The Red Rout Resumes, Con't

If there's one thing that remains constant from 2019 into this year, it's the continued retirement of House Republicans leaving their sinking ship.

Tennessee Republican U.S. Rep. Phil Roe announced Friday that he will retire at the end of the 116th Congress.

Roe called representing East Tennesseans in Congress for the past 11 years “the honor of my life” and said he always intended to serve five or six terms because he didn’t want to make it a second career. He practiced medicine for more than 30 years before being elected.

Roe, who chairs the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he’s proud the panel has achieved the goals he set for it, including increasing access to care and bringing true accountability to the department.

“I’ll leave Congress at the end of the year knowing that our nation’s heroes are better served today because of our work,” he said. “I am still hopeful that, before the 116th Congress adjourns, we will pass important reforms that improve outreach to veterans in crisis to address the suicide epidemic.”

Roe is among more than two dozen Republicans who have decided not to seek reelection next year.

He said he ran for Congress hoping that his experience as a practicing physician could have a positive impact on health care policy.

“The Affordable Care Act was signed into law during my first term, and much of my time was spent trying to undo some of the harm that was done to the patient-centered health care model as a result,” he said.

Roe was swept into office in 2008, ruthlessly primarying out then freshman congressman Dave Davis and he's been running on getting rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion ever since.  But even Trump is too much for him and he knows the GOP isn't going to win back the House any time soon.  He has arguably the safest district in the country, Tennessee's 1st district on the eastern border of NC in the Appalachians hasn't elected a Democrat since Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

But he's leaving.

There's a lesson there for those who wish to learn.

The Drums Of War, Con't

As I said yesterday, the Trump regime 100% wants impeachment off the front page, and the best way to do that is to escalate the conflict with Iran.  Trump just may have gotten his way, and he just may have entered America into a dangerous conflict with Tehran.

An air strike has killed Iranian Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani and another senior Iranian-linked figure in Baghdad, Iraqi state television reported on Thursday.  

No one claimed immediately responsibility for the strike, which Iraqi television also said killed Abu Mehdi al-Muhandas, an Iraqi militia commander, near the Iraqi capital’s airport, but the death of Iran’s most revered military leader appeared likely to send tensions soaring between the United States and Iran. 

Soleimani, who has long been Iran’s most prominent military figure and is closely linked to the country’s foreign proxy groups, has taken on an enhanced role in Iraq as the country’s Shiite militia groups have gained new clout in recet years. 

Pentagon officials declined comment on the strike.

The strike comes amid already increased friction between Washington and Iran over what U.S. official say is a campaign of sustained agrees sin against the United States and its allies.

As Soleimani is the most powerful military person in Iran, second in power only to Supreme Leader Ali Khameni.  If this airstrike truly killed him, then Iran will almost certainly see it as an act of war, an assassination by the US, and they will respond in kind.  Iran arrested three people in October in connection to what they say was an Israeli plot to kill Soleimani.

Soleimani has been Iran's point man in Syria assisting the Assad regime, supporting the Syrian government with both military and paramilitary assistance. Having said that, Iran has other military leaders who can step in to run Qods Force, so it's not going to break Tehran's back, but if Iran wants to take Trump's bait here and lash out, this was the bait to use.

One thing to get straight however: this man was behind Iran's terrorist military and proxy operations for twenty years.

From the start of the Syrian civil war, General Suleimani was one of the chief leaders of an effort to protect President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — an important Iranian ally — that brought together disparate militias, national security forces and regional powers, including Russia in recent years.

But that was far from the only front he operated on. American officials accuse General Suleimani of causing the deaths of hundreds of soldiers during the Iraq war, when he provided Iraqi insurgents with advanced bomb-making equipment and training. They also say he has masterminded destabilizing Iranian activities that continue throughout the Middle East and are aimed at the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.” 

It did not elaborate on the specific intelligence that led them to carry out General Suleimani’s killing. The highly classified mission was set in motion after the American contractor’s death on Dec. 27 during a rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia, a senior American official said. 

In killing General Suleimani, Mr. Trump took an action that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it would lead to war between the United States and Iran. 

While many Republicans said that the president had been justified in the attack, Mr. Trump’s most significant use of military force to date, critics of his Iran policy called the strike a reckless unilateral escalation that could have drastic and unforeseen consequences that could ripple violently throughout the Middle East. 

“Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter, using an alternate spelling of the Iranian’s name. “The question is this - as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

We'll see what Iran's response will be.  This could get very ugly, very quickly. Will they risk a real shooting war over the assassination of their equivalent of DNI/Secretary of Defense?

Whoever talked Trump into giving this order may be counting on it.

But let's not forget.

Just two days into the new decade and an impeached president, facing a Senate impeachment trial for his crimes, has most likely started a bloody shooting war with Iran that will set back Middle East relations for years, endanger Americans all over the globe, and may end in direct military confrontation.  He did not inform Congress, nor did he seek approval of the assassination of a foreign target.  He just started a war with Iran in order to justify the Senate GOP dismissing his impeachment trial.

This is the crisis scenario we warned you was coming four years ago if Trump was elected.

Here there be dragons.  We're into the worst-case scenario section of the book now, and I don't know how this ends.  None of us do.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime plans to remove nearly all flavored e-cigarette vapor cartridges from the market by Memorial Day, with the exception of menthol, according to the FDA.
• Kentucky GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron is asking the FBI to open an investigation into former GOP Gov. Matt Bevin's "pay-for-play" pardons.
• Australian navy vessels are rushing to rescue wildfire victims stranded on the country's eastern coast as flames and record heat continue to ravage the continent.
• The Pentagon says it is ready to send thousands of more troops into Iraq to protect the US embassy in Baghdad and other "green zone" assets if Iranian-backed militias resume their siege of the area.
• Several major drug companies have hiked drug prices by 5-10%on dozens of drugs to open 2020 as Senate Republicans refuse to allow drug price legislation to get a floor vote.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

One of the big advantages to Nancy Pelosi's strategy to delay sending over Trump's impeachment to the Senate is that white Trump and McConnell are busy complaining and lying, vulnerable GOP senators are sweating while more information about Ukraine is coming out as investigations continue.

One of the GOP’s chief talking points in its impeachment defense of President Trump has been this: The U.S. military aid to Ukraine was withheld, yes, but it was released without any quid pro quo being satisfied. Ipso facto, nothing to see here.

That already-strained talking point suffered a significant blow on Thursday.

Just Security’s Kate Brannen was able to view unredacted emails in which the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department discussed the withholding of military aid. The big new takeaway is that there was significant concern within the Pentagon about the legality and sustainability of the hold. Despite that, according to one email from top OMB official Michael Duffey on Aug. 30, there was “clear direction from POTUS to continue to hold.”

The even-bigger takeaway, though, may be how much this fact was obscured. The emails were previously released in redacted form, but many of the redaction choices are puzzling and even suspicious. The redactions include repeated references to legal problems with withholding the aid, basic questions about that subject, and warnings that waiting until too late in the fiscal year (which ended Sept. 30) might mean that some of the funds would never get to Ukraine.

That latter fact appears to have been doubly obscured — including in an official communication. OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Dec. 11 that suggested that the Defense Department hadn’t flagged such a risk.

“In fact, at no point during the pause in obligations did DOD [Office of General Counsel] indicate to OMB that, as a matter of law, the apportionments would prevent DOD from being able to obligate the funds before the end of the fiscal year,” Paoletta wrote. 

In fact, though, there are at least three concrete examples of a Defense Department official flagging something similar to OMB: 

On Aug. 12, with the hold being renewed, acting Defense Department comptroller Elaine McCusker offered proposed language for the hold to Duffey. It stated that “this additional pause in obligations may not preclude DOD’s timely execution of the final policy direction but that execution risk increases with continued delays.”

On Aug. 27, McCusker sent Duffey a draft letter that the Pentagon was preparing to send OMB. In the letter, the deputy defense secretary was to say, “As a result, we have repeatedly advised OMB officials that pauses beyond Aug. 19, 2019 jeopardize the Department’s ability to obligate USAI funding prudently and fully, consistent with the Impoundment Control Act.”

After Politico on Aug. 28 broke the story that the funds were being withheld, emails were exchanged establishing talking points, including one similar to the statement that eventually found its way into Paoletta’s letter: “No action has been taken by OMB that would preclude the obligation of these funds before the end of the fiscal year.” McCusker, though, explicitly told Duffey that wasn’t the case. “I don’t agree to the revised TPs — the last one is just not accurate from a financial execution standpoint, something we have been consistently conveying for a few weeks,” she said. 

All three of these were redacted from the initially released emails by the Justice Department, according to Just Security, and the proposed language from No. 1 wasn’t used by OMB for some reason. Another redaction came in an Aug. 26 email, in which McCusker told Duffey that Paoletta “appears to continue to consistently misunderstand the process and the timelines we have provided for funds execution.” McCusker also told Defense Department officials internally in an email that “OMB continues to ignore our repeated explanation regarding how the process works.”

The coverup of the Ukraine "favor" and Trump's withheld aid was impossible because it involved the White House, the State Department, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon.  There's too much paper trail there to bury, and it was only a matter of time before the documents the White House is trying to bury came to light like they did today.

And what these documents prove is that Trump ordered the Ukraine aid block personally.

It's going to get harder and harder for the Senate not to call witnesses, and it's pressure and leverage that Pelosi should continue to use until she gets them.  I don't believe it'll make a micron's difference in the guaranteed outcome of a Senate acquittal of Trump, but it'll sure be some nasty footage for campaign ads in 2020.

Another Hat Leaves The Ring

Former Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro is the latest to fold up his tent as 2020 opens and the Democratic primary arena becomes smaller.

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Castro, 45, a native of San Antonio who spent five years as its mayor, portrayed himself as an unapologetic liberal who was shaped by his humble beginnings and had been overlooked by the press. Though he created some memorable moments as he championed progressive policy and challenged his rivals on the campaign trail, Mr. Castro did not catch on with voters and was unable to break into the upper tier of a crowded primary field. His exit is the latest departure of a candidate of color from a field that began as the most racially diverse ever in a Democratic primary.

“I’ve determined that it simply isn’t our time,” Mr. Castro said in a nearly four-minute video message released by his campaign, which included a montage from his year on the trail, including visits to the border and a homeless encampment in Oakland. “Today it’s with a heavy heart, and profound gratitude, that I will suspend my campaign for president.”

“I’m not done fighting," Mr. Castro continued, though he gave no indication of his immediate plans. “I’ll keep working towards a nation where everyone counts, a nation where everyone can get a good job, good health care and a decent place to live.”

The video also features Mr. Castro listing the names of African Americans and Latinos who were killed by police or died in police custody in recent years, something he did often during debates and on the trail.

Mr. Castro’s departure shrinks the field of Democratic candidates to 14. He was viewed as a potential vice presidential pick by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and could be a valuable running mate this year, with Democrats eager to court Latino voters.

Castro and his twin brother Joaquin really do have a bright political future ahead of them, but the 2020 Oval Office isn't in the cards.  I'm hoping that the two of them will be a major force going forward in a Democratic cabinet and House in 2021. Joaquin Castro is currently in TX-20 representing the brothers' home turf of San Antonio, and I think both of them will go far.

For now though, as the NY Times article says, there's still 14 primary candidates in this little shindig.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The siege of the US embassy in Baghdad by Iranian-controlled militia militants is over, for now. But Tehran has made it clear that they can hurt the US if they want to, and they're giving Trump a chance to back off.  Trump of course won't take it.

The siege by supporters of an Iranian-backed militia at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad appeared to have ended Wednesday, after the militia ordered them to withdraw, bringing relief to the diplomats trapped inside and averting a potential showdown between the United States and Iran.

Supporters of the Kataib Hezbollah militia who had spent the night camped outside the embassy dismantled their tents and marched out of the area, saying they would instead continue to press for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in the nation’s parliament.

Their retreat signaled an end to a crisis that had seen thousands of angry militia supporters attempt to storm the embassy on Tuesday in protest at the deaths of 25 militia members in U.S. airstrikes on Sunday. The strikes were in turn conducted in retaliation for the death of a U.S. contractor in a rocket attack which the U.S. military blamed on Kataib Hezbollah.

The Pentagon dispatched additional troop reinforcements to the region as President Trump in a tweet blamed Iran for the assault on the embassy, raising fears of an escalating conflict.

The departure of the demonstrators was welcomed by the diplomats and embassy staffers who had been holed up in safe rooms for more than 24 hours.

“Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief,” said Maj. Charlie Dietz, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad. “A situation that could have easily escalated out of control was handled with tactical restraint and everyone was able to walk away.”

An embassy official said he most looked forward to the opportunity to catch up on sleep.

Kataib Hezbollah agreed to end the siege of the embassy after receiving guarantees from the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi that he would lend his support to efforts in parliament to pass a law calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, according to a senior official with the group.

Mohammed Mohyee, Kataib Hezbollah’s political spokesman, said that the prime minister, whose candidacy the militia had supported, had also threatened to vacate his post if the protest continued, deepening turmoil in the already chaotic country, which has been wracked by separate, anti-government protests for months.

Representatives of the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

So Abdul-Mahdi is facing ouster, Iran is essentially running things inside Baghdad, and the militias are waiting for their next offensive.  Meanwhile, Trump will almost certainly turn up the economic and military heat on Tehran this month, only making the situation worse with rising retaliatory pressure.

And yes, this is being done to get impeachment off the front page.  It could very easily turn into the collapse of Iraq's government or war with Iran or both, but hey, Trump's never miscalculated before, right?

StupidiNews!

We're back in business for the new year and here's to all of us.

• Marijuana is now legal in Illinois and 21 states are raising the minimum wage as multiple new laws take effect across the country this week. 
• Hundreds were arrested in Hong Kong as police cracked down on New Year's protesters during major pro-democracy rallies across the city.
• Pope Francis is apologizing for slapping the arm of a woman who held on to the pontiff, saying his actions were setting a bad example for Catholics.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is promising "shocking" new action in his annual new Year's speech as Pyongyang says it will no longer keep any moratorium on nuclear testing.
• Researchers in Mexico are using core samples taken from a 2,000-year-old Mayan village sinkhole to determine what extreme weather events like hurricanes affected Mesoamerican peoples.

Holidaze: Immolation Nation

Australia now enters month three of the worst wildfires in the country's recorded history, and there's no end in sight to temperatures over 110 degrees, massive destruction of homes and wildlife, devastating drought, and pictures that look like the mouth of Hell itself.

As the fire stalked the east coast of Australia on Tuesday, the daytime sky turned inky black, then blood red. Emergency sirens wailed, followed by the thunder of gas explosions. Thousands of residents fled their homes and huddled near the shore. There was nowhere else to go.

Apocalyptic scenes like these in Mallacoota, a vacation destination between Sydney and Melbourne, came on the last day of the warmest decade on record in Australia. The country is in the grip of a devastating fire season, with months of summer still to go, as record-breaking temperatures, strong winds and prolonged drought have ignited huge blazes across the country.

The government prepared to deploy navy vessels and military helicopters to help fight the fires and evacuate people.

The devastation is immense. In the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, more than 900 homes have been destroyed and nine million acres have burned since November. About 90 fires were still raging in the state on Tuesday, with about three dozen more across the border in Victoria. At least 12 people have died.

Australia is normally hot and dry in summer, but climate change, which brings more frequent and longer periods of extreme heat, worsens these conditions and makes vegetation drier and more likely to burn. The country recently concluded its driest spring on record. That was followed in mid-December by the hottest day on record, with average highs across the country of 41.9 degrees Celsius (107.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Polls show a large majority of Australians view climate change as an urgent threat and want stronger government action to combat it. The catastrophic fire conditions have put an intense focus on the Australian government’s failure to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat when released into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a conservative, has made it clear that Australia’s economic prosperity comes first. Even as his country burned, he has said repeatedly that it is not the time to discuss climate policy.

“We have stood up to these terrible disasters before, and we have come through the other side,” he said in his New Year’s Eve address. “We will rebuild and we will stay strong.”

The Morrison government won't lift a finger to change anything, and Australia will continue to burn every summer.  The thing about climate change, and people who refuse to do anything about it, is that eventually the destruction will become so awful that people will revolt.

When that happens, I'm not sure what will become of humanity.  But I foresee bloody conflict ahead for a lot of places as people fleeing the ravages of climate change run into realpolitik and the people with the rifles and tanks.

Get used to scenes like this over the decades ahead.  Not all of us are going to make it.

Holidaze: We Learned Nothing From 2009

I've had my problems with Joan Walsh over the years, but she's absolutely right in her look back at the last decade, and pins the events of the rise of Trump to the cowardice of both the media and of Democrats starting in 2009.

I had a strange spot from which to regularly witness this f&$%ing decade: cable news green rooms, tiny flash cam cubbies and convivial tables of televised political-panel chats; mostly on MSNBC, occasionally on Fox, and lately CNN. Once the euphoria of Obama’s inauguration subsided, it quickly became clear to at least a few of us that we were witnessing a profound racial backlash. In the early days of the anti-Obama Tea Party, journalists were required to say the uprising was about government spending run amok (I covered San Francisco’s first Tea Party event, on Tax Day 2009, and tried to give attendees the benefit of the doubt, though I couldn’t miss the guy demanding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi examine Obama’s birth certificate, an early “birther.”)

Fox News, always a site of white racial anxiety (remember when Barack and Michelle gave one another “terrorist fist jabs” during the 2008 campaign?) immediately became a clubhouse for white panic. Fox went from hyping the lame thuggery and purported voter intimidation of the tiny, impotent New Black Panther Party, to “exposing” some past controversial political views of Obama’s black “green jobs czar” Van Jones (which led to bipartisan demands for Jones to resign), to promoting doctored videos “showing” the black-led community empowerment group ACORN supposedly helped a “pimp” avoid paying taxes (which led to a bipartisan push to defund ACORN), to pushing another Andrew Breitbart (RIP) story that former NAACP leader Shirley Sherrod used a government job to discriminate against white farmers when the truth was the opposite (which led to bipartisan demands that Sherrod be fired).

Yes, my point is: Fox is evil, but it sometimes succeeded because Democrats are cowards, and utterly unprepared to fight evil enemies. Hosts like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the rising Sean Hannity regularly peddled those and other racial panic stories, while the mainstream media generally, and even leading Democrats, tried hard to avoid seeing what was happening.

Then there was the almost immediate uptick in political violence. In April, 2009, a Glenn Beck fan killed three police officers in Pittsburgh. In May, an anti-abortion terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller in the Wichita church where he served as an usher. In June, an elderly white birther murdered a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. In August, anti-Obama protester William Kostric brought a loaded gun to a New Hampshire town hall meeting with Obama, and carried a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s famous credo, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” Folks in the media debated what Kostric was trying to say. (You can understand why I insisted on roping in 2009 into this decade.) But the political violence continues and has worsened—from Charleston to Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso—ever since.

***

I covered all of this, and I had the distinction of being mocked, at least twice, by the cable hosts I loved the most, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. After I debated disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in July 2009, over whether his violence-tinged rhetoric contributed to the climate that led an anti-abortion zealot to murder Dr. George Tiller, Stewart played our heated exchange and distilled it down to each of us saying the other had blood on their hands (admittedly not my finest moment), and mocking us with the zinger “No backsies!”
The fact that I got thousands of hateful emails and a few old fashioned snail-mail letters, some of them threatening harm to me and my daughter, while O’Reilly railed at me every night for almost a week from his top-rated multi-million-dollar Fox perch, didn’t figure in the sketch. We were simply “both sides.” It prefigured Donald Trump’s “many fine people, on both sides” after Charlottesville—but for laughs.

Maybe worse, I was apparently mocked at the stupendously awful “March to Restore Sanity” Stewart and Colbert sponsored in October 2010, for calling the people behind the uptick in political murder “gun nuts.” I say “apparently” because multiple people told me I was in some compilation video of the divisive people on “both sides,” the partisan “crazies” who needed to be called out so that bipartisan “sanity” could be restored, but I’ve never been able to find it online. Whether or not I was mocked doesn’t really matter; we know the “march” occurred, and was intended to promote nonpartisan solutions to the rising climate of hate. Which was mostly, can we now admit, coming from one side? But again, in this f&$%ing decade, criticizing “both sides” was apparently the only way to acknowledge the rot emanating from one side.

But I didn’t only face this on Fox or, occasionally, from folks I admired on Comedy Central. I ran up against it sometimes on MSNBC too. On “Hardball,” longtime political analyst Pat Buchanan regularly attacked me as an elitist for deriding the racism of the growing Tea Party, even as he recognized them as the descendants of the George Wallace voters he’d welcomed into the GOP four decades earlier. The first time he did it, I was gob-smacked, thinking I’d won the debate. But new rules, put into place under Obama, meant you couldn’t even dismiss George Wallace voters as racist anymore. Back-dated by Buchanan, and a precursor to the right’s Trump analysis, the Wallace voters’ problem was merely “economic anxiety” combined with resentment that “elites” like me didn’t like them. Never mind that Buchanan came from a wealthy Washington D.C. family and I grew up a working-class New Yorker.

Meanwhile, I lost my regular invite to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the day in early 2010 when I failed to correctly identify the person Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski believed was the MSNBC equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. I can still find the video and transcript, courtesy of the right-wing Web that loved how a “clueless” me was schooled, especially by Brzezinski:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: …I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the right, and it’s our responsibility to call out people, I believe, on our side.

JOAN WALSH: Who would you have me call out? I mean who would you say on the left is comparable to Rush and…

SCARBOROUGH: Don’t do it.

MIKA BREZEZINSKI: Mmm-mmm! No thanks, Joan. We’re good. We’re good.

SCARBOROUGH: Can we talk about the Chinese now?

MIKA: I think it’s all very obvious.

WALSH: Is it obvious? Who on the left is comparable to Rush and Glenn on the right?

MIKA: Okay, Joan, if it’s not obvious to you I’ll talk to you off-set. I mean, my God! Alright so let’s read from the Washington Post…

SCARBOROUGH: We’ll talk off-set.

WALSH: Okay…

MIKA: Seriously, it’s like BLIP… BLIP… BLIP… right in front of you and you’re like [imitates willfully clueless Walsh] “I’m sorry, I don’t see it!”

A shocked Walsh was left with her mouth hanging open.

I am sure my mouth did hang open. It just hung open again, reading that exchange. “Off-set,” and also later on the Web, it was “revealed” to me that the correct answer was then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Folks, Olbermann has had his career and personal ups and downs, and I have had my own with him, but there is no way that he ever—then or now—spewed the crazy hatred, let alone the casual racism, of Limbaugh or Beck. Of course, the history of this f&%^cking decade shows that “Morning Joe” later opened its airwaves to candidate Donald Trump whenever he chose to phone in—and even later turned on him, to the hosts’ credit. But “even later” was too late. The damage had been done.

Trump's racist birther garbage was apparent eleven years ago, and so was the failure of our media and the Democrats.  The signs were there, and at every turn last decade the country gave in to him.

Now in 2020 we have one last chance to stop him, or the country is done.

Holidaze: They Learned Nothing In 2019

Our media is bad, it has been bad for years, that lack of common sense in the media is a big reason we have Trump in the White House, and after three years of this hurricane of fecal matter flying around the country leaving destruction in its wake, our media betters are still the same awful clods they were in 2016, as evidenced by Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple interviewing NY Times reporter Adam Goldman on the Steele dossier.

What was your first reaction to the dossier? Were you wary of it?

I hadn’t read the dossier until BuzzFeed published it. I was at The Washington Post, and I left in late August [for the New York Times], and I started hearing rumors, but nobody actually told me anything. I’m at the Times; I’m doing terrorism; I’m dealing with the Clinton Foundation; and I don’t actually read the dossier until it’s online.

Were you part of Steele’s media tour?

No, I was not.

You heard rumors, and then BuzzFeed posted it, and then did your focus turn to it?

No, my focus didn’t turn toward it because I was subsumed with the FBI Russia investigation itself, all the different components to it, right? Figuring out if he was under investigation, right? What was it based on, what were the origins of Crossfire Hurricane? I was trying to figure out the past and trying to keep up with what the FBI was doing. So the dossier for me was not a central — there was a lot of reporting to be done, and I wasn’t the one focused on the dossier.

But then it did obviously, eventually come closer into your world.

Of course I remember reading the memo — the [Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) memo claiming surveillance overreach at the FBI], the dueling memos from the Dems and the Republicans. … Who was right and who was wrong? The dossier had been used, we knew, from Nunes’s memo. We didn’t know how much of it was used, and we didn’t have a good understanding of what the FBI had done to vet it. The assumption was they certainly were trying to. And, well, what did they know that we didn’t know? And then how many months ago, the deputy attorney general says they need to look into this. There were all these accusations floating around. So the deputy attorney general has the IG start looking into it. But really for me, as the guy covering the FBI, I was very interested in what the IG was doing. There was a lot going on, as the IG developed his case and more people started to talk to more people, I was able to get a better sense eventually there were going to be problems not only with the dossier but obviously big problems with the FISA.

[…]

I might have figured [that the FBI had interviewed the dossier’s primary sub-source in January 2017] in early 2019 or late 2018. And that for me was an extraordinary moment: Right? I knew, s---, there were problems. So now there’s some indication that there were problems with the dossier and the FBI had a sense of it. But there were only a handful of people in that room with the source [in January 2017]. And I couldn’t — to be able to write a definitive story with the details the IG had was, I guess, a bridge too far, right? It was a mountain too high for me. Because as the IG report shows, the information didn’t even get to the FISA court. So it somehow rested with this very small group of people in the FBI. I did identify one former law enforcement official who I thought would know about it and I’m sure probably did, and this person did not answer any of my requests. So I went to great lengths to try to build out that information and also figure out who the primary [source] was, and it proved to be extraordinarily tough. I mean, you can imagine: That was an explosive part of the IG report. I would have liked to have known and reported what he said in January of 2017. If I had learned more, I would have liked to have written a much larger, more important story informing the public [about] the problems that the FBI uncovered.

[…]

People on the right on Twitter criticized us for our pre-IG leak stories. I thought they were all very sound. The New York Times was the first newspaper to identify Kevin Clinesmith by name. [Clinesmith is the FBI lawyer who, according to the Times account, “altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap.”] My colleagues and I had the first comprehensive story about the main takeaways: No evidence of bias, no — [Joseph] Mifsud wasn’t working for the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane was legit; and these were all important takeaways. The immediate two stories we wrote — I wrote there are many errors, omissions and mistakes [in the FISA applications]. And I wrote there’s exculpatory evidence they should have included about [George] Papadopoulos and the FISA and about Carter [Page]. I didn’t have the nitty-gritty detail of a 500-page report to be able to walk through all 17 of those significant errors. And frankly it wasn’t even clear to me what Clinesmith had done and how he had altered that email. I had a sense of that. … The way it was described to me it was he took something from the positive and made it into a negative. And that’s what he did. … It was an important report, and I think we did a pretty good job previewing what a lot of it was going to say on a macro level.


Everything you did predict actually was in the report. The criticism, such as it is, is a matter of weighting.


Well, the president of the United States has been accusing the FBI of a coup. He said it in that news conference afterward, they tried to overthrow the government. This is a big, weighty accusation. Why wouldn’t we have tackled that one: Was the president right, did the president know something we didn’t? And if the president was right, that’s pretty extraordinary.

[…]

Also: I was very careful with this language reporting they hadn't placed reporters or undercovers inside the campaign. That was also a major takeaway.

Given that you’ve covered the FBI forever and law enforcement forever and surveillance and all this stuff, tell me what you think about the semantics and the technicalities of this debate about spying.

I mean, look, Matt Apuzzo and I wrote the NYPD stories [about the NYPD’s illegal surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, for the Associated Press]. We used the word “spying” because it seemed that the NYPD didn’t have a legal justification to do what they were doing: going into coffee shops, eavesdropping on private citizens in public spaces, gathering intelligence about communities and putting them in secret documents. People had done nothing wrong and were not accused of doing anything wrong. In this particular case, you have what the IG says are informants who didn’t violate any rules or policies being used as a legitimate law enforcement investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr thinks it’s spying. I don’t think I would hesitate to use the word “spying” if they had found something illegal. If lawful surveillance is spying, then is every FBI investigation they do spying? Did they spy when they busted those NFL players for health-care fraud? God knows what they did in that investigation.

Is the investigation into Rudy and Lev and Igor — is that spying? Where is the line between lawful surveillance and spying?

It’s like torture, right? … The implication of “torture” is that somebody did something wrong. They violated someone’s human rights.

You reported in April about the alleged flimsiness of the dossier.

I had just been collecting a lot of information wanting to do a story about all of this. I'd just been filling up this bucket until I had enough information to write a story. And I kept refilling the bucket.

It was cited on “Hannity.” How do you feel oftentimes to see Sean Hannity and Trump rip the New York Times and then rely on it the next day?

I don’t pay much attention to it. But I’d love to go on “Hannity.” 

David Kris was on the Lawfare podcast and said he needed to emphasize a million times that the FISA problems were not political and he couldn’t emphasize that enough. And I know that there are representations in the Horowitz report saying that he couldn’t find political bias —

That’s fine, but he also said he didn’t get reasonable satisfactory answers. I mean, there were so many screw-ups. How is that possible — basic stuff that people were incapable of doing? My position is that we’re going to go with the Horowitz report until we learn otherwise from U.S. Attorney John Durham or whoever — somebody reputable.

And I mean, Goldman is a solid reporter, and Wemple has been all over the Trump regime's treatment of the media, but Goldman would also love to go on the Junior Fascist Hatred Hour, and Wemple is now up to part seven (this interview) of his long-winded criticism of how the media absolutely failed America in every sense of the word by even reporting on the Steele dossier and the Carter Page story.

Wemple has gone so far as to trash Steele himself, going after McClatchy for the Michael Cohen Prague story, slagging Rachel Maddow's coverage of the story over the months, and defending disinformation conduit John Solomon, among other attacks over the last several weeks that's had Wemple cited positively by the very right-wing outlets that have been horrible to him for years.

The media has learned nothing in 2019.  They still believe the Trump regime is operating in good faith. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, their salary depends on not understanding that Trump is their mortal enemy.

Zandar's 2020 Predictions

Another year means another set of ten predictions covering the next 12 months, so without further ado, here's what I think 2020 will bring. I was very pessimistic in my 2019 predictions, but I'm returning to the sunny side of the street this year.

1) Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump and becomes President.  Yeah, this is a safe guess and a pretty likely outcome, but I think it's what will happen.  Biden has been ahead in the primaries and leading in head-to-head matchups with Trump for all of 2019.  I have to believe that Biden will win, but whether or not Trump concedes in 2021 is a question for 2021.

2) Trump will be acquitted in his Senate trial.  I know, I know, next I'll tell you water is wet and the sun is made of burny stuff that is hot.  But it'll happen, and it'll be a big reason why...

3) The Democrats will reclaim the Senate in 2020.  Those votes to acquit are going to wreck vulnerable GOP senators like Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, Martha McSally and Thom Tillis, and I think they're going to lose. A 50-50 tie with Biden winning means Biden's VP is the tiebreaker and the Dems will prevail...unless Joe Manchin switches parties or something. That's why I'm predicting Dems get 51 or 52 seats with Iowa's Joni Ernst losing, Pat Roberts's open seat in Kansas getting picked up, and Doug Jones holding on.

4) Democrats keep the House.  Nancy Pelosi continues to outmaneuver the White House and I think high turnout in November will not only assure a Biden win, but a big House gain for Team Blue.

5) The US Supreme Court will give states sweeping powers in rulings on abortion and discrimination.  I don't want to be right on this one, but I forsee a huge hole being blown in Roe and another in the Civil Rights Act as SCOTUS will come down on the side of letting states make their own rules on abortion clinic access and LGBTQ discrimination, and by January 1, 2021 it's entirely possible that there will be a dozen states with no abortion clinics, and there will be no protections for sexual orientation or gender identity at the federal level.

6) US Attorney General Bill Barr will announce indictments for James Comey and John Brennan. Trump has wanted these two heads for ages, and he's going to get them.  The court fights are going to be bad, but Trump rounding up FBI folks for personal revenge will be the last straw for a lot of voters.

7) The Dow Jones will end up under 25,000 by December 31.  I don't think the recession will hit in 2020, but it'll definitely catch up to us next year. The global slowdown will be too much to overcome.

8) Marvel movies will not rule the box office in 2020.  That's not to say parent company Disney won't have an incredible year again, with a pair of Pixar features (Onward, Soul), Harrison Ford starring in Call of the Wild based on the Jack London novel, and live action movies of Mulan and Jungle Cruise.  But of the three Marvel properties, New Mutants, Black Widow, and Eternals, I only see Black Widow breaking half a billion.

9) Trump will finally get around to those pardons.  He'll have nothing to lose once, well, he loses.  Oh wait, he'll be headed for state cases against him and jail time, but in the meantime the pardons will be the least awful thing he does.

10) And of course, ZVTS will make it through year 12.  It'll be thanks to all of you who have stuck with me since the 2008 primary race and through 4 presidential contests.

Am I right?  Am I wrong?  We'll file these away for the future, as always.

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.