Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Who could have imagined that the kind of ambitious people who would want to be Donald Trump's third Russia expert in under a year would be both watched carefully and also stupidly corrupt?

The top Russia expert on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council has left his post after about three months, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Andrew Peek, the NSC’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, was escorted from the White House grounds on Friday, two of the people said, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss personnel matters. A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment, citing the same reason. Peek also declined to comment.

Axios reported earlier Saturday that Peek was placed on administrative leave pending a security-related investigation.

Peek is the third departure from the position in less than a year. The NSC has been marked by turbulence and turnover over Trump’s three years in office, as the president has repeatedly sought national security advisers more in-line with his own ideology.

Peek assumed the top Russia job on the NSC in November, according to his LinkedIn page. The position and the people who have occupied it have featured prominently in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives last year.
Peek replaced Tim Morrison, who left the position late last year. Morrison testified in the impeachment inquiry that the U.S. Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, had told him there was a quid pro quo in which U.S. aid to Ukraine was conditioned on the country’s government opening an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that employed the son of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Morrison took over the job from Fiona Hill, a longtime Russia expert who also testified as part of the impeachment inquiry. In her testimony, Hill said Republican accusations that Ukraine -- rather than Russia -- meddled in the 2016 presidential election amounted to a “fictional narrative.”

The Senate’s impeachment trial is expected to begin on Tuesday.

Trump fired his last two Russia experts because they told him things he didn't want to hear.  The third is being carted off for possible criminal violations while Trump is facing impeachment. I'd feel sorry for Mr. Peek here, but there is that whole thing about actively choosing to work for the Trump regime that often leads to, well, being scrapped once your usefulness to Dear Leader expires or getting pinched by the feds for doing what Trump wants and getting caught.

Not a good look, but then again, Trump has near total control of his enablers, because if Trump goes down, nearly every single Republican goes down with him. There are plenty of Republicans who have gone so far out on a limb for Trump that there's no climbing back without his help.

We'll see how the trial shapes up, but the Parnas fountain of fun isn't being shit down anytime soon.

Sunday Long Read: Ghost Writer

Author Rax King explains how, in a world of both lasting grief and constant, instant communication, there's always someone on the other side.  When her father died, she sent emails to his old work address, which was active.  And then, somebody wrote back.

As expected, I found only about 10 emails between us in as many years of Gmail use. The revelation was not in anything I read but in the mere typing of his name—an icy wave of relief splashing me in the face. How good it felt to write his name for no reason, in a place that only I could see, and not on some piece of paperwork related to his death or in response to some well-wisher’s post on Facebook. It was like charging a magical sigil. I’d never been one of those writers who attached fetishistic significance to the physical act of writing (or to books themselves, or paper). But I finally understood how those writers felt. Writing to my father, I realized, was a charmed act. It didn’t summon him, but it raised the friendly shadow of him in the room; that was something.

I began writing him emails. I didn’t send them at first. Typing his email address into the recipient bar was enough to conjure up his listening presence. For months I transcribed the hostile anguish in my head into emails to my father, which I would then seal off with the addition of his email address and save in my drafts folder. It was the high school diary, unfiltered. He would never find out how it ended now; it felt good to “tell” him.

The first time I pressed “send,” it was by accident, and I was horrified. I was worried not that someone would receive and read the email, but that the recipient address would bounce back a message that the account had been deactivated.

I stared at my inbox for a minute, waiting for the inevitable. It never happened. The email address was still active.

So I continued the ritual, except now I sent those long-winded emails out. I wrote to my father anytime I needed him. In my letters I tried to talk myself around to whatever he would have said to me, hoping I could reverse-engineer the advice he might have given me. Then I pressed send, which never stopped being thrilling—I’d sidestepped the finality of death and found a plane where my father could thrive unchallenged. I put disclaimers at the beginning of every email: Hey, if you can somehow read this, please ignore it; hey, I don’t think anyone’s checking this email, but if you are then please just delete without reading; I’m lonely, I’m grieving, I miss my father, nothing to see here. But nobody ever responded.

One day, a year and a half later, someone did respond—not from my father’s email address, thank God, or I likely would have passed out at my desk. Still, it was frightening to see another email address from the same Workplace suite, with the same subject line. I don’t know what I was frightened of, exactly. Only that the stakes felt terribly high. I’d forgotten the cardinal rule of doing anything online, even sending emails to a dead person’s inbox—everything that happens online can be witnessed by an audience.

The response I received is the reason you’re reading this, because I posted it on Twitter and it went viral. “I’m sure you remember me,” my father’s former coworker wrote. “I want you to know that I never read these emails because I can tell they are very personal. But I do see them coming in and I can see that you must still miss your dad terribly.” There was more; I’m self-conscious about typing it all out, because of how generous it was for this person to not only share memories of my father with me, but to interpret them, color them with our shared understanding of what my father and I had been together. Like, for example: “Watching the two of you together wisecracking…it was like watching a Mel Brooks movie.”

Zandardad hangs around here and makes his views known in the comment section, and I message him pretty regularly, especially whenever there's a Democratic debate.  I'm lucky that I have a chance to still get advice from pop.  He's a good person, and I've always looked up to him.

In an era of instant messaging, don't take it for granted.

Impeachment Reached, Con't

Dear Leader Trump demands that his impeachment be annulled or removed on unimpeached because it's against the law or something, year, that's the ticket.

President Donald Trump launched his first formal attack on the House’s effort to remove him from office on Saturday, calling the Democrats’ impeachment case against him fatally flawed and “constitutionally invalid” while blasting the effort as a political hit job by his adversaries.

“This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election — now just months away,” Trump’s lawyers argued in a six-page response filed with the Senate just days before the president’s trial begins in earnest.

The allegations raised by Trump’s attorneys — a soft swing at the substance of the impeachment articles and a more direct rebuke of the process Democrats used to get there — mirror the House’s charges against him. Democrats allege the president pressured Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election on his behalf by launching investigations into his political opponents.

Saturday’s filing from Trump marks his initial entry into the impeachment battle. The president and his lawyers had explicitly sat out the House investigation, complaining in a December letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

But that approach won’t fly in the Senate, where Chief Justice John Roberts last week outlined a detailed schedule of separate legal filings for both sides of the debate. Trump’s initial reply will be followed by a more exhaustive trial brief from his lawyers that’s due on Monday.

In its first filing, the Trump legal team hammered what it calls “procedural irregularities” in the House’s impeachment process and the decision by Democrats not to accuse the president of committing a statutory crime — a threshold that constitutional scholars have long said isn’t a necessity when Congress seeks to remove a federal officeholder.

“In the end, this entire process is nothing more than a dangerous attack on the American people themselves and their fundamental right to vote,” the Trump legal filing says.

I can't tell if Trump honestly thinks everyone is as stupid as he is, or if this is the best his legal team can do with impeachment.  Either way, it's embarrassing, America deserves a much better class of villain running the place.

"Impeachments aren't legal because they overturn elections!" except for the part where impeachment is spelled out in the Constitution, making it legal.  I'm not even a lawyer and I think this brief should be written in crayon or finger painted in baby poop, but here we are.

Of course as soon as Chief Justice Roberts rolls his eyes at this, Trump will have all the evidence he needs to convince his base that it will never be a fair trial, so that Trump can and should do whatever he wants regardless of the outcome.

Meanwhile, Mitch is up to his tricks again.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is preparing a resolution that would leave room for President Trump's lawyers to move immediately to dismiss the impeachment charges if they so choose, according to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley.

Yes, but: Republican Senate leaders, including McConnell and Roy Blunt, the senior senator from Missouri, have already said members aren't interested in a vote to dismiss. And it seems unlikely that Trump's team would push for what would almost certainly be a losing vote — a move that could be seen as a sign of weakness at the outset of the trial.

Behind the scenes: "I am familiar with the resolution as it stood a day or two ago," Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, told me in a phone interview on Saturday. "My understanding is that the resolution will give the president's team the option to either move to judgment or to move to dismiss at a meaningful time..." 

Hawley added that in the most recent draft of the organizing resolution he saw there was an option for the president's counsel to make a motion in multiple places, including at the beginning of the proceedings. 

A Republican leadership aide responded: "The White House has the right to make motions under the regular order, including a motion to dismiss, right after the resolution is adopted because a motion to dismiss is a motion permitted by the impeachment rules."

The real reason?  It's the final option in case the trial goes south.

The big picture: Trump endorsed on Twitter the idea of outright dismissal of the charges against him. It could be an opportunity for some of Trump's closest Senate Republican allies to register their contempt for the case that House Democrats marshaled against the president — even if the motion is doomed to fail. 

It could also serve as a break-glass option if the trial took a turn and Trump's allies felt they needed a mechanism to bring about an abrupt end to the trial.

The Trumpies expect an acquittal or dismissal by January 31, before the State of the Union speech on February 4.  If the trial's not done by then, Trump can't take his victory lap on national TV.

That appears to be the most important consideration for this regime.

Last Call For Pete's Sake

With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks and change away, Pete Buttigieg is making his stand in the Hawkeye State and the biggest question on the mind of his supporters isn't "How does he beat Trump in the general" but "Why don't black Democratic primary voters love him?"

The white voters who come to Pete Buttigieg's rallies just don't understand.

Many of them fell for the 37-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the first time they heard him speak: his calm demeanor, his intelligence, the way he seemed to appeal to progressives and moderates alike.

But his support among Democratic-leaning black voters nationally is stuck in the abysmally low single digits.

“I don’t understand that,” said Bill Koeneig, a physician in Des Moines who said Buttigieg is one of his top choices in the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

“I don’t understand it,” said Julie Walstrom, a retired teacher in Perry, Iowa, who is deciding between Buttigieg, former vice president Joe Biden, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

“I don’t understand what that issue could possibly be,” said Doug Gardner, a retired sales worker in Urbandale.

In nearly two dozen interviews across Iowa this month, white voters struggled to reconcile their affection for Buttigieg with how black voters see the candidate. Some said it simply didn’t matter to them. Many more had been grappling with how to think about the disconnect and Buttigieg’s challenges: Some were worried, others frustrated.

But not a single person considering Buttigieg said it would affect their vote in the caucuses, which are nearly two weeks away.

“That’s not my battle to fight,” said Gardner.

Buttigieg is among the frontrunners in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two mostly white states that play an outsize role in deciding the presidential nomination as the first two states to vote. But his standing is lower nationally. In South Carolina, a key early-voting state because of its large black population, Buttigieg has frequently pulled 0% among black voters.

The vast majority of white Iowa voters said they’d heard about Buttigieg’s difficulties with voters of color. Many had heard, particularly, of his record in South Bend, where he was criticized for his handling of police relations and housing issues in communities of color.

“I think it’s partly because of the incident that happened in South Bend,” said Sue Seidenfeld, a retired physician assistant in Waukee who said she was undecided in the race and had come to see Buttigieg in Winterset. She did not specify the incident.

“I think that maybe that black voters feel like he wasn’t as empathetic as he could have been, and as on top of the situation as he should have been,” she said. “Which is kind of a shame — because he has to be impartial, and he has to take some time to see what really the facts were, and I think people are too quick to judge sometimes.”

She paused and added: “But maybe not, you know. There may be something to it.”

Still, Seidenfeld said, it wasn’t an issue that was going to affect her vote either way. She thought Buttigieg was “more empathetic to minorities than a lot of people. I also think, for what it’s worth, that it’s a shame that people think that Iowa shouldn’t be the first [caucus] in the nation. Because after all, we were the first to go for Barack Obama.” 

Let me answer the question for the folks in Iowa.  Three answers, actually.

1) The number one priority for black voters like myself is getting rid of Trump.  It's not just a matter of politics, it's a matter of survival.  He hurts us daily.  Trump and his base are doing everything they can to erase Barack Obama's legacy and memory from this country, and along with it all the executive decisions and government agency programs and departmental memos that Obama issued to help us.  All those are going away and his base cheers that on.  White voters in Iowa will survive a second Trump term.  Black voters will continue to suffer grievous harm from it.

So when we ask Pete "Hey, are you going to bring back the Obama-era policies that we need, are you going to get rid of the federal government's systemic hostility towards black and brown folk" he responds with "That's on the list" like great, like he doesn't want to upset the white people voting for him, especially the ones that say "Well, frankly, all lives matter!"  because he knows Clinton's support for Black Lives Matter hurt her in the Midwest.  Clinton at least had the courage to go down swinging and not assume we would support her.

2) There are some real issues with the South Bend PD and Pete's relationship with it and black residents in the city.  The story of how Pete badly handled examples of overt racism in the city government when he was Mayor doesn't fill anyone with confidence.  This story has dogged him for eight months now and he has yet to actually respond to it in any meaningful way, in fact over and over again in interviews and in his own book, he's responded with "I didn't know".

Again, he's had months to respond to the criticism of this (and not all of it is fair criticism against him) and he's chosen to ignore it or to profess ignorance.  It doesn't make black folk willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because we've all dealt with white folk in positions of power like this who say they are our friends, but act like we don't matter. 

3) Iowa has a four percent black population.  It's nowhere near representative of the country. questions of why a state with a small fraction of black voters is the most important state in the nation when it comes to deciding a Democratic presidential candidate aside, Pete has sunk all of his resources into the state and is ignoring the most more representative SC.  You know who thinks SC matters?  Joe Biden.  Obama's VP.  The guy who stood by Obama for eight years.

Biden has earned the loyalty of black voters because he was there for us and still is.  Yes, he made some terrible calls 40 years ago in his Senate career.  He made some terrible calls when he was running in 2008.  But Barack Obama trusted him, and it was a great choice, and I trust him too.  Iowa is not representative of America and Iowa voters acting insulted that somebody wouldn't pick their candidate i not the way to get people to pick your candidate.

Pete has a long, long way to go, frankly.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Monday's pro-firearms rally at Virginia's state capitol is shaping up to be as bad as Charlottesville or worse, and police have already arrested domestic terrorists ahead of the planned armed demonstrations.

Three men linked to a violent white supremacist group known as The Base were charged with conspiring to kill members of a militant anti-fascist group, police in Georgia announced Friday, a day after three other members were arrested on federal charges in Maryland and Delaware.

A senior FBI national security official said police and federal agents intentionally moved to arrest the men ahead of Monday’s rally because they believed some of them intended to commit violence there. It was unknown if the men arrested in Georgia planned to attend the rally in Richmond.

The Base, a collective of hardcore neo-Nazis that operate as a paramilitary organization, has proclaimed war against minority communities within the United States and abroad, the FBI has said. Unlike other extremist groups, it’s not focused on promulgating propaganda — instead the group aims to bring together highly skilled members to train them for acts of violence.

There’s an intensified focus on The Base after the three members were arrested Thursday in Maryland and Delaware on federal felony charges. A criminal complaint included details of how some of the men built an assault rifle using parts, purchased thousands of rounds of ammunition and traded vests that could carry body armor.

“A big reason why we disrupted it now was based on the timing of the rally on Monday and the intent of some of the individuals to potentially conduct violent acts down in Richmond,” said Jay Tabb, the executive assistant director for national security at the FBI.

Speaking at a homeland security event in Washington, he said the FBI has “got a fair sense of worry” because agents “can’t account for everybody and everything.”

“We have a degree of interest of some individuals that we know are at least saying that they will be there and we have no way to predict where rhetoric turns to violence,” Tabb said.

Organizers of The Base recruit fellow white supremacists online — particularly seeking out veterans because of their military training — use encrypted chat rooms and train members in military-style camps in the woods, according to experts who track extremist groups.

The group, which has the motto “learn, train, fight,” brings together white supremacists with varying ideologies.

The arrests show an intensified focus on the group from law enforcement officials who are concerned that the supremacists may go beyond plotting to violent acts, a threat made more urgent ahead of a pro-gun rally Monday in Richmond, Va.

The arrests only added to rising fears that Monday’s rally could quickly devolve into violence, with thousands of protesters planning to descend on Virginia’s capital, and become a repeat of the 2017 white nationalist rally when a man drove his car into counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal and civil rights activist.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam signed an executive order banning guns from the state Capitol grounds for Monday’s rally, but pro-gun groups filed an appeal seeking to overturn the ban. The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the ban Friday.

The people planning to show up in Richmond aren't just tiki torch carrying internet troll assholes, these are hardcore neo-Nazi domestic terrorists trained to fight and kill non-white folk.  The worst of these scumbags are The Base, a group of white supremacist skinheads who have risen in the wake of Charlottesville and the Trump era.

Members of The Base allegedly spray-painted at least one synagogue in Racine, Wisconsin, with swastikas and anti-Semitic language, officials said. Authorities suspect the case is linked to the one in Michigan.

"We welcome the arrests," Holden said Friday. "As a first-hand witness to their mischief-making, I can easily believe law enforcement has good reason to be concerned."

But experts who track hate groups say the vandalism in Michigan is merely a tamer example of the larger, apocalyptic vision that members harbor: Their ideology supports a race war against minorities and the establishing of white ethno-states. The group's name is the English translation of al Qaeda, according to The Soufan Group, a nonprofit security intelligence firm.

"Just like al Qeada, The Base does not believe in any political solution to what they see as a threat to the white race," said Mollie Saltskog, an intelligence analyst with the firm. "Violence is the only option."

Saltskog said that while the ideologies of a white supremacist group such as The Base and a jihadist organization such as al Qaeda appear disparate, their shared desire for bloodshed only incites their followers.

"They feed off each other in a pretty sick way," she added.

The Base, which began about two years ago, maintains it is not a political organization and denies being a paramilitary group or militia with no formal membership or official leadership.

Its membership numbers are unclear, but Saltskog said The Base's chapters extend beyond the United States and Canada, with support in Europe and Australia.

One of those arrested in the U.S. this week is Canadian national Patrik Mathews, 27, who was allegedly a main recruiter for the group in Winnipeg.

These guys are straight up terrorists in every sense of the word.  The have risen in the shadow of Trump's racism and in response to his rhetoric.  Charlottesville was only the beginning.  Richmond, on the federal MLK Jr. day holiday, could become deadly.

I pray that cooler heads prevail and the storm passes, but it won't.  Trump will make sure of that.

If anyone is hurt on Monday, remember Trump did this.

SCOTUS Motion: Integrity And Faithlessness

The US Supreme Court is taking up the question of "faithless electors", and whether or not a elector empaneled by a state in the electoral college in a presidential contest must vote based on the state's popular vote.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an issue that could change a key element of the system America uses to elect its president, with a decision likely in the spring just as the campaign heats up.

The answer to the question could be a decisive one: Are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are they free to vote as they wish?

A decision that they are free agents could give a single elector, or a small group of them, the power to decide the outcome of a presidential election if the popular vote results in an apparent Electoral College tie or is close.

"It's not hard to imagine how a single 'faithless elector,' voting differently than his or her state did, could swing a close presidential election," said Mark Murray, NBC News senior political editor.

America has never chosen its president by direct popular vote. Instead, when voters go to the polls in November, they actually vote for a slate of electors chosen by the political parties of the presidential candidates. Those electors then meet in December, after the November election, to cast their ballots, which are counted before a joint session of Congress in January.

More than half the states have laws requiring electors to obey the results of the popular vote in their states and cast their ballots accordingly. The problem of what are known as "faithless electors" has not been much of an issue in American political history, because when an elector refuses to follow the results of a state's popular vote, the state usually simply throws the ballot away.

The cases before the Supreme Court involve faithless electors during the 2016 presidential election. Instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote in Colorado, Michael Baca cast his vote for John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio. And in Washington state, where Clinton also won the popular vote, three of the state's 12 electors voted for Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, instead of Clinton.

Colorado threw Baca's vote out and found another elector to vote for Clinton. Washington accepted the votes of its rebel electors but fined them for violating state law. The electors challenged the fines, but the Washington state Supreme Court upheld the state law requiring them to conform to the popular vote.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver reached a different conclusion, however. It said electors can vote for any legitimate candidate.

It's not really hard to imagine a scenario where the Supreme Court throws out state laws that require electors to cast their ballots for the popular vote-getter in June, and then the Democratic candidate in 2020 wins a state like Arizona, North Carolina, or Florida, and then a few electors are shaved off to vote for Trump, which could throw him a win in a close race.

We'll see where this ends up, I would think that SCOTUS would decide that this is another election matter to leave to the states, but the electoral college is also the only real national election process mapped out specifically in the Constitution as well.  It's not out of the realm of possibility that we get a sweeping ruling that declares all states follow a winner-take-all format, in order to force federal uniformity for a federal election.

The right-wing noise machine is portraying the case as an effort to get rid of the electoral college completely, which won't happen, so I have no idea what Republicans actually think about this case. other than yelling "states' rights!" and walking off.

Oral arguments will be in March.

Taking Your Lunch Money

One of the major goals of the Trump regime is to remove all traces of the Obama administration, by destroying and then taking credit for recreating what worked (NAFTA vs. USMCA, VA Choice program vs. VA MISSION Act, etc) and just flat-out destroying whatever he and the base dislike, especially environment and health stuff such as light bulb regulations, toilet flow rules, and in this case, Michelle Obama's healthy school lunch guidelines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken another whack at former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature achievement: Establishing stricter nutritional standards for school breakfasts and lunches. And on her birthday.

On Friday, USDA Deputy Under Secretary Brandon Lipps proposed new rules for the Food and Nutrition Service that would allow schools to cut the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts while giving them license to sell more pizza, burgers and fries to students. The agency is responsible for administering nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools.

Lipps said the changes will help address what he described as unintended consequences of the regulations put in place during the Obama administration. For example, when schools were trying to implement innovative solutions such as grab-and-go breakfast off a cart or meals in the classroom, they were forced to give kids two bananas to meet minimum federal requirements.

But Colin Schwartz, deputy director of legislative affairs for Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that the proposed rules, if finalized, “would create a huge loophole in school nutrition guidelines, paving the way for children to choose pizza, burgers, french fries and other foods high in calories, saturated fat or sodium in place of balanced school meals every day.”

He says that limiting the variety of vegetables could make french fries even more central to students’ diets. He says the potato lobby has been pushing for this change, and that the potato industry was behind a change that happened quietly last March making it easier to substitute potatoes for some fruit in weekly breakfast menus.

Kam Quarles, the chief executive of the National Potato Council, said, “Potatoes are a nutrient dense vegetable, which contain more potassium than a banana and 30 percent of the daily value of vitamin C along with 3 grams of protein, fiber and carbohydrates that school children need to perform their best at school.”

This was an easy three-fer in the Trump book: a direct insult to another part of the Obama legacy by erasing it, pleasing red state constituent farmers in places like Idaho, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Maine, and taking cash from yet another industry lobby group.

Don't be surprised if Melania Trump offers "new" lunch guidelines to help kids in school, either.  It was always her idea, of course, and red state Trumpists will love it.

Michelle who?  Never heard of her.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

A new national poll of black Americans from the Washington Post finds the overwhelming belief that Donald Trump is a racist who has made racism worse in America, and that his regime has translated into a frightening time for those who are black.  Being black, I absolutely agree with the assessment, but remember that Trump is a symptom of a much larger issue.

More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.
The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans. 

Courtney Tate, 40, an elementary school teacher in Irving, Tex., outside Dallas, said that since Trump was elected, he’s been having more conversations with his co-workers — discussions that are simultaneously enlightening and exhausting — about racial issues he and his students face everyday.

“As a black person, you’ve always seen all the racism, the microaggressions, but as white people they don't understand this is how things are going for me,” said Tate, who said he is the only black male teacher in his school. “They don’t live those experiences. They don’t live in those neighborhoods. They moved out. It’s so easy to be white and oblivious in this country.”

Francine Cartwright, a 44-year-old mother of three from Moorestown, N.J., said the ascent of Trump has altered the way she thinks about the white people in her life.

“If I’m in a room with white women, I know that 50 percent of them voted for Trump and they believe in his ideas,” said Cartwright, a university researcher. “I look at them and think, ‘How do you see me? What is my humanity to you?’ ” 

The president routinely talks about how a steadily growing economy and historically low unemployment have resulted in more African Americans with jobs and the lowest jobless rate for black Americans recorded. Months ago he said, “What I’ve done for African Americans in two-and-a-half years, no president has been able to do anything like it.”

But those factors have not translated positively for the president. A 77 percent majority of black Americans say Trump deserves “only some” or “hardly any” credit for the 5.5 percent unemployment rate among black adults compared with 20 percent who say Trump deserves significant credit.

In follow-up interviews, many said former president Barack Obama deserves more credit for the improvement in the unemployment rate, which declined from a high of 16.8 percent in 2010 to 7.5 percent when he left office.

Others said their personal financial situation is more a product of their own efforts than anything the president has done.

“I don’t think [Trump] has anything to do with unemployment among African Americans,” said Ethel Smith, a 72-year-old nanny who lives in Lithonia, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. “I’ve always been a working poor person. That’s just who I am.”

It really does come down to black folk like myself wondering if a room full of white folks are oblivious to the black experience in 2020 or actively hateful of it, and I don't know which.  I learned long ago not to bring up politics in any conversation around here in NKY because then I learn the answer.

Coming For Comey

The Barr Justice Department, unable to find a crime to charge former FBI Director James Comey with in either their investigation into the Mueller probe or Operation Crossfire Hurricane into candidate Trump's Russia connections, has now decided that Comey has to hang for leaking classified info to the press in 2017.

Federal prosecutors in Washington are investigating a years-old leak of classified information about a Russian intelligence document, and they appear to be focusing on whether the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey illegally provided details to reporters, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The case is the second time the Justice Department has investigated leaks potentially involving Mr. Comey, a frequent target of President Trump, who has repeatedly called him a “leaker.” Mr. Trump recently suggested without evidence that Mr. Comey should be prosecuted for “unlawful conduct” and spend years in prison.

The timing of the investigation could raise questions about whether it was motivated at least in part by politics. Prosecutors and F.B.I. agents typically investigate leaks of classified information around the time they appear in the news media, not years later. And the inquiry is the latest politically sensitive matter undertaken by the United States attorney’s office in Washington, which is also conducting an investigation of Mr. Comey’s former deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, that has been plagued by problems.

Law enforcement officials are scrutinizing at least two news articles about the F.B.I. and Mr. Comey, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2017, that mentioned the Russian government document, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Hackers working for Dutch intelligence officials obtained the document and provided it to the F.B.I., and both its existence and the collection of it were highly classified secrets, the people said.

The document played a key role in Mr. Comey’s decision to sideline the Justice Department and announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. would not recommend that Hillary Clinton face charges in her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state.

The investigation into the leaks began in recent months, the people said, but it is not clear whether prosecutors have impaneled a grand jury or how many witnesses they have interviewed. What prompted the inquiry is also unclear, but the Russian document was mentioned in a book published last fall, “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law” by James B. Stewart, a Times reporter.

A lawyer for Mr. Comey declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Washington.

So we know what the Justice Department will be doing for 2020, which is harassing Comey and using these "old leaks" as justification to go through 2016 Obama-era FBI and DoJ files.  Of course our shiny object chasing press will go with it, and Trump will have a ready made smokescreen of "new allegations in the Comey investigation" to roll out whenever he needs to.

And of course, the questions will lead to "What did Joe Biden know?"

As Jon Chait writes, "Enough cases fit the pattern for it to have become unmistakable."

The Department of Justice has conducted several reviews of the Mueller investigation. The last one, conducted by Inspector General Michael Horowitz subjected its FISA warrants of Trump’s staffers to strict oversight, finding several errors. The problem is that the public had little basis of comparison to measure the errors — were they egregious, as Trump suggests, or ordinary sloppiness? Nobody knows what the ordinary level of sloppiness is, because FISA warrants don’t normally come under intense public scrutiny.

Meanwhile, Barr has appointed John Durham to undertake another even broader investigation into the FBI and the intelligence community’s Russia investigation. The probe appears to be aimed at other Trump antagonists, such as former CIA Director John Brennan. Barr has thrown his weight behind the probe, visiting foreign countries and asking their cooperation.

The Department has also pursued a case against former director Andrew McCabe for misleading the Department about media leaks. McCabe is another Trump target, who stood behind Comey after Trump fired him, has since then been the target of public and private abuse by the president. The potential charges have been hanging over McCabe’s head for so long that last month a court ordered the Department either to bring a case or drop it.

In theory, there would be nothing wrong with the Department of Justice tightening up its standards of conduct. But all the evidence points to the conclusion those standards are being raised only for Trump’s political enemies. The Department released batches of private texts by Lisa Page, including texts that had no political relevance, exposing her to personal embarrassment. Trump of course is the head bully, mocking Page repeatedly, including engaging in a simulated orgasm between her and the FBI agent with whom her affair was exposed in the texts. Page is suing the Department, but the Department is not bringing its own charges against the officials who undertook this obvious abuse.

Nor is the Department investigating the ubiquitous 2016 leaks about the Clinton email probe.The sentiment against Clinton among conservative FBI agents was at such a fervor that agents would openly cheer on colleagues investigating her with comments like “You have to get her” and “You guys are finally going to get that bitch.” They pressured Comey to bring charges by leaking constant stories to the right wing media. “FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey urging the Justice Department to not prosecute Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information,” stated a report in the Daily Caller. Giuliani was literally broadcasting his leaks from conservative agents on television.

This history is relevant for two reasons. First, those leaks were far more historically significant than any of the leaks that are currently being investigated. The anti-Clinton cabal was trying to force Comey to violate DOJ protocol and announce an investigation of a candidate leading up to an election, and they succeeded.

Second, the flagrant nature of the 2016 anti-Clinton leaks show just how unseriously the bureau has taken its rules on leaking. The behavior was so common precisely because everybody on all sides assumed the prohibition would never be enforced, which is what makes the new selective enforcement of strict anti-leaking protocol so obviously biased. It would be as if every car in Washington, D.C., driving even one mile over the speed limit was suddenly pulled over and subjected to the maximum penalty allowed by law.

Trump is not arbitrarily having his opponents arrested. He is doing something more subtle, but still extremely dangerous: using the Department of Justice to selectively hold his opponents to the most exacting levels of legal scrutiny that are not broadly applied. It doesn’t even matter that not every investigation brings charges, and the charges themselves probably won’t hold up in court. The time, expense, and reputational cost of the investigations will be damaging enough.

It's sad that we can see this coming a mile away, and it's still going to most likely work.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Florida's state Supreme Court has sided with state Republicans and Gov. Ron DeSantis that felons must pay back all court costs and restitution fees related to their sentences before being allowed to vote.

It came down to a question of wording, after Florida voters in 2018 approved amendment 4.

The amendment called for the restoration of voting rights for felons who were not convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense “after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole and probation.”

That statement led to more than a year of legislative and court battles over the meaning of “complete all terms”.

Gov. Ron DeSantis sided with a number of Republican lawmakers who asserted the amendment requires felons to pay all fines, fees and restitution before their voting rights are restored. Civil rights groups like the ACLU argued that amounted to an illegal poll tax designed to further disenfranchise a potentially large block of voters.

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court finally dropped the gavel on the debate.

The justices issued an opinion advising the governor and the attorney general that the wording of amendment 4 – “complete all terms of their sentence” – does include all the money a felon is required to pay.

“The phrase 'completion of all terms of sentence' includes any period of incarceration, probation, parole and financial obligations imposed as part of an individual’s sentence. The financial obligations may include restitution and fines, imposed as part of a sentence or a condition of probation under existing Florida statute,” the justices wrote in their opinion.
It’s unclear how this ruling with affect felons who have already registered to vote.

There are nearly 1,500,000 felons in Florida.

That number includes one in five potential voters in the African American community.

Everything you need to know about what Republicans are doing here is summed up by a tweet from Gov. DeSantis.

I am pleased that @FLCourts confirms that Amendment 4 requires fines, fees & restitution be paid to victims before their voting rights may be restored. Voting is a privilege that should not be taken lightly, and I am obligated to faithfully implement Amendment 4 as it is defined.

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) January 16, 2020

You catch that? Voting is a privilege, not a right.  And only Republicans get to determine who is allowed to exercise that privilege.

That privilege doesn't extend to groups that primarily would vote Democratic.

Republicans replaced felony bias for 1.5 million Florida citizens with a legal poll tax.  It has nothing to do with voter ID or "integrity of the vote", it's just there to keep black and brown people from voting.

That's it.

That's all it ever was.

StupidiNews!

• The Pentagon is now saying that 11 US soldiers were injured in Iran's attack on an Iraqi base last week, initially no casualties were reported.
• Citing damage to state Republicans, the head of Connecticut's GOP wants Lev Parnas associate Robert Hyde to drop out in his congressional bid.
• The Government Accountability Office has found that the White House broke the law by withholding security aid for Ukraine as senators were sworn in Thursday by Chief Justice Roberts.
• Lev Parnas's latest interview with Rachel Maddow last night implicated former Energy Secretary Rick Perry as part of the group of Trump regime people working with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine.
• The year ahead in spaceflight could finally bring space tourism, manned missions by private companies, and multiple missions to Mars from space agencies around the globe.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is shipping asylum seekers to Guatemala by the literal planeload now, being sent to a country they know nothing about, and where they become somebody else's problem. It's only a matter of time before ICE detainees are sent there too...along with US citizens caught up in immigration hell.

The chartered U.S. government flights land here every day or two, depositing Honduran and Salvadoran asylum seekers from the U.S. border. Many arrive with the same question: "Where are we?"

For the first time ever, the United States is shipping asylum seekers who arrive at its border to a “safe third country” to seek refuge there. The Trump administration hopes the program will serve as a model for others in the region.

But during its first weeks, asylum seekers and human rights advocates say, migrants have been put on planes without being told where they were headed, and left here without being given basic instruction about what to do next.

When the migrants land in Guatemala City, they receive little information about what it means to apply for asylum in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. Those who don’t immediately apply are told to leave the country in 72 hours. The form is labeled “Voluntary Return.”

“In the U.S., the agents told us our cases would be transferred, but they didn’t say where. Then they lined us up to get on the plane,” said Marta, 43, from Honduras. She sat in a migrant shelter here with her 17-year-old son, who nursed a gunshot wound in his left cheek — the work, mother and son say, of a Honduran faction of the MS-13 gang.

“When we looked out the window, we were here,” she said. “We thought, ‘Where are we? What are we supposed to do now?’ ”

Human rights organizations in Guatemala say they have recorded dozens of cases of asylum seekers who were misled by U.S. officials into boarding flights, and who were not informed of their asylum rights upon arrival. Of the 143 Hondurans and Salvadorans sent to Guatemala since the program began last month, only five have applied for asylum, according to the country’s migration agency. 

Safe third country is one of the Trump administration’s most dramatic initiatives to curb migration — an effort to remake the U.S. asylum system. President Trump has called it “terrific for [Guatemala] and terrific for us.”

But an Asylum Cooperation Agreement is bringing migrants to a country that is unable to provide economic and physical security for its own citizens — many of whom are themselves trying to migrate. In fiscal 2019, Guatemala was the largest source of migrants detained at the U.S. border, at more than 264,000. The country has only a skeletal asylum program, with fewer than a dozen asylum officers.

If Trump is reelected, we will learn only after the fact that hundreds of thousands of US citizens were disappeared into Guatemala.

This was always the plan.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas is singing like Aretha Franklin at the Super Bowl, not only is he cooperating fully with US Attorneys in Manhattan, he's giving interviews like the one with Rachel Maddow last night, and as Greg Sargent points out, he's nailing Rudy and Trump to the wall.

There are any number of bombshells in Lev Parnas’s new interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and as we’ve experienced at other major points in this saga, it’s once again hard not to feel overwhelmed by the bewildering scale and magnitude of this scandal.

But the importance of one particular exchange needs special attention: It’s the one in which Parnas flatly accuses Rudolph Giuliani, and also possibly his “client,” as Giuliani likes to put it, of a criminal conspiracy. That “client,” of course, is President Trump.

The exchange in question concerns Trump’s freezing of military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out Trump’s dirty political deeds. Parnas ties Giuliani more directly to this act than anyone else has, and shares what appears to be new information about it, though this still needs to be confirmed.

The key exchange with Maddow comes after she asks Parnas if he met with Sergey Shaffer, a senior Zelensky aide. Maddow notes that it has been reported that Parnas conveyed to Schaffer that Zelensky must announce an investigation of Biden, in order to get the military aid released.

Then this happened:

PARNAS: The message that I was supposed -- that I gave Sergey Shaffer was a very harsh message. I was told to give it to him in a very harsh way, not in a pleasant way. 

MADDOW: Who told you to give it to him a harsh way? 

PARNAS: Mayor Giuliani, Rudy, told me after, you know, meeting the president at the White House. He called me. The message was, it wasn’t just military aid, it was all aid. Basically their relationships would be sour, that he would -- that we would stop giving them any kind of aid that -- 

MADDOW: Unless? 

PARNAS: -- unless there was an announcement made.

The important thing here is that Parnas is alleging that Giuliani directly told him to convey the message to Ukraine that the military aid was contingent on announcing the investigations Trump wanted — after talking to Trump about it.

Let’s state clearly here that this is just Parnas’s word, and that we need more confirmation. Parnas is a slippery character who’s trying to cooperate with federal prosecutors, probably for a reduced sentence, having been indicted on campaign finance charges last fall.

Giuliani has generally responded that Parnas is lying, without offering a specific rebuttal.

But here’s the thing. We already know for a fact that this message — that Trump made the military aid conditional on announcing investigations that would smear Biden and absolve Russia of 2016 electoral sabotage — actually was delivered to Ukraine, by one of Trump’s top henchmen.

That henchman would be Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who has testified that he told a top Zelensky aide that the money was conditioned on Zelensky announcing those investigations.

Not that the fact Trump directed a criminal conspiracy will matter one bit to his current impeachment trial, and now McConnell has to absolutely bury any hope of witnesses or Parnas will be called, but here we are.

Trump did it.  He's guilty.

And it doesn't matter one bit.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Con't

With Lindsey Graham as the Senate Judiciary chair having to pretend to be impartial for the impeachment trial next week, Mitch McConnell temporarily needs a new enforcer to keep the likes of Susan Collins and Mitt Romney in line, and that thug is apparently Rand Paul.

Sen. Rand Paul is waging a fierce campaign to prevent the Senate from hearing witnesses in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, vowing to force tough votes on his fellow Republicans if they break with the president or back Democrats' demands for new evidence.

The Kentucky Republican is occasionally at odds with Trump, from his killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani to his national emergency to build his southern border wall. But when it comes to impeachment, Paul is taking the hardest line possible in Trump’s favor.

Paul says if four or more of his GOP colleagues join with Democrats to entertain new witness testimony, he will make the Senate vote on subpoenaing the president’s preferred witnesses, including Hunter Biden and the whistleblower who revealed the Ukraine scandal — polarizing picks who moderate Republicans aren’t eager to call. So he has a simple message for his party: end the trial before witnesses are called.

“If you vote against Hunter Biden, you’re voting to lose your election, basically. Seriously. That’s what it is,” Paul said during an interview in his office on Wednesday. “If you don’t want to vote and you think you’re going to have to vote against Hunter Biden, you should just vote against witnesses, period.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has warned Republicans not to divide the party and endanger his slim GOP majority, but Paul’s play could be useful to him. If the pressure campaign stifles the small group of Republicans open to hearing from witnesses like former national security adviser John Bolton, McConnell will be able to conclude the trial in the swift fashion he’s long sought.

But if a majority of the Senate agrees to hear witnesses, Paul is ready to go all out to make sure everyone in the Senate is on the record about whether they stand with Trump.

“My first preference would be to be done with it as soon as possible and not to have any witnesses,” Paul said. “If they insist on having people like Bolton coming forward, my insistence will be not just one witness. But that the president should be able to call any witnesses that he deems necessary to his defense.”

Paul’s threat is backed up by real power under the process envisioned by McConnell and allowed for under Senate rules.

After hearing opening arguments and questioning from House impeachment managers and the White House counsel, the Senate is expected to take a vote on whether to consider the witness issue at all, according to senators familiar with McConnell’s plans. If the Senate agrees to hear witnesses, every senator will have the chance to force a motion seeking testimony.

In other words, Paul is promising scorched earth if any witnesses are called, ranging from Hunter Biden to whoever Trump wants to call, and Trump has previously said he wants Rep. Adam Schiff, Joe Biden, and the Ukraine whistleblower to take the stand to be grilled on national TV for who knows how long, and Paul probably has the votes to make those rules stick.

Paul's threat isn't really for Susan Collins, it's for Doug Jones and Joe Manchin, and maybe Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown and other blue state Dems. The White House says it wants the trial over before Trump's State of the Union speech on February 4, where he can take a national victory lap on TV and bask in that for several weeks.

This is still by far the most likely outcome, but it would be amazing to see Collins and company actually stand up and do the right thing.

But like I've said time and again, depending on Republican senators to contain Trump in any real way is a sucker's bet every time.

 

StupidiNews!

• At least 77 people have been killed by avalanches triggered by heavy snow and rain in northeast Pakistan, with dozens killed as homes were crushed by snow and ice.
• Virginia has become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but the Trump Justice Department says that the timeframe for ratification has expired.
• Protests in Lebanon have turned violent for the second night in a row as the country has now gone three months without a Prime Minister.
• Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has declared a state of emergency as the state expects armed protests against a package of gun safety bills in the State Assembly.
• Climatologists have found that preliminary data shows 2019 was second only to 2016 as the hottest year on record globally.