Another #MeToo Moment For America

A sobering reminder tonight that it's not just high-profile Republicans who have been exposed by reporting and the #MeToo movemnet, but multiple Democrats and Democratic party donors as well.  

Of course, Harvey Weinstein was the tip of the iceberg, and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken resigned in disgrace, but it seems overdue justice has now come for New York's Attorney General, Eric Schniederman.

At least four women have come forward detailing physical sexual assault by Schniederman. He claims it was consensual roleplay, but what the women coming forward to Ronan Farrow and the New Yorker are describing is nothing short of sadism, and there was nothing consensual about it.

Manning Barish says that she fell quickly for Schneiderman and was happy to be involved with someone who seemed to share her progressive idealism and enjoy her feistiness. Page Six chronicled the romance, calling her a “ravishing redhead” and noting that, at a fund-raiser, the television producer Norman Lear had introduced her as Schneiderman’s “bride-to-be.”

But Manning Barish began to see signs of controlling and abusive behavior. Soon after she started dating Schneiderman, he told her to remove a small tattoo from her wrist; it wasn’t appropriate, he said, if she were to become the wife of a politician. The process of having it removed was painful and expensive. In retrospect, she says, it was the first step in trying to control her body. “Taking a strong woman and tearing her to pieces is his jam,” she says.

About four weeks after they became physically involved, she says, Schneiderman grew violent. One night, they were in the bedroom of his Upper West Side apartment, still clothed but getting ready for bed, and lightly baiting each other. As she recalls it, he called her “a whore,” and she talked back. They had both been drinking, and her recollection of their conversation is blurry, but what happened next remains vivid. Schneiderman, she says, backed her up to the edge of his bed. “All of a sudden, he just slapped me, open-handed and with great force, across the face, landing the blow directly onto my ear,” Manning Barish says. “It was horrendous. It just came out of nowhere. My ear was ringing. I lost my balance and fell backward onto the bed. I sprang up, but at this point there was very little room between the bed and him. I got up to try to shove him back, or take a swing, and he pushed me back down. He then used his body weight to hold me down, and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad. I kicked. In every fibre, I felt I was being beaten by a man.”
She finally freed herself and got back on her feet. “I was crying and in shock,” she says. She recalls shouting, “Are you crazy?” To her astonishment, Schneiderman accused her of scratching him. At one point—she can’t remember if it was at this moment or in a later conversation—he told her, “You know, hitting an officer of the law is a felony.”

After the incident, Manning Barish left the apartment, telling him that she would never come back. “I want to make it absolutely clear,” she says. “This was under no circumstances a sex game gone wrong. This did not happen while we were having sex. I was fully dressed and remained that way. It was completely unexpected and shocking. I did not consent to physical assault.”

Again, two of the four women are 100% going on record with their identities to accuse Schneiderman, and their storeis are very similar.  Schnierderman would hit women because he believed they liked it.

Tanya Selvaratnam is the author of “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock,” which explores infertility issues; she is also an actor and a film producer, as well as a supporter of feminist and progressive social causes. She, too, is divorced. In 2016, she attended the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, where Schneiderman introduced himself to her. She says that their first encounter felt “like kismet.” They had both gone to Harvard: she as an undergraduate and a graduate student, he as a law student. She was impressed when he expressed an interest in meditation and Buddhism. They had both studied Chinese, and, when he asked, in Mandarin, if she spoke the language, she answered, “Wo shuo keshi bu tai liuli”—“Yes, but not fluently.”

They began dating, and appeared to be a happy couple. Selvaratnam all but lived in his apartment, attending political functions and dinners with his friends and donors, and brainstorming with him on speeches and projects. But, as she puts it, “it was a fairy tale that became a nightmare.” Although Schneiderman often doted on her, he demanded that she spend more and more time with him, and he began physically abusing her in bed. “The slaps started after we’d gotten to know each other,” she recalls. “It was at first as if he were testing me. Then it got stronger and harder.” Selvaratnam says, “It wasn’t consensual. This wasn’t sexual playacting. This was abusive, demeaning, threatening behavior.”

When Schneiderman was violent, he often made sexual demands. “He was obsessed with having a threesome, and said it was my job to find a woman,” she says. “He said he’d have nothing to look forward to if I didn’t, and would hit me until I agreed.” (She had no intention of having a threesome.) She recalls, “Sometimes, he’d tell me to call him Master, and he’d slap me until I did.” Selvaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, has dark skin, and she recalls that “he started calling me his ‘brown slave’ and demanding that I repeat that I was ‘his property.’ ”

The abuse escalated. Schneiderman not only slapped her across the face, often four or five times, back and forth, with his open hand; he also spat at her and choked her. “He was cutting off my ability to breathe,” she says. Eventually, she says, “we could rarely have sex without him beating me.” In her view, Schneiderman “is a misogynist and a sexual sadist.” She says that she often asked him to stop hurting her, and tried to push him away. At other times, she gave in, rationalizing that she could tolerate the violence if it happened only once a week or so during sex. But “the emotional and verbal abuse started increasing,” she says, and “the belittling and demeaning of me carried over into our nonsexual encounters.” He told her to get plastic surgery to remove scars on her torso that had resulted from an operation to remove cancerous tumors. He criticized her hair and said that she should get breast implants and buy different clothes. He mocked some of her friends as “ditzes,” and, when these women attended a birthday celebration for her, he demanded that she leave just as the cake was arriving. “I began to feel like I was in Hell,” she says.

This guy is an abuser, point blank.  If this is true, and there's every reason to believe it is, then he needs to go.  I don't care how much of a crusader for justice he is if he's an abusive law-breaking jackass who needs to cool his heels in prison for a while.  Nothing justifies this in the short or long run.

And as expected, he has resigned.

Schneiderman Resigns. pic.twitter.com/OVm2oXVxgg

— Laura Nahmias (@nahmias) May 8, 2018

Bye, Eric.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

There's no such thing as a truly "safe" suburban Republican House district anymore.  Increasingly, either there's a hefty challenge from the Democrats who are outraising you, a primary challenge from the right forcing you to split your resources, or both.  The heavily gerrymandered suburban Charlotte districts in North Carolina's are a good example.

Republican Rep. Ted Budd opened the calendar on his iPhone during a campaign day last week to reveal a jam-packed schedule — wake up at 4:55 a.m., breakfast with veterans, an opioid discussion in another county — and yet he was worried that it wasn’t enough.

“I’m getting nervous because of the white space I see,” said Budd, pointing to the few blank lines on the schedule.

Across the country, dozens of House Republicans who previously coasted to victory are for the first time facing credible and well-financed Democratic opponents — and working furiously to find a strategy for survival.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) delivered a stern message last month to the rank and file after a surprisingly narrow special election win in a reliably Republican Arizona district: Wake up, because Democrats are motivated.

Many newly vulnerable Republicans represent suburban communities such as Budd’s, where Donald Trump won in 2016 but has since lost popularity.

Budd is one of two GOP incumbents in this region of North Carolina being targeted by Democrats, with pollsters and independent handicappers saying the races could be competitive. 

The two GOP incumbents have adopted slightly different strategies for self-preservation, largely out of necessity.

While Budd has been able to focus on the general election by talking at times about how he has bucked his party, Rep. Robert Pittenger has been grappling with a bitter Republican challenge ahead of Tuesday’s primary election here that has led him to move to the right in ways likely to complicate his message to voters in the fall.

Democrats had largely ignored the districts in this decade after Republicans redrew the state’s congressional boundaries to their advantage. Budd’s district, which stretches from Democratic-leaning Greensboro to the northern suburbs of Charlotte, backed Trump by 9 percentage points. Voters in Pittenger’s district, which rolls from Charlotte nearly to the state’s coastline, supported the president by almost 12 points.

In 2016, Budd and Pittenger survived primaries, then sailed to victory over Democrats who raised less than $100,000. This election, Democrats recruited Kathy Manning, a philanthropist and longtime party donor who has raised $1.3 million to Budd’s $832,690. Dan McCready, a business executive and veteran, has raised $1.9 million to Pittenger’s $1.1 million.

Don't get me wrong, these are the districts that the GOP has to win in order to keep the House, and they know it.  But they're so scared at this point that like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they are starting to do things in swing districts like "Admit Obama was right".

Candidates rarely admit being wrong about anything.

It’s even more rare for a candidate in a Republican primary to say he was wrong and former President Barack Obama was right. But it happened during Saturday night’s Florida Family Policy Council dinnerwhen moderator Frank Luntz asked U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who’s running in a GOP primary for governor against Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, to provide an example of a time he’s changed his mind about something.

“Actually, I think the one time that I was wrong in the Congress was when we had the breakout of Ebola and I thought we’ve just got to shut everything down, we can’t take any risks,” DeSantis said of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and concerns about its spread to the U.S.

“Obama didn’t do that and I criticized him a lot for doing that. A lot of my Republican colleagues criticized him for doing that but, you know, I look back at it – it was handled well,” DeSantis said. “I was just wrong about that. I think that the way the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and some of the folks in government handled it was actually an example of government getting the job done. So I’m totally willing to just be honest and admit if I call it wrong. Just admit that you were wrong and people appreciate that. Because we’re going to make mistakes in this line of work, that’s just the bottom line.”

Damned if you run as a Trumpie, damned if you don't.

Collusion Of A Different Kind

Josh Marshall connects the dots on what looks like a orchestrated attempt by the Trump regime to use an Israeli private intelligence firm to dig up dirt on the previous administration's foreign policy people in order to discredit the Iran nuclear deal.

Yeah, that's a mouthful.  Yes, the evidence is there to support the theory.

We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.

Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation – not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.

Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.

Black Cube is now vehemently denying it was hired to spy on or run dirty tricks against Rhodes or Kahl. It’s not clear to me whether that denial came before or after Rozen uncovered the apparent link between the two cases. The denial seems to be unambiguous. But it is very hard to believe that two separate operations would stumble on the same name for a front operation. Conceivably, two different firms worked in concert with yet another firm that was running this front operation. But that’s a very far-fetched hypothetical in contrast to a very straightforward explanations. It was Black Cube working for Weinstein and the Trump aides and they’re simply lying about their involvement.

Ronan Farrow has a new piece up on Black Cube to reflect these developments.

A month before Norris received her e-mail, Rebecca Kahl, a former program officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of the former Obama Administration foreign-policy adviser Colin Kahl, had also received a puzzling e-mail. A woman named Adriana Gavrilo claimed to be the head of corporate social responsibility at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Gavrilo told Kahl that her firm was launching an initiative on education and that she wanted to meet to discuss the school that Kahl’s daughter attended, at which Kahl volunteered. Kahl referred Gavrilo to school staff members, but Gavrilo repeatedly refused to speak to anyone but her. Gavrilo’s firm would “not be able to make the necessary due diligence” on the school employees, she wrote. Rebecca Kahl, who said she “worried I’m strangely a target of some sort,” eventually stopped responding to Gavrilo.

Adriana Gavrilo and Eva Novak appear to be aliases. LinkedIn pages for both Gavrilo and Novak at one point showed a slim blond woman advertised as fluent in Serbian. Shortly after The New Yorker contacted Black Cube about this story, Novak’s LinkedIn page was deleted. The e-mail addresses listed by both women do not work. Calls to the phone number Novak listed went unanswered. The Web sites for Reuben Capital Partners and Shell Productions have been taken down, but both were bare-bones pages constructed through the free site-building tool Wix. The addresses for both companies led to shared office spaces; there is no evidence that Shell Productions or Reuben Capital Partners had ever operated there.

The documents show that Black Cube compiled detailed background profiles of several individuals, including Rhodes and Kahl, that featured their addresses, information on their family members, and even the makes of their cars. Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information about them, including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had worked closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one of the Obama staffers responsible for “unmasking” Trump transition officials who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an affair.

The campaign is strikingly similar to an operation that Black Cube ran on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, which was reported in The New Yorkerlast fall. One of Weinstein’s attorneys, David Boies, hired Black Cube to halt the publication of sexual-misconduct allegations against Weinstein. Black Cube operatives used false identities to track women with allegations, and also reporters seeking to expose the story. In May, 2017, a former Israel Defense Forces officer, who had emigrated to Israel from the former Yugoslavia, was working as an undercover agent for Black Cube. The woman contacted the actress Rose McGowan, claiming to work for Reuben Capital Partners but using the identity of a Diana Filip. Filip’s e-mails to McGowan displayed the same tactics as those in the e-mails sent to Norris and Kahl, and in some cases used almost identical language. (Filip also wrote to me from Reuben Capital Partners, and again used similar language.)

In a statement, Black Cube said, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work.” The statement also read, "Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal." The firm also said that it "always operates in full compliance of the law in every jurisdiction in which it conducts its work, following legal advice from the world’s leading law firms.”

In the Iran operation, as in its operation for Weinstein, Black Cube focused much of its work on reporters and other media figures, sometimes using agents who posed as journalists. The company compiled a list of more than thirty reporters who it believed were in touch with Obama Administration officials, annotated with instructions about how to seek negative information. Transcripts produced by Black Cube reveal that the firm secretly recorded a conversation between one of its agents and Trita Parsi, a Swedish-Iranian author. The conversation, which began as a general discussion of Iran policy, quickly devolved into questions about Rhodes, Kahl, and whether they had personally profited off of the Iran policy. “I’ve had the first part of the conversation five hundred times,” Parsi recalled, of his conversation with the agent, who claimed to be a reporter. “But then he started asking about personal financial interests, and that was more unusual. He was pushing very, very hard.”

The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran. (A Trump Administration spokesperson declined to comment to the Observer on the allegations.)

There are a lot of people who want to see the Iran deal go up in smoke, not just the Trump regime.  Remember, Rudy Giuliani flat out said this week that Trump was not only going to rip up the Iran deal anyway, but that Trump was also 100% committed to regime change in Iran.

It doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here, and what the end game is going to be.

We're heading for war with Iran at breakneck speed.

StupidiNews!

• Trump's nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, reportedly sought to withdraw her nomination on Friday because of the difficulty in getting her nomination through the Senate.
• House GOP Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes says he will hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress unless Sessions complies with subpoenas on wiretaps.
• Negotiations by Mexico, Canada, and the US on NAFTA enter a critical juncture this week as all three countries want a hand in revisions to the free trade agreement going forward.
• Iran, Israel, the EU, and US lawmakers are making their final pitches this week to Donald Trump as the deadline for decertifying the Iran nuclear deal is this Saturday.
• US brewery giant Anheuser-Busch is purchasing 800 hydrogen fuel cell trucks from Tesla competitor Nikola by 2025 for use along its busiest shipping routes.

The New Robber Barons

Amazon has done more than any other company to contribute to Seattle's affordable housing crisis.  Now the city is coming to collect Amazon's share, and as a result Amazon is now openly threatening to leave its new downtown building unfinished and take 7,000 jobs elsewhere if Seattle makes the company pay a dime.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced the company would halt the construction of a new building in downtown Seattle it was planning to build, jeopardizing some 7,000 jobs.

Why? Because the company opposes a tax being considered by the City Council.

The tax targets 500-600 businesses in the city that gross at least $20 million a year. The companies would be charged a “head tax” at $500 per employee. In 2021, the head tax would be replaced by a 0.7 percent payroll tax. The payroll tax would windup costing Amazon more than the initial head tax, considering Seattle Amazon employees are paid about an average of $110,000 per year, according to data from job-reviews site Glassdoor.

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head-tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” a spokesperson for Amazon told The Seattle Times.

The city council is expected to vote on the tax on May 14.

The city estimates the tax would raise an estimated $75 million annually, with Amazon paying roughly $20 million in 2019 and 2020. One might think for a company that pulled in $1.6 billion last quarter, they could afford to help out the city of Seattle and its most vulnerable residents, especially considering the extent to which Amazon’s presence in the city has exacerbated the housing crisis there.

Since 2010, when Amazon opened its first headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, housing costs have skyrocketed.

The median cost of a single-family home has more than doubled to $820,000, and rents have increased 64 percent, according to the Seattle Times. The average two-bedroom home in Seattle costs more than $2,000 per month. Only a third of condominiums in Seattle are priced below $500,000.

Amazon is willing to wreck everything over $20 million a year, and why shouldn't it be this obnoxious when dozens of cities are willing to destroy their local economies just to get Amazon's second corporate HQ?

Here's an idea.

Maybe stop shopping at Amazon?  Maybe cancel your Prime subscription?  Maybe let them know they already have more money than Walmart or Target ever had and that that they're too big to be allowed to continue?

Just a thought here in the feudal tech era.

Sunday Long Read: That Kansas Tornado Again

Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback is on his way out as the state's chief executive, but his legacy of economic destruction will continue for a generation as the combination of red state austerity policies, production-at-all-cost agriculture, and rural-to-urban population shift has left the state's farm counties all but completely broken. The New Food Economy's Corie Brown:

My journey began last December, with a journalistic lead—a story I felt sure would confirm my belief in the power of good food.

I’d learned that a group of nonprofits led by the Kansas Health Foundation had spent years studying the depopulation of rural Kansas. Their research had yielded one central finding: local food stores selling fresh produce help to stabilize struggling communities. Last November, the consortium unveiled an initiative implemented by Kansas State University that could deliver up to $10 million through a mix of grants and loans to support such stores (the majority of those dollars will be provided in loans). 

The spark for this initiative came from Marci Penner, a self-starter in Inman, Kansas (population 1,353) who publishes state guidebooks through her Kansas Sampler Foundation. After twice visiting each of the state’s 626 incorporated towns—half of which have fewer than 400 people—she has doggedly tracked the success of their food stores. In her view, a town’s ability to survive hinges on whether residents can buy healthy food there. 

Penner’s goal is to get urban Kansans out to rural areas to support these struggling communities. “No one knows how to wrap their heads around these little towns. We are invisible,” she told me. “It’s time someone said, ‘I’m from Kansas. I’m sticking up for this state.’” 

My bags were packed the minute I got off the phone. A story about Kansans determined to keep America’s breadbasket from becoming a food desert would write itself, I thought. But it was also an excuse to go back home. A fourth-generation Kansan on both sides, I found myself looking for a reason to return, and longing to drive through parts of the state I haven’t visited in decades. I could almost smell the Flint Hills wildflowers and see the wind’s invisible fingers moving through that ocean of bluestem grasses. 

With a list of Penner’s favorite stores in hand and my daughter along to share the journey, I flew home. 

We sensed the missing plot points in Penner’s folktale early on. Too many storeowners knew nothing about the grants. When we asked rural officials about the importance of grocery stores, they shrugged. Affordable housing, jobs, schools and hospitals topped their lists. Everyone wanted to talk about Kansas’s depopulation crisis, but a lack of healthy food, they all agreed, was not why people left. 

Reality snapped into focus the morning we drove into Downs (population 844). I’d been in a close friend’s wedding there in the 1980s, and the tiny, one-street downtown had teemed with life back then. My friend’s father owned, edited, and published the local newspaper. Another friend’s dad ran a successful real estate company. It took those girls forever to walk anywhere; everyone wanted to stop and chat. Downs had 1,324 residents in 1980—36 percent more than it has today. 

Thirty years later, the blank faces of empty storefronts line the main drag. Oddly, one of the last remaining businesses we found was a well-stocked grocery store, though no one was shopping inside the brightly lit aisles. When we asked where we could get a cup of coffee, the cashier directed us to the gas station outside of town on the two-lane state road. A pot of brown water on a quick mart hot plate was the best the town had to offer.
Everywhere, I felt the absence—of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it. 

That image—abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape—sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.

Some 90% of Kansas's land is devoted to production of food.  Farms are massive automated systems that produce hundreds of acres of grain.  There's nothing but the local economy, and the local economy is dying.  The closest Mickey D's or Starbucks is 60 miles away from Downs.

This is exactly why red states in particular need more of a safety net on some issues, especially basic infrastructure, than more urban blue states.  But Republican austerity policies have robbed them of even that.

Kansas has so super-specialized with agriculture that it's increasingly tough to get businesses to move there or people to stay.  In a sense it's like a desert.  The state doesn't need to serve Big Ag the way it does, but it does anyway.

It may not be the code cubes of Silicon Valley or the mines of West Virginia, but the farms of Kansas can be just as much a corporate profit sweatshop.

Last Call For Coaled Comfort

West Virginia's GOP Senate primary is Tuesday, and the state's Republicans are about to nominate a screamingly racist convicted miner-killing felon to lose to Democrat Joe Manchin in November.  Needless to say, a replay of Roy Moore in Alabama has the party in 100% panic mode.

There is growing concern among Republicans that Don Blankenship, a bombastic coal baron who has spent time in prison, is surging ahead of Tuesday’s West Virginia Senate primary — and a last-minute campaign is underway to stop him.

As the tight contest hurtles to a close, four Republicans said they’d reviewed polling conducted in recent days showing Blankenship, who spent a year in jail following the 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine that killed 29 workers, moving narrowly ahead of his more mainstream GOP rivals, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.

The Republicans cautioned that the surveys, designed to offer a snapshot of the race, were conducted over a brief period of time and may be overstating Blankenship’s support.

Still, Blankenship’s rivals and other Republicans are alarmed. Many are convinced that a Blankenship win, coming just months after the disastrous Alabama Senate race, would destroy the party’s prospects of defeating Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November.

Some Republicans involved in the race said they were hoping the White House would intervene ahead of the Tuesday primary, though it remains unclear whether it will do so.

On Thursday, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., sent out a tweet asking “the people of West Virginia to make a wise decision and reject Blankenship.”

“No more fumbles like Alabama,” he added. “We need to win in November.”

Republicans are sinking millions into the race to stop Blankenship, and it's not working.  It's not working at all, because Blankenship is putting his own fortune into winning, and he's running against the most hated man in the state:  Mitch McConnell.

National Republicans have sought to prevent Blankenship from winning the nomination. An outside group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Mountain Families PAC, has spent $1.3 million on a TV ad campaign targeting the former prisoner. On Friday afternoon, the group began a digital advertisement telling West Virginians, “Don’t vote Don Blankenship.”

The offensive bears similarities to the ultimately unsuccessful one the party launched against former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore in last year’s Alabama Senate race. Moore beat back the national GOP campaign against him and went on to lose the general election to Democrat Doug Jones.

Blankenship has responded in kind, launching a slash-and-burn campaign targeting McConnell.

His scorching attacks have veered into deeply personal, even racially-charged territory.

This week, Blankenship began airing a TV commercial labeling McConnell “Cocaine Mitch,” an apparent reference to a 2014 report that drugs were once found aboard a shipping vessel owned by the family of McConnell’s wife, Taiwanese-born Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Then, a few days later, Blankenship began airing another spot declaring that McConnell’s “China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.”

Believe me when I say Republican primary candidates are paying attention to Blankenship's attacks on McConnell as a path to victory.  It's a free-for-all and everyone's a target now.

The Handmaid's Tale Stage Spectacular

Iowa GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds has done what Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich won't do: signed into law a ridiculously unconstitutional "fetal heartbeat" abortion ban that will eliminate more than 90% of abortion procedures and will immediately be challenged in court.  Maureen Shaw explains:

Dubbed the “heartbeat bill,” the law will prohibit doctors from providing abortion care once a fetal heartbeat is detected. But heartbeats can be detected as early as six weeks after gestation (i.e., six weeks after a pregnant person’s last period began). Given that many women don’t learn they are pregnant until after that benchmark, Iowa's law effectively makes abortion illegal while depriving women of their bodily autonomy.

Indeed, women typically don’t find out they are pregnant until they are, on average, five to seven weeks along (for a number of reasons). The science is clear on this issue but I also know it to be true from personal experience. In my early 20s, I didn’t suspect I was pregnant until I was seven weeks along. I then had to make an appointment with my OB-GYN to confirm the pregnancy and get a referral for abortion care. Just that one appointment delayed my abortion by a week, putting me at 8 weeks gestation. By Iowa’s standards, I would have been ruled ineligible and deprived of a chance to choose the best option for my health and the health of my family.

According to the Iowa Department of Public Health, of the 3,722 abortions performed in the state in 2016, only 347, or 9 percent of them occurred before six weeks of pregnancy. Based on these numbers, the heartbeat bill will potentially force pregnancy upon the vast majority of pregnant women in Iowa who do not want to have a child.

Previous to this bill being signed, Iowa already imposed numerous restrictions on abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions after 20 weeks gestation are banned in the state unless the woman’s life is endangered, and public funding is available for abortion only in cases of life endangerment, rape, incest or fetal anomaly. The governor must approve each Medicaid-funded abortion. Women are also forced to undergo an ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion, and a pregnant minors’ parent or parents must be notified before the procedure can be performed.

In this context, Iowa’s heartbeat bill isn’t entirely unexpected. But it is unlikely to go into effect in light of judicial precedent. Federal courts have already thwarted similar attempts to ban abortions in Ohio, North Dakota and elsewhere.

So what’s the endgame here? As Robyn Marty has previously noted: “Anti-abortion groups no longer fear that the Supreme Court, given its current and future mix of justices, will uphold Roe if another case makes its way there.” In other words, they’re attempting to use this bill as a test case to get the issue in front of the Supreme Court, where they hope a post-Trump court will gut abortion rights nationwide.

Indeed, state Sen. Rick Bertrand (R-Sioux City) publicly declared as much during the bill’s floor debate: "Today we will begin this journey as Iowa becomes ground zero nationally for the life movement and the starting line back to the Supreme Court. I believe this bill will be the vehicle that will ultimately provide change and provide the opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade."

Bertrand’s “opportunity” is a dystopian nightmare for women. Imposing such a punitive law would decimate women’s self-determination by eliminating the ability to plan their families. And make no mistake: low-income and financially overburdened women have been shown to suffer the brunt of other, similar abortion bans (as those with financial resources are better able to travel out of state to seek abortion care).

We're one new Trump-appointed justice away from losing essentially every court-based civil rights, reproductive rights, and equality-based protection gained in the last 60 years.  The clock is not on our side, and if Trump gets re-elected, the game is essentially over.

I'm not sure what it's going to take in order to get people to realize this, but we're already well on the road to things being far too late.

A Fairbanks-Weather Friend

Now that GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that no legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller will ever get a vote in the Senate, let alone a Trump signature, useless "moderate Republicans" like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski are more than happy to sign on to an effort that requires nothing on their part.

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said this week that the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III should be allowed to proceed to its natural end and that she would support legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to protect the inquiry.

Murkowski, in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News-Miner editorial board Wednesday, also praised the FBI and said the agency has a "a serious and significant role" in the investigation.

"I have said all along that Mueller should be allowed to take this investigation wherever it takes him and his team," she said. "And I said that at the beginning and I repeat that, because I believe very, very firmly in that. And I think any efforts to thwart that are dangerous.

"If the investigation takes them to an additional turn that needs to be followed, I think this is what we're asking for when we ask for an independent investigation," she said. "That means that the president can't meddle. That means that the attorney general can't meddle. That means that the United States Senate can't meddle, and I just firmly believe that they should be able to take it where it goes."

Murkowski added, however, that she doesn't want to see the investigation go on indefinitely — "You know, this is going to be years and years and years" — and that the probe eventually must reach its natural end.

"And I think you have people of goodwill and good faith that are working to do just that," she said.

"I do not subscribe that this is some kind of a witch hunt," she said, referring to President Donald Trump's oft-repeated criticism of the special counsel inquiry into alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election and that now appears to have spread to other matters involving Trump and his associates.

Murkowski doesn't face Alaska voters until 2022, and by then Trump will either have his second term or will be gone, so either way Murkowski, like the rest of the GOP senators elected in 2016 along with Trump, doesn't have to do anything at all.

It's easy for Murkowski to say whatever she wants about Trump, but expecting her to do anything is ludicrous.  No Republican will lift a finger to stop Trump or to protect Mueller and/or Rod Rosenstein when the time comes, and it pisses me off to see Murkowski try to take credit for something that she'll never actually act upon.

All of the GOP has to go.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

As I've been warning people and especially Democrats, Trump fatigue has settled in and nobody gives a damn anymore about the banana republic we live in.  Trump at 40% approval no matter what happens is the new normal.

For ordinary Americans, observed Republican pollster Whit Ayres, "We've learned nothing new in the last 24 hours." Surveys taken before Rudy Giuliani disclosed that Trump paid the hush money – which he and attorney Michael Cohen previously denied – back up that assessment.

In a Quinnipiac University poll last month, six in 10 Americans said they believed Trump had an affair with Daniels and knew about the hush money. But seven in 10 said it wasn't important.

Quinnipiac has measured views of Trump's honesty since his term began. The proportion of Americans who consider him dishonest has never fallen below 54 percent.

Of two big targets he frequently accuses of lying, ex-FBI Director James Comey and the news media, Quinnipiac found that majorities trust them more than the president. Fully 55 percent overall – 16 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents, and 92 percent of Democrats – said Trump lacks "a sense of decency."

Those assessments have damaged the president and fellow Republicans. Fewer Americans approve his job performance than that of any recent predecessor at the same point, even with the economy humming and international affairs comparatively calm.

But views of Trump's character have largely lost their ability to change his current standing. As unflattering information keeps accumulating, the share of Americans approving of him has ticked up from slightly below, to slightly above, 40 percent.

After 16 months, Americans have grown accustomed to Trump in the White House. The longer he serves without economic downturn or war, the more inured they become to his behavior.

"People have concluded that he's a liar," explained Mark Mellman, a leading Democratic pollster. "He lies every day. People know it."

Dubya both got us into a decade-plus war and wrecked the economy in his first term and he still got a second.  Then he got us into another war and cratered the economy completely and we still almost handed the country over to John McCain and Moose Lady, and then tens of millions of white folks decided "OK, they had their black president, time to revert to status quo".

As long as there's gas in the tank to get Taylor to soccer practice and 2 for $20 dinner specials at Applebee's, America is largely content to let Trump be Trump.  "The Face-Eating Leopard Party isn't going to sic the leopards on me or anything, so whatever.  America sucks, what are ya gonna do, vote for the other corporate party?  That's a sucker's bet.  Just keep your head down and go into work on Monday like you always do."

Ten years ago when I started ZVTS, we cared.

That seems like a lifetime ago.

Three People Outside Jefferson City, Missouri, Con't

Missouri Republicans have possessed every opportunity to scrap impeachment proceedings against GOP Gov. Eric Greitens in the wake of his felony charges involving sexual assault and campaign finance violations, but they continue to play it straight given the overwhelming depth of evidence mounting against the embattled state chief executive.

Even with a more than two-thirds supermajority in both the state House and Senate, Missouri Republicans are now calling a special session later this month to impeach and possibly remove Greitens from office.

The Missouri General Assembly has taken the historic step of calling itself back into special session to decide whether to impeach Gov. Eric Greitens.

According to the petition signed by 138 House members and 29 senators — both more than the three-fourths required in each cahmber to call a special session — lawmakers will consider the findings and recommendations of a House committee investigating Greitens, “including, but not limited to disciplinary actions against Gov. Eric R. Greitens.”

The special session would begin at 6:30 p.m. on May 18, immediately after the legislature adjourns its regular session for the year. It will mark the first time in Missouri history that lawmakers have called a special session themselves instead of relying on the governor to do so.

House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, first proposed a special session last month after a special House committee investigating Greitens released a report detailing allegations of abuse, blackmail and sexual coercion made by a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015.

"Today's actions ensure there will be a conclusion to this process," Richardson said, later adding: "This path is not the one I would have chosen for Missourians or for my colleagues. I've hoped from the beginning of this process that the committee would find no wrongdoing. ... Unfortunately, this is where the facts led. We will not avoid doing what is right, just because it's hard."

House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City, agreed with Richardson.

"This is a necessary step," she said. "We have to make sure we do this right, and the best way to do that is to give the committee time to complete the investigation, and if they see fit, to file articles of impeachment."

She said some of her fellow Democrats refused to sign because they wanted impeachment to start immediately. Others thought impeachment should wait until after Greitens' criminal trial, which starts May 14.

Impeaching the governor would take 82 votes in the House. The Senate would then appoint seven judges to conduct a trial. If five agree he should be removed from office, Lt. Gov. Mike Parson would take over. Parson would serve until his term ends in early 2021.

This isn't like Bill Clinton's impeachment and trial 20 years ago, done by an opposition party to railroad a popular president.  This is Greitens's own party going to the unprecedented lengths of pledging to call a special session of the legislature to consider impeachment of a sitting governor.  They could have easily run out the clock on the investigation, they could have easily scrapped the investigation and waited for the courts to deal with it, they could have done precisely nothing and there wouldn't have been a thing Democrats in the state could have done in response.

That tell me that the evidence presented to the state legislature has been so overwhelmingly against Greitens that there's no question an impeachment vote is coming.  Remember, calling that special session without the governor requires meeting the ludicrously high bar of three-quarters of both chambers, and they are publicly proclaiming that they have that level of support.

Greitens should resign immediately.  In all seriousness, he should hang it up. 

He is done.  Not only will he be near certainly impeached, he will be more than likely removed from office in disgrace.

I don't know if the guy can take a hint, but it's over.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder has done tremendous damage to the state in eight years, and Democrats are trying to win the state back, but in the Trump Era, anything goes.  Ahead of an open primary season for both parties with voters going to the polls in August, right-wing Republicans are already attacking Democrats as terrorists in a state with a growing Muslim population.

The Michigan gubernatorial race took an ugly turn last week, when a Republican contender accused a Democratic candidate of being part of a “civilizational jihad” to take over America.

The Republican, state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, stands by his accusation that former Detroit health director Abdul El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Just one of Colbeck’s Republican rivals condemned the remarks; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Colbeck backer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

What El-Sayed is going through happens to nearly every Muslim-American in public life: They face baseless questions about their patriotism and then are left in a no-win situation. If they deny the charges, they risk giving them credence. But if they ignore them, they might get even more traction.

“We have to spend the bulk of our time disproving negatives: ‘Prove that you’re not a radical Islamist. Prove that you’re not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Prove that you’re not trying to implement Sharia,’” said Wajahat Ali, a Muslim-American writer and co-author of “Fear Inc.,” a 2011 study of networks of anti-Muslim bigotry.

It’s a phenomenon that Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim-American civil rights group, calls a “type of neo-McCarthyism.”

If elected, El-Sayed, a 33-year-old physician, would be the country’s first Muslim governor. And there is no evidence that he has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But thanks to Colbeck and the amplification he received on conservative talk radio, the allegations already show signs of staying power.

El-Sayed graduated with honors from the University of Michigan, where his classmates and teachers picked him to deliver the 2007 commencement speech. The remarks, peppered with inside-campus jokes, showcased an early flair for public speaking.

He was also vice president of the Muslim Students Association, which Colbeck believes shows El-Sayed has sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, just because they both have the word “Muslim” in them doesn’t mean they’re the same.

Unfortunately, that distinction doesn't matter to as many Michiganders as it should.  Rampant Islamophobia in the GOP in the Trump era is no surprise, it's what they want to push, the racism and hatred cards.

Both Colbeck and El-Sayed are long shots, the frontrunners are the state's current GOP Attorney General Bill Schuette, and the former Democratic state Senate minority leader, Gretchen Whitmer.

Both of them have significant competition however, Schuette from Snyder's Lt. Governor, Brian Calley, and Whitmer from pharmaceutical entrepreneur Shri Thanedar.  Where this all goes, we'll see, but with redistricting on the line in 2020, Democrats need as many 2018 gubernatorial victories as they can get.

StupidiNews!

• Hawaii's famous Mt. Kilauea has erupted, hundreds have been evacuated from two nearby housing subdivisions as lava, ash and gas approached residential areas late Thursday.
• Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to work up plans for troop reductions in South Korea, Trump has said in the past that the US should withdraw troops from the Korean peninsula.
• Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has concluded a trade delegation to Beijing without any major breakthroughs as trade relations between China and the US continue to worsen.
• Walmart will buy a 75% stake in India's biggest online retailer, Flipkart, for $15 billion as the US retail giant prepares to go head-to-head with Amazon in Asia.
• California public health officials are confirming at least one person has died from E. coli-tainted Romaine lettuce grown in Arizona.

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

Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues to connect the dots, and the people those dots represent ought to be really scared.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is focusing intensely on alleged interactions between former top Trump campaign official Rick Gates and political operative Roger Stone, one of President Donald Trump's closest confidants, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. 

Stone, a longtime advisor to Trump, is apparently one of the top subjects of the Mueller investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, sources told CNBC on condition of anonymity. 

The questions have been largely about what was discussed at meetings, including dinners, between Stone and Gates, before and during the campaign, said the sources, who have knowledge of the substance of the recent interviews.

In February, Gates pleaded guilty to two counts stemming from the Russia investigation, and he is cooperating with Mueller's probe. 

The new developments indicate that Mueller's team is interested in Stone beyond his interactions with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign. 

An attorney for Stone, Robert Buschel, did not deny the relationship between his client and Gates, but sought to downplay its importance. 

"Roger Stone did not have any substantive or meaningful interaction with Rick Gates during or leading up to the 2016 campaign," Buschel told CNBC in a statement. 

An attorney for Gates declined to comment. The special counsel's office declined to comment. 

The link between Gates and Stone goes back to their work at what had been one of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington, which was founded by Stone along with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The special counsel's probe has yielded two indictments against Manafort, who is accused of several crimes, including bank fraud and conspiracy against the United States.

I've been wondering when Roger Stone would find himself in Mueller's direct crosshairs, and it seems we have our answer.  Don't be surprised if Stone is Mueller's next target, because as with the weeks before the Manafort and Flynn indictments, the grand jury subpoena game is heating up rapidly.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday filed a request for 70 blank subpoenas in the Virginia court presiding over one of two criminal proceedings involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. 

The two-page filing doesn’t offer much in the way of details, but each subpoena orders the recipient to appear at the federal courthouse in Alexandria on July 10 at 10 a.m. to testify at Manafort’s trial on charges stemming from Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 

Although Manafort faces no charges related to the Trump campaign, he is accused in cases filed both in Alexandria, Virginia and Washington, D.C. of hiding the work he did for and the money he made from a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. 

In Virginia, he is also accused of concealing foreign bank accounts, falsifying his income taxes and failing to report foreign bank accounts. 

In Washington, Manafort faces counts of conspiracy to launder more than $30 million, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent.

May brings the spring flowers and the seeds of justice.

The Great Wall Bean Ball Downfall

Trump's trade war with China has its first major casualty, and it's America's soybean exporters here in Ohio and other farm states.

The world’s biggest oilseed processor just confirmed one of the soybean market’s biggest fears: China has essentially stopped buying U.S. supplies amid the brewing trade war. 

“Whatever they’re buying is non-U.S.,” Bunge Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Soren Schroder said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “They’re buying beans in Canada, in Brazil, mostly Brazil, but very deliberately not buying anything from the U.S.” 

In a move that caught many in U.S. agriculture by surprise, China last month announced planned tariffs on American shipments of soybeans. As the market waited for the measure to take effect, there was some hope among traders and shippers alike that relations between the nations could ease in the meantime and the trade flow would continue. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least for now, according to Bunge.

It’s “very clear” that the trade tensions have already stopped China from buying U.S. supplies, Schroder said. “How long that will last, who knows? But so long as there is this big cloud of uncertainty, that’s likely to continue.”

Soybeans are a billion dollar crop in Ohio.  Lot of farmers here depend on those exports and China is by far the largest buyer.  Now they have stopped buying.

Gonna be a fun November around here.