trump made that clear at the White House today:

"I'll do whatever I want" with the Senate #impeachment trial, says @POTUS. "I'll do long or short."

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) December 13, 2019

"I'll do whatever I want" has absolutely been the motto of Donald Trump.

Nobody will stop him on his way to autocracy.  And nothing makes me think there will be any outcome in November 2020 that will be free or fair as a result.

The Great Debate Debate

Donald Trump has bandied this about before, but here we are 11 months before the election and he's already vowing to skip the 2020 debates next fall.

President Trump is discussing with his advisers the possibility of sitting out the general election debates in 2020 because of his misgivings about the commission that oversees them, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Trump has told advisers that he does not trust the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonprofit entity that sponsors the debates, the two people said.

Less of a concern for Mr. Trump than who will emerge as the Democratic nominee is which media personality will be chosen as the debate moderator, according to people in contact with him.

At a state-of-the-race campaign briefing in Arlington, Va., the president’s advisers declined to comment on what their plan was for the debates. One senior adviser to the president seemed to wince at the question, and said it was not something advisers were prepared to discuss until next year.

In the 2016 general election debates, Mr. Trump repeatedly complained about being at a disadvantage to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. And the post-debate polls showed Mr. Trump had good reason to be concerned: Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton were essentially tied in the polls going into the first debate, but she received a bump after each of the three face-to-face matchups.

A Gallup poll conducted after the third debate, for instance, found that 60 percent of viewers thought Ms. Clinton did a better job, while 31 percent chose Mr. Trump.

After his performance in one of the debates was panned, Mr. Trump blamed a “defective mic” and questioned whether it was done “on purpose” to put him at a disadvantage. It turned out that a technical malfunction had indeed affected the volume of his voice during that debate, in September 2016.
That acknowledgment by the commission, however, never mollified Mr. Trump.

His 2016 debate team — led primarily at that time by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor — also clashed with the commission over where to seat a group of women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault or sexual harassment.

The Trump campaign invited the women as surprise guests to the second debate in St. Louis. Mr. Trump wanted them seated in his V.I.P. box, where Mr. Clinton would have to walk past them; they would also have been in her line of site from the stage. In the end, the campaign had to stand down after the commission threatened to call security and have the women removed.

Former Clinton aides said they expected Mr. Trump to participate in at least one 2020 debate, despite the president’s hints that he would refuse. “Not doing any would not be strategically smart,” said Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton adviser, who predicted that “he’ll bluff that he won’t do any with the goal of only having to do one.”

He wants the media and the Democratic candidate to come crawling to him for a debate, and they will oblige him.  It will be awful and ugly and Trump will declare victory no matter what, but there will be at least one debate.

And if he doesn't get his way, the Trump campaign will schedule their racist rallies to counter anything that may be broadcast.  Worse, I wholly expect our media to openly ask if we even need debates in 2020 for anything anymore because they are boooooooooring.

Mostly it's because Trump's increasing dementia makes a debate super risky for him.  His team is  already trying to get out of it.

They know.

StupidiNews!

• Calling the case for impeachment against Donald Trump "so darn weak", GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell says he will openly coordinate with the White House on Trump's defense.
• Art historians at an Italian museum say they are "confident" that a painting discovered hidden behind an external wall is the gallery's lost Klimt painting that went missing in 1997.
• China will supposedly buy $50 billion in US farm products in return for White House concessions on tariffs, but neither Washington nor Beijing have confirmed the deal will happen.
• House Democrats plan a final impeachment vote on Wednesday, House Judiciary committee members debated for over 12 hours on Thursday night as the GOP tried to stall the vote.
• The FCC says that it will designate 988 as the phone code for suicide prevention and mental health issues, the plan could take well into 2021 before it would roll out nationwide.

Last Call For Absolutely Tory Bull

UK Prime Minister called out the Labour party and forced new elections in order to complete Brexit, and that's exactly what the UK will get as the Tories ran rampant in Thursday's elections.

The Conservatives are set to win an overall majority of 86 in the general election, according to an exit poll for the BBC, ITV and Sky News.

The survey taken at UK polling stations suggests the Tories will get 368 MPs - 50 more than at the 2017 election - when all the results have been counted.

Labour would get 191, the Lib Dems 13, the Brexit Party none and the SNP 55.

The Green Party will still have one MP and Plaid Cymru will lose one seat for a total of three, the survey suggests.

The first general election results are due before midnight, with the final total expected to be known by Friday lunchtime.

In the exit poll, voters are asked to fill in a mock ballot paper as they leave the polling station indicating how they have just voted.

The exit poll was conducted by Ipsos Mori at 144 polling stations, with 22,790 interviews.

Exit polls have proved to be very accurate in recent years. In 2017 it correctly predicted a hung Parliament, with no overall winner, and in 2015 it predicted the Conservatives would be the largest party.

It's shaping up to be a bloodbath, even worse than when Theresa May won.

BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said if the exit poll figures are broadly correct then Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister Boris Johnson will get the backing he needs in Parliament to take the UK out of the EU next month.

It would be the biggest Conservative victory since 1987 and Labour's worst result since 1935, the poll suggests, with the party forecast to lose 71 seats.

But it will not become clear whether the exit poll is accurate until the results start rolling in during the early hours of Friday.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said the government will move quickly to "get Brexit done" before Christmas by introducing legislation in Parliament, if it is returned to power.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell told the BBC the exit poll was "extremely disappointing" for Labour if it was correct.

"I thought it would be closer. I think most people thought the polls were narrowing," he added.

If these results are anywhere close to accurate, the EU will be gutted.  Brexit will almost certainly happen before the end of the year, and you can kiss the National Health Service goodbye as well.

A brutal new era of British austerity is on tap, and when it becomes painfully clear that Johnson and his party have no idea how to manage the split from Brussels, it will be shockingly ugly.

And what of Labour and Jeremy Corbyn?

He's done.  He's resigning this week.  This is the equivalent of Tulsi Gabbard winning the Democratic nomination and getting utterly smashed in 2020, with Pelosi losing the House.  The United Kingdom will not stay united much longer, I fear.  Scotland all but voted to leave the UK today as well.

Stay tuned.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Dems are getting smart, getting tough, and getting real about taking back state legislatures in 2020, finally getting their act together with a multi-state, multi-million dollar projects to flip battleground states like Michigan and NC back to blue at the local level.

Two groups, Arena and Future Now Fund, are planning to spend $7 million to try to flip GOP-controlled state legislatures in Florida, Arizona, Michigan and North Carolina.

“If you look at where the important states are, the places most people are watching are the Electoral College to secure the White House,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the Future Now Fund. “But the truth is that when you talk about the impact of 2020, electoral control of the state legislatures is critical.”

The organizations said their funding represents “the largest coordinated-side commitments to date in North Carolina, Michigan and Florida for the 2020 cycle.”

Under former President Barack Obama, Democrats lost more than 1,000 state and congressional seats. The devastating losses left many Democratic activists and insiders believing that they needed to do more to focus beyond the White House.

“That’s the lesson the radical right has taught us over the last 45 years,” said Ravi Gupta, co-founder of Arena. “So much of what is going on depends on the states.”

Arena and Future Now Fund are expecting to place more than 100 staffers in the four targeted states, hold five-day training academies for 150 aides in each of them, and provide funding to candidates and related groups. Most of their funds will be raised at the grassroots level, the liberal groups said.

Leaders for the groups said they chose those four states in particular for the joint project for several reasons: They think Democrats are poised to win them back, and that each state has faced voter rights or redistricting issues, such as gerrymandering in North Carolina.

They also want to address specific issues in those places, including low teacher pay in Arizona and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And they are looking to take power in the states ahead of redistricting following the 2020 Census. The GOP prioritized its redistricting efforts to great success after the last Census, and the two groups are looking to emulate those results.

Frankly this is a project that should have started in 2008.  And I see Michale Bloomberg and Tom Steyer having both collectively spending close to $200 million on their ego runs for President when they could have instead pitched in just half of that total and made an enormous impact for Democrats.

Of course, Steyer and Bloomberg don't really care about local Democrats, so they wont lift a finger.

I'm just sad that it took so long for Dems to get their crap together on this.

The Last Days of Bevinstan

Outgoing GOP Gov. Matt Bevin left office at midnight on Tuesday, and Gov. Andy Beshear is now chief executive of the Bluegrass state, but Bevin didn't leave without a boatload of controversial pardons.

The family of a man pardoned by Gov. Matt Bevin for a homicide and other crimes in a fatal 2014 Knox County home invasion raised $21,500 at a political fundraiser last year to retire debt from Bevin’s 2015 gubernatorial campaign.
The brother and sister-in-law of offender Patrick Brian Baker also gave $4,000 to Bevin’s campaign on the day of the fundraiser, according to the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance database.

A photo of Bevin attending the July 26, 2018, fundraiser at the home of Eric and Kathryn Baker in Corbin was published six days later in a local paper, the News Journal.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Jackie Steele, who prosecuted Patrick Baker and other defendants for the 2014 death of Donald Mills, told The Courier Journal on Wednesday it would be an “understatement to say I am aggrieved” by Bevin’s pardon.
Steele identified Patrick Baker as the brother of Eric Baker, who hosted the Bevin fundraiser at his Corbin home.

The Friday order was one of 428 pardons and commutations Bevin issued since his narrow loss in November to Democrat Andy Beshear, who was sworn into office Tuesday.
The beneficiaries include one offender convicted of raping a child, another who hired a hit man to kill his business partner and a third who killed his parents.

Steele noted Baker served two years of a 19-year sentence on his conviction for reckless homicide, robbery, impersonating a peace officer and tampering with evidence.

Steele, who, like Bevin, is a Republican, also cited the fact that two of Baker’s co-defendants are still in prison. "What makes Mr. Baker any different than the other two?" he asked.

Answering that question, he said he believes Baker was pardoned while the others remain locked up because Baker’s family has given generously to Bevin. State records show that Victoria Baker, who lives at the same Corbin address where the fundraiser was held, donated $1,000 in 2015 and that Kathryn Baker gave another $500 to Bevin’s reelection in March.

In a pardon order Friday, Bevin said Baker had made “a series of unwise decisions in his adult life” and that his drug addiction “resulted in his association with people that in turn led to his arrest, prosecution and conviction for murder.”

Bevin wrote that the evidence supporting Baker’s conviction is “sketchy at best. I am not convinced that justice has been served on the death of Donald Mills, nor am I convinced that the evidence has proven the involvement of Patrick Baker as a murderer.”

Good to know that twenty-five grand or so will get a loved one off the hook for murder in Kentucky.

Well, if you're the right kind of person, that is.

Not going to miss Matt Bevin at all.

StupidiNews!

• GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to hold a vote to acquit Donald Trump after he is impeached when a majority of senators believe the trial has "run its course".
• Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein is expected to settle out of court in his sexual assault trial for $25 million.
• The House has passed a Defense Authorization Act bill that gives Donald Trump his Space Force in exchange for paid family leave for all federal workers.
• The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee has advanced a bill to put additional economic sanctions on Turkey over Ankara's military action in Yemen, the bill faces a certain Trump veto.
• Senate Judiciary lawmakers in both parties blasted Big Tech in blaming crypto tech for the rise in child pornography and demanding that companies provide access to any data with a warrant.