Last Call For The Whole Kitchen Sink

Well, everything happened after my 4:00 PM post, so let's get down to it.  First of all, as I noted earlier today, former long-time Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts in federal court.  The new part from this afternoon is that Cohen's pleas included a direct implication of Donald Trump in a federal crime.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court Tuesday to eight criminal counts, admitting that "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office" he acted to keep information that would have been harmful to the candidate and the campaign from becoming public during the 2016 election cycle. 

The charges against Cohen, an attorney for Trump until earlier this year and a member of his inner circle throughout his presidential campaign, bring an end to a months-long investigation by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

Again, this is Trump being implicated by Cohen in the commission of a federal crime.  This is, frankly, where Donald Trump should resign.  Of course, that won't happen.  Elsewhere, there was all sorts of legal news for the GOP.

Paul Manafort's jury came in with 8 guilty convictions and 10 deadlocked counts, and while prosecutors are still deciding on whether to retry Manafort on the other 10 charges, the 8 convictions are enough to put him away for life.

A jury has found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on tax and bank fraud charges — a major if not complete victory for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as he continues to investigate the president’s associates.

The jury convicted Manafort on eight of the 18 counts against him and said it was deadlocked on the other 10. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those charges.

Manafort stood impassively, his hands folded in front of him, and showed little reaction as the clerk read the word “guilty” eight separate times. As through most of the three-week trial, Manafort showed no apparent emotion as he looked at the six women and men who convicted him.

President Trump reacted to the verdict by denouncing Mueller’s investigation.

“It doesn’t involve me ... it’s a very sad thing,” the president said after arriving in West Virginia for a political rally, adding that the Manafort case “has nothing to do with” Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort,” Trump said. “Again, he worked for Bob Dole, he worked for Ronald Reagan. He worked for many people. And this is the way it ends up.” 

Even if he gets off lightly, he's still facing a decade-plus at the minimum and the rest of his life more than likely.  Oh, but speaking of Republican campaign finance violations, it seems our old friend Rep. Duncan Hunter is the next in the dock.

Rep. Duncan Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were indicted Tuesday on charges related to the misuse of $250,000 worth of campaign funds for personal expenses and the filing of false campaign finance records. 

The charges of wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations and conspiracy were the culmination of a Department of Justice investigation that has stretched for more than a year, during which the Republican congressman from California has maintained his innocence. 

The Justice Department said the Hunters are scheduled to be arraigned Thursday morning in federal court in San Diego. 

Republican Party leaders had long worried that with a potential indictment looming, Hunter's traditionally safe district, which makes up much of eastern San Diego County, could be at risk of Democratic takeover in November's midterm election. 

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in unusual charges on Hunter's campaign credit card had come under scrutiny, including among other things, an Italian vacation, dental work, purchases at a surf shop, and huge tabs at bars in restaurants in the San Diego and Washington, DC, areas. Among the most mocked charges was airfare for a pet rabbit to fly with the family, which an aide said was mistakenly charged to the wrong credit card.

So that's another major pickup opportunity for the Dems in November.  His opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, is definitely deserving of some help from folks.

Oh, and Larry Kudlow, Trump's economic adviser of the week or whatever?  Hosted a party with white supremacist asshole and founder of VDARE, Peter Brimelow.

The publisher of a website that serves as a platform for white nationalism was a guest last weekend at the home of President Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow.

Peter Brimelow attended the gathering, a birthday bash for Kudlow, one day after a White House speechwriter was dismissed in the wake of revelations that he had spoken alongside Brimelow on a 2016 panel.

Brimelow, 70, was once a well-connected figure in mainstream conservative circles, writing for Dow Jones and National Review. But over the past two decades, he has become a zealous promoter of white-identity politics on Vdare.com, the anti-immigration website that he founded in 1999.

While Brimelow has long personally rejected the label of “white nationalist,” he acknowledged to the Harvard Crimson in 2016 that his website does “certainly publish a few writers I would regard as ‘white nationalist’ in that they stand up for whites just as Zionists, black nationalists do for Jews, blacks, etc.”

So they're not just crooks folks, they're stupid, racist crooks to boot.

What a day.  This is when the dam broke, guys.  I'd like to say that "this is when history was made, when we look back, this was the day it ended for Trump" but tonight Trump was in Charleston, WV screaming about witch hunts and Chris Farley on a day where his former campaign manager was convicted and his personal lawyer implicated him in a federal crime, they still yelled "Lock her up!"

If you don't vote in November to remove the GOP, you're the reason why we'll have these scumbags forever.

I'm sure of that.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

As long expected, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen has cut a deal with federal prosecutors.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, has tentatively reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, ABC News has learned.

Given Cohen’s proximity to Trump during the past decade, including throughout his meteoric rise from mogul and reality television star to the White House, observers consider him one of most potent legal thorns to confront Trump’s presidency since he took office.

“The guy who knows where all the bodies are buried,” said Seth Hettena, an author and veteran journalist who has chronicled Trump’s business career.

The investigation into Cohen was referred to New York’s Southern District by special counsel Robert Mueller, and if Cohen agrees to cooperate, the information he provides could benefit the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But it remains unclear if he has committed to cooperate.

Cohen’s relationship with Trump dates to the mid-2000’s after Cohen, who owned condominiums in multiple Trump buildings in New York, took Trump’s side in a legal dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower on Manhattan’s East Side. Cohen eventually went to work for the Trump Organization, where he held the positions of executive vice president and special counsel to Donald J. Trump.

The deal itself, according to ABC News, involves Cohen pleading guilty and receiving jail time (four years is what I'm hearing) on bank fraud, tax evasion, and campaign finance violations.  It's that last part, the two campaign finance law counts, that involve Donald Trump.  Cohen has a hearing this afternoon to finalize the deal, and the NY Times is backing up ABC's story.

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, on Tuesday reached a plea agreement with prosecutors investigating payments he made to women for Mr. Trump but the deal does not include cooperation, two people familiar with the matter said.

Prosecutors in New York had been scrutinizing Mr. Cohen for bank and tax fraud, as well as for his role in helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

The United States attorney’s office announced that there would be a “proceeding of interest” in a case against a defendant identified only as John Doe, language that almost always indicates a guilty plea. One person with knowledge of the matter said the proceeding would be the guilty plea by Mr. Cohen.

Even though Mr. Cohen is not cooperating with prosecutors, his decision to plead guilty is a political blow to Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen had been the president’s longtime fixer, handling his most sensitive business and personal matters. He once said he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump.

The investigation of Mr. Cohen has focused in part on his role helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump, including Stephanie Clifford, an adult film actress better known as Stormy Daniels. Federal authorities have also been investigating whether Mr. Cohen committed bank and tax fraud.

The charges against Mr. Cohen were not a surprise, but he had signaled recently he might be willing to cooperate with investigators who for months have been conducting an extensive investigation of his business dealings. That bid to negotiate a plea deal under which he would exchange information in return for a lesser sentence appears to have broken down.

As I said yesterday:

The fact that Cohen has basically been off the radar over the month of August makes me think "the matter" is "being finalized" as we speak.  The article makes it clear there's two scenarios: Cohen gets charged before Labor Day, or he cooperates (and the Mueller team has bonus "we can't comment on this" plausible deniability due to the Justice Department guidelines on political cases before an election.)

We'll see which one Cohen chooses.  It's possible at this point in the game, he doesn't have anything novel to offer Mueller, and he gets crushed before the month is out, too.

My gut says he cooperates.

Seems Cohen isn't cooperating after all, but he still may decide that he will.  Still, the hammer fell, and the "John Doe" indication means that there's still more people to be possibly charged down the road.

We'll see.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Donald Trump continues to act 100% guilty, and 100% like the second the Paul Manafort verdict comes in with any convictions that he's going to fire Robert Mueller.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump echoed the concerns of his top lawyer in the probe, Rudy Giuliani, who has warned that any sit-down with Mueller could be a “perjury trap.”

The president expressed fears that investigators could compare his statements with that of others who have testified in the probe, such as former FBI Director James Comey, and that any discrepancies could be used against him.

“So if I say something and he (Comey) says something, and it’s my word against his, and he’s best friends with Mueller, so Mueller might say: ‘Well, I believe Comey,’ and even if I’m telling the truth, that makes me a liar. That’s no good.”

Despite his concerns, Trump did not comment on whether he would ultimately agree to an interview with Mueller, who is, among other things, investigating whether Trump’s campaign team colluded with Russians during the 2016 election and whether Trump has obstructed justice in the probe.

Trump also declined to say whether he might strip Mueller of his security clearance, as he did last week to former CIA Director John Brennan, who had repeatedly criticized Trump’s handling of foreign policy and national security issues.

“I haven’t given it a lot of thought,” he said.

He's thinking about it.  I guarantee it.  He's thinking about that and a lot worse at this point.  Here's the giveaway:

Trump asserted that he retained the power to intervene in the probe, but that he had chosen not to do so for the moment.

His administration, Trump said, was “a smooth-running machine, except in that world. And I’ve decided to stay out. Now I don’t have to stay out.

“I can go in, and I could do whatever — I could run it if I want. But I decided to stay out,” he said. “I’m totally allowed to be involved if I wanted to be. So far, I haven’t chosen to be involved. I’ll stay out.”

Meanwhile, White House Counsel Don McGahn is pretending he didn't flip on Trump in order to save his own ass, and he's not fooling anybody.

White House counsel Donald McGahn does not believe that he implicated President Trump in any legal wrongdoing in extensive interviews he has given the special counsel, McGahn’s attorney told Trump’s legal team in recent days.

The assurances from McGahn’s attorney came as the president and his lawyers pushed back against the suggestion in a New York Times report that Trump’s attorneys have little insight into what McGahn told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and whether Trump has sought to obstruct that probe.

McGahn’s attorney, Bill Burck, told Trump’s lawyers this past weekend that McGahn did not assert that Trump engaged in any wrongdoing when he spoke to Mueller’s investigators in three lengthy interviews since last November, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

“He did not incriminate him,” Burck wrote in one email, which was described by multiple people.

McGahn referred questions to Burck, who declined to comment.

That isn't McGahn's evaluation to make, now is it?

Again, we're rapidly approaching the point where Trump is going to make his move on Mueller. 

[UPDATE] It won't be long now, especially since former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is expected to strike a deal with Mueller any time now.

StupidiNews!

• Pacific Hurricane Lane is bearing down towards Hawaii, the Category 3 storm is approaching the Big Island just two weeks after Hurricane Hector passed by.
• The UN Human Rights Commission is warning Donald Trump that he has a responsibility to the American media, and that calling then "enemies of the people" hurts the press in other countries.
• New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood is leading a group of 22 states asking the Trump regime to reinstate net neutrality rules.
• Generation Z, those born after 2000, are set to outnumber Millennials born between 1980 and 2000 as early as next year.
• Google is facing legal action from civil liberties and consumer groups for the revelation last week that the company stores location data even when the option to do that for users is turned off.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The Trump regime keeps having to fire WH people for being speakers at white supremacist conference events, and I'd wonder why they were hired in the first place but it's pretty clear at this point that hiring speakers at white supremacist conference events is a stated goal of the regime, as long as the press doesn't find out.

A White House speechwriter for President Trump was terminated last week after revelations that he had spoken at a conference attended by well-known white nationalists, according to three people familiar with the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Darren Beattie, who was a visiting instructor at Duke University before he joined the White House speechwriting team, was fired Friday after a media inquiry about his appearance at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference, where Beattie spoke on a panel alongside Peter Brimelow.

Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigrant website Vdare.com, is a “white nationalist” and “regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that tracks extremists.

Earlier this year, Brimelow described himself as a believer in “racial nationalism” who sees the future of the United States “precipitating out on racial lines.”

CNN’s KFile, an investigative unit, published a report Sunday on Beattie and his appearance at the Mencken event, which has been attended in the past by white nationalist Richard Spencer. Spencer is a prominent figure in the “alt-right,” a movement whose adherents are known for espousing racist, sexist and anti-Semitic points of view.

Once White House officials were informed about CNN’s pending report, Beattie reportedly was confronted and urged to step down immediately. But he apparently refused to resign, arguing that he was not racist and that he had made uncontroversial academic points at the Mencken gathering. When it became clear that Beattie would not resign, the people familiar with the matter said, the White House terminated him.

It's weird how the Trump regime has such terrible vetting procedures.  You would think "Hey maybe we should check to see if the people we hire ever were panelists at Mencken Club" might be something they'd look for, but I guess that's not a big deal until CNN finds out about it.

Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is back, as America's favorite mercenary warlord is once again pushing his plan to privatize the Forever War with Afghanistan, something guaranteed to made Prince and his family tens of billions of dollars but I'm betting nothing will come of it.

President Donald Trump is increasingly venting frustration to his national security team about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and showing renewed interest in a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to privatize the war, current and former senior administration officials said.

Prince's idea, which first surfaced last year during the president's Afghanistan strategy review, envisions replacing troops with private military contractors who would work for a special U.S. envoy for the war who would report directly to the president.

It has raised ethical and security concerns among senior military officials, key lawmakers and members of Trump's national security team. A year after Trump's strategy announcement, his advisers are worried his impatience with the Afghanistan conflict will cause him to seriously consider proposals like Prince's or abruptly order a complete U.S. withdrawal, officials said.

In an interview with NBC News, Prince said he believes Trump advisers who oppose his plan are painting "as rosy a picture as they can" of the situation on the ground, including that "peace is around the corner" with recent U.S. efforts for peace talks with the Taliban. He said he believes Trump's advisers "over-emphasize the fluff and flare of these so-called peace talks."

Prince, a staunch Trump supporter whose sister is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, argues that after 17 years of war in Afghanistan, it's time for the U.S. to try something new.

"I know he's frustrated," Prince said of the president. "He gave the Pentagon what they wanted. ...And they haven't delivered."

Prince said he hasn't spoken directly to Trump about the plan, but told NBC News he plans to launch an aggressive media "air campaign" in coming days to try to get the president to embrace it.

His effort coincides with Tuesday's one-year anniversary of Trump announcing a strategy that increased the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. Trump approved the Pentagon recommendations reluctantly.

Prince wants to sell Trump a big win ahead of the midterms, and as I mentioned before, Prince has been pushing Trump down this path for some time now.  Of course, one of the major problems is that Prince is neck deep in Trump's foreign campaign money laundering and that Robert Mueller has cooperating witnesses that put Prince as Trump's point man at meetings in Seychelles in 2016. As a result, Prince himself is now cooperating with Mueller.

Somehow I don't think Donald Trump is going to look kindly upon that and want to work with Prince.  Just sayin.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The hammer is about to fall on former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, big time, as the criminal investigation gets one major step closer to Trump himself.

Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.

Any criminal charges against Mr. Cohen would deal a significant blow to the president. Mr. Cohen, 52, worked for the president’s company, the Trump Organization, for more than a decade. He was one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal and visible aides and called himself the president’s personal lawyer after Mr. Trump took office.

The bank loans under scrutiny, the total of which has not been previously reported, came from two financial institutions in the New York region that have catered to the taxi industry, Sterling National Bank and the Melrose Credit Union, according to business records and people with knowledge of the matter, including a banker who reviewed the transactions.

Federal investigators in New York are seeking to determine whether Mr. Cohen misrepresented the value of his assets to obtain the loans, which exceed $20 million.

They are also examining how he handled the income from his taxi medallions and whether he failed to report it to the Internal Revenue Service.

Cohen is about to have supreme motivation to cooperate with Robert Mueller.

At this late stage of the inquiry, it is still possible that Mr. Cohen may plead guilty rather than face an indictment. He has hinted publicly and has stated explicitly in private that he is eager to tell prosecutors what he knows in exchange for leniency.

A cooperation agreement would likely include a provision that Mr. Cohen also provide information to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating possible involvement by the Trump campaign in Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

It is unclear whether the prosecutors and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers have had detailed discussions about a potential cooperation deal, but it is unlikely that the government would bring charges without having done so.

But if a plea deal is not reached, either because Mr. Cohen and prosecutors cannot agree on the terms or because prosecutors determine he does not have valuable information or is not credible, the government would likely seek to bring charges well before the midterm elections.

If the matter is not finalized by the end of August, prosecutors probably will wait until after the election, one of the people familiar with the inquiry said in recent weeks. That schedule would conform with the Justice Department’s informal policy of avoiding bringing politically sensitive cases that could influence voters close to an election.

In other words, the plea deal door closes for Cohen in two weeks.  The fact that Cohen has basically been off the radar over the month of August makes me think "the matter" is "being finalized" as we speak.  The article makes it clear there's two scenarios: Cohen gets charged before Labor Day, or he cooperates (and the Mueller team has bonus "we can't comment on this" plausible deniability due to the Justice Department guidelines on political cases before an election.)

We'll see which one Cohen chooses.  It's possible at this point in the game, he doesn't have anything novel to offer Mueller, and he gets crushed before the month is out, too.

My gut says he cooperates.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime has rejected an offer from Turkey to release an American pastor being held under house arrest in exchange for forgiveness of US fines on Turkey's largest bank.
• The Pentagon says US troops will remain in  Iraq "as long as needed" to help stabilize formerly ISIS-held regions of the country.
• Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull could be facing revolt as his popularity has collapsed, leaving the opposition Labor party a heavy favorite in May's scheduled elections.
• International cargo shipping giant Maersk says US tariffs will hurt America far more than other countries, according to the company's trade flow data.
• After putting the first woman in space 55 years ago, Russia's space program is down to its last female cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, and she may be grounded on a semi-permanent basis.

Last Call For The Coaled Hard Truth For Kentucky

Kentucky coal jobs are never coming back, and when Donald Trump promised the people of this state that he would bring them back, he lied to us, plain and simple, in order to get our votes.

Personal income has gone down in several Eastern Kentucky counties where coal employment has been decimated in recent years, according to a report from the Appalachian Regional Commission.

In Harlan County, for instance, per capita market income fell from $13,053 in 2015 to $12,579 in 2016, while in Perry County it dropped from $19,726 in 2015 to $19,043 in 2016, the most recent year covered in the ARC’s calculations.

Pike, Knott, Bell, Breathitt, Leslie, Letcher and Johnson also were among the Eastern Kentucky coal counties that saw a drop in per capita market income.

The declines were a factor in income in Appalachian Kentucky losing ground in comparison to the U.S. level.

Per capita market income in Appalachian Kentucky equaled 48.3 percent of the national level in 2015, but that fell to 46.8 in 2016, according to the ARC report.

Nationally, the income figure went up in 2016 to $40,679, but in Kentucky’s Appalachian counties, it edged down from $19,204 in 2015 to $19,022 in 2016.

That was the lowest level of any area in Appalachia, which the federal government defines as covering all of West Virginia, about half of Kentucky and parts of 11 other states.

Per capita market income is a measure of an area’s total personal income not counting transfer payments such as public assistance, according to the ARC report.

Coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky have plummeted from 14,619 in 2011 to 3,909 in the second quarter of this year, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.

Studies have cited competition from cheap natural gas for electricity generation as the biggest factor in coal’s decline, though other factors have played a role, including efforts to beef up environmental rules in the Obama administration and the rise of renewable energy such as wind power.

There has been no significant increase in coal jobs in Kentucky under President Donald Trump.

And there never will be, Kentucky.  Coal jobs are never, ever, ever coming back. Stop voting for the party that wants to give our money to billionaires.

You Never Go The Full Orwell, Rudy

We've finally reached the point where Donald Trump's lawyer is on TV telling the world literally that "truth isn't truth" anymore.

President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign officials and a Russian government ally could not be evidence of collusion even though the intention of the meeting was to get damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Giuliani brushed aside the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller could rely on the meeting for any possible charges against the president.

"It turned out to be a meeting about another subject and it was not pursued at all. Any meeting in regards to getting information about your opponent is something any candidate's staff would take," Giuliani said on "Meet the Press."

"The president of the United States wasn't at that meeting, he didn't know about that meeting, he found out about it after. By the time he found out about it, it was nothing. If this is their case for collusion, good luck Mueller."

It's not, any everyone knows there's far more evidence against Trump, but we play the kayfabe game anyway.  It's all professional wrestling.

Giuliani also threw more cold water on the prospect of the president testifying in the special counsel's investigation, arguing he wants to avoid Trump getting "trapped into perjury."

"When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth," he said.

"Truth isn't truth," Giuliani added, pointing to the accusations that Trump discussed the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in a meeting with then-FBI director James Comey, who Trump later fired.

"Donald Trump says: I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says: You did talk about it. So tell me, what the truth is?"

Up is down, black is white, and the truth is what Dear Leader Trump says it is, citizen.  Anything else is Fake News.

Sunday Long Read: Anything But Vanilla

The BBC has put together this week's Sunday Long Read on one of the oldest flavorings in the world, vanilla. In remote Madagascar villages, vanilla beans are more precious than gold - or lives sometimes -- and thieves and criminals know it.  The demand for natural vanilla in products has skyrocketed in the last few years, and that's put a major commodity squeeze on the beans and their producers.

A barefoot farmer is making his way through a forest.

Quiet drops of rain tumble steadily through the night, picked out in the light from his torch.

The rusty machete he holds isn’t for cutting down vines or chopping away stubborn branches - it is a defence against thieves.

Lots of other men - farmers like him - are out in the rain, patrolling the forest. For the past three months, they have left their homes every night and made the long journey into the plantations to protect their crop.

But this is not an illegal coca plantation, or anything like it. In fact, these farmers are growing a crop whose name is a byword for something boring.

The men need weapons to guard against robbers who roam the countryside looking for one thing - Madagascan vanilla.

It’s easy to see the raised pattern of dots on the smooth green skin of the pods.

They show that these vanilla vines belong to Leon Charles.

"That’s my name. My nickname - people here call me Baba.”

Leon is with his wife, Oristin, in their garden, where they grow coffee and vanilla in the village of Ambanizana, at the edge of the Masoala National Park, in the north-east corner of Madagascar.

It’s a hard place to get to - there are no roads to speak of. From the island’s capital, Antananarivo, it takes two flights, two hours on a speedboat and another 30 minutes in a canoe to reach Ambanizana.

The village is full of music. Upbeat dance melodies blare through the sheer, pink curtain covering the doorway of Leon’s home - a rectangular, wooden structure with a peaked roof.

Here, the forest meets the sea and the high humidity, shade, and moderate temperatures make it perfect for growing vanilla.

Each vine that Leon prunes holds pods - also known as beans - that will eventually retail for more than $150 (£120), once they are dried.

To deter theft, all the farmers in the surrounding area are stamping their names, or sometimes serial numbers, on to individual pods while they’re still on the vine. Even when the pods are dried, the markings can be made out.

Leon was robbed before last year’s harvest - and it was devastating for his family. “I was working in my [nearby] rice field when they quickly took advantage in order to steal,” he says. “I was so sad, I even cried, because we lost everything. I didn’t have money to send the children to school. Our household has been experiencing hardship for a whole year.”

But it could have been even worse.

 It's a good story, and one of the oldest in history: the 21st century spice trade is still all about scarcity, quality, and exploitation.  And it's the poor subsistence farmers who always lose in the end.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

I do remember saying back last September that White House counsel Don McGahn should cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller regarding his investigation:

And given Trump's long, long history of screwing his employees whenever it becomes slightly inconvenient for him personally, if I were Don McGahn I'd strongly consider rolling over on Trump before I ended up with a very long federal prison sentence.

Guess what we just found out over the weekend?

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s furor toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which investigators might not have discovered without him.

For a lawyer to share so much with investigators scrutinizing his client is unusual. Lawyers are rarely so open with investigators, not only because they are advocating on behalf of their clients but also because their conversations with clients are potentially shielded by attorney-client privilege, and in the case of presidents, executive privilege.

“A prosecutor would kill for that,” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, a deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater investigation, which did not have the same level of cooperation from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers. “Oh my God, it would have been phenomenally helpful to us. It would have been like having the keys to the kingdom.”

Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.

Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.

It is not clear that Mr. Trump appreciates the extent to which Mr. McGahn has cooperated with the special counsel. The president wrongly believed that Mr. McGahn would act as a personal lawyer would for clients and solely defend his interests to investigators, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking.

In fact, Mr. McGahn laid out how Mr. Trump tried to ensure control of the investigation, giving investigators a mix of information both potentially damaging and favorable to the president. Mr. McGahn cautioned to investigators that he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities, though the limits of executive power are murky.

I'm not sure who leaked this, but it's pellucid clear that McGahn has been in the process of saving his own ass for the last nine months. The phrases "including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise" and "investigators might not have discovered without him" should be giving Trump a heart attack right now, because it seems to me this is the biggest rollover yet on Trump himself.

Remember, McGahn threatening to quit as WH counsel was the reason why Trump was stopped from firing Mueller 14 months ago. Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien said as much eight months ago that McGahn not only leaked the NY Times story in January about Trump attempting to fire Mueller, but that McGahn's cooperation with Mueller was a distinct possibility.

If McGahn is now in Mueller's crosshairs, he might have decided that the simplest solution is to cooperate with the probe and turn over information in exchange for gentler treatment. In that scenario, McGahn becomes the source, directly or indirectly, of all kinds of interesting stuff for investigators and the media to ponder.

The timeframe of the NY Times story this weekend matches up with McGahn being the leaker then.  It makes a lot of sense that he would also be the leaker now, especially if McGahn felt Mueller was in trouble again.

Of course, there's the very real possibility that McGahn is cooperating to not only protect himself from the obstruction investigation, but to insulate himself from the Russia conspiracy investigation as well. As Marcy Wheeler reminds us, McGahn's days prior to being WH counsel at the FEC meant McGahn was the deciding vote to kill a 2011 investigation into Trump's 2012 campaign PAC run by Michael Cohen, with help from Roger Stone.

There's a reason why McGahn is Trump's White House counsel, in other words.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For Hard Seven Going On Eight in China

The Ten Stages of Genocide tells us that the Chinese roundup and persecution of Uighur Muslims is well into stages seven and eight.

China has sharply expanded an internment program that initially targeted ethnic Uighur extremists but is now confining vast numbers of the largely Muslim minority group, including the secular, old and infirm, in camps across the country’s northwest.

Up to one million people, or about 7% of the Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang region, have now been incarcerated in an expanding network of “political re-education” camps, according to U.S. officials and United Nations experts.

As the camps have swelled in size, some Uighurs living outside China say that relatives—mainly, but not all, older people—have died in detention or shortly after their release.

Satellite images reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and a specialist in photo analysis show that camps have been growing. Construction work has been carried out on some within the past two weeks, including at one near the western city of Kashgar that has doubled in size since Journal reporters visited in November.

The full extent of the internment program was long obscured because many Uighurs feared speaking out. Now more are recounting experiences, including six former inmates interviewed by the Journal who described how they or other detainees had been bound to chairs and deprived of adequate food.

“They would also tell us about religion, saying there is no such thing as religion, why do you believe in religion, there is no God,” said Ablikim, a 22-year-old Uighur former inmate who asked to be identified only by his first name.

Stage seven, Preparation, is where Beijing is now: we're in the middle of the "Final Solution" of ridding China of Uighurs in the name of "re-education" in detainment camps.  Stage eight, Persecution, means that the detained will never leave the camps alive.

Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. In state sponsored genocide, members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often expropriated. Sometimes they are even segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. They are deliberately deprived of resources such as water or food in order to slowly destroy them. Programs are implemented to prevent procreation through forced sterilization or abortions. Children are forcibly taken from their parents. The victim group’s basic human rights become systematically abused through extrajudicial killings, torture and forced displacement. Genocidal massacres begin. They are acts of genocide because they intentionally destroy part of a group. The perpetrators watch for whether such massacres meet any international reaction. If not, they realize that that the international community will again be bystanders and permit another genocide.

At this stage, a Genocide Emergency must be declared. If the political will of the great powers, regional alliances, or U.N. Security Council or the U.N. General Assembly can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance provided to the victim group to prepare for its self-defense. Humanitarian assistance should be organized by the U.N. and private relief groups for the inevitable tide of refugees to come.

No such UN Security Council action will come, because China will veto it.  No such military action will come, because China has the troops and weapons to make any such action Pyrrhic. No such financial or economic action will come, because China is too important a trading partner to the world.

The Uighurs will be massacred, and we will soon proceed to stage nine, Extermination, and stage ten, Denial, afterwards.

Billions will be rightfully horrified by this.  But others will see a blueprint for future action.

The Late Women Of Late Night

In the #MeToo era where white guys still run everything, Hollywood still has a massive problem with women hosting late night shows.

Well, that was fast. On Friday, Netflix quietly pulled the plug on The Break with Michelle Wolf, one of the only “late-night” shows on “television” hosted by a female comedian, just three months after it premiered.

The streaming service also ended the short-lived Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale, but it was the news about Wolf’s show that came as a much bigger shock. That’s because, when The Break premiered in May, Wolf was riding higher than pretty much any other comedian in the country after her breakthrough performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. As recently as last week White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was still talking about how much her jokes stung.

At the time, the general consensus was that she was suddenly a hot commodity and Netflix was lucky to have her after she decided to leave first Late Night with Seth Meyers and then The Daily Show. Now, after just 10 episodes, Netflix has decided not to order any more.

“None of us can believe how classlessly Netflix has handled this,” a source connected to the show told The Daily Beast after the news broke, noting that the entire writing staff and even the showrunners found out they had been fired on Twitter.

The move comes just a couple of weeks after BET announced it was cancelling The Rundown with Robin Thede after its first season. That cuts the number of late-night-style shows hosted by women in half, with only TBS’ Samantha Bee and Hulu’s Sarah Silverman left standing.

The utter opacity of Netflix’s model makes it impossible to know how many people were watching The Break on a weekly basis, but the show’s cultural impact could be felt on a near-weekly basis. Wolf is an expert at outraging conservatives—perhaps something Netflix was less-than-thrilled about—from her “God bless abortions” segment over the 4th of July to her commercial parody that equated ICE to ISIS a couple of weeks later.

The later segment made heads explode on Fox News, including comedy aficionado Mike Huckabee, who declared, “You know, comedians are supposed to be funny, they’re supposed to make us laugh. I love satire, it’s one of my favorite forms of comedy, but her form of comedy is not satire, it’s angry, bitter hate.”

Wolf and Thede are gone, let's not forget that the right has also called for Silverman's head and Trump himself demanded that Samantha Bee lose her show.  If Hulu and TBS had folded their cards earlier this year as the right wanted, there would be no women hosting late night.  That still may happen now that the number of women late night hosts has been halved in August and the right now will focus again on Bee and Silverman, emboldened by their obvious wins.

That's exactly how they right wants it.  They want subservient, meek, obedient women, not biting, funny, smart ones.

The Dark Road From Eighty Years Prior

History tells us that the bad old days of European white nationalism are definitely back.  Austria's Freedom Party, Greece's Golden Dawn, Italy's Lega, France's National Front, Hungary's Jobbik and Fidesz, all are virulently anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-black, and very much pro-white. Poland has already fallen to these forces of proto-fascism, where critics of Polish President Andrzej Duda are being deported and banned from the EU.

The right-wing Polish government is continuously breaking new ground in its attacks on democracy and the rule of law. But now it has set a truly astonishing precedent. Warsaw has just used its European Union powers to deport a government critic and banned her from entering any country within the European free movement zone. The implications are ominous – and not only for Poland.

Lyudmyla Kozlovska, a young Ukrainian human rights defender, is a fervent promoter of democratic Poland. Since she left her home country for Poland a decade ago, she has put considerable effort into promoting the model of Polish democracy to emerging countries through the Open Dialog Foundation, her Warsaw-based think tank. She has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Polish politicians and officials for the cause.

This week, the Polish government deported Kozlovska. The authorities have not provided any explanation, but the likely reason is clear enough. She and her Polish husband, Bartosz Kramek, had criticized the government for what they see as its efforts to undermine the country’s democracy.

“It’s evil irony I ended up in the same situation that I helped many people to avoid,” Kozlovska told me. Now back in Ukraine, she is completely cut off from her life on the other side of the border, including her family and husband. But it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Kozlovska says she has lived through more than a year of government harassment after her husband posted a statement on Facebook criticizing the democratic rollback in Poland and calling for peaceful civil disobedience. The post went viral.

Sweden too is on the edge of disaster as the openly neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats are rapidly gaining power.

Around 4,000 far-right supporters gathered on the grounds of a ruined castle last weekend to plot the downfall of the socialist ideas that have come to define their progressive country.

Their views — anti-immigration, anti-establishment and often anti-Muslim — are not new amid the populist tsunami that's crashed into much of the West.

But this is Sweden, where socialists have dominated every election for the past 101 years, making the Nordic nation something of a lodestar for leftists around the world.

Some polls predict that the supporters' favored party, the Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazism and white nationalism, will win as much as 25 percent of the vote in an election scheduled for Sept. 9. Such a result would likely earn the Sweden Democrats more seats in Parliament than any other single party.

At the party's annual summer festival here, speeches were interspersed with heavy metal music as supporters gathered at Sölvesborg Castle for the headline act: an address by Jimmie Åkesson, the 39-year-old leader of the Sweden Democrats.

"He's the only politician I can trust," a retiree named Jan shouted above the din. "We need him for our country. I don't have so many years left, but for my children and for my grandchildren."

This is where the Trump regime wants to go, and if they maintain control of Congress in January, we're all headed down this path to the end of the republic.  The same forces that gave rise to Trump are loose in Europe.  The results will be far nastier I expect.

We've been here before, 80 years ago.