Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

Last week I talked about how Pennsylvania's GOP-gerrymandered congressional districts were found in violation of the state's constitution, and how the state's Supreme Court ordered a full redraw of the map ahead of the November elections.  The US Supreme Court denied the GOP's request to stay the order, to which the GOP then floated the idea of impeaching and removing all the state Supreme Court justices who ruled against the Republicans that control the state legislature.

They still might end up doing that, but it won't save them from the clock.  Last Friday's deadline passed and the GOP vomited out a map that was literally just as bad as the current one.  Chris Ingraham at the Washington Post shows us the numbers:

The new districts generally respect county and municipal boundaries and don't “wander seemingly arbitrarily across Pennsylvania,” as the state's Supreme Court wrote. Unfortunately for Pennsylvania voters, the new districts show just as much partisan bias as the old ones. 

You can demonstrate this using the precinct-level results of the 2016 presidential election: See which precincts are assigned to which districts under the new map, use those assignments to calculate the total presidential vote in each of the new districts and compare those figures with the vote totals under the old districts. That will give you a good sense of how the partisan makeup of the new districts compares to the old ones. 

Brian Amos, a redistricting expert at the University of Florida, has done exactly that. Amos combined the new district maps with precinct-level returns compiled by cartographers Nathaniel Kelso and Michal Migurski. 

The similarities are striking: In 2016, Donald Trump received more votes than Hillary Clinton in 12 out of Pennsylvania's 18 districts. Under the Republicans' new map, Trump would similarly outperform Clinton in exactly 12 districts. 

Not only that, but the vote margins in each district would be virtually identical. The chart below plots, for each district, the vote margins in 2016 vs. the margins that would result from the Republicans' new map. Across all 18 districts, the average difference in vote margins between the old and new map would be a little over four percentage points. 

From a partisan standpoint, in other words, the new map is almost exactly like the old one. Under the existing map, Democratic House candidates have routinely received roughly 50 percent of the statewide popular House vote but only five of the state's 18 House seats. The new map is unlikely to change that.

Today, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf, tossed the GOP's crapass homework in the garbage can, meaning that unless something totally out of the blue happens, the state's Supreme Court will make good on their threat to draw the map themselves.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf on Tuesday rejected a new proposed map for the state’s congressional districts, saying the state’s Republican-controlled legislature submitted an unconstitutional gerrymander. 

“Partisan gerrymandering weakens citizen power, promotes gridlock and stifles meaningful reform,” Governor Wolf said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “As non-partisan analysts have already said, their map maintains a similar partisan advantage by employing many of the same unconstitutional tactics present in their 2011 map.” 

Republican leadership submitted the redrawn map to Wolf on Friday. From there, Wolf had until this Thursday to to tell the state Supreme Court whether he approved of the map; and if he did, it would be enacted. 

Citing a number of nonpartisan analysts on Tuesday, however, Wolf said: “Like the 2011 map, the map submitted to my office by Republican leaders is still a gerrymander. Their map clearly seeks to benefit one political party, which is the essence of why the court found the current map to be unconstitutional."

We'll see how the new map goes, and I expect the GOP to fight it every step of the way, but it can't be much worse than the current map, which had Democrats gain a slight majority of votes in 2016 House races in the state, but Republicans still won 13 of 18 districts.

By the way, the new map the Pennsylvania GOP proposed?



It packs all of Pittsburgh's blue voters into one blue district and Philly's into four, leaving one suburban swing blue district and three red ones on the eastern side of the state.  The Pennsyltucky area in the middle, dead red.  Nine GOP districts with double digit advantages, and six of those districts having 20-point plus advantages.  Even if voters preferred Democrats by ten points in the state, the best the Dems could ever hope to do under this map would be to break even.  The default would be a 12-6 split.

So yeah, I'm glad this is happening, and it needs to happen in more states.

Papers Please Everyone

The Trump regime takes yet another step towards authoritarianism with both ICE and Border Patrol agencies vying to move under the umbrella of US intelligence agencies as part of Homeland Security.

The Border Patrol is one of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agencies; it can stop travelers within 100 miles of the border without probable cause. 

It’s also one of President Donald Trump’s favorites. He boasted on the campaign trail about his support from agents, and frequently tweets about its work. While he regularly trashes the FBI, his praise of the Border Patrol is unstinting. 

Now, the Border Patrol could become even more potent. The Daily Beast can confirm that officials in the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, are quietly advocating to join the country’s powerful collection of intelligence agencies. And some former CBP officials are warning that this combination of border agents and spies could present an “Orwellian problem with law enforcement becoming both investigators and intelligence collectors.”

Sources familiar with the effort tell The Daily Beast that efforts within Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to join the Intelligence Community are significantly more advanced than those within ICE (The Daily Beast reported last week that ICE officials are also looking to enlist). A former senior DHS official said this effort is especially promising under the Trump administration.

This means that both ICE and Border Patrol would have full access to the nation's post-Patriot Act intelligence resources, to be used increasingly against people already in the country. 

Now to be fair, the Obama administration was already considering this, but ran into problems with civil liberties and Republicans refusing to take action on immigration reform.

Jeh Johnson, the secretary of DHS for the last three years of the Obama administration, told The Daily Beast he supported the change when he headed the Department. 

“I thought it was a pretty good idea, because what CBP has to offer and contribute to the IC is travel data,” he said.

As shaky as the Obama administration was on deportations and civil liberties at times the Trump regime on the other hand definitely doesn't care about civil liberties protections. If anything they are looking to make sure intelligence resources can be used to track down, say, undocumented immigrants or to profile everyone entering the country.

This would have been a pretty bad idea under Obama, but will be an abysmal abuse of government power under Trump.

Austerity Hysteria, Con't

Donald Trump's budget proposal for FY 2019 is less of a budget and more of an outline of how exactly to humiliate tens of millions of Americans, many of whom voted for the guy. 

The budget that President Trump proposed Monday takes a hard whack at the poorest Americans, slashing billions of dollars from food stamps, public health insurance and federal housing vouchers, while trying to tilt the programs in more conservative directions.

The spending plan reaches beyond the White House’s own power over the government social safety net and presumes lawmakers will overhaul long-standing entitlement programs for the poor in ways beyond what Congress so far has been willing to do.

The changes call on lawmakers to eliminate the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and transform the rest of that program into a system of capped payments to states; convert food assistance into a hybrid of commodity deliveries and traditional cash benefits; and expand requirements that low-income people work to qualify for federal assistance.

“We’re very encouraged by their approach to reforming the welfare state, both to taxpayers and the people on these programs,” said Akash Chougule, director of policy for the libertarian group Americans for Prosperity. “We’re encouraged by the president’s rhetoric and recent actions.”

Congress has final say over spending — but Monday’s budget proposal is seen as an important sign of Trump’s priorities.

Ahh, that good ol' Dickensian/Calvinist punishment system.  We never really got over it, you know. Only immoral people need government help, so Trump will make government help so awful that you'll magically fix your own problem.

Specifically, the Trump budget proposal would gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, by $17.2 billion in 2019 — equivalent to 22 percent of the program’s total cost last year — and implement a boxed food delivery program, a system that White House budget director Mick Mulvaney compared to Blue Apron.

The proposal would bring a fundamental change to a program that for the past 40 years has allowed recipients to use SNAP benefits at grocery stores as if they were cash. SNAP provides an average of $125 per month to 42.2 million Americans.

Under the full-scale redesign, the Agriculture Department would use a portion of those benefits to buy and deliver a package of U.S.-grown commodities — officially dubbed “America’s Harvest Box” — to recipients, using the government’s buying power to lower costs.

The deliveries of government-purchased foods would account for roughly half of the benefits for the vast majority of SNAP households.

The foods in the deliveries would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans, and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to USDA. The department estimates that it could supply these goods at roughly half the cost of retail, slashing the cost of SNAP while still feeding the hungry.

Advocates for the hungry said they are skeptical of the plan and unclear how it would work for people with specialized diets, or whether USDA would allot the same foods to, say, an elderly diabetic and a family with young children.

It would be a disaster, of course.  Reagan did this with cheese and milk back in the 80's in order to boost the profits of dairy farmers, and rather than just toss the stuff it ended up going to food stamp recipients whether they wanted it or needed it.  Trump now plans to do this with, well, everything.

Hey, we're already testing the program in Puerto Rico, right?  Why not take it national, eh?

It's funny that the party that wrecked health care in the US over the individual mandate raising insurance premiums on tens of millions, that still wages a near decade-long war to assure America has the God-given right to use incandescent light bulbs and screamed "tyranny!" at school lunch nutritional requirements now wants the federal government to literally choose what food millions of Americans eat and give it to them.

Some would call that socialism, you know.   Just saying.  But what do you expect from the brain trust that proposes $300 billion in cuts to infrastructure spending over ten years to turn it into $200 billion in tax incentives to "encourage" states to cough up $1.3 trillion in funds to rebuild federal highways and bridges, then has the balls to call it a "$1.5 trillion infrastructure spending plan"?

There's a lot of painful austerity in Trump's budget proposal, including the elimination of funding for PBS and NPR, huge cuts at HUD, State, the EPA, and massive cuts to Medicaid.  We fought most of those cuts off last year, and I'm betting the GOP won't try it again with midterms just months away, but if the Dems don't win back the House and/or Senate in November, it's going to be brutal austerity in 2019, I guarantee.

StupidiNews!

• South African President Jacob Zuma's fate will be decided today as his African National Congress party will decide whether or not to force Zuma to resign after a series of scandals.
• Among the biggest losers in Donald Trump's new budget proposal is the Department of Energy's office on renewable energy research, which would be cut by two-thirds.
• The Trump regime's full-blown global trade war is heating up as Monday saw Trump call for a "reciprocal tax" on any country, including US allies, that levies tariffs against US exports.
• Energy giant ExxonMobil is going after the states and organizations suing it over climate change, claiming a "vast conspiracy" by attorneys general and environmental groups.
• Iceland has become Europe's hub for Bitcoin-mining, where energy consumption from creating cryptocurrency will overtake that of residential use by the end of the year.

Last Call For Anybody And Everybody's Packing

Last night CBS's 60 Minutes sounded the alarm on the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would allow anyone with a concealed carry license in one state to use it anywhere in America.

Of all the political and cultural issues that divide red states from blue ones, none is more volatile than guns and who can carry them. 

Conservative rural states like Arizona and West Virginia allow almost anyone to carry a loaded firearm in public, while in urban states and big cities, it can be a felony. 

But a piece of legislation quietly churning its way through Congress may change all that by making gun permits more like driver's licenses, transportable across state lines. If you are allowed to carry a concealed weapon in your home state, you would be allowed to carry it in all of them. 

The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act has already sailed through the House of Representatives and has the full support of President Trump. It has roughly 40 co-sponsors in the Senate where a showdown is shaping up between the gun lobby and law enforcement over states' rights and the second amendment. 

This is the handgun counter at Van's Sporting Goods outside Jackson, Mississippi, a state with the fourth highest gun fatality rate in the country and some of the weakest gun laws. 

Pretty much anyone 18 years of age and not a convicted felon can carry one of these concealed weapons here in their pocket, their pants or their purse for self-defense against muggers, carjackers and other assailants. 

If the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act becomes law, they'll be able to carry them legally across state lines and onto the streets of any city in America.

The GOP and the gun lobby are hoping enough Senate Dems in red states will defect and get this past a filibuster.  There's a very good chance that this will happen and that this will soon become law. 

We'll see.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

As I told you Saturday, Rachel Brand, the number 3 at the DoJ tendered her resignation over the weekend.  I told you what it meant then:

Trump can search more carefully for somebody willing to fire Mueller now with Brand gone, that is if he doesn't already have somebody in mind. My guess is that Brand was asked if she would do it, or knew that she very soon would be, and decided to leave rather than be a part of it. Her departure is a thundering alarm that Trump is moving sooner rather than later on this.

Turns out I was exactly right.

The Justice Department's No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.

Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said. 

She will be leaving the Justice Department in the coming weeks to take a position with Walmart as the company's executive vice president of global governance and corporate secretary, a job change that had been in the works for some time, the sources said.

Imagine that.  Of course, the only way she would have been asked to oversee the Russian investigation into Trump was if Rod Rosenstein, the number 2 at DoJ and the man who appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was either recused or fired.

As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent, Senate-confirmed officials. 

Four of the 13 divisions overseen by the associate attorney general remain unfilled, including the civil rights division and the civil division, over one year into the Trump administration.

This is important too, as currently the Trump DoJ basically has no civil rights division, and no intention of prosecuting federal civil rights cases.  At all.  Regardless of the outcome of Mueller's probe, the damage Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have already done to civil rights in America is incalculable.

But that kind of obvious disdain for the law brings us back to the real reason Brand left: Trump's obstruction of justice continues daily.

Putting Them On ICE

The Trump regime continues its reign of terror towards the immigrant community in the US as the number of ICE non-criminal deportation arrests since Trump took office now number well into the tens of thousands.

A week after he won the election, President Trump promised that his administration would round up millions of immigrant gang members and drug dealers. And after he took office, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers surged 40 percent.

Officials at the agency commonly known as ICE praise Trump for putting teeth back into immigration enforcement, and they say their agency continues to prioritize national security threats and violent criminals, much as the Obama administration did.

But as ICE officers get wider latitude to determine whom they detain, the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.

Critics say ICE is increasingly grabbing at the lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants to meet the president’s unrealistic goals, replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.

ICE has not carried out mass roundups or major workplace raids under Trump, but nearly every week brings a contentious new arrest.  

The Washington Post noticed that too.  If ICE really wanted the maximum number of deportees, they would start with raiding workplaces.  They don't do that.  It's a bug, not a feature.  They look the other way on migrant farms and meat-packing plants because they are told to do so, so they target individuals instead.

We do hear stories of long-time residents of this country being rolled up by ICE and held for immediate deportation proceedings, mothers, doctors, respected businessmen, community figures, and activists.  But we're now going on 40,000 such arrests and there are so many stories that we'll never hear. 

A Virginia mother was sent back to El Salvador in June after her 11 years in the United States unraveled because of a traffic stop. A Connecticut man with an American-born wife and children and no criminal record was deported to Guatemala last week. And an immigration activist in New York, Ravi Ragbir, was detained in January in a case that brought ICE a scathing rebukefrom a federal judge.

“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust,” said U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, reading her opinion in court before ordering ICE to release Ragbir.

“We are not that country,” she said.

All apologies Judge Forrest, but we are very much "this country", a country that gave into hatred and bigotry like it has time and time again over its 400 year history as a colony and country, a country founded on slavery and pain, a country that elected a racist, white supremacist demagogue.

Yet again.

Immigrants whose only crime was living in the country illegally were largely left alone during the latter years of the Obama administration. But that policy has been scrapped.

Those facing deportation who show up for periodic “check-ins” with ICE to appeal for more time in the United States can no longer be confident that good behavior will spare them from detention. Once-routine appointments now can end with the immigrants in handcuffs.

More broadly, the Trump administration has given street-level ICE officers and field directors greater latitude to determine whom they arrest and under what conditions, breaking with the more selective enforcement approach of President Barack Obama’s second term.

Trump officials have likened this to taking “the shackles off,” and they say morale at ICE is up because its officers have regained the authority to detain anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

Officers are detaining suspects in courthouses more often, and ICE teams no longer shy from taking additional people into custody when they knock on doors to arrest a targeted person.

“What are we supposed to do?” said Matthew Albence, the top official in the agency’s immigration enforcement division, who described the administration’s goal as simply restoring the rule of law. If ICE fails to uphold its duties to enforce immigration laws, he added, “then the system has no integrity.”

Small government, non-intrusive federalism, "drown it in a bathtub" types sure like ICE, don't they?  Republicans sure like government's jackbooted thugs when they are doing their bidding to rid the country of those deemed undesirable.

Star Wreck: The Trump Generation

The country that first put a man on the moon 50 years ago will be completely out of the space exploration business in just a few years, and you can thank Trump for that travesty.

The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry. 

The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post. 

“The decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time — it is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,” the document states. “NASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.” 

In its budget request, to be released Monday, the administration would request $150 million in fiscal year 2019, with more in additional years “to enable the development and maturation of commercial entities and capabilities which will ensure that commercial successors to the ISS — potentially including elements of the ISS — are operational when they are needed.”

Don't expect any help from Republicans in NASA states like Texas or Florida, either.  They're definitely on board for "commercializing" the ISS.

The plan to privatize the station is likely to run into a wall of opposition, especially because the United States has spent nearly $100 billion to build and operate it. Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he hoped recent reports of NASA’s decision to end funding of the station “prove as unfounded as Bigfoot.” He said the decision was the result of “numskulls” at the Office of Management and Budget. 

“As a fiscal conservative, you know one of the dumbest things you can to is cancel programs after billions in investment when there is still serious usable life ahead,” he said. 

When asked about the possibility of a public-private partnership, he said, “I think all of us are open to reasonable proposals that are cost effective and that are utilizing the investments we made in a way that maximize their effectiveness."

Quite the fold there from Ted Cruz.  Of course he wants the ISS to continue and to use NASA mission control in Houston.  He just doesn't want taxpayers footing the bill.

And so China, the European Union, of course Russia, and even India will continue their national space programs while we turn over everything to Elon Musk and whoever follows him, and hope for the best.

Space isn't worth it if there's no immediate profit, I guess.

Sunday Long Read: Curing Mono

Jacksonville's long been the standing punchline of Florida, a city that tries so hard to be Miami or Tampa or even Atlanta, and instead ends up being, well, Jacksonville.  We're talking about a city that put a monorail in place thirty years ago and if you're wondering why Jacksonville isn't famous for it, well, you've discovered the problem.

But now Jacksonville is turning to automated shuttles that use the monorail track and proposed off-ramps to get people where they need to go, and if the plan works, Jacksonville might just be famous. For a good reason.

The Central Station monorail platform hangs above the streets of Jacksonville, Florida. The fareboxes, which haven’t accepted payment in almost six years, wear vinyl wrap with “SKYWAY IS FREE” stenciled in white block letters. Even at that price, the end of a recent morning rush finds only a handful of riders bothering to wait for the silver-and-blue trains that glide in every six minutes.

On a cool day in January, the wait might not be much of an impediment. But it’s too long during sweltering Florida summers, when air-conditioned monorail cars become an oasis, says Brad Thoburn, vice president of planning, development and innovation at the Jacksonville Transportation Authority. It’s part of the reason he believes the monorail, a failed relic of a future that never arrived, needs to be replaced by the next sweeping vision of urban transit: autonomous vehicles.

The Skyway was supposed to mature into a sleek system moving millions of riders each year from Jacksonville’s core to a historic district on the north side, what’s now a stadium for the city’s National Football League team to the east and beyond. But the monorail never left downtown after its 1989 debut or extended past a two-and-a-half mile track. Daily ridership hovers around 5,000, just 10 percent of initial projections.

Pulling down the elevated tracks or mothballing the system would trigger payback of tens of millions of dollars to the federal and state agencies that bankrolled most of the construction costs. Which is another reason why the JTA has pinned its hopes on driving robots.

The authority’s new five-year plan calls for off-ramps to be built at key points along the monorail route, allowing the self-driving shuttles down to reach the street in dedicated traffic lanes. That will make it more affordable for the stunted transit system to finally expand without erecting new tracks—and it would make Jacksonville one of the first cities to tie its transit fate so closely to automated vehicles.

In case the hopeful dynamic isn’t clear enough, Thoburn’s office is decorated with a version of the “Field of Dreams” movie poster that casts him as the main character, who hears a voice intoning, “If you build it, they will come.”

The automated shuttles, called EV10s, are the great hope for the future of the city's transportation.  The problem of course is that the technology isn't there yet.  But it will be soon.  And soon can't come quickly enough, as the existing monorail cars are falling apart and the city still has to get another 20 years out of their investment, or they'll owe the federal government tens of millions in penalties that the city doesn't have.

We'll see if Jacksonville can turn a failed bet into the transportation model of the future.

Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing

America crept closer to the fateful showdown over Robert Mueller this week as the number 3 official at the DoJ, Rachel Brand, announced her resignation. I agree with Vox's Alex Ward that this makes Trump's attempt to fire Special Counsel Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein a lot easier, as now Trump can appoint his own headhunter.

Here’s why: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is currently in charge of overseeing the Mueller probe. Rosenstein has said that he won’t fire Mueller without good cause.

But if Trump were to fire Rosenstein, or if he were to recuse himself from the investigation or quit outright, the responsibility for overseeing the probe would go to the next in line: Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.

Which means that whoever Trump picks to replace Brand could potentially end up in charge of the Mueller investigation. Technically, the next in line is Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who is now serving in Brand’s role in an acting capacity. But legal experts told me that Trump has the authority to name anyone he wants to replace Brand.

And here’s the scary thing: That person might follow Trump’s order to dismiss the special counsel.
That can only happen if Rosenstein no longer oversees Mueller — and that’s still a distinct possibility for three reasons.

First, Rosenstein could recuse himself from overseeing Mueller because he had a hand in firing former FBI Director James Comey. Mueller became the special counsel becauseTrump may have let go Comey go in order to obstruct the Russia investigation. So if Rosenstein recuses himself — legal experts, like Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare think he should — then Mueller’s boss becomes whomever Trump may soon name.

Second, Trump could simply fire Rosenstein — and there’s reason to think he might. Trump allies expected last week’s release of the memo from Rep. Devin Nunes would prompt Rosenstein’s dismissal. Trump has consistently made his displeasure with Rosensteinknown, at one point claiming he’s “a Democrat” even though Rosenstein is a lifelong Republican.

And finally, Rosenstein could resign if Trump ordered him to fire Mueller. Rosenstein has reiterated time and time again that he has yet to see any reason to fire Mueller. So if Trump does ask Rosenstein to let Mueller go — and Rosenstein declines — Trump could fire Rosenstein. And so, again, Trump’s hand-picked successor would oversee Mueller — and then possibly fire him.

Trump can search more carefully for somebody willing to fire Mueller now with Brand gone, that is if he doesn't already have somebody in mind.  My guess is that Brand was asked if she would do it, or knew that she very soon would be, and decided to leave rather than be a part of it.  Her departure is a thundering alarm that Trump is moving sooner rather than later on this.

Pay very, very close attention to whomever Trump appoints to fill Brand's shoes, because that person will be expected to swing the axe.

Israeli A Problem Now

Things just got very serious in Syria this weekend as Israel carried out a major air attack on a Syrian base after Israeli claims of an Iranian drone entering Israeli airspace from Syria.

Israel says it launched a “large-scale” aerial attack inside Syria on Saturday after one of its jets was downed under Syrian antiaircraft fire, in a series of cross-border incidents that threatened to destabilize the volatile region between the two countries.

Israel says the situation started with an Iranian drone crossing into its territory from Syria at around 4:30 a.m. It was shot down by an Israeli attack helicopter.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahran Qasemi, however, described the Israeli claim as “ridiculous.”

Israel later dispatched eight fighter jets to bomb the T4 military base near the Syrian city of Palmyra, from where it says the drone was dispatched and controlled. Syria responded with “substantial Syrian antiaircraft fire” under which two Israeli pilots ejected from their F-16, which crashed inside Israel, according to the Israeli military. One of the pilots was severely injured, it said.

“The Syrians are playing with fire that they are allowing the Iranians to attack Israel from their soil,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces. “The IDF is ready and capable to inflict a heavy price on anyone that attacks us. This is a severe attack and a breach of Israeli sovereignty perpetrated by Iran.”

There's more than a bit of "wag the dog" here as the bribery scandal closing in on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has reached the stage where indictments against him are imminent.

According to Israeli media reports, the police team investigating Netanyahu, nominally headed by Alsheikh, has concluded that Netanyahu should be indicted for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in "Case 1000," which involves the allegations that Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.

One of the businessmen is believed to be Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, an Israeli citizen for whom Netanyahu reportedly pressured then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry for a green card.The police have reportedly not made a firm recommendation regarding "Case 2000," in which Netanyahu is also suspected of having negotiated a quid pro quo with the publisher of Israel's most widely distributed tabloid newspaper. According to recordings held by the police, Netanyahu negotiated for favorable coverage in exchange for a law that would have weakened Israel Hayom, a free daily owned by Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Netanyahu is a central figure, but not a suspect, in "Case 3000," a police inquiry into Israel's questionable multibillion-dollar procurement of German-made naval vessels and submarines. Numerous close associates, including senior aides and his personal lawyer and cousin, have been questioned or arrested.

In a rare television appearance, Alsheikh, the police chief, said that his senior detectives had been pursued by "private investigators collecting information against police officers involved in ongoing investigations into the prime minister."

"We're not talking about a conspiratorial mind here," Alsheikh said, "these are facts." He said the private investigators had been hired by "powerful figures."

In response, the prime minister uploaded a Facebook post denouncing the police chief, who is a Netanyahu appointee. Netanyahu said he was shocked by the "outlandish and false claim," adding that "every decent person will ask himself how can people saying such outlandish things regarding the prime minister then question him objectively and be impartial when it is time to reach a decision about him?"

"A dark shadow has been cast over the police investigations and recommendations," Netanyahu added, calling for "an immediate and objective inquiry into the matter."

If this all sounds very familiar, like, say, a defiant Trump, there's a reason for that.

Netanyahu aides recently implied that he is likely to do what none of his predecessors has done: Remain in office even if indicted. Noting that Netanyahu is unlikely to resign "after what happened to Olmert," Rahat said that "by law, he can remain prime minister until he is convicted of a crime, and even then parliament has to vote him out."

Such a circumstance, he added, would cause an unprecedented legal crisis in Israel.

Indeed it would.  And less than 24 hours after it became clear Netanyahu was going to be indicted, we now have a major military escalation between Syria and Israel that could lead to open war.

Go figure.

Austerity Hysteria, Con't

The GOP austerity regime has real-life consequences in America, folks.  The GOP tax scam bill is going to remove trillions from state budgets over the next decade and states are going to be expected to pick up the tab. Should you want to see the future if the Republicans continue to control the House and Senate in 2019, you have to look no further than Oklahoma, now drowning in red ink to the point where lawmakers have gutted schools to the point where they are only open four days out of the week now.

FORTY miles from Tulsa, sometimes along unpaved roads, sits Wagoner High School, with its 650 pupils, championship-calibre football team and show barn—a seemingly ordinary small-town school. But unlike most high schools, Wagoner is closed on Mondays. The reason, a severe reduction in state funds, has pushed 90 other school districts in Oklahoma to do the same. Teacher pay is the third-lowest in the country and has triggered a statewide shortage, as teachers flee to neighbouring states like Arkansas and Texas or to private schools. “Most of our teachers work second jobs,” says Darlene Adair, Wagoner’s principal. “A lot of them work at Walmart on nights and weekends, or in local restaurants.” Ms Adair hopes that Walmart does not offer her teachers a full-time job, which would be a pay rise for many. 

The roots of the fiasco are not hard to determine. As in Oklahoma’s northern neighbour, Kansas, deep tax cuts have wrecked the state’s finances. During the shale boom, lawmakers gave a sweetheart deal to its oilmen, costing $470m in a single year, by slashing the gross production tax on horizontal drilling from 7% to 1%. North Dakota, by contrast, taxes production at 11.5%. The crash in global oil prices in 2014 did not help state coffers either. Oklahoma has also cut income taxes, first under Democrats desperate to maintain control over a state that was trending Republican, and then under Republicans, who swept to power anyway. Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, came to office pledging to eliminate the income tax altogether. Since 2008 general state funds for K-12 education in Oklahoma have been slashed by 28.2%—the biggest cut in the country. Property taxes, which might have made up the difference, are constitutionally limited. 

Other state agencies are broke, too. Highway patrolmen are told not to fill their petrol tanks to save money. Those caught drunk-driving are able to keep their licences because there are no bureaucrats to revoke them. Prisons are dangerously overcrowded, to the point that the state’s director of corrections publicly says that “something is going to pop”. But unlike Kansas, whose Republican legislature eventually rebelled and reversed the tax cuts over the governor’s veto, Oklahoma will find its troubling experiment much more difficult to undo. Because of a referendum passed in 1992, any bill that seeks to raise taxes must be approved by three-quarters of the legislature. 

No fact embarrasses Oklahomans more, or repels prospective businesses more, than the number of cash-strapped districts that have gone to four-day weeks. Yet even such a radical change may not help finances much. Paul Hill, a professor of education at the University of Washington, Bothell, estimates that the savings are “in the 1 or 2% range at most”. That sliver is still important to Kent Holbrook, superintendent of public schools in Inola (the self-styled “Hay Capital of the World”). “In my mind, that’s five or six teachers,” says Mr Holbrook. Already, from 2008 to 2016, he has lost 11 teachers from a corps that once numbered 100. He has also had to reduce Spanish classes and, for the tenth year running, delay buying new textbooks. 

This is what the Tea Party movement has wrought in red state Midwest: states that literally can't afford to keep schools open five days a week anymore and haven't been able to buy new textbooks in over a decade because it would take a 75% vote from both chambers in the state legislature to raise a dime of new taxes to pay for basic services.

And mysteriously, those tax cuts went to big oil who walked away with the money and left the people of Oklahoma holding the bag.

There are only budget cuts now.  And every year they get worse.  It's hard to imagine a state that has cut education spending over the last decade more than Kansas of Kentucky, but there Oklahoma is, a state where Wal-Mart employees now make more than the people who teach their kids.

They decided government was the problem, it was the enemy, it had to be destroyed.  Now they wonder who will keep the schools open, the roads open, put gas in State Patrol cars.

And they answer, very soon, will be "nobody".

Oklahoma is far from the only red state trapped and squeezed by Republicans until no more blood can come from the stone.  West Virginia's GOP governor, billionaire coal magnate Jim Justice, is following the lead of Kentucky and Indiana and wants to add work requirements to pretty much all government assistance programs with the goal of driving people off the rolls.

Months after rejecting a Kentucky-style work requirement for Medicaid in West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice (R) now seems to be moving in the opposite direction — with assistance from the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ally and an affiliate of the Koch-funded State Policy Network. 

The apparent switch is nothing new for Justice, who made a leap into politics when he ran for governor of West Virginia as a Democrat in 2016. Nine months after winning, Justice — the richest man in West Virginia and the state’s only billionaire — announced at a Trump rally that he was switching to the Republican party. 

Today, Justice’s Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) is pushing a series of bureaucratic barriers to public assistance, including: three-month time limits for unemployed and part-time workers receiving food assistance (SNAP); a $2,250 limit on cash and assets that would penalize families receiving food assistance for modest savings; and a hefty contract for a private corporation to determine the assets of every member of a recipient family. 

DHHR has already awarded Optum with a contract of $300 million over 10 years to verify eligibility for Temporary Assistance (income assistance for families with children), food assistance, Medicaid, and other programs — even as a bill that would create such a system is still under consideration in the state legislature. That legislation would incentivize the corporation to kick people off of these programs — requiring it to demonstrate greater savings than the cost of the contract in the first year. (A spokesperson for DHHR confirmed the 10-year contract with Optum worth more than $308 million, but denied that there is a savings requirement. The spokesperson said the state will “save approximately $55 million over 10 years while reducing its existing system cost.”) 

The DHHR’s own study suggests that strict time limits on food assistance for people who are unemployed or underemployed is flawed. Its pilot project in nine counties with the best local economies in the state terminated SNAP for more than 5,400 jobless people. The agency’s nearly 14,000 job referrals led to just 259 people gaining employment. According to the DHHR, “Our best data does not suggest that the program has had a significant impact on the employment figures for the [targeted] population in the 9 counties.” 

That didn’t come as a surprise to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy (WVCBP), which noted that the people most affected by the time limits tend to be “very poor and most have a high school education or less.” Unemployed and part-time workers terminated due to the limit typically have barriers to employment such as “a lack of transportation or driver’s license, mental or physical limitation, felony conviction, or were recently dismissed from a job.” 

What the pilot project did have a significant impact on was federal dollars leaving the state to the tune of $13 million due to reduced SNAP caseloads, and an increased demand for assistance at local food banks and pantries that the providers couldn’t keep pace with. 

“There was a 30 percent rise in meals served during the study,” said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach coordinator at the WVCBP. “You can see the exact point that people were thrown off SNAP — by July 2016 people had to be turned away by our churches, food banks, and missions. There is no reason to think it will do anything but get worse if we expand this policy.”

And remember, these austerity cuts to social programs are being made while the overall economy is good.  When it starts turning bad again, and the warning signs of another impending recession are already here, these programs won't be able to handle the need.

At that point, things are going to get very bad, very fast in America.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

A very weird Friday News Dump in the ongoing Russian investigation of Trump, today we learned that the CIA was trying to buy information from a Russian seller who (thanks to Ed Snowden!) had possession of NSA cybersecurity tools.  Instead, the Russian seller offered the CIA dirt on Trump, and they pulled the plug on the deal out of fear it was a setup.

After months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.

The cash, delivered in a suitcase to a Berlin hotel room in September, was intended as the first installment of a $1 million payout, according to American officials, the Russian and communications reviewed by The New York Times. The theft of the secret hacking tools had been devastating to the N.S.A., and the agency was struggling to get a full inventory of what was missing.

Several American intelligence officials said they made clear that they did not want the Trump material from the Russian — who was suspected of having murky ties to Russian intelligence and to Eastern European cybercriminals. He claimed the information would link the president and his associates to Russia. But instead of providing the hacking tools, the Russian produced unverified and possibly fabricated information involving Mr. Trump and others, including bank records, emails and purported Russian intelligence data.

The United States intelligence officials said they cut off the deal because they were wary of being entangled in a Russian operation to create discord inside the American government. They were also fearful of political fallout in Washington if they were seen to be buying scurrilous information on the president.

The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the negotiations with the Russian seller. The N.S.A., which produced the bulk of the hacking tools that the Americans sought to recover, said only that “all N.S.A. employees have a lifetime obligation to protect classified information.”

The negotiations in Europe last year were described by American and European intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a clandestine operation, and the Russian. The United States officials worked through an intermediary — an American businessman based in Germany — to preserve deniability. There were meetings in provincial German towns where John le Carré set his early spy novels, and data handoffs in five-star Berlin hotels. American intelligence agencies spent months tracking the Russian’s flights to Berlin, his rendezvous with a mistress in Vienna and his trips home to St. Petersburg, the officials said. 

The N.S.A. even used its official Twitter account nearly a dozen times to send coded messages to the Russian.

The episode ended earlier this year with American spies chasing the Russian out of Western Europe, warning him not to return if he valued his freedom, the American businessman said. The alleged Trump material was left with the American, who has secured it in Europe.

Good ol' fashioned spycraft, and nobody does it like the Russians.  The real issue is though that the CIA and the NSA ra screaming from info on Trump.  The setup excuse if convenient, the reality is that nobody wanted to be the guy who brought in dirt on a sitting chief executive, that's instant career death.

Information that harms Trump disappears.

President Trump blocked on Friday the release of a classified Democratic memo rebutting Republican claims that top federal law enforcement officials had abused their surveillance powers in spying on a former Trump campaign aide, raising the specter of a potential showdown with Congress.

Donald F. McGahn II, the president’s lawyer, said in a letter to the House Intelligence Committee that the memorandum “contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages.” He said the president would again consider the release of the memo to the public if the committee revised the memo to “mitigate the risks.”

Under the obscure rule invoked by the House Intelligence Committee to initiate the document’s release, the committee could choose to make those changes, or could decide whether to seek a vote of the full House of Representatives to try to override Mr. Trump’s decision.

Democrats are certain to be outraged by the action, given that last week the president declassified the contents of a rival Republican memo drafted by committee staff and drawn from the same underlying documents over the objections of his own Justice Department and F.B.I.

Mr. McGahn said Mr. Trump is “inclined to declassify” the Democratic memorandum and encouraged the committee to make the changes that he said the Department of Justice had identified as important for “national security and law enforcement interests.”

While many Republicans said their memo showed evidence of political bias present in the early stages of the Russia investigation, Mr. Trump went farther, claiming, incorrectly, that the Republican memo “totally vindicates” him from the investigation.

The full House can vote to release the memo.  My guess it won't even get a vote.  Down into the memory hole it goes, unless it's leaked, of course.

The General Needs To Go

Now that Steve Bannon is gone, the job of Donald Trump's enabler-in-chief has fallen to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.  As Vox's Dylan Matthews reminds us, there are several reasons why Kelly should have been booted from the job months ago.

I can’t tell you the exact moment it became clear that retired Gen. John F. Kelly had to resign his position as White House chief of staff.

Perhaps it was in October, when he lied and smeared Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL). Kelly claimed that during a dedication ceremony for a new FBI office in Miami, a ceremony where he and others were focused on the heroism of the two slain FBI agents after whom the office was named, Wilson “stood up there in all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building.”

Video of the event confirmed that Kelly was lying — Wilson didn’t take credit for getting the funding. She graciously extended credit to her colleagues, including Republican Reps. Carlos Curbelo and Mario Díaz-Balart, and devoted much of her speech to honoring the two agents for whom the office was named. Kelly was lying to smear her for criticizing President Trump — indeed, for criticizing Trump’s treatment of a war widow.

Compounding the issue was White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders telling reporters it was ”highly inappropriate” to call Kelly on his lies — because he’s a retired general. It was a shocking statement, one that undermined norms of civilian control of and oversight over the military. Kelly should have at least told the press he disagreed with Sanders, that he does not believe he is above scrutiny because of his military record. He did not.

Or maybe his time was up when he praised Robert E. Lee, who committed treason to defend the institution of slavery and the subjugation of black Americans, as an “honorable” man and blamed the Civil War on a “lack of compromise.” Or perhaps it was when he decried some DREAMers who failed to secure protection from deportation (in some cases because they feared that if they told the federal government they were undocumented, they could be deported) as “too lazy to get off their asses.” It was a shocking insult to more than a million Americans, who have lived here almost all their lives and contributed time and again to their communities and their nation.

But it became extremely, abundantly clear that Kelly had to go when he went to bat for White House staff secretary Rob Porter.

Let's be perfectly clear about the Porter story: neither Rob Porter nor John Kelly are the victims here. Porter's ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and  Jennifer Willoughby, were beaten, terrorized, abused, and irreparably harmed by this monster.  They came forward to stop this brutish lout from being involved in our nation's executive branch.

John Kelly knew about it for months and promoted Porter anyway, as did White House Chief Legal Counsel Don McGahn.

Kelly knew all of this. Both Holderness and Willoughby were interviewed by the FBI in January 2017 as part of the hiring process for Porter, and White House counsel Don McGahn learned of the allegations the same month. McGahn took no action, nor did he take any action when the ex-girlfriend contacted him in November. The FBI told the White House about the abuse in June 2017, and by the fall it was clear the allegations were preventing Porter from getting a security clearance.

“When McGahn informed Kelly this fall about the reason for the security clearance holdup, he agreed that Porter should remain and said he was surprised to learn that the 40-year-old had ex-wives,” the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Beth Reinhard report. “Kelly handed Porter more responsibilities to control the flow of information to the president.”

A few weeks ago, Kelly was informed by the FBI that they were recommending that Porter be denied full security clearance, and recommended the same about a number of other White House aides who, like Porter, had been working on interim clearances. “The White House chief-of-staff told confidants in recent weeks that he had decided to fire anyone who had been denied a clearance — but had yet to act on that plan before the Porter allegations were first reported this week,” Politico’s Eliana Johnson reports.

After all that, and even after the scandal broke in the news media, Kelly was still pushing within the White House to keep Porter on board. Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Kelly wanted Porter to “stay and fight.” Publicly, while Kelly said he was “shocked by the new allegations” and proclaimed, “There is no place for domestic violence in our society,” he reiterated, “I believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation.” When the scandal broke, he told the Daily Mail that Porter was “a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him.”

Again, these allegations against Porter were known from day one.  Not only was Porter hired, he was promoted to a sensitive position like White House Staff Secretary where he could read classified information without a security clearance.

And just think, there's dozens of other Trump staffers who should have security clearance but do not.

Just to top it all off, Porter was dating another member of Trump's staff, Hope Hicks. He was her boss.  And guess who Trump blames for this mess?

Hope Hicks. 

All of these clowns need to go, starting with Trump.

Budget Buster Blues

Well, if there was still any doubt out there that 2009-2017 was simply one long GOP exercise in punishing America for daring to elect a black president twice after Republicans simply forgot what all their complaints about the deficit and national debt were with a tax bill that will add $1.5 trillion in debt when we couldn't afford a jobs bill or a bridge bill or you know anything when Obama was in charge, this morning's budget bill proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The budget deal lawmakers have agreed to would increase discretionary spending above and beyond repeal of the sequester and the caps set in law under the Budget Control Act, in addition to a Christmas list of other items they desire. This deal comes with a hefty price tag of $320 billion over ten years according to the Congressional Budget Office, despite the fact that most of the deal is only temporary. It would push the deficit in 2019 clearly above $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion.

That $320 billion mostly reflects near-term costs, however. If temporary provisions in the bill were made permanent, the ultimate cost could increase to $1.7 trillion, or $2.1 trillion including interest, and increase debt to 105 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2027. Coming on the heels of the $1.5 trillion tax cut in December, this deal would be another huge blow to fiscal responsibility.

The largest expense in the budget deal is a plan to increase defense caps by $165 billion over two years and non-defense discretionary caps by $131 billion. But the legislation also allocates $89 billion of new budget authority on disaster relief and includes additional spending and tax cuts by repealing the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), extending tax measures that expired at the end of 2016, and funding community health centers.

These $419 billion of increases are offset by just $100 billion of spending cuts, with a third coming from extending the sequester on mandatory spending for an extra two years beyond 2025; another third from various changes and reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs; and the rest from selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, extending various customs and visa fees, and further limiting Federal Reserve remittances.

GOP think tanks are appalled.  They shouldn't be.  Dick Chaney famously said "Deficits don't matter" as long as the guy in charge isn't Obama.

We can afford trillion-dollar deficits as long as the money is going to corporations and the richest 0.1% I guess.