Last Call For Vote Like It Matters

Next time somebody tells you your vote doesn't matter in local and state races, remember 2017 in Virginia.

A Republican seat flipped Democratic in a wild recount Tuesday - with the Democrat winning by a single vote - creating a rare 50-50 tie between the parties in the House of Delegates and refashioning the political landscape in Richmond.

Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th District of the House of Delegates, seizing the seat from Republican incumbent David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.

Of the 23,866 votes cast in the Newport News district on Election Day, Yancey held a tenuous lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.

But five hours and much nailbiting later, after painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed before it gradually disappeared and then reversed, allowing Simonds to beat him by one vote.

The final tally: 11,608 for Simonds to 11,607 for Yancey.

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise. Committee chairs have to be negotiated as does the person who will serve as Speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance. Republicans hold a slight 21-19 edge in the state senate but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties, and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

One vote flipped a seat from GOP to Democratic.  That one flipped seat in turn tied up the State House of Delegates rather than giving the GOP control.

One single vote.

One single vote may be the difference between Medicaid expansion in Virginia and no expansion, which the GOP in the House of Delegates swore to block.

One single, solitary vote.

No wonder the GOP is trying to do everything they can to disenfranchise Democratic voters.  One vote can change everything.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Mueller probe continues (for now at least) and so do the House and Senate investigations. They're following the money, separately and in tandem, and apparently the trail of Russian meddling and the 2016 election has led to the doorstep of one third-party candidate: Green Party gadfly Dr. Jill Stein.

The top congressional committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has set its sights on the Green Party and its nominee, Jill Stein.
Dennis Trainor Jr., who worked for the Stein campaign from January to August of 2015, says Stein contacted him on Friday saying the Senate Intelligence Committee had requested that the campaign comply with a document search. 

Trainor, who served as the campaign’s communications director and acting manager during that time, told BuzzFeed News that he was informed of the committee’s request because during his time on the campaign, his personal cell phone was “a primary point of contact” for those looking to reach Stein or the campaign. That included producers from RT News, the Russian state-funded media company, who booked Stein for several appearances, Trainor said. 

“Then I was told by Jill just to wait for further instructions,” Trainor said, adding that he was told the campaign would contact him in the next week with instructions, presumably from the Senate Intelligence Committee, for executing the document search, including precise search terms. That has not happened yet, Trainor said. 

When asked Monday what the committee was looking for from the Stein campaign, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the committee’s chairman, responded, "collusion with the Russians." Burr said that the committee is "just starting" its work investigating two campaigns, but did not elaborate. 

Stein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trainor, who has done on-and-off work for Stein since formally leaving the campaign in 2015, said he is inclined to cooperate with the committee’s request but wants to first seek legal counsel. He said he believes Stein plans to comply as well and post the documents on her own website “in an effort to show complete transparency and kind of wage her own war against [...] what I imagine she thinks is an overblown investigation into collusion.” 

Stein has not previously been a major focus during the Russia investigations on Capitol Hill, but her name has surfaced occasionally. The Senate Judiciary mentioned her in a letter to Donald Trump Jr. in July, requesting copies of “all communications to, from, or copied” to the president’s son that related to Stein and a long list of other, more prominent figures in the investigations. 

Trainor said he would be surprised if Stein ever communicated with Trump Jr., who participated in an interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors for more than nine hours last Wednesday. “Don Jr. has been incredibly cooperative with the committee,” Burr said Thursday. 

Stein’s name has also come up in the context of a 2015 dinner hosted by RT in Moscow. Stein sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first White House national security adviser until he was ousted just 24 days into the job. Flynn recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting a criminal investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

Trainor said he expects the Senate Intelligence Committee will want to know more about the Moscow dinner, but that he wasn’t employed by the campaign at that time and therefore wouldn’t have any documents related to the event. Stein has said that unlike Flynn, she was not paid to attend the dinner and paid for her own travel costs.

That Russia Today dinner with Flynn and Putin has always struck me as weird, if not outright bad news.  Sure, you couldn't find a better third-party foil to mess up America's elections than Jill Stein, especially if you were trying to throw the election away from Clinton by attacking her from the left.  I always figured Stein was Putin backup plan, considering he had the man he wanted, Donald Trump, squarely in the spotlight.

Then again, Stein's margin in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are what cost her those states and the election.  If she hadn't siphoned votes from Clinton, Hillary would have won.

I don't feel bad at all that she's drawn the attention of investigators.  Meanwhile a Washington Post piece from last week is getting attention because it flatly points out that the nation's intelligence services knew the Trump campaign team was compromised by the Russians, but Trump refused to lift a finger to do anything to stop them...and still hasn't done so.

In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.

They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.

The story goes on to say that the intelligence bureaus straight up told Trump that they had evidence that Putin himself had given these orders to interfere in the election, but Trump's ego refused to allow him to believe that he was helped to a victory he clearly felt he had been granted by dint of his own glory.

And Trump still has yet to deal with Russia. He's not going to, because he's a Russian asset.  Don't take my word for it though, take Jim Clapper's.

While his career had its ups and downs—you don’t work in any trade for over 50 years without missteps—the former far outweighed the latter. Clapper, a retired Air Force three-star general, is widely respected in national security circles, across partisan lines, as a guy who knows his stuff and focuses on the job. Naturally, he’s exceptionally discreet as well. 

That changed yesterday, when Clapper went on CNN to drop an unimaginably large bombshell on President Donald Trump. Since the inauguration in January, Clapper has made a few critical comments regarding the president and his strange ties to Moscow, but these have been largely anodyne. Clapper began showing his hand in September, with a comment that the IC assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election raised questions about why Trump was in the White House: it “cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory in the election,” he stated. 

At the end of October, in an interview with Politico, Clapper added more about Kremlin interference in the 2016 election: “The Russians have succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations.” Clapper dismissed President Trump’s repeated attacks on the investigation of his Moscow links as “fake news” with a warning that the Russians “have been emboldened and they will continue to do this.” 

Clapper went considerably further yesterday in his appearance on CNN’s The Lead, in which he finally let his top secret mask drop to say what he really thinks about our 45th president: 

I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president … You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president. 

When pressed about what exactly he was saying, Clapper explained that he meant his words “figuratively,” but that barely mitigates the shock value of what he said. To be perfectly clear: America’s most experienced spy boss publicly termed our president an asset—that is, a witting agent—of the Kremlin who is being controlled by Vladimir Putin. Even if meant only “figuratively,” this is the most jaw-dropping statement ever uttered about any American president by any serious commentator.

Once again, Trump is attacking our intelligence services because they have the evidence that he is a Russian asset.

And most of the rest of the GOP knew this and went along willingly.

The Blue Wave Builds, Con't

Democrats continue to hold a double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot numbers as Trump is now dragging the GOP down like a millstone.

If this lead continues to hold (or grows, certainly possible if things start going south on the economy or otherwise) then Democrats are looking to make big gains in the suburban swing districts that will allow them to retake the House.

From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican-held seats filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump. 

“If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who as a member of Congress in 2006 helped Democrats win back the House. “The president’s conduct has basically given voters this permission slip to go against the Republicans.”
Congressional Republicans are scrambling to fortify their defenses. 

On Wednesday, the last five leaders of the House Republican campaign arm privately addressed Republican lawmakers, outlining the sort of suburban districts most at risk and imploring members to contribute to their colleagues. Former Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York said it had been aimed at dozens of lawmakers elected since 2010 who had never faced a Democratic wave. 

“The general tenor was: This is not a year like most of you have seen, because you’ve not seen wind in your face,” said Mr. Reynolds, who led the House campaign committee in 2006. 

While Mr. Trump has seemed eager to engage in the midterm races, it is unclear where he would campaign and unlikely his presence would help Republicans in many imperiled districts. Already, his unpopularity is luring candidates into races once considered long shots. Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House. 

In October, Mayor Ben McAdams of Salt Lake County, a Democrat, announced a bid to oust Representative Mia Love in Utah, a conservative state stocked with educated Mormon voters who view Mr. Trump with disdain. In early December, Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Ky., a Democrat, kicked off a campaign against Representative Andy Barr, about 40 percent of whose electorate is in Lexington, home to the University of Kentucky. 

Outside Philadelphia, Scott Wallace, a lawyer and philanthropist whose grandfather was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, is exploring a challenge to Representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a traditional haven for white-collar Republicans, people who have spoken with Mr. Wallace said. And P. G. Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati City Council member who briefly ran for Senate last year, is being recruited by House Democrats to challenge Representative Steve Chabot in a district that mixes African-Americans and urban and suburban whites. 

“It has all the trappings of a winnable seat if the climate cooperates,” Mr. Sittenfeld said.
Should that climate worsen, Republicans say, lawmakers not previously thought to be at risk could be endangered, like Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who is facing a former State Senate leader.

Beyond the biggest blue states, perhaps two dozen red-hued districts with significant suburban populations could be winnable for Democrats in a banner year, including those held by Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dave Reichert of Washington State; Ted Budd and Robert Pittenger of North Carolina; and Kevin Yoder of Kansas.

Seeing Steve Chabot knocked off in Cincinnati and Andy Barr knocked off in Lexington would be the kind of wins Dems need in order to take the House back.  And a 2010-style wave election could put dozens of seats in play for the Dems that gerrymandering has put out of reach, places where Dems would need a double-digit advantage to win.

That's why the GOP is running scared right now.  They know the axe is coming.

StupidiNews!

• Federal investigators say an Amtrak passenger train was speeding as the train derailed at a highway overpass in Washington State, killing 3 and injuring more than 100.
• Columbia, South Carolina may become the first US city to ban the sale of "bump stocks", the devices were used on several guns in October's deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas.
• The US is officially putting the blame for May's "WannaCry" cyberware ransom attack on North Korea, homeland security adviser Tom Bossert makes the charge in today's WSJ.
• House Republicans plan to take up a final vote on the GOP tax bill today and send the bill to the Senate where it will face Democratic senators looking to delay the legislation.
• Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab is suing the Trump regime for banning the company's software from government PCs over possible Russian cooperation to steal data.

Last Call For The New Black Panthers

Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson has owned the team since its inception in the NFL almost 25 years ago, but he won't be the owner much longer as the league is now formally investigating his conduct towards players and staff as racist and sexist.

Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson announced Sunday that he would put his team up for sale at the end of the season after the National Football League said it was opening an investigation into accusations of workplace misconduct against him. 

"I believe that it is time to turn the franchise over to new ownership," Richardson, 81, said in a statement on the team's website. "Therefore, I will put the team up for sale at the end of this NFL season." 

Two days ago, the team said it was conducting an internal investigation into Richardson's conduct, but did not specify the nature of the allegations. Sports Illustrated says they include sexual harassment of multiple female employees and a racial slur. 

Hours before Richardson's announcement on Sunday, NFL.com reported that the league was opening its own investigation into the allegations. 

In the statement on Friday announcing the internal investigation, the Panthers said the team was "committed to ensuring a safe, comfortable and diverse work environment where all individuals, regardless of sex, race, color, religion, gender, or sexual identity or orientation, are treated fairly and equally." 

The Panthers announced that former White House chief of staff to President Clinton, Erskine Bowles — who is a minority owner of the team — would oversee the investigation by law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan. 

SI, quoting unnamed sources, detailed what it claims were inappropriate comments made by Richardson about how female employees fit into their jeans, as well as "Multiple female employees [recalling] to SI that Richardson asked them if he could personally shave their legs," the magazine said. 

" ... on multiple occasions when Richardson's conduct has triggered complaints—for sexual harassment against female employees and for directing a racial slur at an African American employee—he has taken a leaf from a playbook he's deployed in the past: Confidential settlements were reached and payments were made to complainants, accompanied by non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses designed to shield the owner and the organization from further liability and damaging publicity," according to SI.

Unlike Congress, it seems Richardson wont be able to get away with secret harassment settlement claims bound by NDAs.  And who would be willing to buy the Cardiac Cats?

Diddy, of course. And his first hire would be Colin Kaepernick.

Hip hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs said Sunday night he’s interested in buying the Carolina Panthers and signing quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been unemployed this season after kneeling during the national anthem in 2016. 

Panthers owner Jerry Richardson announced Sunday he would be selling the team after the 2017 season, just hours after Sports Illustratedpublished accusations of sexual misconduct from former employees. Richardson also allegedly used a racial slur about a team scout. 

Diddy took to Twitter soon after the Panthers announced the upcoming sale, declaring his desire to own a team and increase diversity among NFL ownership.

In a video posted to Instagram on Sunday night, Combs said “I would be the best NFL owner you could imagine. I will immediately address the Colin Kaepernick situation, and put him in the running for next year’s starting quarterback. It’s just competition baby, it’s just competition.”

We'll see who owns the Panthers next season.  Having grown up in North Carolina I've been a Panthers fan since the beginning, but I'm not going to lie and say Richardson has been a good owner.  The team has made it to two Super Bowls despite him, so hopefully the new owner won't be a complete jackass who happens to have several hundred million bucks lying about.

Actually Diddy's probably right that he might be the best owner we could hope for given that criteria.

Taxing Our Patience, Con't

With Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain now expected to miss the final votes on the GOP tax bill in the Senate this week as chemotherapy for his advanced brain cancer continues, the focus turns to Tennessee GOP Sen. Bob Corker, who now has to answer for his sudden and last-second yes vote as critics have found a provision slipped into the Senate bill that will personally benefit Corker by millions of dollars.

In an exclusive interview with International Business Times, U.S. Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn, denied knowing about a controversial last-minute provision slipped into the Republican tax bill that could personally enrich him. Corker, the lone Republican to vote against the original Senate bill, which didn't include the provision, also admitted he has not read the final tax bill he announced he will support.

A trio of Democratic Senators, meanwhile, slammed the provision, which was first reported on by IBT.

Corker’s vote is considered pivotal in the closely divided Senate and he could be in a position to make or break the landmark legislation. He declared his support for the final reconciled version of the bill on Friday after GOP lawmakers added a provision that could benefit his vast real estate holdings -- a provision that Corker denied having any knowledge of.

In a series of rapid-fire telephone interviews, Corker asked IBT for a description of the provision, and then criticized it. But minutes later, he called back to walk back that criticism, saying he wanted to further study the issue, and that it was more complex than he initially understood it to be. Despite potentially holding the fate of the entire tax bill in his hands, Corker told IBT that he has only read a short summary of the $1.4 trillion legislation.

“I had like a two-page summary I went through with leadership,” said Corker. “I never saw the actual text.” Despite not reading the bill -- and having time to read it before the final vote scheduled for this week -- he reiterated his support for the bill to IBT, support he announced hours before bill’s full text was publicly released on Friday.

So Corker was a yes on the bill without reading it.  And then IBT catches him in the act of raiding the till.

Corker called IBT to respond to a series of IBT investigative reports showing that he switched his vote to “yes” on the tax legislation, only after Republican leaders added in a provision reducing taxes on income from real-estate LLCs. Federal records reviewed by IBT show Corker, a commercial real estate mogul, made up to $7 million last year from such income. President Donald Trump's financial disclosures listed between $41 million and $68 million of the same income.

After the report, Corker called IBT and asked for a detailed description of the provision, insisting he did not know about. After the provision was described, he said: “If I understand what [the provision] does, it sounds totally unnecessary and borderline ridiculous.”

A few minutes later, however, Corker called back, and tried to back off that criticism.

“I don’t really know what the provision does to be honest. I would need an accountant to explain it,” Corker said. “I had no knowledge of this and would have no knowledge of it except for you guys are calling me about it. I have no idea whatsoever whether it impacts me or doesn’t impact me.”

Corker you see would benefit from the same multi-million dollar tax break that a certain temper-tantrum tossing tangerine tyrant in training would benefit from, a provision slipped into the Senate bill text in the last minute.  He knows it, Trump knows it, and now the people know it.

The GOP is raiding the treasury on the way out before the economy collapses into a depression, and they're not even bothering to hide it.  How many other GOP senators got a kickback like Corker to screw their constituents?

They're planning to vote this week before we can find out.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Donald Trump says he has no plans to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but he does have issues with Justice Department leadership as the game of cat and mouse continues.

President Trump on Sunday sought to douse speculation that he may fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III amid an intensifying campaign by Trump allies to attack the wide-ranging Russia investigation as improper and politically motivated.

Returning to the White House from Camp David, Trump was asked Sunday whether he intended to fire Mueller. “No, I’m not,” he told journalists, insisting that there was “no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia.

The president’s comments came a day after a lawyer representing Trump’s transition team accused Mueller of wrongfully obtaining thousands of emails sent and received by Trump officials before the start of his administration — a legal and public relations maneuver seen as possibly laying the groundwork to oust the special counsel.

Trump criticized Mueller for gaining access to those emails, telling reporters the situation was “not looking good.”

“It’s quite sad to see that,” Trump said. “My people were very upset about it.”

Mueller’s spokesman denied wrongdoing, and some legal experts questioned the claim that the emails were improperly obtained.

The outcry over Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference grew louder over the weekend among Trump loyalists and conservative media figures. Although Trump has publicly and privately criticized the Department of Justice and the FBI and voiced displeasure with his appointees there, the president’s advisers insisted he is not aiming his ire at Mueller.

“As the White House has repeatedly and emphatically said for months, there is no consideration about firing or replacing the special counsel with whom the White House has fully cooperated in order to permit a fully vetted yet prompt conclusion,” Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer overseeing the Russia matter, said Sunday in a statement.

Trump’s lawyers, who have been assuring the president that Mueller’s investigation is poised to wrap up by January or so, are scheduled to meet with Mueller’s team this week for a routine status conference. They are expected to ask the special counsel if there are any other outstanding questions or materials that investigators need before concluding the probe.

Trump's not angry at Mueller, you see. He expects the investigations to be over and done with next month.  He's angry at the people who employed Mueller.  After all, Mueller's just doing his job and there's nothing to find because Trump believes he did nothing wrong, so the investigation will be over shortly.

One way or another, it will be over shortly, that is.

Advisers who have spoken recently with Trump about the Russia investigation said the president was sharply critical of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller operation — but did not broach the idea of firing Mueller.

“I think he realizes that would be a step too far,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private conversation.

Rather, Trump appeared to be contemplating changes in the Justice Department’s leadership. In recent discussions, two advisers said, Trump has called the attorney general “weak,” and complained that Rosenstein has shown insufficient accountability on the special counsel’s work. A senior official said Trump mocked Rosenstein’s recent testimony on Capitol Hill, saying he looked weak and unable to answer questions. Trump has ranted about Rosenstein as “a Democrat,” one of these advisers said, and characterized him as a threat to his presidency.

In fact, Rosenstein is a Republican. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated him to be U.S. attorney in Maryland.

After all, Trump can't actually fire Mueller himself, he can simply pull a Saturday Night Massacre and fire people in the Justice Department until he finds somebody willing to get rid of Mueller for him.

Trump regime State TV certainly wants him to jettison a lot of people.

Fox News host Jesse Watters suggested that the FBI investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election has maybe transformed into a “coup” against President Donald trump. Before a segment in which Watters interviewed Kellyanne Conway with the chyron, “A COUP IN AMERICA?” the Fox News host went on a rant about what he described as “smoking gun evidence” that the FBI agents investigating Trump are biased against the president.

“The investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign has been crooked from the jump,” Watters said on Saturday night. “But the scary part is we may now have proof the investigation was weaponized to destroy his presidency for partisan political purposes and to disenfranchise millions of American voters. Now, if that’s true, we have a coup on our hands in America.”

Watters specifically criticized FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was fired after he was found to have sent anti-Trump messages to a colleague. And Strzok is hardly alone as a target. Many at Fox have been increasing the rhetoric against FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Because the FBI has always been a hotbed of radical leftist anarchy rather than law and order, or something.

On Saturday night, another Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, outright suggested that the FBI wanted to reverse Trump’s election. She explained her reasoning:

What would you say if I told you your vote doesn’t count? That all the effort into the issues and candidates is a waste of time? That there are people at the citadel of power who believe it is their right to invalidate your choice if they don’t agree with it?

Folks, this is not about politics. It’s much bigger. I doubt in American presidential election history that there has been as great a crime or as large a stain on our democracy than that committed by a criminal cabal in our FBI and the Department of Justice who think they know better than we who our president should be.

FOX News is certainly enjoying lighting all these fuses, priming viewers and all but calling for  bloody violence against if Mueller recommends charges against Trump, and the "all but" part will disappear when Mueller does so.

You thought 2017 was bad, folks?  2018 is two weeks away and it already promises to be one of the darkest years in modern American history.

StupidiNews!

• The power has been restored to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the world canceled hundreds of flights and left thousands of holiday fliers stranded.
• The NFL has taken over the sexual misconduct and racial harassment investigation of Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, the league is retaining an outside counsel.
• Republicans say they have to votes to pass a final tax bill this week and put it on Donald Trump's desk before Christmas, it would be the biggest tax rewrite in 30 years.
• Meanwhile Senate Republicans aren't quite sure they have the votes to keep the government open another month as the House GOP's budget bill gives $664 billion to the Pentagon.
• Two new studies of Hurricane Harvey find that the record rainfall that flooded Houston earlier this years was made significantly worse by global warming.

Sunday Long Read: Millennial Malaise

HuffPost's Michael Hobbes makes the solid, strong case that the cause of the dire, economic disaster with the Millennial generation is the same problem that Gen Xers like me have: the Boomers screwed us all to the wall and are looting the remaining wealth in the country.  Only the problem is exponentially worse for Millennials, because the vast majority of the generational cohort that now makes up a quarter of the country is they're broke and always will be.

Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted. 

We’ve all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. We still haven’t learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention “millennial” to anyone over 40 and the word “entitlement” will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

They are crushed under student debt 300% of what their parents had to attend the same universities, half as likely to own a home, and 20% are living under the federal poverty line, and doomed to work themselves to death without ever getting a dime of Social Security or Medicaid that will be long gone 40 years from now.

And they are pissed.

What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life—the ones that boomers lucked into—are being lifted out of our reach. Add it all up and it’s no surprise that we’re the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

It’s tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover. But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America’s.

And that calamity is coming imminently, folks.  The lunatics at the helm of the ship are bailing with everything from the safe and when we run aground its going to get violent, bloody, and awful.  We're long, long overdue for some historical corrections.  It's the Millennials who will pay the highest price, too, because the tens of millions of Millennials who couldn't afford any college at all now have zero job prospects.

It will only get worse.

Israeli Messy Right Now

The UN Security Council is attempting to do something about Trump's explosive call to end the Middle East peace process and unilaterally declare Jerusalem the sole province of Israel, but there's not much the UN can frankly do, and Trump knows it.

The United Nations Security Council is considering a draft resolution that would insist any decisions on the status of Jerusalem have no legal effect and must be rescinded after U.S. President Donald Trump recognized the city as Israel’s capital.

The one-page Egyptian-drafted text, which was circulated to the 15-member council on Saturday and seen by Reuters, does not specifically mention the United States or Trump. Diplomats say it has broad support but will likely be vetoed by Washington.

The council could vote early next week, diplomats said. A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, France, Britain, Russia or China to pass.

Trump abruptly reversed decades of U.S. policy this month when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, generating outrage from Palestinians. Trump also plans to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

After the decision, Arab foreign ministers agreed to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution. While the draft is unlikely to be adopted, it would further isolate Trump over the Jerusalem issue.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the draft. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has praised Trump’s decision as “the just and right thing to do.”

The draft U.N. resolution “affirms that any decisions and actions which purport to have altered, the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”

Again, such a measure would be vetoed by the US (as any real UN Security Council measure holding Israel actually responsible for its collective punishment of Palestinians over the last several decades has been vetoed by the US, long before Trump) but I'm sure the vote will be 14-1 anyway.

The reality is that the UN can't really do anything that its five permanent members don't want done collectively, so there's no real will to punish the Trump regime politically, economically, or diplomatically (and certainly not militarily!)

 I don't see that changing anytime soon.
 

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

At least one Democrat is warning that Donald Trump will fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and that Republicans will attempt to end the House investigation against Trump at the end of next week after Congress leaves for the holidays.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Friday that "rumors" on Capitol Hill suggest President Trump could fire special counsel Robert Mueller before Christmas, after Congress leaves Washington for the winter recess.

“The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on Dec. 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller," Speier told California's KQED News.

Speier, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Trump was trying to shut down the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, pointing to the lack of interviews scheduled for the new year.

The New York Times reported Friday that the committee is scheduling its final witnesses of the year to testify in New York, despite important votes coming up in Washington, D.C., and confirmed no additional witnesses are scheduled yet in 2018.

"We can read between the lines I think," Speier said. "I believe this president wants all of this shut down. He wants to shut down these investigations, and he wants to fire special counsel Mueller."

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), also said Friday that he is worried that Republicans leading the committee are seeking to shut down the committee's investigation by the end of the year.

"Republicans have scheduled no witnesses after next Friday and none in 2017 [sic]. We have dozens of outstanding witnesses on key aspects of our investigation that they refuse to contact and many document requests they continue to sit on," he tweeted Friday.

The Department of Justice has repeatedly said that Mueller would not be fired short of misconduct but Trump backers have been setting the table for weeks attacking Mueller's credibility, and now a majority of Americans believe Mueller has a conflict of interest.  Trump will reportedly make his move after FOX News reported exactly such "misconduct" this weekend.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained “many tens of thousands" of Trump transition emails, including emails of Jared Kushner, transition team sources tell Axios. 

Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said. 

The emails include 12 accounts, one of which contains about 7,000 emails, the sources said. 

The accounts include the team's political leadership and the foreign-policy team, the sources said.

Why it matters: The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes. 

“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads," a transition source told me.

How it happened: The sources say Mueller obtained the emails from the General Services Administration, the government agency that hosted the transition email system, which had addresses ending in “ptt.gov," for Presidential Transition Team.

Taking fight public: Charging "unlawful conduct," Kory Langhofer, counsel for the transition team, wrote in a letter to congressional committees Saturday that "career staff at the General Services Administration ... have unlawfully produced [transition team] private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel's Office."

In other words, the White House is officially saying that Mueller got these emails illegally, that the emails weren't germane to the investigation, that went too far to get them, that the emails were either leaked to him or stolen, and as a result the entire investigation is a fraud.

No doubt Trump will use this as his justification to fire Mueller next weekend, waiting for Congress to recess for the year so there's no opposition from Democrats.

The stage is now set as the right-wing noise machine is at full blast.

"The anti-Mueller rhetoric in conservative media right now is part of a feedback loop," Nicole Hemmer, the author of a book about conservative media, "Messengers of the Right," told CNNMoney.

"Conservative media personalities know Trump hates the investigation and wants it shut down," she said in an email. "They bash the investigation and Mueller, and when Trump sees that happening (say, on 'Fox & Friends') it reinforces his belief that the investigation is illegitimate and that he should do something to end it. The likely consequence is that this increases the odds of Trump attempting to fire Mueller."

Hemmer added: "We'll have to wait and see whether internal restraints within the White House — lawyers and advisers — are enough to stop him from doing that."

  What happens now depends on us.

Trump Cards, Con't

A few years ago the name of the person in the White House became synonymous with hope, diversity, inclusivity, equality. Obama still means that to millions across the country and the world today.

The curent occupant of the Oval Office, well his name has become a racial epithet, a promise of violence, a quantum of racism, a barbaric yawp of white supremacy, shorthand for what fate awaits non-Christian whites in the America that exists today.

Last year’s contentious presidential election gave oxygen to hate. An analysis of F.B.I. crime data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found a 26 percent increase in bias incidents in the last quarter of 2016 — the heart of the election season — compared with the same period the previous year. The trend has continued into 2017, with the latest partial data for the nation’s five most populous cities showing a 12 percent increase.

In addition, anti-Muslim episodes have nearly doubled since 2014, according to Brian Levin, the director of the center, which he said has also counted more “mega rallies” by white nationalists in the last two years than in the previous 20. “I haven’t seen anything like this during my three decades in the field,” he said.

Peppered among these incidents is a phenomenon distinct from the routine racism so familiar in this country: the provocative use of “Trump,” after the man whose comments about Mexicans, Muslims and undocumented immigrants — coupled with his muted responses to white nationalist activity — have proved so inflammatory. His words have also become an accelerant on the playing field of sports, in his public criticism of black athletes he deems to be unpatriotic or ungrateful.

Officials at Salem State University in Massachusetts discovered hateful graffiti spray-painted on benches and a fence surrounding the baseball field, including “Trump #1 Whites Only USA.” An undocumented immigrant in Michigan reported to the police that two assailants had stapled a note bearing a slur to his stomach after telling him, “Trump doesn’t like you.” A white Massachusetts businessman at Kennedy International Airport in New York was charged with assaulting and menacing an airline worker in a hijab, saying, among other threats: “Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you.”

In an email, the White House on Friday denounced the use of the president’s name in cases like these. “The president condemns violence, bigotry and hatred in all its forms, and finds anyone who might invoke his or any other political figure’s name for such aims to be contemptible,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said.

Still, it persists. Across the country, students have used the president’s name to mock or goad minority opponents at sporting events. In March, white fans at suburban Canton High School in Connecticut shouted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as players from Hartford’s Classical Magnet School, which is predominantly black and Latino, took foul shots during a basketball playoff game. They also chanted “He’s our president!”

The visiting players and their chaperones interpreted the chants not as a sudden burst of presidential fealty, but rather as a slyly racist mantra intended to rattle. As if Donald J. Trump was the president of here, in white suburbia, and not there, in the diverse inner city.

“I’m not sure what politics has to do with basketball,” Azaria Porter, then the Classical team’s 16-year-old manager, told The Hartford Courant. “It was just annoying. It was like, O.K., we get it.”

In a world of internet meme culture and pervasive social media, Trump has become the most meme-able of things, code for all the overt discrimination and bias that is now allowed to be freely expressed in this country.

And he's proud of that fact, guaranteed.  This is what the name of the leader of our country means now, he's the leader of a twisted cult of hatred, not a name to inspire hope, but one to inspire fear.

Dirty Words Gone Dirt Cheap

The Trump regime is now telling American science agencies what they are allowed to do, what they are allowed to research, and most importantly what they are now allowed to say.

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.

The question of how to address such issues as sexual orientation, gender identity and abortion rights — all of which received significant visibility under the Obama administration — has surfaced repeatedly in federal agencies since President Trump took office. Several key departments — including Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, as well as Justice, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — have changed some federal policies and how they collect government information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

In March, for example, HHS dropped questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in two surveys of elderly people. 

HHS has also removed information about LGBT Americans from its website. The department’s Administration for Children and Families, for example, archived a page that outlined federal services that are available for LGBT people and their families, including how they can adopt and receive help if they are the victims of sex trafficking.

At the CDC, the meeting about the banned words was led by Alison Kelly, a senior leader in the agency’s Office of Financial Services, according to the CDC analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. Kelly did not say why the words are being banned, according to the analyst, and told the group that she was merely relaying the information.

Other CDC officials confirmed the existence of a list of forbidden words.It’s likely that other parts of HHS are operating under the same guidelines regarding the use of these words, the analyst said.

Those whom the Trump regime deem undesirable are being disappeared from the government's language and from the government's programs.  The crowning achievement in all this will be the 2020 Census, where those who don't agree with the regime will erased from government records altogether.   Mass disenfranchisement done the easy way, and there's nothing to indicate that the GOP isn't doing this on purpose to justify government spending cuts.

And this is definitely a screaming signal of authoritarianism we now live under in America.  First they came for the LGBTQ, to paraphrase Niemoller.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Robert Mueller is getting closer to the smoking gun in the Trump/Russia collusion matter, and that path goes through the data analytics firm that Trump was using in order to launder Russian intelligence.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the Trump campaign’s data operation in the months leading up to the election, The Wall Street Journal reporter Friday. 

Mueller reportedly asked the data firm, Cambridge Analytica, to provide his investigative team with emails of employees who worked with the Trump campaign, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke with the WSJ. 

The House Intelligence Committee, which is also probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the foreign power, also requested similar documents from the data firm earlier this year. Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, the people familiar with the investigation told WSJ. 

Mueller’s request for the emails was earlier this year, before it was widely reported that Nix was in contact with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in 2016. 

Cambridge Analytica began working for the Trump campaign in mid-May 2016 after former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon introduced Nix to then-candidate Trump. The firm provided the campaign with data, polling and research, WSJ reported.

With Mueller now investigating Trump Organization money laundering of Russian cash and data laundering of Russian intelligence, it's no wonder that the false attacks on the FBI and Mueller as "biased" and "compromised" are coming in hard and fast this week.

The Republican Party has spent the last two days in a frenzy of indignation over the disclosure that an FBI agent who worked on the Clinton and Trump investigations (and has since been removed) sent texts to another agent, whom he was reportedly dating, criticizing Trump. The story was driven by the curious decision by Trump’s Department of Justice to leak partial excerpts of the texts. It produced sensational headlines like, “In texts, FBI agents on Russia probe called Trump an ‘idiot’; Messages could fuel GOP claims that bias tainted Clinton and Trump investigations,” (Politico) and “In Texts, F.B.I. Officials in Russia Inquiry Said Clinton ‘Just Has to Win’” (New York Times). 

The main problem with this pseudo-scandal is that nobody has ever previously expected FBI agents not to privately express political viewpoints. Indeed, to prosecute liberal bias at agencies that lean rightward and kept the Republican nominee’s very serious investigation private while publicizing the trivial investigation into the Democratic nominee is perverse in the extreme. 

There turns out to be another flaw in the “scandal.” The main agent in question also wrote text messages criticizing Democrats, reports Del Quentin Wilber. His messages included calling Chelsea Clinton “self-entitled,” and mocking Eric Holder. He wrote, “I’m worried about what happens if HRC is elected.” Of course, we don’t know the context of that any more than we know it for the other texts. If the administration had leaked these texts instead or in addition, the narrative would have been completely different.

So it's smoke and mirrors as with HILLARY'S EMAIL SERVER SCANDAL™ but the con is starting to work on the American people.

A majority of polled voters say special counsel Robert Mueller has a conflict of interest because of his past ties to former FBI Director James Comey, according to the latest Harvard CAPS-Harris survey. 

When asked if Mueller has a conflict of interest “as the former head of the FBI and a friend of James Comey,” 54 percent responded that the “relationship” between the two amounts to a conflict of interest, including 70 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats. 

Comey succeeded Mueller as FBI director and the two have been described as “brothers in arms” for their working relationship, which dates back to the early 2000s, although the extent of their personal relationship is unclear.

The Republicans have been wrking very hard this week to destroy Robert Mueller's credibility.  Indeed, the person who appointed Mueller to the post, current DoJ Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, testified this week before Congress that Mueller has Rosenstein's full confidence, but that story has been drowned by the noise machine.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation into whether President Trump’s team assisted Russian meddling in last year’s campaign, pushed back strongly Wednesday against Republican accusations that the probe is infected with partisan bias and steadfastly defended special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. 

“The special counsel’s investigation is not a witch hunt,” Rosenstein told a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing, specifically rejecting the phrase that President Trump has used to denounce the case. He said Mueller has managed the case “appropriately.” 

Rosenstein also said he would not fire Mueller unless the former FBI director had violated Justice Department guidelines or the law. “If there were good cause, I would act,” he said. “If there were no good cause, I would not.”

The Trump regime continues to set up the possible firing of Mueller.  This week has been the clearest evidence yet that such an attempt to undermine Mueller to the point where he "has" to be fired is underway.  Don't buy the nonsense, and spread the word that this is going on.

Last Call For The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver

Looks like Paul Ryan is reading the GOP tea leaves in a post-Roy Moore future and is realizing he won't be Speaker of the House much longer and is pulling a Boehner and i heading for the exits.

Despite several landmark legislative wins this year, and a better-than-expected relationship with President Donald Trump, Ryan has made it known to some of his closest confidants that this will be his final term as speaker. He consults a small crew of family, friends and staff for career advice, and is always cautious not to telegraph his political maneuvers. But the expectation of his impending departure has escaped the hushed confines of Ryan’s inner circle and permeated the upper-most echelons of the GOP. In recent interviews with three dozen people who know the speaker—fellow lawmakers, congressional and administration aides, conservative intellectuals and Republican lobbyists—not a single person believed Ryan will stay in Congress past 2018. 

Ryan was tiring of D.C. even before reluctantly accepting the speakership. He told his predecessor, John Boehner, that it would be his last job in politics—and that it wasn’t a long-term proposition. In the months following Trump’s victory, he began contemplating the scenarios of his departure. More recently, over closely held conversations with his kitchen cabinet, Ryan’s preference has become clear: He would like to serve through Election Day 2018 and retire ahead of the next Congress. This would give Ryan a final legislative year to chase his second white whale, entitlement reform, while using his unrivaled fundraising prowess to help protect the House majority—all with the benefit of averting an ugly internecine power struggle during election season. Ryan has never loved the job; he oozes aggravation when discussing intraparty debates over “micro-tactics," and friends say he feels like he’s running a daycare center. On a personal level, going home at the end of next year would allow Ryan, who turns 48 next month, to keep promises to family; his three children are in or entering their teenage years, and Ryan, whose father died at 55, wants desperately to live at home with them full time before they begin flying the nest. The best part of this scenario, people close to the speaker emphasize: He wouldn’t have to share the ballot with Trump again in 2020.

And yet speculation is building that, Ryan, even fresh off his tax-reform triumph, might not be able to leave on his own terms. He now faces a massive pileup of cannot-fail bills in January and February. It’s an outrageous legislative lift: Congress must, in the coming weeks, fund the government, raise the debt ceiling, modify spending caps, address the continuation of health care subsidies, shell out additional funds for disaster relief and deal with the millions of undocumented young immigrants whose protected status has been thrown into limbo. It represents the most menacing stretch of Ryan’s speakership—one that will almost certainly require him to break promises made to his conference and give significant concessions to Democrats in exchange for their votes. To meet key deadlines, he’ll have to approve sizable spending increases and legal status for minors who came to the U.S. illegally—two things that could raise the ire of the GOP base and embolden his conservative rivals on Capitol Hill. There is no great outcome available, Ryan has conceded to some trusted associates—only survival. “Win the day. Win the next day. And then win the week,” Ryan has been preaching to his leadership team. 

The speaker can't afford to admit he’s a lame duck—his fundraising capacity and deal-making leverage would be vastly diminished, making the House all the more difficult to govern. When asked at the end of a Thursday morning press conference if he was leaving soon, Ryan shot a quick “no” over his shoulder as he walked out of the room.

The screaming unpopularity of Trump and the GOP right now is only going to plummet as Ryan has to betray the saps who voted Republican or the government shuts down and possibly much worse.  Either way, the Dems are looking better and better in 2018.

Oh, and Ryan knows what's going on with Trump and Pence. He knows damn well that he's third in line for the presidency and he's looking for the exits anyhow.  That alone should tell you something.