Last Call For Sub-Tweeting Mayor Cranley

Cincinnati's mayoral race just got a bit more interesting as long-shot Democratic candidate Rob Richardson wants to not only run on expanding the city's streetcar program, long the bane of Mayor John Cranley's political existence, but he also wants to expand on Cincinnati's infamous abandoned subway system.

Mayoral candidate Rob Richardson Jr. has added four intriguing words to his campaign website: "Revive Cincinnati's subway system." 

Forward-thinking? Pandering? Unrealistic? Maybe all of the above. Regardless, the progressive Democrat wants to jump start the conversation about what – if any – role Cincinnati's unfinished and abandoned subway system could play in improving one of the nation's worst public transportation systems for connecting people to jobs. 

Richardson's campaign hatched the idea based on the fact 75,000 jobs in the region aren't accessible by public transportation, according to a 2015 study by the University of Cincinnati Economics Center. So why not take another look at the 2.2 miles of abandoned subway tunnels underneath Central Parkway? 

"The current infrastructure of the tunnel system provides a launching pad for this effort," said Danny O'Connor, Richardson's campaign manager. "We are confident that Cincinnatians are eager for legitimate and substantive investment in a variety of public transit options beyond the squabbling over the streetcar." 

As for paying to resume subway work, well, that's where Richardson is short on details. Construction stopped in 1929 amid rising costs, and it's difficult to determine what a cost to upgrade the tunnels would be, let alone burrowing on. For context, the two-mile Second Avenue Subway that opened in New York City this year cost $4.5 billion. 

"Rob plans to bring together several different constituencies – something he has always done – to determine how we can properly invest in the infrastructure and resources that are critically needed by thousands of Cincinnati residents," O'Connor said. "The reality, however, is that we will be assuming a $25.1 million budget deficit from the incumbent candidates in this race. Fixing that issue will be our first priority."

Well, if Robertson wanted to differentiate himself from Cranley in the primary election in two months, running on a huge expansion in the Queen City's mass transportation is definitely the tack to take.  As improbable as the plan is, the goal I'm hoping is a serious look at Cincinnati's terrible mass transit system, one of the worst in the country for a major US city, and one that just happens to have limited or no service to the area's black communities (looking at you, Cincy Bell Connector).

Subway or not, that's a problem that the next Mayor needs to work on, and I'm hoping Roberston at least makes that a major campaign issue this year, even if his subway plan is already sunk.  We've already got one of the worst transportation infrastructure problems in the country between our lousy mass transit and the Brent Spence Bridge, and it should be a top priority among voters.

We'll see how Cranley responds.

A Hostile Agency Environment

Trump regime EPA head Scott Pruitt is wasting no time stocking the top positions at the agency with GOP's leading climate change skeptics, and the damage they will cause future generations will be incalculable.

Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of his friend and fellow Oklahoma Republican, Senator James Inhofe, long known as Congress’s most prominent skeptic of climate science. A former Inhofe chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, will be Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jackson’s deputy. Andrew Wheeler, a fossil fuel lobbyist and a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, although he requires confirmation to the position by the Senate.

To friends and critics, Mr. Pruitt seems intent on building an E.P.A. leadership that is fundamentally at odds with the career officials, scientists and employees who carry out the agency’s missions. That might be a recipe for strife and gridlock at the federal agency tasked to keep safe the nation’s clean air and water while safeguarding the planet’s future. 

“He’s the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator that’s ever been,” said Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change. “He’s not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.” 

Gina McCarthy, who headed the E.P.A. under former President Barack Obama, said she too saw Mr. Pruitt as unique. “It’s fine to have differing opinions on how to meet the mission of the agency. Many Republican administrators have had that,” she said. “But here, for the first time, I see someone who has no commitment to the mission of the agency.” 

Pruitt is determined to turn the EPA into an Orwellian dark comedy, an agency that cares nothing for protecting the environment and in fact will be dedicated to exploiting it for corporate gain at every opportunity, not to mention putting the health and well-being of millions of Americans at risk. But it gets worse.

A pair of Trump campaigners from Washington State are also heading into senior positions at the E.P.A. Don Benton, a former Washington state senator who headed President Trump’s state campaign, will be the agency’s senior liaison with the White House. Douglas Ericksen, a current Washington state senator, is being considered as the regional administrator of the E.P.A.’s Pacific Northwest office. 

As a state senator, Mr. Ericksen has been active in opposing efforts to pass a state-level climate change law taxing carbon pollution. Last month, he invited Tony Heller, a climate denialist who blogs under the pseudonym Steven Goddard, to address a Washington State Senate committee on the costs of climate change policy. Mr. Heller’s blog says “global warming is the biggest fraud in science history.” 

“I think the reason both of these guys are being considered for this stuff is they were the only prominent elected officials in the state of Washington that were early supporters and organizers for Trump,” said Todd Donovan, a political scientist at Western Washington University. “No other state legislators were putting their necks out for Trump.”

On top of the EPA now being a joke, it's now a plum bureaucratic reward for those Republicans who jumped on the Trump train early in order to make big government paychecks at taxpayer expense. But that's the party of fiscal responsibility for you, right?  Ahh, but here's the fun part:

The agency’s policy agenda is snapping into focus: Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of dismantling a major Obama-era regulation aimed at increasing the federal government’s authority over rivers, streams and wetlands in order to prevent water pollution. Also last week, Mr. Pruitt ordered the agency to walk back a program on collecting data on methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. 

This week, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, and Mr. Pruitt is expected to announce plans to begin to weaken an Obama-era rule mandating higher fuel economy standards. 

A draft White House budget blueprint proposes to slash the E.P.A. budget by about 24 percent, or $2 billion from its current level of $8.1 billion, and cut employee numbers by about 20 percent from its current staff of about 15,000. 

Agency employees say morale has already been damaged. After working for years to draft climate change regulations under the Obama administration, many of those same career scientists and lawyers will be ordered to go back and undo them.

Undoing the entire Obama environmental agenda was always a chief goal of the GOP, and now it looks like they will completely erase 44's entire legacy on climate change and the environment.  All of it, gone.  But her emails, right?

I don't think our grandkids will forgive us, either. New tag, as I expect I'll be writing a lot about his crimes against the planet: Scott Pruitt.

To Whom The Wiki-Benefit?

Jon Fingas over at Engadget has details of WikiLeaks' latest package of alleged CIA technical documents, revealing tools the agency reportedly uses to get around encryption and to spy on people. The "Level 7" documents come just a few days after Trump's paranoid tirade that Obama had Trump Tower bugged and once again it's Julian Assange's outfit that comes riding the Trump regime's rescue.

WikiLeaks just ignited another powder keg. Julian Assange's outfit has posted the first of a string of CIA leaks, nicknamed Vault 7, that purports to reveal the agency's "entire hacking capacity." The information is said to have escaped an "isolated" secure network at the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Virginia, and indicates that the organization has far-reaching abilities to snoop on modern technology... including encrypted apps that are supposed to be tough to crack.

According to WikiLeaks, the CIA has horded a slew of zero day (that is, unpatched) exploits that let it infiltrate a slew of platforms, including current desktop and mobile platforms, network routers, smart TVs and antivirus software. Notably, the CIA is capable of bypassing the encryption for secure chat apps like Confide, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp -- the agency compromises the phone and intercepts message traffic before encryption kicks in. It's not as significant as cracking the encryption itself (these apps are still safer), but it's still noteworthy. Also, the mobile teams have reportedly produced malware that can compromise Android and iOS devices that run or have run "presidential Twitter accounts" -- a particular problem for the current Commander-in-Chief.

Other infiltration methods are similarly sneaky. An attack against Samsung smart TVs, built in tandem with the UK's MI5 agency, quietly leaves a set turned on so that it can record conversations like a giant wiretap device. And when the CIA needs physical access to a device, it sends an agent out with a USB drive that grabs data from a PC while a decoy app runs in the foreground. Malware is designed to avoid any fingerprints that would lead back to the CIA or its partners, and even the infection patterns are meant to throw people off the scent. Code can lurk in a device for years.

The leak also goes into some of the organizational structure of the CIA's digital surveillance efforts, including some security concerns. It notes that the US consulate in Frankfurt doubles as a base for CIA hackers targeting Europe, the Middle East and Africa, giving them freedom to travel throughout much of Europe once they arrive. However, it also appears that the agency's malware, command and control tools and listening post software are all labeled as unclassified -- there's not much officials can do if it gets out into the wild, which it clearly has given the leak. There's a similar worry that the CIA's propensity to hog zero day exploits is violating the government's Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which promises that the government will share flaws with companies on a continuous basis.

So again, a whole bunch of CIA tools, techniques, and tradecraft just happen to show up on WikiLeaks within hours of when the world starts thinking that the Trump regime has all but confirmed wrongdoing with Russia.  Suddenly now the story is back to the eeeeeeeeeevil intelligence community and how noble patriot Trump is right to consider them a problem. 

It also happens to blow yet another giant hole in America's cyber-counterintelligence capabilities just as stories about CIA cyberwar with North Korea surface and how effective the CIA has been at stopping Pyongyang from getting too far down the road of nuke technology.  That just got thrown in the trash can overnight.

And finally, please note the documents claim the CIA can make their cyber-snooping look like anyone but the CIA is behind it, which of course has both Trumpies and Moscow screaming that the entire Trump-Russia kerfuffle is in fact a giant false flag operation by Obama to harm Great Patriot Friend Donald Trump.

And lo and behold, now people are saying "Well maybe Trump wasn't crazy after all."

Funny how that exact coincidental timing works when Trump needs "evidence" of his conspiracy theory, and it magically appears once again thanks to his good friend Julian Assange.

StupidiNews!

• Hawaii is the first state to challenge the Trump regime's revised Muslim travel ban in court, the state Attorney General's office plans to file a motion today.
• Although Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has promised to legalize pot across all provinces, lawmakers in Ottawa say there's still a lot of work to do to craft legislation and regulations.
• Iran is claiming that a US Navy ship apparently changed course in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend as ships passed within 600 yards of each other, provoking a rebuke from Tehran.
• On International Women's Day today, women all over the US plan a general strike across the country for the Day Without Women movement.
• A new study finds Americans are having sex less often than they did 20 years ago, with significant drops among those with college degrees and people living in Southern states.

Last Call For The Criminalization Of Dissent, Con't

Last month I noted Arizona Republicans wanted to turn protesting into a felony crime with legislation that, in theory, would have held all marchers and organizers responsible under felony state racketeering charges if any property damage was done whatsoever, even if it wasn't by actual people involved in the protest itself.  The outrage over the bill was so hot that Arizona Republicans shelved the bill within days, but I warned you of this at the time:

Arizona's bill was the most egregious, and the intent was certainly to turn the state's next Black Lives Matter or immigration protest into an opportunity to declare thousands to be felons, throw them in prison (or deport them) and remove their right to vote. Like most states, Arizona does not allow felons to vote, and if convicted of multiple felonies, that disenfranchisement is permanent. 

But several other states are moving to criminalize mass protests. Republicans in Arizona may have been defeated for now, but eventually this bill or something like it will be passed, and it will be used against people of color to disenfranchise. harm, or even kill.

As I predicted, another state has stepped up on this, and it should come as no surprise that our next contestant on "Who Wants To Criminalize Dissent?" is North Carolina's GOP.

Rep. John Torbett, a Gaston County Republican, is the primary sponsor of House Bill 249. He says drivers who came upon protesters on Charlotte highways last fall “feared for their lives,” and his bill would “add a little bit more of a deterrent by heightening awareness and adding a penalty.” 

“The first core responsibility of government is the safety and security of its citizens, and this will assist in that effort,” Torbett added. 

North Carolina is one of 17 states where Republican lawmakers have filed bills addressing recent protests, according to The New York Times. Some of the proposals are similar to Torbett’s legislation. 

If Torbett’s bill passes, people who block roads while participating in a “riot or other unlawful assembly” would face Class A1 misdemeanor charges, the misdemeanor category with the longest sentences for jail, probation or community service. Illegally blocking roads for any other reason would remain a Class 2 misdemeanor. 

The bill would also allow local governments to sue people convicted of riot, unlawful assembly or traffic obstruction charges for the cost of the law enforcement response. 

Penalties would be even tougher for anyone convicted of the new crime of “economic terrorism,” which the bill defines as “a criminal offense that impedes or disrupts the regular course of business” by causing damage of at least $1,000 with the intent to “intimidate the civilian population” or a government entity. That would be a Class H felony, which typically carries a prison sentence of four to 25 months. 

The American Civil Liberties Union is voicing concerns that the bill could infringe on First Amendment rights to protest. 

“No matter your politics, all North Carolinians should be concerned any time lawmakers seek to curb our fundamental constitutional right to protest and criticize our government,” ACLU North Carolina spokesman Mike Meno said Friday. “This bill is part of a wave of legislation we’ve seen across the country designed to criminalize peaceful protest and have a chilling effect on people’s First Amendment rights”.

That's correct folks, NC Republicans want to round up any protesters who participate in any "unlawful assembly" on maximum misdemeanor charges and jail time, and want to turn rioters into "economic terrorists" complete with felony convictions and in NC, loss of voting rights.

The next Black Lives Matter protest in NC under this legislation?  Mass arrests, convictions, and countersuits to allow local governments to sue protesters for the cost of the police response.  And who gets to determine what an "unlawful assembly" is?  Why the very government looking to pass this legislation.  It's whatever the state wants to deem as unlawful.

It may not be quite as egregious as Arizona's proposed legislation, but North Carolina is definitely heading dow the road of authoritarian government in order to protect Dear Leader Trump.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article136241788.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article136241788.html#storylink=cpy

Repeal And Repulse, Con't

The long-awaited Republican double-secret probation plan to save America from affordable health insurance is out, and it's effectively the worst of all worlds and has basically no chance at all of passage even in the GOP-controlled House, let alone the Senate.  Vox's Sarah Kliff:

The American Health Care Act was developed in conjunction with the White House and Senate Republicans. Two big questions — how many people it will cover and how much it will cost — are still unresolved: It will likely cover fewer people than the Affordable Care Act currently does, but we don’t know how many. And the Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the legislation, so its price tag is unknown.

But what we can say for sure is this: 

• Some of Obamacare’s signature features are gone immediately, such as the tax on people who don’t purchase health care. Other protections, including the ban on discriminating people with pre-existing conditions and the provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plan through age 26, would survive. 

• The plan maintains the Medicaid expansion — for now. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to cover millions of low-income Americans. And, in a big shift from previous drafts of the legislation, which ended Medicaid expansion immediately, this bill would continue to that coverage expansion through January 1, 2020. At that point, enrollment would “freeze,” and legislators expect enrollees would drop out of the program as their incomes change. 

• The replacement plan benefits people who are healthy and high-income, and disadvantages those who are sicker and lower-income. The replacement plan would make several changes to what health insurers can charge enrollees who purchase insurance on the individual market, as well as changing what benefits their plans must cover. In aggregate, these changes could be advantageous to younger and healthier enrollees who want skimpier (and cheaper) benefit packages. But they could be costly for older and sicker Obamacare enrollees, who rely on the law’s current requirements. 

• The bill looks a lot more like Obamacare than previous drafts. A curious thing has happened to the Republican replacement plan as it has evolved through multiple drafts: it has begun to look more and more like Obamacare itself. The bill keeps some key features of Obamacare, like giving more help to lower-income Americans and the Medicaid expansion, around in a scaled-back form. This speaks to how entrenched the health care law has become since its enactment 7 years ago, and how difficult it will be for the GOP to repeal it entirely.

In other words, the legislation A) scraps subsidies for refundable tax credits, which Republicans hate anyway and won't help people actually pay for health insurance, because B) the legislation also gets rid of the individual mandate, which will drive costs up and C) also gets rid of a lot of other taxes that actually helped pay for Obamacare but D) it keeps the Medicaid expansion through 2020 but then it turns around and E) scraps those in three years and turns Medicaid into a per-capita block grant.

And it gets worse.  In short, the plan is a certified disaster.   LA Times' Michael Hilzik:

Reporters and experts will be poring over the new draft for days, but here are some key elements gleaned from a first reading. Further examination undoubtedly will unearth more issues with the bill. The chances are almost nil that closer examination will find much, if anything, good about it.

The proposal defunds Planned Parenthood. No federal funding can be made, either directly or indirectly, by Medicaid to a healthcare organization that “provides for abortions,” other than those done in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. That’s Planned Parenthood. It’s proper to note that Planned Parenthood doesn’t use federal funds to pay for abortions, as that’s already against the law. This measure shuts down funding for the organization just because it uses other funds to cover those procedures.

The bill effectively shuts down private health insurance coverage for abortion. According to a House Ways and Means Committee digest, the measure forbids spending federal tax subsidies on health plans that include coverage of abortion, even if the customer doesn’t get an abortion. This would dramatically shrink working Americans’ access to insurance-covered abortions, or would lead to insurers dropping abortion coverage from their plans, or both. Customers could buy separate policies to cover abortions, but couldn’t use the federal subsidy to help pay for them. Insurers likely would charge hugely discouraging premiums for such policies, as the market for them would be tiny.

The individual and employer mandates are eliminated. They’re not repealed exactly, but the penalties are repealed, which amounts to the same thing. Without a requirement that individuals carry health insurance, the insurance markets are almost certain to collapse. The repeal is retroactive back to the beginning of 2016, but the real problem is in the market starting this year. Individuals would be able to drop their coverage immediately, which will wreak havoc with the market starting right now. Aetna’s chairman and chief executive, Mark Bertolini, said recently that the individual market was entering a “death spiral” in which healthier customers dropped coverage, leaving sicker customers who know they need insurance facing an ever-increasing rates. This provision will do much to guarantee that will happen.

Essential health benefit rules are repealed. As of Dec. 31, 2019, ACA rules that required qualified health plans to provide hospitalization, maternity care, mental health services and other benefits would be sunsetted at the federal level. States would have the authority to set them instead. The impact on private, non-Medicaid plans would therefore vary by state. If a state removes maternity benefits, for example, that’s likely to make maternity coverage, among other services, immensely expensive, if available at all.

Income-based premium subsidies would be replaced by age-based subsidies, which will hurt working-class families in many states. Under the ACA, subsidies to help individual buyers afford premiums and (for poorer households) deductibles and co-pays were based on household income. The GOP measure will base them on the buyer’s age, instead, with older buyers receiving more help than younger. The GOP plan limits subsidies to $4,000 per individual; under the ACA, which also keys subsidies to the cost of benchmark insurance plans in the buyer’s home market, the subsidies theoretically could be several times higher. No family could receive more than $14,000 in subsidies, and no more than five family members could be eligible for subsidies.

And let's keep in mind that the House GOP plans to rush this through starting this week without a Congressional Budget Office score whatsoever (we'll get one eventually but still.)  It's a horrific bill and its fate appears to be to die screaming, but this is what the Republicans want to do in order to effectively give tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations: pass a health insurance bill that will do lasting harm to tens of millions of Americans.

This bill is a mess, period.  And this has nothing to do with Trump, this is the GOP in Congress being awful on their own merits.  How bad is this legislation?

Even our old friend Avik Roy hates it.

The American Health Care Act repeals nearly all of Obamacare’s taxes, save the postponement of the Cadillac tax. But Obamacare’s tax hikes comprised about 60 percent of its funding for the law’s coverage expansion. So the $2 trillion question is: does the AHCA explode the deficit, or is it relying on steep Medicaid cuts to keep the deficit in line? We won’t know until the CBO scores the bill. 

But, remarkably, House GOP leadership plans to move forward with marking up the bill on Wednesday without even having the CBO score available. It’s not clear why they’re proceeding without a score, but it means that members of the House Energy & Commerce and Ways & Means Committees will not have the information they need to make informed decisions about how best to revise the bill. 

The CBO is likely to score the AHCA as covering around 20 million fewer Americans than Obamacare. There are flaws in the way the CBO models health reform legislation, but the AHCA itself contains enough flaws that there can be little doubt that the plan will price millions out of the health insurance market. 

Expanding subsidies for high earners, and cutting health coverage off from the working poor: it sounds like a left-wing caricature of mustache-twirling, top-hatted Republican fat cats. But not today.

Let that one sink in for a while.  This might actually be the worst possible version of the GOP Obamacare replacement.  And the GOP knows it.

The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind)

Dr. Ben Carson, Trump HUD Secretary and apparently the world's worst history student, strikes again.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson referred to slaves as "immigrants" while speaking Monday to department employees. 

"That's what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity," Carson said. "There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

Ben, "immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships" were in fact, you know, slaves.

You know what, I'm sure he's a gifted neurosurgeon, but the guy is a terrible, terrible civil servant, Cabinet secretary, and human being.  How could anyone, let alone an African-American, be this utterly tone deaf and blockheaded?  Did nobody pull his sleeve and get him to stop before he was able to finish this paragraph on "gosh slavery wasn't so bad, they had dreams too to keep them going!" or something?

Can we hire somebody to do that?

Thanks.

StupidiNews!

• Trump Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says he is indeed considering removing children from their parents when families are caught trying to cross the US border illegally.
• The Trump regime has announced a new immigration ban effective March 16th, but the order still singles out six predominantly Muslim countries for 90-day bans.
• North Korea is blocking all Malaysian nationals from being able to enter or leave the country after last month's assassination of Kim Jong Un's brother at Kuala Lumpur's airport.
• The move comes in response to US deployment of THAAD anti-missile systems in South Korea, months ahead of schedule after North Korean missile tests over the weekend.
• Mobile carrier Sprint says it's confident that the Trump regime will approve a merger with T-Mobile or another competitor soon, possibly even with cable giant Comcast.

Last For Motel, Hotel, Trump-A-Day Inn

The new center of the nation's political map is Trump's hotel in DC, where if you want in on milking the rubes and lobbying for billions, you need to pay-to-play and be seen doing business with The Donald.

At a circular booth in the middle of the Trump International Hotel's balcony restaurant, President Donald Trump dined on his steak — well-done, with ketchup — while chatting with British Brexit politician Nigel Farage. 

A few days later, major Republican donors Doug Deason and Doug Manchester, in town for the president's address to Congress, sipped coffee at the hotel with Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. 

After Trump's speech, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin returned to his Washington residence — the hotel — and strode past the gigantic American flag in the soaring lobby. With his tiny terrier tucked under an arm, Mnuchin stepped into an elevator with reality TV star and hotel guest Dog the Bounty Hunter, who particularly enjoyed the Trump-stamped chocolates in his room. 

It's just another week at the new political capital of the nation's capital. 

The $200 million hotel inside the federally owned Old Post Office building has become the place to see, be seen, drink, network — even live — for the still-emerging Trump set. It's a rich environment for lobbyists and anyone hoping to rub elbows with Trump-related politicos — despite a veil of ethics questions that hangs overhead. 

"I've never come through this lobby and not seen someone I know," says Deason, a Dallas-based fundraiser for Trump's election campaign. 

For Republican Party players, it's the only place to stay. 

"I can tell you this hotel will be the most successful hotel in Washington, D.C.," says Manchester, adding that he would know because he has developed the second-largest Marriott and second-largest Hyatt in the world. Manchester says Trump's hotel will attract people based on its location near the White House and Congress, the quality renovation and the management team. 

Then there's also the access. 

Although Trump says he is not involved in the day-to-day operations of his businesses, he retains a financial interest in them. A stay at the hotel gives someone trying to win over Trump on a policy issue or political decision a potential chit. 

That's what concerns ethics lawyers who had wanted Trump to sell off his companies as previous presidents have done. 

"President Trump is in effect inviting people and companies and countries to channel money to him through the hotel," said Kathleen Clark, a former ethics lawyer for the District of Columbia and a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 

If you want Trump's ear, you stay in Trump's hotels, eat as his restaurants, buy a membership to his clubs, and rub elbows with his people.  And they all want their cut.

This is how America does business now.

Dick And The Moscow Special

As I said earlier today, Republicans will continue to do nothing about Trump and Russia until the cost of doing nothing exceeds the cost of pissing off Trump's base.  Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is trying to raise that cost of doing nothing.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal says he will use “every possible tool” to block the nomination of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein until he commits to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate ties between the Trump administration and Russia. 

Following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal from involvement in the Russian investigation, it is now the responsibility of the Deputy Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor.

On Monday morning, Blumenthal’s will detail how he would block Rosenstein’s nomination until he commits to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate ties between the Trump administration and Russia. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing Tuesday on Rosenstein’s nomination to serve as Deputy Attorney General. 

“Unless Rosenstein commits to appointing a special prosecutor, Blumenthal will use every tool available to block his nomination, including denying unanimous consent and obstructing action on the Senate floor,” the Democratic senator’s office announced in a release.

I have no idea how effective this will be, and I appreciate Sen. Blumenthal's efforts, the reality is that this will delay Rosenstein's confirmation by at most a week, and most likely not at all.  Again, it's important to note that the Deupty AG would be the person making the decision on a special prosecutor for Russia since AG Jeff Sessions's recusal last week, but again, that's simply not going to happen.

Blumenthal is doing the right thing here, applying pressure where it needs to be applied, but again there's simply not much Dems can do right now except annoy Republicans.  The real decision to take this investigation seriously has to come from Republicans determined to actually stop Trump and again that will never happen as long as Republicans fear Trump's base more than they fear the wrath of the general public.

There are some small signs that this may be starting to happen.

So far in 2017, special elections have largely gone Democrats’ way, but in each instance, these were state legislative races. The real test will come next month in a congressional special election in a Republican district in Georgia. 

In theory, keeping the seat, which was held by Tom Price before he became HHS secretary, should be easy for Republicans, but as the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported yesterday, GOP officials appear to be quite concerned.

If a blood-red House district in Georgia is competitive enough for Republicans to spend serious ad money on it, maybe there's still some slender reed of hope left.

It's Still All About Trump's Base

The only political bloc that matters in America in 2017 is Trump's base, despite it being less than a quarter of American eligible voters, because until Trump's base turns on Trump, they will be able to primary any Republican who dares to go after him.  Since nobody wants to be the next Eric Cantor, they run the country now, so the fact that the rest of the country overwhelmingly wants a special prosecutor on Russia is 100% meaningless.

About two-thirds of Americans say a special prosecutor should investigate contacts between Russians and Trump campaign associates, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, and 55% say they are at least somewhat concerned by reports that some connected to the Trump campaign had contact with suspected Russian operatives. 

However, the steady stream of news about investigations into those contacts doesn't appear to have affected President Donald Trump's approval rating, which ticked up only one percentage point -- 44% to 45% -- from January. 

Concerns about the reported contacts are closely tied to partisanship, with 71% of Democrats saying they are "very concerned" about it while 54% of Republicans say they have no concerns "at all" about the reports. 

Among Republicans, a majority feel Congress can handle the investigation, but a sizable 43% support the call for a special prosecutor, as do majorities of Democrats (82%) and independents (67%). Overall, the poll finds that 65% would rather see a special prosecutor handle the investigation, while 32% think Congress is capable of handling it. 

Views of whether Russia attempted to influence the US election at all are becoming increasingly polarized when compared with a January CNN/ORC poll. In the new survey, more Democrats say it's extremely likely that the intelligence community's assessment that Russia did attempt to influence the US election is correct than said so before the inauguration (47% in January, 52% now) while more Republicans now say that it's not at all likely to be correct (from 12% in January to 27% now).

That CNN poll has Trump's approval rating at 90% among Republicans and 58% among independents.  Less than half of Republicans believe the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference (46%), less than half are even concerned at all about the accusations (46%), and again only 43% want to see a special prosecutor appointed as opposed to a GOP congressional investigation.

So even with this scandal being real for a chunk of the GOP, nearly all Republicans who want a special prosecutor are still willing to look the other way on Trump to give him a thumbs up on job approval so far.

Until that changes, Republicans can sit on their hands and continue to do nothing, and get away with it. No special prosecutor will happen, and the notion that this is all a "massive Obama conspiracy against Trump" will magically become fact for tens of millions of Trump voters heading into midterm elections.

As Steve M. said yesterday:

That's why I think the craziness, of this weekend has done more to shore up the Trump base than a speech was seen as successful. You and I see Trump as a half-mad king making wild accusations with no evidence. The base thinks he's going on offense against the most hated enemy of all. To the base, he's not vulnerable to a new cycle of bad news; instead, he's seizing bad news and jiujitsuing it to his advantage. The base was ready to love "presidential" Trump not because base voters want him to be presidential, but because they want him to vanquish those of us who think he can never really pull presidential off. So that seemed like a win to them. But they think this is better: He's going on the attack and he's taking the bad news head on.

Going after Obama will be even more wildly successful among the Trumpies than "Lock her up!" was. No matter what comes out of this investigation into Russia over the next few weeks and months, they can just yell "It's an Obama conspiracy!" and win.

Until that spell somehow gets broken (and the only reasonable chance of that happening is another Bush-style financial collapse) Trump will remain in power as long as Republicans in Congress fear his base more than the rest of the country.  And in the meantime, Trump can continue to lie all he wants to without penalty.

So when you see Democrats like Nancy Pelosi completely misread the situation like this?

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is telling her rank-and-file members that she is confident a good portion of President Donald Trump's voters will eventually turn on him -- and Democrats just have to wait it out. 

She's using a colorful analogy to make her point -- comparing Trump to a friend's boyfriend who is a "jerk." 

"The way I told my members: It's like telling your friend the guy she's dating is a jerk. You can't tell her that. She has to find out for herself. You can give her clues and then eventually one thing will lead to another, she'll come to her conclusion. But if you tell her right up front, you'll lose a friend. So we're not interested in losing any friends. Let them find out," Pelosi recounted during a small briefing for reporters in her Capitol suite Tuesday. 

"They made a judgment and they're not willing to walk away from their own judgment," she said.

Understand that this is dangerously naive.  Trump's base isn't going anywhere, and will continue to be his most powerful weapon against the country.

StupidiNews!

• State lawmakers in Alabama are moving forward on impeachment of GOP Gov. Robert Bentley after an investigation last year into audio recordings of sexually harassing an aide.
• Congress demands answers after a story detailing a Facebook community of current and former Marines were sharing thousands of nude photographs of female Marines.
• North Korea has fired at least four ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan, days after Pyongyang promised military retaliation for scheduled US-South Korean military exercises.
• Progressive political groups are facing extortion attempts by Russian hackers demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin ransom payments or else face massive data leaks.
• Time Warner Cable is facing hundreds of millions in penalties for violating Sprint's voice-over-IP technology patents after a jury verdict in Kansas City last week.

The Republicans Are Playing With Thermite

Yesterday Donald Trump went wild on Twitter, accusing President Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower and demanding that somebody do something about it, I guess forgetting that as the guy supposedly in charge that he can happily interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation into his Russian collusion and declassify whatever he wants to.

President Donald Trump made a stunning claim Saturday, alleging without offering evidence that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election. 

"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!" Trump tweeted early Saturday morning in one part of a six-tweet tirade that began just after 6:30 a.m. 

The President went on to compare the alleged tapping of his phones to Watergate and called Obama "bad (or sick)." 

"How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy," Trump tweeted. 

But two former senior US officials quickly dismissed Trump's accusations out of hand.
"Just nonsense," said one former senior US intelligence official. 

Another former senior US official with direct knowledge of investigations by the Justice Department under the Obama administration said Trump's phones were never tapped. 

"This did not happen. It is false. Wrong," the former official told CNN.

A spokesman for Obama, Kevin Lewis, called "any suggestion" that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump "simply false." 

Republicans are of course happy to enable Trump's fantasy, vowing to investigate this "latest Obama scandal."

A Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee says he believes President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated allegations that his predecessor ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower will become part of the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton says, "We're going to follow the facts wherever they lead us. And I'm sure that this matter will be a part of that inquiry."

Trump has provided no evidence of his tweeted accusation that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.

And Cotton said he has not seen any evidence of official wiretapping.

Cotton tells "Fox News Sunday," ''That doesn't mean that none of these things happened. It simply means I haven't seen that yet."

Note Cotton is carefully hedging his bets here.  The obvious reality is that Trump, long considered a national security risk thanks to his dealings with the Russians, was and still is being investigated under FISA statutes by the FBI.  The Breitbart/Bannon wing of the Trump regime is desperately trying to flip this on its head as this being a gross abuse of power by Obama, and indeed the calls to immediately jail the former President are already all over white supremacist Twitter, led by Roger Stone and Mike Cernovich.

Things could get ugly, fast here.  Again, no president in US history has ever been removed against his will.  Nixon resigned when it became clear he had lost the trust of both parties and the American people.  Trump will do no such thing.  If Republicans in Congress decide that it's Obama that needs to be investigated here and not Trump, the results could be both bloody and disastrous.

Sadly, there's every reason to believe that in the name of political expediency, the GOP will play Trump's games.

What's really stopping Trump from rounding up Democrats at this point?

Sunday Long Read: The Extreme Team

This week's Sunday Long Read is Emily Bazelton's piece in NYT Magazine on Steve Bannon, Steve Miller and Jeff Sessions, white supremacist brothers-in-arms who now have the power to all but destroy decades of civil rights advancements and return America to de facto Jim Crow. The goal is nothing less than the end of immigration, legal or otherwise, and to install a permanent advantage for white voters in America.

They may very well pull it off.

Crime — especially urban crime — lies at the heart of the new nationalist message, in part as an argument for why liberal-run cities, with their dense, diverse, polyglot communities, shouldn’t serve as a model for the nation as a whole. Since the outset of his campaign, Trump has exaggerated the violence and poverty of “inner cities,” painting them as war zones and blaming Democrats for the destruction. The politics behind this sort of language are not new: For 50 years, Republican candidates for president have won by stoking fear of crime, promising to “restore order and respect for law in this country,” as Richard Nixon put it in 1968. But Trump has been fixated on the issue, ignoring actual crime statistics to inaccurately blame African-Americans for most white homicides and falsely claim that the murder rate is at its highest point in 47 years. 

While many conservative figures kept their distance from Trump during the campaign, one group embraced him wholeheartedly: law-enforcement unions. The rank and file did, too. A survey before the election by Police Magazine found that 84 percent of officers who planned to vote backed him, while just 8 percent supported Hillary Clinton. Trump’s views on the Black Lives Matter movement, which many cops have seen as unfair and a danger to policing minority neighborhoods, no doubt played a part. Last summer, Trump called the movement a “threat,” blaming it for the deaths of officers and adding, “We are going to have to perhaps talk with the attorney general about it.” 

Today the test is how Trump’s new attorney general will view the Justice Department’s responsibility, conferred by Congress in 1994 after the beating of Rodney King, to investigate local police departments for a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations. With more than 12,000 police departments across the country, the division couldn’t exercise anything approaching true national oversight even if it wanted to. (Perez and Gupta’s total of 25 investigations was equal to that of the Clinton Justice Department over eight years; the Bush administration initiated 21.) But the Obama Justice Department’s willingness to enter cities like Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., after high-profile encounters between the police and African-Americans meant that officers everywhere had to reckon with the possibility of federal investigation — at a time when many of them already felt under siege. 

Consider Chicago, which throughout the campaign was Trump’s exemplar of a city rife with “carnage.” Chicago has been reeling from a major spike in gun violence and killings, but it is also a city with a sordid history of police abuses. Under Gupta, the civil rights division opened an investigation into the city’s police department in 2015, after the release of a video of the killing of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by an officer while the teenager was walking away. After hundreds of hours of interviews with police officers, residents and city officials, the civil rights division issued an unsparing set of findings in January, faulting the police department for routinely using excessive force (especially against African-Americans and Latinos), a deficient system for investigating police misconduct and a poor structure of supervision, promotion and training. The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police welcomed the parts of the report about training and promotion. But the union objected to the Justice Department’s implication that race affects police decision-making, arguing that officers are simply targeting criminal behavior in high-crime areas, not African-Americans and Latinos. 

Now the police have an attorney general who has been unwilling to give credence to their critics. Confronting Gupta in November 2015 at a Senate hearing called the War on Police, Sessions suggested that the civil rights division was going “beyond fair and balanced treatment” of law enforcement. Sessions has also called court-monitored consent decrees, which the Justice Department has used to settle school desegregation cases in addition to police investigations, “one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power.” The problem, in other words, isn’t what the police are doing. It’s that the federal government is interfering.

An unfettered law enforcement community, bolstered by tens of thousands of contractors, a private army designed to be used against Latinos, blacks, Asians, Muslims, LGBTQ, and anyone who isn't a white Christian, all in the name of stopping "murderous immigrants" and "black criminals".  This is Bannon and Sessions, this is who they are, and this is what they want: second-class citizens too scared to stand up to their white masters.

Massive, brutal, and deadly force will be unleashed against the black and the brown in this country. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of bodies will be in the streets.  Millions more will be rounded up for deportation.  If you're white, you're alright.  If you're not, you're shot.

I know this sounds like a nightmare of hyperbole, the bad old days of Southern lynchings and Japanese internment, Operation Wetback and the worst days of the civil rights fight all combined into one Armageddon.  But so help me, this is what these guys want, and they are very, very close to getting it now.

I spent years warning people about what was coming, and instead I was told "well it won't be that bad, and besides, Clinton is corrupt and could never have won anyway."

So here we are, one event away from the federal government being used against people who look like me.

Don't ask me not to be scared.

Trumper Bunker Busters

Things are not going well for the Trump regime, as The Donald does not tolerate failure among his minions, and this week has been nothing but across-the-board disaster with Jeff Sessions and Obamacare repeal.

“We should have had a good week. We should have had a good weekend. But once again, back to Russia," a senior White House official said, expressing the frustration simmering in the West Wing following the news earlier in the week that Sessions failed to disclose during his confirmation process that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the election campaign. Sessions at the time was a senator on the Armed Services Committee and was also helping the Trump campaign.

Among those gathered in the Oval Office on Friday: Chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, White House Counsel Don McGahn, press secretary Sean Spicer, newly-hired Communications Director Mike Dubke, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, the sources said.

With Marine One waiting on the South Lawn, Trump and his team engaged in an animated exchange -- captured by press pool cameras peering in through the windows from the White House South Lawn. Trump then left the office for the helicopter, taking the hands of his young grandchildren and joined by his daughter Ivanka and Kushner.

Priebus and Bannon were planning to join the trip, but suddenly after the president's eruption those plans changed. One source said both men volunteered to stay behind in Washington, with another source saying the president seemed to concur that they should. Sidelining key staffers with whom he was angry was an occasional Trump tactic during the campaign.

As President Trump was in the air aboard Marine One headed for Air Force One on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, a last-minute phone call was made from the West Wing to the team on board the president’s plane with a directive to remove Priebus and Bannon from the manifest, sources said. They would not be coming to the Sunshine State. 

Both Priebus and Bannon have been grounded, and now Sessions is on the outs as well. It seems Jared Kushner is now the new favorite lieutenant in the ranks.  The larger issue is that Trump now knows his team can't stop the leaks coming from the White House, and with Sessions, he now knows that his team has not been straight with him, either.

If you thought Trump was in full paranoia Nixon bunker mentality before, well, I think we haven't seen anything yet.  Stay tuned.