Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin is throwing in the towel on his Medicaid dental and vision cuts after massive outrage from the hundreds of thousands of people who lost coverage and a defeat in federal court.

In a surprise reversal, Kentucky officials have announced the state will rescind Medicaid cuts that eliminated dental, vision and non-emergency transportation services for nearly 400,000 Kentuckians.

In a statement released late Thursday, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services announced that "we have begun the process to reinstate vision and dental coverage, as well as non-emergency transportation services."

The statement provided no explanation for reversing cuts officials had insisted were necessary as recently as Wednesday in testimony before a state legislative committee.

It came shortly after the Courier Journal reported sources had said the administration of Gov. Matt Bevin was working on an announcement that the cuts were being rescinded.

Advocates were delighted with the prospect that dental benefits would be restored.

"That is such good news," said Jennifer Hasch, manager of dental services for the Shawnee Christian Healthcare Center in West Louisville. "I think people are going to be thrilled. I think it's weight lifted for our office, both for our patient population and our team."

State Rep. Joni Jenkins, a Shively Democrat, who had criticized the governor for cutting the benefits, said she welcomes the news.

"I'm very pleased if that's true," she said.

Sources told the Courier Journal that the state plans to reinstate the benefits by Aug. 1, but will make them retroactive to July 1, so people can visit the dentist or eye doctor during July and the provider can bill Medicaid for the services. The sources asked not to be identified, saying they were not authorized to comment.

The abrupt cuts effective July 1 created an uproar across Kentucky, catching patients and providers off guard, causing the most disruption in dental services. Dentists were forced to turn away hundreds of patients who had lost benefits overnight, many suffering from pain from severe infection and dental abscesses.

While health advocates say all three services cut—dental, vision and transportation are important—the loss of dental services were most critical because of the very poor dental health of some Kentuckians and the fact that dental abscesses and infection can be life-threatening.

Needless to say, the local news coverage over the last couple of weeks has been brutal.  The state's top health official, Health and Family Services Cabinet Secretary Adam Meier, blew his stack in an angry letter to Kentucky Democrats blaming them and the Louisville Courier-Journal coverage of the cuts for "false information".

It's funny, because Bevin's health care reforms and been nothing but disaster after disaster, with the Kynect elimination and its replacement with the awful benefind system, an online benefits portal so badly designed that tens of thousands lost benefits that they qualified for.  Now these cuts have been rolled back because Republicans are getting crushed politically, and Bevin won't admit that, but it's true.

This is good for now, but I can't help but think that Bevin will try again.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As I said yesterday, there's plenty of evidence that Trump is going along with Putin because his ego won't allow him to admit the Russians helped him, and that he likes Putin and his autocracy, something he imagines he can have here in America.  But that doesn't mean that the evidence that Putin has compromising material on Trump should be dismissed either, as they aren't mutually exclusive, and besides, the NY Times dropped a bombshell last night that heavily favors the theory that both conditions are true.

Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

I've long suspected that Trump was briefed on the Russian attacks at some point during the transition before he was sworn in or soon after, but the story gives us an exact date (January 6, 2017) and includes the fact that Trump was outright told, using intelligence from the crown jewels of specific CIA methods and means themselves as evidence, that Putin ordered these attacks as well.

America got a nice chunk of that briefing as an unclassified version was released to the public that day.  I wrote about it on January 7th last year, and how Trump supporters immediately dismissed it on January 8.

That hasn't changed.  What did change was that the question of "What did Trump know and when did he know it?" has been definitively answered. 

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

Again, Trump was outright told by America's top intelligence officers that the Russians hacked the Clinton campaign with the intent of damaging her chances in the 2016 presidential contest, and that they were working with WikiLeaks.  Trump was also told of the Steele Dossier.  Finally, Trump was told the exact case behind why the US intelligence community believed Putin gave these orders.

Since we now know when the briefing was, we now know that Trump's guilty-looking response came the same day.

After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.

Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very aggressive.”

For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.

Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new president soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election.

Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election interference.

Former Obama DNI James Clapper is confirming that briefing happened this morning. And let's keep in mind that instead of supporting the finding and cooperating, Trump immediately chose to attack the people who told him Putin was behind the hacking, and to mislead America about it even before he took office two weeks later.  Just a week after that briefing was held, GOP Sen. Richard Burr opened up the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the Russian attacks.

It was also the same time period that heavy suspicion started falling on Michael Flynn, then still Trump's incoming National Security Adviser, for his multiple phone calls to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on the day then President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in December 2016.

So what does all this mean?  Whenever Trump has publicly gone after the US intelligence community, they have fired back with a pretty solid leak precisely laying out why Trump is full of horseshit on the matter.  This time is similar, but now the stakes are high enough after Trump's performance in Helsinki that they are willing to put specific information like this out in the open in order to refute Trump's latest lies.

There's no doubt left that Trump knew Putin was behind the attacks and the propaganda.  And immediately, Trump started lying about it to the American public.

I'd like to know when Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were told of this, especially McConnell.  McConnell doesn't get nearly enough flack for blocking any efforts to make this a public bipartisan statement before the election.

But there's now no question that Trump knew.  Does it matter, however?  As I've said, it'll only matter if Trump's hold on his cult can be broken.  There's no evidence that this will ever happen, even now.

79% of Republicans approve of Trump's summit disaster.  85% still say the Russian investigation is a distraction.  And these people will go out in November and pull the lever for Republicans and demand that Congress protect "our leader".  CBS News found similar numbers, with 68% of Republicans approving of Trump's Helsinki performance, and in fact 42% saying that they simply believe that US intelligence agencies are lying about the entire Russia investigation.  Expect that figure to go up dramatically and soon.

Any Republican who speaks out now will be crucified on national television and none of them want to be that martyr, because they crave power more than patriotism.  Trump is already parroting Russian talking points that all Democrats and any right-wing critics must want an open war with Russia.  Tens of millions of Republican voters will agree and demand continued congressional GOP cowardice, and they will get it.

And we will continue to be doomed until that wall breaks, if it ever does.  But never forget, Trump knew.  Which means all the Republican leadership knew too, and they went along 100%.

StupidiNews!

• California's state Supreme Court has blocked a ballot measure that would split the state into three separate states over questions regarding the validity of collected ballot signatures.
• Donald Trump is again proposing separate bilateral trade deals with Mexico and Canada, putting the future of NAFTA in doubt as Mexico's new president has signaled that he wants an agreement.
• Trump's nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraniger, faces a Senate confirmation hearing today amid questions over her qualifications from both parties.
• The EU is expected to announce a new list of retaliatory tariffs on US goods ahead of trade talks in DC next week between EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Trump.
• The FDA is coming out against the term "milk" being used in conjunction with "non-lactation" products like soy, almond, and coconut milk in a move long-sought by US dairy farmers.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

If you're wondering what Putin got out of Monday's Helsinki meeting with his star employee Donald Trump, the answer is delicious, delicious real estate that will suddenly become available in the Balkans.

President Trump, who rattled U.S. allies at a NATO meeting last week, voiced concern in a television interview broadcast Tuesday night that sending troops from the alliance to defend an “aggressive” Monte­negro could result in World War III. 

Trump was asked about Monte­negro, which joined NATO last year and has a population smaller than the District of Columbia, during a Fox News interview with host Tucker Carlson. 

Carlson pressed Trump on the purpose of the alliance, which was created in 1949 to protect the United States, Canada and a host of Western European nations from Soviet incursion. The organization calls for member nations to come to the aid of any ally that is attacked. 

“Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” Carlson asked in the interview, which was recorded Monday following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in Helsinki.

“I understand what you’re saying, I’ve asked the same question,” Trump responded. “You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. … They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III. But that’s the way it was set up. Don’t forget, I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago.”

Understand that this is Trump, a day after coming back from a two-hour closed door meeting with Russia's president, now saying that he doesn't believe America should answer its Article V NATO responsibilities in case a NATO country is say, I don't know, annexed by Moscow or something.  You know, no big deal, right?

Also, this is the same day Trump came back from Finland after meeting Putin and said that he looks forward to working with Russia militarily.

Russia announced it was ready to pursue agreements reached by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump "in the sphere of international security," though the White House and Pentagon would not confirm any agreements had been made or offer any details. 

Trump and Putin met for about two hours during their summit in Helsinki with only translators present. It is still not clear what the two men discussed or agreed to during their meeting. 

"The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is ready for practical implementation of the agreements reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in the sphere of international security achieved at the Helsinki summit," Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian military spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday. 

The Russian military "is ready to intensify contacts with the US colleagues in the General Staff and other available channels to discuss the extension of the START treaty, cooperation in Syria, as well as other issues of ensuring military security," Konashenkov said. 

The National Security Council would not confirm what Trump had agreed to in the one-on-one with Putin. A spokesman for the NSC told CNN on Tuesday that they were still "reviewing the discussion."

Russians are all ready to jump into this agreement with Trump, but we don't know what's in it.  The NSC doesn't even know, because nobody told them.  Trump didn't tell anybody, it seems.

So once again, we have Trump saying "screw NATO" and "Here's our new military agreement with Russia".  You don't have to be a think tank fellow to see the implications here, especially when you factor in Russia's little adventure in taking Crimea from Ukraine, which everyone seems to have accepted as geopolitical fact now.

So yeah, if you're wondering what Putin is getting out of this?  A whole row of green lights from America.  And our response?  Well, the Washington Post is certainly outraged, but as long as Trump's approval ratings among Republicans remains at the 85-90% level it is now, nothing will change.  maybe that means Mueller drops a nuke, maybe that means the GOP gets clobbered in the midterms so badly that they turn on him, but most likely this leads to Mueller being fired and the fight that follows.

We'll see.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Last weekend I talked about the plan by the House GOP Freedom Caucus to bring impeachment proceedings against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Those articles of impeachment were supposed to come to the House floor as early as Monday, and were supposed to give Donald Trump the cover he needed to fire Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whom Rosenstein appointed.

But that was before Trump's disastrous performance in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin, a debacle so bad that even Republicans are now starting to realize just how far gone Trump is down the "useful idiot to Russia" path, and suddenly that impeachment maneuver against Rosenstein looks like the aiding and abetting of a foreign asset that it is.

A long-simmering rift between Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump’s top Hill allies is starting to boil over as both sides fight over an effort to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

The Wisconsin Republican and retiring House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) have stifled conservatives’ push in recent weeks to impeach Rosenstein, who oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian contacts with Trump's 2016 campaign.

Gowdy scoffed at the suggestion on national television Sunday. And Ryan — who has long sought to avoid such confrontations with the Justice Department — told reporters Tuesday morning that DOJ is “now coming into compliance” with congressional subpoenas as part of lawmakers’ scrutiny into alleged FBI bias against Trump.

But those comments drew a swift rebuke from conservative Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who are leading the impeachment campaign and argue that Rosenstein is slow-walking their oversight of the FBI. Meadows told reporters Tuesday morning that Ryan appeared misinformed about what Justice has and has not turned over.

"I can tell you that I guess the speaker’s staff is not fully informing him of what DOJ’s actually complying with,” Meadows said.

Meadows also noted that the House had already adopted a resolution giving the Justice Department until July 6 to turn over the remaining documents that lawmakers have requested. While Ryan has said those documents are being handed over, Meadows said that’s hogwash.

“We’re still waiting on tens of thousands… of documents that many of the people here today have been advocating for a long time,” Meadows said. “How long do we have to wait?”

The sniping follows Trump's widely criticized summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which has led even loyal Republicans to question his judgment. Ryan allies and top Republicans thought the bipartisan outcry over Trump’s refusal to accept his own intelligence community's conclusions — that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — would shift attention away from their own internecine procedural gripes.

Indeed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say it has bolstered the importance of Mueller's probe, which led to last week’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee.

But Trump’s supporters on Capitol Hill are vowing to keep up the pressure on Rosenstein and are prepping an increasingly aggressive push against him for what they claim is his resistance to turning over documents connected to the FBI's Russia probe.

"All options are still on the table," said Jordan when asked about the prospect of impeaching Rosenstein. The Freedom Caucus co-founder argued that “we have caught them hiding information from us [and] redacting information that should not have been redacted.”

He added: “If that is not a sufficient reason to move forward [with impeachment], particularly when they are not in compliance with the resolution that was passed by the full House of Representatives two weeks ago, I do not know what is. … All options are still on the table.”

So the plan has run into a buzzsaw.  House Freedom Caucus members still plan to push forward, but they can't without Ryan.  Oh, and there's still the little matter of Jim Jordan still being in the House at all as calls for his resignation over his role in Ohio State's wrestling sexual abuse scandal when he was assistant coach for the team are getting very very loud.

As long as Ryan and Gowdy continue to block the Freedom Caucus's impeachment circus, the plan is off.  It's possible that Trump could fire Rosenstein and Mueller at any time, yes, but the last several days shows us there are at least some limits to how far the GOP is willing to follow Trump off an obvious cliff.

At least, it shows that limits are self-imposed by cowardice, and that Republicans are still capable of being more afraid of voters and public sentiment than they are of Trump.  Even for a split-second, that's an improvement.

But in the near-term, the reality of Trump's overwhelming approval by GOP voters will reassert itself, and the Cult of Trump will continue, and eventually, he will make his move on Mueller.  After all, attacking Mueller is the main midterm strategy of the GOP.

Headed into a election that’s expected to favor Democrats, a top GOP Senate strategist says Republicans are counting on President Donald Trump’s media dominance to turn out their voters in November — and drown out opponents’ messaging. 

If successful, Republicans could pick up as many as four Senate seats this November, even as the left swamps their candidates in fundraising and enthusiasm, GOP operative Josh Holmes told Beyond the Bubble on Monday. 

“Everybody thinks that President Trump is some kind of drag on the Republican Party, [when] in this case, he’s just the essential ingredient,” said Holmes, who’s helped engineer his party’s Senate strategy for the past 16 years as a chief aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. 

“What the president is doing by continuing to discuss the investigation [into allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russia] and the quote-unquote ‘witch hunt,’ particularly on prime time Fox [News], is doing more to mobilize base voters than any legislative issue we’ve seen,” added Holmes.

It may be delayed for a bit by the Helsinki debacle, but it's still coming.  Keeping Mueller around as a boogeyman has paid off so far for Trump and the GOP, but eventually Mueller's going to hit pay dirt, and when that happens, the real fight will begin.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

GQ political reporter Julia Ioffe argues that Monday's summit debacle proves the Sword of Damocles that Putin is dangling over Donald Trump's head isn't a pee tape or blackmail, but the results of the 2016 presidential election itself.

Donald Trump today described his campaign as “brilliant,” but those of us who were there remember it for what it was: lurching, volatile, scraping the bottom of the barrel for even remotely competent staff. As we now know, the campaign, in the form of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, was willing to take all the help it could get. The trickle of indictments from Robert Mueller make it increasingly difficult to believe that there's no there there, that the Russians didn't meddle, that the Trump campaign didn't know about it, let alone actively welcome it, that all this stolen information just happened to coincide with Trump's statements and the campaign's ad buys and didn't change any votes.

Of course, Trump denies it now. It's hard to imagine even a politician less thin-skinned and prideful than him saying, essentially, “Yes, you're right. My victory was illegitimate, and therefore so is my presidency.” There is no other way to frame this: This is, and has always been, about the legitimacy of his presidency. And no one, especially not a sitting president who values the idea of himself above all else, would cede that ground.

And of course Putin denies it. Going into the summit, friends in the White House pool and TV hosts asked what Putin would do to Trump in their meeting. Would he try to intimidate him, like he did by bringing his black Labrador Konni to his meetings with the notoriously dog-phobic Angela Merkel? Would he push on all those financial ties Trump's sons have bragged about over the years? Of course not. In the end, the only approach that works with Trump is flattery. Trump wants Boris Johnson to be prime minster of England not just because he likes his position on Brexit, but because “he has said very nice things about me.” He likes Putin not just because he's an authoritarian Trump clearly wants to emulate, but because he believes Putin called him a “genius.” (The actual word used, “colorful,” was more of a backhanded compliment, but Putin wisely let the mistranslation stand.) And if Putin were smart, which he clearly is, he would have flattered Trump exactly the way he needed to be in their tête-à-tête: by echoing his denials. Of course we didn't interfere, Donald. You won fair and square. You did it all by your genius self.

I was always skeptical of the idea that Putin had kompromat on Trump that was something akin to the rumored pee-pee tape for two reasons. First, because the operative element in blackmail is shame, and as we saw with his reaction to another embarrassing tape, the one from Access Hollywood, Trump is un-blackmailable on that front. I also assumed that Trump would lash out at anyone who tried to pressure him openly: Do this, or we release the tape. No one puts Trump in a corner.

What didn't occur to me was the most obvious option, the one we saw revealed in Helsinki. When Putin was asked if he had compromising materials on Trump, Trump interjected and said, “I have to say, if they had it, it would have been out long ago.” And it’s true. It’s been out for ages, since the October 2016 warning by the intelligence community, then the January 2017 report from the Director of National Intelligence, then the drip-drip-drip of revelations in the press, and indictment after Mueller indictment, the last installment coming just three days before the Helsinki presser. Trump was right. It is out there.

The kompromat is the election result itself, and Trump is lashing out at the people who are trying to get him to do something on its basis: the press, the Democrats, the intelligence community, Robert Mueller, and Trump's own Department of Justice. We are the ones saying, Do this or else. And Trump is, predictably, lashing out. The only person, it seems, who knows how to use the blackmail to his advantage is Putin. True to the intelligence training he spoke about today, Putin knows his subject and his supple psychology, the nooks and crannies of his insecurities and obsessions. Why threaten him when you can get him to do your bidding with simple flattery: Of course we didn't interfere, Donald. You won fair and square. You did it all by your genius self.

It's a solid theory, for sure. Trump is doing Putin's budding because anything else would be an admission that he cheated and had help, that he didn't win on his own, and that he doesn't deserve it, that he's nothing more than a sham. His ego can't handle it.

That's all true, of course.  Trump has always been a sham, but now he's trapped in his own grift forever, and so are the Republicans around him and the voters who fell for the long con.  They will never, ever come clean on this, but it would destroy them for all time.  They would go down as the greatest villains in modern history, the dupes, the suckers, and the goats.

They flocked to Trump because they were terrified that America was passing them by.  Admitting they were willing participants in the con, because the best cons always make you want to believe in them, you see, that would end them.  They would lose everything, and they would deserve to lose everything.

Remember, Trump never thought he was going to win.  But he did, and he did it with help from Putin.  So now he's along for the ride, and Putin is driving.  We're all passengers now.

So they will play along until we disabuse of them of the notion that the con can continue.

StupidiNews!

• At least three people are dead after a midair collision between two small planes flying near Miami-Dade International Airport, the two planes were presumed to be pilot training flights.
• California firefighters are battling a blaze near Yosemite National Park, the Ferguson Fire has already scorched 20 square miles across steep terrain, making it difficult to combat.
• A six-story apartment building in New Delhi has collapsed into a neighboring building, killing at least three and injuring several as rescue workers are searching through the rubble.
• Google faces a $5 billion fine from EU antitrust regulators over Android mobile apps, more fines could be on the way as a separate antitrust probe into Google's online advertising platform continues.
• Support for a House bill to restore net neutrality rules continues to grow as the first Republican has signed on, Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado has joined 176 Democrats in demanding a floor vote.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Some mixed news in the latest PRRI poll on Americans' views on voting ahead of the 2018 midterms, but it's certainly better news than this time four years ago.

At this stage in the 2018 election cycle, half (50%) of Americans report that they are absolutely certain to vote in the upcoming midterm election, while 16% say they will probably vote. Roughly one-third (32%) of the public give themselves no better than a 50-50 chance of voting, including 12% who say they are definitely not voting. 

At the same time in 2014, a remarkably similar number of Americans reported they were committed to voting. About half (51%) of the public said they were absolutely certain to vote in the 2014 midterm election. 

Republicans and Democrats are about equally likely to say they are sure to vote this year (59% vs. 56%). In 2014, Republicans held a considerable edge. More than two-thirds (68%) of Republicans, compared to only about half (51%) of Democrats, said they were absolutely certain to vote in 2014. 

The generation gap in reported voting intent is massive. Only 28% of young adults say they are absolutely certain they will vote in the 2018 election compared to 74% of seniors. 

Notably, white (56%) and black (52%) Americans are about equally likely to say they are absolutely certain to vote this year. Fewer than one-third (31%) of Hispanic Americans report being absolutely certain about casting a ballot in the coming election. There are sizable differences between white Americans by education level. More than two-thirds (68%) of white Americans with a four-year college degree are absolutely certain they will vote, compared to fewer than half (49%) of those without a four-year college education. 

However, black Americans are more likely than white Americans to say their close friends are planning on voting in the 2018 congressional election. More than seven in ten black Americans say all of their friends (27%) or most of their friends (45%) will be voting in the coming election. A majority of white Americans report that all (10%) or most (46%) of their friends will be voting. Fewer than half of Hispanic Americans report that all (12%) or most (29%) of their friends will be voting.

The good news is that 50% turnout with another third saying 50-50 that they'd vote in a midterm election would be phenomenal for the Democrats and a tsunami for Team Blue.

The bad news is that these numbers were similar to 2014, and turnout four years ago was the worst midterm showing since WWII at 36%.  A whole lot of people in this poll are dirty liars who won't vote, tens of millions of them.

Still, Republicans have the advantage here.  The real issue: only 28% of young adults say they are certain to vote.  If a third or more of them are lying too, then November is going to be rather disappointing.   It depends on which America shows up to the polls.

We'll see.  I have to believe that Americans are going to vote in four months, because if we don't, we're done.

Bless Your Cinnamon Roll Heart, Ruth Marcus

Bless WaPo columnist Ruth Marcus's little heart, she is a cinnamon roll that is too pure for this world to actually have a job like hers in the Trump era.

Everyone who works for President Trump: Quit now. Save your souls. Save your honor, such as it is. Save your reputation, such as it remains. Russia attacked our democracy. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly, and did so again with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that he doesn’t care and won’t defend his country. 

If you work for this man and you call yourself a patriot, it is time for you to go. 

This may sound excessive, even irresponsible. Indeed, for months I have agonized over the question of public service in the age of Trump. 

Of course, as a general matter, it is better to have more grown-ups around Trump, mitigating his worst impulses, providing wisdom born of experience to counter his ignorance and petulance. 

But that assessment assumes facts not in evidence: that Trump is educable or containable. Actually, it contravenes the available evidence. There is none that Trump has done anything but what Trump wants to do. Monday’s news conference made that clear. 

Extreme times call for extreme measures, and these are the extreme-est of times.

The problem of course is that the people Trump has surrounded himself with, and the GOP that enabled his perfidy for the last 18+ months, are just as soulless and as hateful as Trump is, and they're more than happy to remain in the service of Trump's stated political policies because they believe, rightly so in nearly all cases, that they are going to be absolutely fine and they won't lose a wink of sleep over it either.

If they do get fired or quit, they'll just go to some think tank or DC lobbyist firm or law firm or sinecure and they'll happily keep on serving the GOP's all-American brand of bigotry and white nationalism.  Even guys like Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort are going to be fine in the end.  (Well, okay, maybe not Manafort, Mueller has a surprise for him apparently.)

The larger problem is that the 60 million plus people who voted for Trump are okay with his racism, and they'll remain okay with it.  If the Russians helped Trump stop "that stupid Clinton bitch" then they can't be all that bad, can they?  They'll excuse that just like they excuse everything else he's done, and his support among Republicans will remain close to 90% like it always will.

I appreciate Marcus's sentiment, but as I've said for years now, Trump is the symptom of a broken, cancerous, hateful GOP and the tens of millions of angry bigots that it serves.  His rise was inevitable.  Nobody's going to resign over this.  We're going to have to take power from them and drive the regime out.

That conflict is also inevitable, and it's time we steeled ourselves and prepare to face it rather than engaging in wishful thinking dreaming of the day the people who voluntarily decided to work for Trump in the first place suddenly developing a conscience where the gaping void in their souls are currently.

Power is never surrendered voluntarily.

Saving America From Trump's State TV

Under investigation by the FCC's inspector general for being too close to the Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to buy dozens of Tribune Media-owned local TV stations, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has apparently had to scrap the deal by sending it for "further review", an effective death knell for the deal.

Sinclair Broadcast Group's acquisition of Tribune Media Company has run into a major roadblock at the Federal Communications Commission.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he won't approve the Sinclair/Tribune acquisition as it's currently structured, saying Sinclair's plans for divested stations would violate the law. Pai is recommending that the merger be reviewed by an administrative law judge, a move that could ultimately kill the deal.

Pai's decisions came after months of pressure from Democratic lawmakers, consumer advocacy groups, and industry lobby groups. Pai has been repeatedly accused of making regulatory changes that benefit Sinclair; the FCC's inspector general in February agreed to investigate whether Pai has improperly coordinated with Sinclair on rule changes.

Pai's FCC previously rolled back broadcast TV station ownership limits, a move that at the time gave Sinclair a better chance of buying more stations. But Pai's statement today said that the FCC can't approve Sinclair's plan for Tribune:

The evidence we've received suggests that certain station divestitures that have been proposed to the FCC would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law. When the FCC confronts disputed issues like these, the Communications Act does not allow it to approve a transaction. Instead, the law requires the FCC to designate the transaction for a hearing in order to get to the bottom of those disputed issues. For these reasons, I have shared with my colleagues a draft order that would designate issues involving certain proposed divestitures for a hearing in front of an administrative law judge.

Pai's statement did not say which station divestitures would break the law. Reuters reported that the draft order says, "Sinclair's actions here potentially involve deception" in its application to acquire Tribune and divest WGN, a TV station in Chicago. The draft order also said that "this question of misconduct" bears not just on the WGN transaction but also on the entire merger application, Reuters wrote.

Critics of the merger say it could raise TV prices for consumers and reduce viewpoint diversity in local news. Sinclair also needs Justice Department approval of the deal.

I've talked multiple times about how Sinclair Broadcasting Group is Trump's state media controlling a surprisingly large amount of local news stattions across the country.  With the acquisition of Tribune's forty-plus stations, Sinclair would far and away be the largest single owner of local broadcast TV stations in America.

But now that deal is in serious trouble.  However, that also means that the scores of stations that Sinclair currently owns will continue to broadcast Trump propaganda, and while the deal may be delayed, I won't honestly believe the deal is dead until Sinclair and Tribune both drop their merger plans.

It's definitely a win for now, but the reality is a six months or a year from now, this deal may quietly go through, especially if the Republicans still control the House and/or Senate.

StupidiNews!

• In an interview with FOX News, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to justify the hack of DNC emails in 2016 by saying that "every single grain" of the leaked emails were true.
• A Trump-appointed federal judge has sided with the Trump regime in a case allowing the government to shift Title X family planning funding to faith-based and abstinence-based organizations.
• Alabama GOP Rep. Martha Roby faces a runoff primary fight today against former Democrat Bobby Bright after Roby called Donald Trump's 2016 admission of sexual assault "unacceptable".
• Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin now says most tax-exempt "social welfare groups" no longer have to disclose donors to the IRS ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
• The Department of Energy is only now admitting that a March 2017 incident where two officials left radioactive cesium and plutonium in a rental SUV that was broken into and the material stolen.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Whatever scintilla of a doubt that somehow had not been crushed into atoms that Donald Trump was not fully compromised and conducting US foreign policy at the behest of one Vladimir Putin was annihilated this morning in Helsinki at the joint press conference following Trump's two-hour private meeting with his Russian supervisor.

Asked whether he believes his own intelligence agencies, which say that Russia interfered in the 2016 United States election, or Mr. Putin, who denies it, Mr. Trump refused to say, but he expressed doubt about whether Russia was to blame. 

Mr. Trump raised the matter of Russian electoral meddling, the two leaders said at a news conference after their meetings, and Mr. Putin reiterated his denial of Russian involvement. 

Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, and other American intelligence officials “said they think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” 

But when asked directly whom he believes, Mr. Trump changed the subject to misconduct by Democrats during the campaign. 

The president’s ambivalence, after the indictments of Russian intelligence agents for the election hacking, and after the findings of congressional committees, represents a remarkable divergence between Mr. Trump and the American national security apparatus. 

Mr. Putin said: “President Trump mentioned the so-called interference of Russia in the American elections. I had to reiterate things I said several times: that the Russian state has never interfered, and is not going to interfere, in internal American affairs, including the election process.” 

He offered to have Russian intelligence agencies work with their American counterparts to get to the bottom of the matter.

“I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in our elections,” Mr. Trump said. “I felt this was a matter best discussed in person. President Putin may very well want to address it, and very strongly, because he feels very strongly about it, and he has an interesting idea.”

To recap: Trump went to Finland to meet the leader of a country that did untold damage to our electoral process, shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said "I don't believe you did it" and not only did he not confront Putin about the 2016 election hacking of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party, he publicly sided with Putin in front of him over America's entire intelligence community.

Needless to say, the unprecedented and historical damage from today will reverberate for decades.  Germany, arguably our most important ally in the EU and NATO right now, with a $4 trillion economy, has all but given up on the US coming to its senses.

Germany’s foreign minister said on Monday Europe could not rely on Donald Trump and needed to close ranks after the U.S. president called the European Union a “foe” with regard to trade. 

We can no longer completely rely on the White House,” Heiko Maas told the Funke newspaper group. “To maintain our partnership with the USA we must readjust it. The first clear consequence can only be that we need to align ourselves even more closely in Europe.” 

He added: “Europe must not let itself be divided however sharp the verbal attacks and absurd the tweets may be.”

For Berlin to admit this on the same day as this summit is staggering.  The NATO alliance is crumbling before our eyes.  Both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel should resign in protest over this, along with the US Ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

None of them will however.  The reality is that Trump is so weak that he can't accept that he didn't win without Russian help and everyone knows it, so on we will go with this farce until something happens that's just too much for us to take and we shut him down.

Meanwhile, while all this was happening, there was yet another arrest and indictment in the Mueller investigation to greet Trump when he arrives back in the states on charges of being an unregistered foreign agent.

A Russian woman who tried to broker a pair of secret meetings between candidate Donald J. Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, during the 2016 presidential campaign, was charged Monday and accused of carrying out a secret Russian effort to influence American politics. 

The Justice Department said in court documents that the woman, Mariia Butina, worked to establish “back channel” lines of communication with American politicians. “These lines could be used by the Russian Federation to penetrate the U.S. national decision-making apparatus to advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.” 

Ms. Butina, whose first name is more commonly spelled Maria, twice tried to set up a meetings between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin in 2016. The charges announced Monday do not name Mr. Trump but they make clear that Ms. Butina’s overtures were part of a Russian intelligence operation.

The affidavit that goes along with this arrest is astonishing.

I understand the argument that the 12 Russian GRU agents indicted on Friday will never see the inside of a US courtroom, but Maria Butina is under federal arrest right now and she was arranging meetings to influence politicians in our nation's capital.

Again, this is Mueller laying out Americans working with Russian agents with then intent of influencing US politics.  It's a bad, bad look for US Person 1 and US Person 2 here, and I'm willing to bet cash money that one or both of these American citizens were part of the Trump campaign at the time.  there's also no doubt that the Russian Official is Butina's boss, our old friend and Russian gun aficionado Alexander Torshin.

Oh, and speaking of working for the Russians:

Hi, NRA. Howsit going over there?  You guys doing OK?  Cause US Person 1 sounds like they might be former NRA President and Moonie Times opinion page editor David Keene, or possibly even the most recent NRA president, Wayne LaPierre.

The Washington Post believes Person 1 is GOP consultant Paul Erickson, who was the fixer for the proposed meeting between Donald Trump, Butina, and Torshin at the 2016 NRA Convention in Louisville, while Casey Michel at Think Progress believes Person 2 is George O'Neill Jr., a Rockerfeller heir who has been big in GOP circles and threw quite a dinner that included Butina, Torshin, and Erickson.

I wouldn't hold your breath for the sanity part, as Trump as the GOP are in too deep, but we still ostensibly have an election in November that could go a long way in restoring sanity to our country.  But as Charlie Pierce notes, that may be far too late.  Republican senators could stop Trump now if they wanted.

The fact is that there is only one constitutional method by which this renegade presidency* can be stifled before the November midterm elections—and it needs to be reined in as quickly as possible. The only available option is to have two or three Republican senators announce that, hereafter, they will caucus and vote with the Democratic minority between now and November. 

It is clear that nobody can control the president*. Impeachment has to begin in the House of Representatives, and, at the moment, the House is a barn full of maniacs and its speaker is an invertebrate life-form who can’t keep woodchucks from eating his car. The Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill are very limited, institutionally, in what they can do. The people in general have to wait until this fall to make their feelings known, and that through a compromised system of national elections.

They will do nothing, of course.  They are compromised just as much as Trump is, and they know it.

We are being sold out in real time, guys.  Putin made it clear what Trump's marching orders are.  We'll only find out when it's far past time we could have done anything about it.

Trump's War On Women, Con't

Slate's Christina Cauterucci makes the case that Trump's inhumane migrant family separation policy is absolutely tied to his monstrous disregard for reproductive rights, and that the goal has always been punishing women as a deterrence and control mechanism.

The Trump administration and Trump’s surrogates have proved callous to the pain of the children and parents they’ve been dividing up and shipping all over the country. (Listen, if you haven’t already, to former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski groaning “womp, womp“ when informed that a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome had been separated from her parents.) No plea for humanity rang true to the dozens of people behind the “zero tolerance” border policy—not the medical argument that the trauma could harm these children for the rest of their livesand reverberate for generations, not the human-rights argument that people seeking asylum shouldn’t be treated like criminals, not the family-values argument that parents and children should be kept together whenever possible. To justify the policy, Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen invoked the same simplistic rationale. People crossing the border are breaking immigration laws. People who break laws get jailed. People who get jailed lose their kids. 

The inaccuracies in this line of reasoning aside—for one, people seeking asylum aren’t breaking any laws—it was a useful bit of evidence that Trump and his cronies view children, and the pain they can cause their parents, as a disciplinary tool. For this administration, the cruelty of the family-separation policy was its primary selling point. In order for the policy to serve as a deterrent, it needed to be so inhumane that potential migrants would be scared into staying home despite the risk of extreme danger. (The fact that migrants haven’t been deterred from crossing the border demonstrates just how horrific the violence is in many parts of Central America.) The fact that children would suffer was a feature of the policy, not an unfortunate side effect. 

Deterrence is also a key element of the right wing’s philosophy on contraception and abortion. Some anti-abortion activists argue that permitting women to terminate their pregnancies encourages wanton behavior—specifically noncommittal, unprotected sex. In this sense, the prospect of forced pregnancy and childbirth, and the physical and/or emotional pain that goes with them, is meant as a punishment for the crime of promiscuity. 

Denying women abortions isn’t, as anti-abortion advocates often claim, just about saving the lives of unborn children. It’s also about imposing a moral judgment on women for having sex. Pro-lifers tend to frame childbirth as a consequence any sexually active single woman should be ready to assume. The phrase abortion on demand, a popular encapsulation of the presumed position of the pro-choice set, suggests that certain women, by virtue of their reasons or circumstances, deserve abortions more than others. Many, but not all, right-wing politicians make room within their anti-abortion frameworks for exceptions in cases of rape and incest. Their thinking goes something like this: A woman who was raped had no ability to prevent her pregnancy. Every other woman who gets pregnant bears the responsibility for doing so, and their bodies must suffer for failing to accept that responsibility, even if it means bringing a child into a family who is unable or unwilling to properly care for it. 

Consigning a woman to pregnancy and childbirth against her will is not a physically neutral act. It is corporeal punishment with lasting bodily impact. A woman who gives birth is 14 timesmore likely to die during or after labor than to die from complications of a legal abortion. Pregnancy, labor, and recovery all carry with them the inevitability of discomfort and, to varying degrees, pain. When the state forces a woman to give birth, it is extracting pain as a physical penalty—a price no cisgender man who has sex for nonprocreative purposes will ever have to pay. During his presidential campaign, Trump envisioned a world in which women who assert control over their own bodies would also have to pay a price. If Roe v. Wade were to fall, he told Chris Matthews, there would need “to be some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions—an “if she breaks a law, she must pay the price” philosophy that echoes the administration’s justification for family separation.

This has been the GOP goal for decades now, but Trump's personal animosity towards women, African-Americans, Latinx and Hispanic Americans, and LGBTQ Americans I think goes back to Trump's treatment by President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner.  Donald Trump has never, ever forgiven Barack Obama for publicly embarrassing him seven years ago and Trump swore revenge not only on Obama, but Clinton, Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

He's wanted to punish the Obama coalition for years.  He's now been given the chance to do exactly that, and the first 18 months of his term has been utter rancor against Obama voters, seeking our destruction and surrender at his feet.

But Cauterucci is absolutely correct: Trump is all about punishing women in the most brutal fashion imaginable, with their own bodies as prisons, and with their own families as collateral damage.

The Party Of Trump, Con't

Once again, it's worth noting that the Republican party is the party of Trump, and Trump is the Republican party.  The cult of personality is so pervasive now, the GOP so metastasized now, that removal of Trump, the cancer on the party, would kill the patient, and yet the cancer is so widespread that not removing it will also be fatal.  Ryan Lizza asks Republicans what they think of Dear Leader, and the answer is grim resignation to being the party of Trump.

As the country awaits whatever conclusions Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation brings, the most important question in politics may be whether there is any red line Trump could cross and lose significant party support. Four and a half decades ago, Republicans stuck with Richard Nixon until incontrovertible evidence of his crimes emerged. Democrats never abandoned Bill Clinton because they believed his misdeeds weren’t impeachable. What is the red line for a contemporary GOP increasingly built around a personality cult? I put that question to a dozen Republicans in the House and Senate, a mix from across the ideological spectrum and from every region of the country. The conversations revealed a lot about the Trump GOP, but the red line, with respect to Trump’s behavior generally, or his conduct specific to the Mueller probe, was vanishingly thin and difficult to detect. And every time you think you see it—pee tape, porn-star liaison, erratic diplomacy, threats to fire Mueller—it keeps moving. As Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, “I don’t know that there is one.” 

Flake never supported Trump and has been the president’s most consistent critic in Congress, though one who still votes for much of his agenda. When Flake was deciding whether to run for reelection this year, one of his political consultants told him there was only one path: “You’ve got to be okay with Trump’s policies or be quiet about them and be okay with his behavior or be quiet about it.” Flake decided to retire instead. 

Jenkins, the congresswoman from Kansas, relayed a conversation she recently had with a factory owner back home, who told her that while the guys on his shop floor “hate” Trump—they are from the Bible Belt, after all, she noted—“they love what he’s doing.” She then offered the most honest explanation I’ve heard for this phenomenon. “It’s kind of like supporting your favorite team and there’s a talented trash-talking personality on the other team,” she said. “That player is the worst human being on the face of the earth, but if that same talented player is on our team, well, you know, they’re our team, so we give him a pass.” 

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was known as one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. I caught Graham on his cell phone while he was visiting Iraq in July. During the 2016 campaign, he called Trump “a kook,” adding, “I think he is unfit for office.” Graham is now much more diplomatic, offering himself up as a kind of translator between the #NeverTrump movement and the party’s base. On the plus side for him were the judges, the tax cuts, the fight against ISIS, and the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement. On the other side were Trump’s “uncertainty about our commitment” to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; his trade policy; and his lack of seriousness about Russian meddling in American elections. “This constant minimizing of Putin and his agenda—very problematic.” 

Those were his toughest words for Trump. I was surprised how much he was soft-selling his well-known disagreements with the man on foreign policy, especially Trump’s retreat from defending our democratic allies. I asked him if the American president was still the leader of the free world. He paused for five seconds before telling me, “America First is one or two things. It’s an understanding that we’re a unique country and it’s about burden sharing,” he said. “You gotta remember, he won. I think when the president talks of how other countries are taking advantage of us, we’re fighting their wars, we’re spending too much for their defense, that resonates with people.” He never did answer the question.

Earlier this year, Graham made the case that if Trump fired Mueller, “it would be the end of President Trump’s presidency.” I asked if he still believed that about Mueller. He let out a deep sigh. “He’s done such a number on this guy, I don’t know,” he said, referring to Trump’s attacks on Mueller’s credibility. 

Leonard Lance, a congressman from New Jersey, was one Republican, albeit a moderate, who volunteered a red line: “Personal collusion by Trump with the Russians during the campaign.” But if Republicans keep the House and the Senate this fall, Trump will have a political fortress protecting him in Washington. That prospect has led a few anti-Trump Republicans, like Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, to openly support a Democratic takeover of Congress. In their minds, there is no red line for the GOP. I came to the same conclusion after my hours of interviews. 

Conservative Trump critics fear becoming the next Sanford and stay quiet—what Flake and others call the “don’t poke the bear” mind-set. Meanwhile, many of the moderate anti-Trump Republicans are leaving office. Congressman Ryan Costello, a Republican from Pennsylvania who decided to quit (redistricting gave him a bluer constituency), said, “If I were running for reelection, every single time that I saw on the TV screen that the president was going to hold another rally, I’d be like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ Because he’s going to say fifty things that aren’t accurate.”

They're leaving rather than opposing him, or stopping him, or attacking him.  They are retiring in near-record numbers.  They know they're done in November.  They're going to let the Democrats deal with him, because the GOP doesn't have the courage, and because nearly 90% of Republican voters love Trump anyway.

And so it goes.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is blaming past administrations for America's "never been worse" relationship with Russia ahead of today's summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
• European Council President Donald Tusk is again calling on the US, China, and Russia to rein in any potential trade wars ahead of EU-China trade talks this week.
• UK PM Theresa May faces an angry British parliament Monday as several tough votes are expected on Brexit proceedings today, a loss by May's party could spell the end of her government.
• France's 4-2 win over Croatia in the World Cup finals Sunday is seen as a victory for French immigrants, but may not have much of an economic impact on the country's finances.
• A new British Royal Society study finds open office floor plans actually hurt productivity and face-to-face communication among co-workers compared to traditional cubicle office setups.