Holidaze: Feels Like 40 Years Ago

The US Embassy in Baghdad is under siege by hundreds of Iraqi protesters after the US responded to the death of a US military contractor at an Iraqi military base with missile strikes that killed more than 40.

Supporters of an Iranian-backed militia besieged the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes, breaking through the first layer of security at the embassy compound and damaging a reception area before being expelled by Iraqi security forces. Here’s what we know:

• U.S. diplomats took refuge in a safe room as guards fired tear gas at the invading protesters and tried to put out fires they set.
• President Trump accused Iran of “orchestrating an attack” on the embassy, and the Pentagon said it was sending reinforcements to help protect it.
• Iraqi security forces later intervened and set up a barricade, but protesters threw gasoline bombs into the compound.
• The Kataib Hezbollah militia vowed to force the embassy to shut down.

Hundreds of angry supporters of an Iranian-backed militia shouting "Death to America" broke into the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on Tuesday, trapping diplomats inside in response to U.S. airstrikes that killed or wounded scores of militia fighters.

Tensions eased somewhat later in the day after Iraqi security forces intervened, erecting a steel barrier at the smashed gate into the compound's reception area and forcing the protesters to leave. However, protesters outside periodically threw molotov cocktails into the compound and tried to tear down the razor wire atop its walls, as guards inside fired stun grenades at them.

The protesters breached the vast embassy compound's outer security but did not reach the main chancery building where diplomats waited out the intrusion in a safe room.

President Trump responded angrily Tuesday to the protesters' actions, charging that Iran was behind a deadly militia attack that led to the airstrikes and blaming Tehran for the embassy siege.

"Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many," Trump tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. "We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!"

The US State Department is basically denying everything about any possible breach of the embassy's outer grounds and says there are no plans to evacuate.  Meanwhile, Tang the Conqueror is golfing at Mar-A-Lago again and some cruise missile strikes on Iranian targets would be a great way for him to wrap himself in the flag heading into any impeachment trial.

This is a pretty dangerous situation.  Both sides have considerable reason to want escalation here and the protesters never would have been able to get past the outer embassy security without help from Iraqi security forces, at least initially.

Trump has every reason to make this worse.

Zandar's 2019 Scorecard

Welp, it's December 31, and that means we take a look at how I did in my 2019 predictions, and I wasn't very accurate.  For some of these predictions that's actually a good thing.  For others, I wish I had been right.

1) Robert Muller recommends impeachable offenses for Donald Trump.

Sadly, this did not happen, and it was the miss that maybe defined the year.  If Mueller had recommended indictment six months ago, I honestly wonder where we would be right now. But he was never going to do it, and it was foolish of everyone, myself included, to believe for a second that he would.

2) Trump will wait until after Mueller's report is delivered in order to issue pardons.

That still may be the case, but the impeachment of Donald Trump has so far prevented that. Another miss.

3) Trump will not be impeached in 2019.

Another miss, but not by much.  It took until the waning days of the House 2019 session in December, but he was impeached, another miss (and I'm actually glad).


4) The Roberts Court will get a major decision on executive power related to the Mueller probe.

Again, the impeachment of Donald Trump pushed this back to 2020.  While the Supreme Court did take up the case in 2019, the decision won't come until June, if at all (being remanded back to a lower court is kind of the standard thing for these guys.) A miss.

5) The Roberts Court will effectively side with Trump in Gamble vs. United States.

This was my biggest worry, and in a 7-2 decision, the Roberts Court preserved a state's ability to try a case where the defendant was acquitted on federal charges. Siding with Trump would have meant that the NY state case against Trump would have to be dropped.  A very feel-good miss.

6) Hillary Clinton won't enter the 2020 race in 2019.

I got this one exactly right.  She stayed way, way out of it.

7) Bernie Sanders will enter the 2020 race in 2019.

Of course he did.  As I said, as much of a no-brainer as Clinton passing.

8) Dow Jones Average will be under 20,000 on December 31, 2019.

As much as I thought we were headed for a recession in 2019, it didn't happen. Despite a rough January - May period, the Dow and the economy rallied in the second half of the year and gained more than 20% for the year, the S&P 500 was up over 25%, and the NASDAQ up over 35%.  The Trump Tax Scam and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin made it possible, and it came at the direct expense of higher prices for the American consumer.

9) Marvel movies will continue to rule the box office.

Boy did they ever.  Captain Marvel came up a tad short on the domestic half-billion mark I had set, but all three Marvel films obliterated the billion mark worldwide, and Avengers: Endgame took in $2.7 billion. Eight movies broke one billion worldwide in 2019, seven of them were Disney films (and the other was Joker).  Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker is well on its way to one billion after it's December 20 release, so Disney will have a happy 2020 as well.

10) And of course, ZVTS will make it through year 11.

We did, thanks to you.  It's been a rough year, a year where I went 4 for 10, but if I had been right on more things, I think we would have been in a lot worse shape overall.

I'll have my predictions for 2020 up later this evening.

Meanwhile, I still had a better year than most of these professional pundits, so there's that.

Holidaze: I've Seen The Future

Charles Gaba notes the makeup of the current House caucuses for both parties.

UPDATE: Per several requests, I've redone both charts to keep the colors consistent for each category, and have also embedded the counts/percentages onto the charts. Here's the difference in the Republican & Democratic Parties in a nutshell. pic.twitter.com/OtM2h8Epca

— Charles #GetCovered-ba (@charles_gaba) December 30, 2019

One of these parties has a future with its current House roster, given America's increasingly diverse demographics.

The other party does not.

Well, I take that back.  The other party has a future that should frighten the living hell out of all of us.

Holidaze: The Drums Of War

The Trump regime has counterattacked targets in Iraq and Syria with missile strikes in response to an attack over the weekend on and Iraqi military base that killed a US military contractor.

The strikes occurred at about 11 a.m. ET on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. They stand as the first significant military response in retaliation for attacks by the Shia militia group, known as Kataib Hezbollah, that have injured numerous American military personnel, according to US officials. 

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman described the strikes against the group as "precision defensive strikes" that "will degrade" the group's ability to conduct future attacks against coalition forces. 

Defense Secretary Mark Esper briefed President Donald Trump Saturday before carrying them out with the President's approval, according to a US official familiar with the strikes. 

At least 25 people were killed in the US airstrikes, according to a statement Sunday from the Popular Mobilization Units, a Tehran-backed Shiite militia also known as the Hashd al-Shaabi. 

Kataib Hezbollah is a group under the Popular Mobilization Units. Jewad Kadum, a PMU official, said in a statement earlier Sunday that the rescue operations were still ongoing as well as the evacuation of the wounded, recovery of the dead bodies and the extinguishing of the fire caused by the airstrikes.

Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, traveled Sunday to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the strikes with Trump. 

Speaking from the President's Florida resort, Pompeo said the US took "decisive action" and said threats against American forces had been ongoing for "weeks and weeks." 

"We will not stand for the Islamic Republican of Iran to take actions that put American men and women in jeopardy," Pompeo said. 

Esper said Sunday's meeting with the President included discussing "other options available" without providing further detail. He added that the US "would take additional actions as necessary to ensure that we act in our own self-defense and we deter further bad behavior from militia groups or from Iran."

Trump very badly wants to get the press off of his impeachment trial, so a nice military escalation in the Middle East seems to be the solution.  Especially given indicted Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's continued troubles, further significant action against Iranian-backed Syrian targets seems pretty likely at this point.

Stay tuned.

Holidaze: Them's Fightin' Words

As I keep saying, Trump is the symptom.  The disease is the people who vote for Trump, especially those that see his election as an open call to intimidation and violence against those who don't agree with them.  

We call them white nationalists, white supremacists, racists.  That gives them the right to threaten our lives, apparently.  The openly congregate at events like "Trumpstock" in Arizona, with sitting members of Congress like GOP Rep. Paul Gosar joining them, so they can swear allegiance to start shooting if Trump loses.

Arizona will be a key battleground state in 2020: Democrats already flipped a Senate seat and a Tucson-based congressional district from red to blue in 2018. For Mr. Trump, big turnout from white voters in areas like Mohave County — and in rural parts of other battlegrounds like Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia — could be a lifeline in a tight election.

“We like to call this the ‘Red Wall of Arizona,’” said Laurence Schiff, a psychiatrist and Republican campaign official in Mohave County who organizes in support of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Winning the state starts here, with us.”

Grass-roots gatherings play a critical role in the modern culture of political organizing, firing up ardent supporters and cementing new ones. Small circles of Trump-supporting conservatives, often organized online and outside the traditional Republican Party apparatus, engage in more decentralized — and explicit — versions of the chest-beating that happens at Mr. Trump’s closely watched political rallies.

In interviews, people in the crowd described a white America under threat as racial minorities typified by Mr. Obama, the country’s first black president, gain political power. They described Mr. Trump as an inspirational figure who is undoing Mr. Obama’s legacy and beating back the perceived threat of Muslim and Latino immigrants, whom they denounced in prejudiced terms.

“I don’t have a problem with Muslims,” said Angus Smith, an Arizona resident who attended the festival, “but can they take the rag off their head out of respect for our country?”

At Mr. Trump’s official rallies, including a recent one in Florida, the president has referred to Mr. Obama by stressing his middle name, Hussein, and said Democrats were “trying to stop me because I’m fighting for you.”

The Trumpstock speakers pushed even further, tying Mr. Obama’s middle name to a false belief that he is a foreign-born Muslim.

And Democrats were portrayed as not just political opponents, but avatars of doom for Mr. Trump’s predominantly white voter base and for the country.

“There is no difference between the democratic socialists and the National Socialists,” said Evan Sayet, a conservative writer who spoke at the event, referencing Nazi Germany. Democrats, he said, “are the heirs to Adolf Hitler.”

The difference is of course these are the guys willing to start the next civil war.

Events like Trumpstock are not limited to Arizona. Its organizer, Laurie Bezick, recruited speakers from around the country through social media, tapping into a network of pro-Trump voices only a click away.

Long-shot congressional candidates touting an “America First” agenda came from places like Iowa and Maryland. Leaders of fledgling political groups with names like JEXIT: Jews Exit The Democratic Party, Latinos for Trump and Deplorable Pride, a right-wing L.G.B.T. organization, told the overwhelmingly white audience they were not anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic or racist. In fact, the speakers insisted, people who used those terms were more guilty of bigotry than the people they accused.

To applause, the co-founder of Latinos for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, read the pledge he took when he became a naturalized citizen and renounced his Mexican homeland. Nitemare, a pro-Trump rapper who refused to give his legal name, invoked QAnon and called Mr. Obama a racist slur in his set.

Brian Talbert, the founder of Deplorable Pride, was contacted by the White House after he was barred from the L.G.B.T. pride parade in Charlotte, N.C. At Trumpstock, Mr. Talbert, who has a history of expressing anti-Muslim beliefs on social media, gave voice to hatred of Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Mr. Trump’s 2016 opponent.

“I think she should be hanging at the end of a rope for treason,” he said of Mrs. Clinton.

Members of groups like these at once make up a critical portion of Arizona’s conservative base, and espouse derogatory rhetoric that must repeatedly be repudiated, creating political difficulties for the state’s Republican lawmakers. After a photograph emerged last April of members of Patriot Movement AZ posing with Gov. Doug Ducey, he said he had never heard of the group. “I absolutely denounce their behavior,” he added.

Trumpstock attendees say they are used to being denounced, another quality they feel they share with the president. It’s part of why they are protective of him, to the point that they refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a Trump loss in 2020.

Mark Villalta said he had been stockpiling firearms, in case Mr. Trump’s re-election is not successful.

“Nothing less than a civil war would happen,” Mr. Villalta said, his right hand reaching for a holstered handgun. “I don’t believe in violence, but I’ll do what I got to do.”

We live in a country where people regularly open fire into crowds of people with the intent to kill.  How many times will that happen if Donald Trump is defeated?  These are people only warning us that they will pull the trigger, folks.  And our government cannot be counted on to protect us from them.

Not one bit.

Sunday Long Read: The Most Dangerous Game

In 2017, a white man named James Harris Jackson stabbed Timothy Caughman, an unarmed random black man, to death in the middle of Times Square in NYC.  Jackson walked up to police searching for Caughman's assailant and confessed to the crime.  He absolutely confessed to killing Caughman for the sole reason that Caughman was black.

The man stumbled into the police precinct in Hell’s Kitchen late one night, staggering toward a tall reception desk painted black and blue. Before the desk officer could ask the man his business, he collapsed on a bench, dripping blood.

When officers pulled up his shirt, they found a series of deep stab wounds in his dark skin. As they struggled to stem the bleeding, they asked the man who had attacked him, but he could only groan. He died minutes later at a Manhattan hospital without saying a word.
Police scrambled to make sense of the March 20, 2017, slaying. A witness had seen the victim tussling with someone on the street half a block away. Surveillance footage showed a young white man with a black coat and neatly parted blond hair fleeing the scene.

But the motive was a mystery. And by the following evening, police still had no leads on the suspect — not even a name.

As two dozen officers gathered in Times Square — nine blocks from the crime scene — at midnight to continue the search, a solitary figure suddenly emerged from the stream of tourists. His flaxen hair was carefully combed.

“I’m the guy you’re looking for,” James Harris Jackson said, calmly slipping off his black jacket and setting it down in front of an officer. “There are knives in that coat.”
For the next five hours, in a videotaped interview that would later be entered into the court record, Jackson proudly told detectives how he had stabbed Timothy Caughman in the back with a Roman-style short sword simply because he was black.

Caughman, the 28-year-old Army veteran explained, was “practice” for a bigger attack in which Jackson aimed to kill as many black men with white women as he could.

“I was looking to get black men scared and have them do reciprocal attacks,” he said, “and inspire white men to do similar things.”

If the detectives really wanted to understand him, Jackson said, they should read the manifesto he had planned on sending to the media.

“The Racial World War starts today,” it began. “God has ordered us to eliminate the Negro races from the face of the earth for the good of all mankind.”

There's no doubt that both the number of and the casualties caused by hate crimes in the US have only skyrocketed under the Trump regime.  But now we're seeing these crimes being linked to a much nastier movement, with a distinct goal in mind.

And this regime is helping them.

Holidaze: Another Brick In The Wall

The Trump regime has basically built zero new miles of border wall, because they haven't been able to get the land for it from people who live along the border, so now the Trump regime is stepping up Justice Department lawsuits to take thousands of miles of land by force through eminent domain.

Three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the U.S. government is ramping up its efforts to seize private land in Texas to build a border wall. 

Trump’s signature campaign promise has consistently faced political, legal, and environmental obstacles in Texas, which has the largest section of the U.S.-Mexico border, most of it without fencing. And much of the land along the Rio Grande, the river that forms the border in Texas, is privately held and environmentally sensitive. 

Almost no land has been taken so far. But Department of Justice lawyers have filed three lawsuits this month seeking to take property from landowners. On Tuesday, lawyers moved to seize land in one case immediately before a scheduled court hearing in February. 

The agency says it’s ready to file many more petitions to take private land in the coming weeks. While progress has lagged, the process of taking land under eminent domain is weighted heavily in the government’s favor. 

The U.S. government has built about 90 miles of walls since Trump took office, almost all of it replacing old fencing. Reaching Trump’s oft-stated goal of 500 miles by the end of 2020 will almost certainly require stepping up progress in Texas.

Opponents have lobbied Congress to limit funding and prevent construction in areas like the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, an important sanctuary for several endangered species of jaguars, birds, and other animals, as well as the nonprofit National Butterfly Center and a historic Catholic chapel. They have also filed several lawsuits. A federal judge this month prevented the government from building with money redirected to the wall under Trump’s declaration of a national emergency earlier this year. Also, two judges recently ordered a private, pro-Trump fundraising group to stop building its own wall near the Rio Grande. 

Even on land the government owns, construction has been held up. In another federal wildlife refuge, at a site known as La Parida Banco, work crews cleared brush this spring and the government announced in April that construction would soon begin. Eight months later, the site remains empty. 

According to a U.S. official familiar with the project, work crews discovered that the land was too saturated. The planned metal bollards installed on top of concrete panels would have been unstable because of the water levels in the soil, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person did not have authorization to share the information publicly. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment on the issue of saturation at La Parida Banco, saying construction there was “currently in the design phase.”

Trump's biggest campaign promise in 2016 was 500 miles of new border wall by the end of his first term, and he'll be lucky if there's 50.  The last thing he wants is the papers in Texas and especially in Arizona filled with stories of government land grabs from law-abiding citizens being forced off their property by gunpoint as we head into 2020.

Of course, a second Trump term absolutely will be filled with those stories.  That's the point.

Holidaze: Eat The Rich

The 500 wealthiest billionaires on the planet gained $1.2 trillion in additional wealth in 2019, or an increase from 2018 of 25%, as the rest of us suffered.

The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.

Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.

It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.

Even car wrecks proved to be a treasure trove. Willis Johnson, the gold-chain-wearing Oklahoma native who founded Copart Inc., has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune by building a network of junkyards to sell damaged autos.

Read more: Junkyard billionaire thriving on auto wrecks expands empire

The emergence of atypical fortunes underscores just how much money the uber-rich accumulated in 2019.

And the richer they were at the start of the year, the richer they got. The world’s 500 wealthiest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.2 trillion, boosting their collective net worth 25% to $5.9 trillion.

It's unsustainable, of course.  25% yearly returns don't happen without massive economic depressions at some point.  But when we get there, the rich will be fine.  They always are.  The other 7.5 billion of us, not so much.

Holidaze: Destruction Modi Engaged

The Atlantic's Yascha Mounk argues that if you want to see the horrific autocratic fascism of a second Trump term, take a look at where India's Narendra Modi is now with his violent hypernationalism.

When I spent a month on a research trip to India in December 2014, half a year after Narendra Modi swept to power, the writers, academics, and intellectuals I met were engrossed in a debate that may now feel oddly familiar to Americans. They all disliked Modi, an ardent Hindu nationalist, because of his disdain for India’s secular constitution. But they were divided on the impact that his rule was likely to have on the basic freedoms they enjoyed.

Some people feared that Modi would quickly move to quash dissent; one even worried that he might soon land in prison for criticizing the government. Others waved such fears away as hyperbolic.

In his first five years in office, Modi did considerable damage, both to the freedoms his critics enjoyed and to the security of the country’s religious minorities. Social-media mobs intimidated anybody who dared to criticize his government. Media outlets allied with Modi stoked fears about Muslim men waging “love jihad” by marrying Hindu women. Mainstream newspapers that were once highly critical of Modi started to praise him with surprising regularity, and to criticize him with notable rarity. And in episodes of what Indians euphemistically call “communal violence,” Muslims were lynched by angry mobs.

The worst, however, was yet to come. After Modi won reelection with an even larger majority in the spring of this year, his government began to take radical action to unwind the secularism of India’s constitution, arguably doing more damage in the first months of its second term than it had in the previous five years. Some of the concerns about Modi that seemed exaggerated at the conclusion of his first term in office are now starting to look prescient.

During his reelection campaign, Modi vowed to introduce a national register of citizens, which would allow the government to keep better records and to expel unauthorized immigrants. This plan raised fears both among Hindu immigrants who came to the country decades ago after being expelled from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh and among Muslims who lack the necessary documentation to prove that they are in fact citizens. Once reelected, Modi proposed to help the former group by granting unauthorized immigrants from Muslim-majority countries—including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—an express path to naturalization if they belonged to a persecuted religious minority in their country of origin. In other words, Hindus who have no legal right to be in India would likely be able to stay, while many Muslims who have been in India for generations would face the threat of deportation—bringing India one step closer to the Hindu nation that Modi desires.

Over the past weeks, a large protest movement has formed to oppose these radical changes. In cities and universities across the country, citizens of every faith have rallied to defend the country’s secular constitution. The government’s response has been brutal: In some states, it has invoked colonial-era statutes to ban the assembly of more than five people. In other states, it has shut down the internet. Harrowing videos that quickly went viral show policemen roughing up Muslim students whom they suspect of having protested the government.

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the country’s preeminent political scientist, told me, in his first term, Modi focused on economic initiatives without ever distancing himself from Hindu nationalism. “In the second term, he has taken a more aggressive stand to enshrine Hindu majoritarianism in law and polarize public discourse,” Mehta said. “Even more worryingly, the use of the state apparatus to quell dissent and protest has increased markedly. In states like Uttar Pradesh, the police is cracking down on protesters from the minority community with unprecedented ferocity.”

Many observers of India have been surprised that Modi has grown so much more extreme in his second term in office. But a comparison of populist governments around the world suggests that India is following a predictable pattern of what would-be authoritarians do when they win reelection.

As we’ve seen in countries including Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, populist leaders are at first hamstrung in their ability to concentrate power in their own hands. Many key institutions, including courts and electoral commissions, are still dominated by independent-minded professionals who do not owe their appointment to the new regime. Media outlets are still able and willing to report on scandals, forcing the government to tread somewhat carefully.

Once these governments win reelection, these constraints begin to fall away. As the independent-minded judges and civil servants depart, populist leaders feel emboldened to pursue their illiberal dreams.

Replace "Hindu" with "Christian" and you already have the Trump regime's deportation plan under Stephen Miller.  Give them a second term with Mitch still in charge of the Senate and god help us the House, and another Supreme Court pick or two, and all bets are off as to whether the Civil rights era survives into 2024.


Or free and fair elections, for that matter.

Holidaze: Das Trumpenfuhrer

When polling outfit YouGov asked Germans which world leader they thought was the largest threat to world peace, the results weren't even close.

41% of Germans believe President Trump is more of a threat to world peace than North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping or Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a YouGov survey reported by DW.

Why it matters: The results show the degree to which trust in U.S. leadership has eroded under Trump, even among countries like Germany that are traditionally viewed as close allies.

Details: 2,000 Germans participated in the survey, which was conducted between Dec. 16 and 18. Kim Jong-un came in second at 17%, followed by Putin and Khamenei at 8% and Xi at 7%.

Hey, at least he won something.

Holidaze: Impeachment Reached

Public support for removing Trump from office is now up to 55% in a new Yahoo News/MSN poll conducted this week.

Fifty-five per cent of those asked said they were in favour of the US president’s conviction by the Senate, a figure which has shot up from 48 per cent the week before.

Meanwhile, the number of people against Mr Trump’s removal has dropped to an all-time low, according to the MSN poll.

On Christmas Day, 40 per cent were opposed to the Senate voting to convict the president, who has been impeached over his dealings with Ukraine and an alleged subsequent attempt to obstruct congress.

The gap between the two views has become much wider since last week, when there was little to divide them (48 per cent in favour of Mr Trump's removal, 47 per cent against).

The percentage of respondents who neither supported nor opposed conviction also grew.

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, said the numbers of people shifting from opposition to removal to "don't know" was significant. “When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support,” he said.

“This polling is a clear sign that [the] Republican policy of complete obstruction is not selling well to [the] voting public.”

I'll believe that when I see Republican Senators actually voting to have a real trial, but for now at least Pelosi's delay strategy to put pressure on the Senate is definitely working.

Holidaze: The Village Idiot

Jay Rosen catches NBC Meet The Press host Chuck Todd trying to explain away his guilt in allowing the Trump regime's misinformation for three straight years on his weekly politics show, and if anything I agree with Rosen that Todd's admission should lead to his immediate replacement.

‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.
Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.

Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.

Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)

You cannot call that an oversight. It’s a strategic blindness that he superintended. By “strategic blindness” I mean what people mean when they quote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The ostensible purpose of the Rolling Stone interview was to promote a special edition of Meet the Press on December 29 that will focus on the weaponization of disinformation. But its effect is to bring MTP — and by extension similar shows — into epistemological crisis. With Todd’s confessions the mask has come off. It could have come off a long time ago, but the anchors, producers, guests, advertisers and to an unknown degree the remaining viewers colluded in an act of make believe that lurched along until now. One way to say it: They agreed to pretend that Conway’s threatening phrase, “alternative facts” was just hyberbole, the kind of inflammatory moment that makes for viral clips and partisan bickering. More silly than it was ominous.

In reality she had made a grave announcement. The nature of the Trump government would be propagandistic. And as as Garry Kasparov observes for us, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” This exhaustion, this annihilation were on their way to the Sunday shows, and to all interactions with journalists. That is what Kellyanne Conway was saying that day on Meet the Press. But the people who run the show chose not to believe it.

That’s malpractice. Chuck Todd called it naiveté in order to minimize the error. This we cannot allow.

Todd is trying to escape his own culpability with his defense of "I'm a professional pundit and they were good enough to fool even me!"

For years I've been saying that the Village media, in its constant quest for "access" to the Trump regime, has all but destroyed itself in the process.  We no longer have White House briefings or a White House Correspondents' Dinner,  we barely even have a White House press.

Todd saying "Well gosh I just didn't believe them" as a political roundtable host, well, frankly he should be fired.

And he's not just a host, he's been NBC News's political director for over a decade now.  He's their top political voice for the network, and he's an idiot.

No wonder we're screwed.

Holidaze: Merry Turtlemas, Kentucky

Mitch McConnell's approval rating here in Kentucky is still somewhere around "lukewarm bacon grease and licorice sandwich" but he figures he can buy another term with a half-billion in spending and another half-billion in corporate tax cuts for the Bluegrass State.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is delivering more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks to his Kentucky constituents, just in time for Christmas and ahead of a potentially tough reelection campaign.

McConnell’s biggest obstacle to getting the deal done was not Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) or Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), but President Trump, who proclaimed last year that he was not going to sign another omnibus spending bill and whose White House made rumblings about backing a year-end spending freeze instead.

But McConnell, who is running for his seventh Senate term next year, flexed his political muscle to secure $914.2 million in direct spending for Kentucky in the two year-end omnibus spending bills. The windfall will likely boost his political standing at home in the face of a well-financed Democratic opponent and his perennially low approval ratings.
McConnell touted his spending and tax-relief accomplishments at a press conference in Louisville, and drew a sharp contrast with his Democratic opponent, Amy McGrath, a retired Marine Corps fighter pilot who raised nearly $11 million in the third quarter this year for the 2020 race.

Noting that he’s the only top congressional leader who isn’t from California or New York, McConnell emphasized he was one of four people in the room making final decisions about specifics on the year-end spending and tax deals.

The GOP leader argued that his presence at the high-level talks gave Kentucky “an advantage to punch above its weight.”

“I saw a commercial from my likely opponent indicating that I was all that was wrong with Washington. So I have a question for her here as we go into the new year: In what way would Kentucky have been better off without any of these items that I put in the year-end spending bill?” McConnell said.

It's a powerful argument from a politician who registers a 37 percent approval rating at home, according to a Morning Consult poll from the third quarter.

"He's never had a great level of personal popularity so it's been important for him to deliver for the state, and he does a good job of doing that," said Al Cross, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky and a longtime commentator on state politics.

Cross said McGrath has enough fundraising prowess to match McConnell on the airwaves next year and noted the GOP leader "never takes anything for granted."

McConnell's wins in the spending legislation included coal miners’ pension benefits; $410 million for the construction of the new Robley Rex Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville; $314 million for cleanup of Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a $40 million increase over last year’s funding level; a tax break for spirits distillers worth an estimated $426 million in 2020 alone; and $65 million for the construction of the Forage Animal Production Lab at the University of Kentucky.

“I was directly responsible — directly responsible — for these items,” McConnell declared at the press conference.

I'm old enough to remember when pork barrel earmarks were a bad thing all throughout the Bush and Obama presidencies, right up until Trump got in the door.  Now it's "You should vote for me because I'm personally responsible for a billion in spending."

And suddenly, "Obama's profligate wasteful spending" no longer matters while Trump is running up trillion-dollar annual deficits with no relief in sight.

Holidaze: Deeply Concerned Two: The Concernening

You guys, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski is DEEPLY CONCERNED this Christmas.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, says she was “disturbed” to hear Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell say there would be "total coordination" between the White House and the Senate over the upcoming presidential impeachment trial.

“And in fairness, when I heard that I was disturbed,” Murkowski said before describing that there should be distance between the White House and the Senate in how the trial is conducted. “To me it means that we have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process.”

Murkowski was critical of the impeachment process conducted in the House of Representatives that she describes as rushed. “Speaker Pelosi was very clear, very direct that her goal was to get this done before Christmas.”

She says the Senate is now being asked to cure deficiencies in the evidence that will be presented at the trial, particularly when it comes to whether key witnesses should be brought forward to testify including White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton.

“How we will deal with witnesses remains to be seen,” Murkowski said before describing that the House should have gone to the courts if witnesses refused to appear before Congress.

For how the trial is formulated, Murkowski spoke of her desire for a “full and fair process,” potentially using President Clinton’s impeachment hearings as a template.

Murkowski remains undecided how she would vote when the trial takes place. “For me to prejudge and say there’s nothing there or on the other hand, he should be impeached yesterday, that’s wrong, in my view, that’s wrong."

On the one hand, this is precisely why Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer didn't immediately send over articles of impeachment to the Senate, in order to make vulnerable GOP senators sweat a little and to get other, less vulnerable (but still very media savvy and mavericky grandstanders) GOP senators like Murkowski to put pressure on McConnell to allow a Real, Actual Senate Trial™.

On the other hand, Murkowski is openly lying when she says she hasn't made up her mind in order to acquit Trump yet.  As GOP Senate leader, Mitch McConnell is a lot of things, ruthless, corrupt, immoral, and one of the most repugnant villains of our political era, but he's not stupid.  There's no way he hasn't already set ground rules with Murkowski, Romney, Collins, Cory Gardner, etc. for moving forward, and for that matter, he's already had his conversations with Democrats like Doug Jones and Joe Manchin.  Witnesses allowed in the trial or not, the outcome is preordained.

On the gripping hand, Murkowski playing this game serves both the GOP and the Democrats, and both sides know it, so the forms must be obeyed.

Another Washington Christmas, where hope of bipartisanship springs eternal and all that.

Merry Christmas From ZVTS!

The reason for the season.

An entire town in Louisiana got a Christmas blessing thanks to holy water and an airplane. 

Cow Island and the neighboring farms got a dusting of 100 gallons of holy water just before Christmas, the Diocese of Lafayette announced Sunday. 

Cow Island is a town about 32 miles southwest of Lafayette.

The community-wide blessing was thought up by L'Eryn Detraz, a native of Cow Island and a missionary currently stationed in Ohio, the diocese said. 

Parishioners of St. Anne Church brought water from home to be blessed by Fr. Matthew Barzare before it was loaded onto a plane and distributed by a cropduster pilot. 

"A happy and blessed Christmas to everyone from St. Anne Church and parishioners!" the diocese said in the statement.

It's a nice cover story though.