Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Donald Trump has apparently had enough of this whole "migrant" thing and is now considering sealing and militarizing the southern border totally as WH Chief of Staff John Kelly, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and National Security Adviser John Bolton's Mustache are now fighting it out to see whether or not we start putting goddamn tanks and troops on the Rio Grande.

President Donald Trump's frustration over rising numbers of undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S. is stoking tensions among his advisers as some White House officials push for a more aggressive policy that includes completely sealing the southern border, said four people familiar with the discussions.

The differences escalated into an angry, profanity-laced exchange on Thursday between White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton as a Honduran migrant caravan of roughly 4,000 people approached the U.S. border. The dispute was so heated, according to several people, that Kelly ended up storming out of the White House shortly afterward.

Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration, including family separation policies that involved holding children in cages, has been a centerpiece of his presidency and a core message ahead of the midterm elections. But his failure to secure funding for a promised wall along the border with Mexico, coupled with a renewed surge in border crossings, has tested his ability to make good on his promises.

During a meeting Thursday about the issue, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was explaining an 80 percent rise in immigrant families crossing the border when Bolton interrupted her to criticize her handling of the issue, two people familiar with the meeting said.

Bolton said that Nielsen, a close Kelly ally, was doing a poor job with the border and that her department was not producing the needed results, these people said. He argued that she was failing at one of her signature tasks as Homeland Security secretary, they said.

Bolton, as well as Trump's senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, also proposed sending armed guards to the border and denying entry to anyone without proper documentation, including asylum-seekers, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

What began as a policy discussion turned into a harsh exchange between Kelly and Bolton, just steps from the Oval Office, with Kelly telling Bolton that he lacked an understanding of the complexities of immigration policy, and Bolton telling Kelly that his efforts so far have been ineffective, people familiar with the discussion said. The exchange between Bolton and Kelly was first reported by Bloomberg.

According to three people familiar with the exchange, Kelly repeatedly used the f-word to punctuate his points. These people said Kelly, who had served as Trump’s first secretary of Homeland Security, fiercely defended Nielsen, who has come under fire from Trump over her handling of the border.

The advisers then went into the Oval Office to discuss the matter with the president. Kelly ultimately stormed out of the White House early with no resolution on the issue, these people said.

"I’m f---ing out of here," Kelly said, according to one person briefed on the exchange.

I've said multiple times that the one thing Trump won't tolerate as far as his rogues' gallery of staffers and cabinet flunkies is "making the boss look bad to his base".  With border crossings up due to Trump being forced to back off on separating families at the border, it looks like Trump is going to blow a gasket and maybe seal the border completely at some point as a caravan from Honduras approaches.

We'll see.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Republican continue to be the party of white supremacy, and it's not just "Southern Strategy" mummery to placate the rubes, they honestly believe this garbage and when they won't admit it here in the States, Republicans like Iowa Rep. Steve King are more than happy to give interviews to European white supremacist publications.

King’s conversation with [Austrian white supremacist Caroline] Sommerfeld largely revolves around the paranoid idea of the Great Replacement — the belief that mass migration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, is an extinction-level event for white European culture and identity. Or as he put it in the interview, a “slow-motion cultural suicide.”

“The U.S. subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion,” King said. “We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of ‘somebody else’s babies’ who are raised in another culture before they get to us.”

Sommerfeld responded, “That’s what we call the Great Replacement.”

Nick Ryan, the director of communications at the British-based anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate, told HuffPost that “terms such as ‘Great Replacement’ are the preserve of conspiracy theorists and extremists.”

It’s a phrase, he said, widely used by anti-Muslim European networks to refer to the supposed Islamification of Europe by migrants and refugees.

The idea of the Great Replacement is imagined most vividly in The Camp of the Saints, a stunningly racist 1973 novel by Jean Raspail that “reframes everything as the fight to death between races,” said Cécile Alduy, a professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on France’s far right. It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that “wash ashore like the plague.”

In the interview, King said that he read the book and that it was “completely logical to me that this could come to pass.” He went on to describe how he believes George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and bogeyman of the far right, might be footing the bill for the Great Replacement.

To recap:

White supremacist Republican Congressman goes to Austria, talks about how non-white immigrants are destroying the "European" way of life, warns of the end of white culture, blames Jewish boogeyman for funding it.

And this isn't even the only "Steve King is a white supremacist" news this week.

U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has a history of controversial remarks, is praising a Canadian political candidate who is far right and a white nationalist.

King tweeted Tuesday night in support of Faith Goldy, a candidate for Toronto mayor, describing her as an excellent candidate who is "pro Rule of Law, pro Make Canada Safe Again, pro balanced budget, &...BEST of all, Pro Western Civilization and a fighter for our values. @FaithGoldy will not be silenced."

King, a Kiron resident who is seeking re-election in Iowa's 4th Congressional District, got a blizzard of responses on Twitter. King's tweet about Goldy had nearly 3,000 likes and nearly 1,000 comments by Wednesday morning.

Kedron Bardwell, who chairs the political science department at Simpson College in Indianola, said Goldy has claimed "Canada is undergoing a 'white genocide.'"

Goldy also "appeared on the Neo-Nazi/white supremacist web site 'Daily Stormer,' and was fired by a Canadian right wing/anti-Muslim site for being too extreme," Bardwell said.

Bardwell also tweeted that Goldy "explicitly recited white supremacist slogan The 14 Words ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for WHITE children") on a 2017 radio show, and she also said she “salutes” white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville, Virginia, “in hordes.”

Goldy has worked as a reporter and commentator for a number of media organizations and she stirred controversy last year when she appeared in a video from Bethlehem, discussing the Islamic call to prayer and claiming that "Bethlehem's Christian population has been ethnically cleansed."

But don't call them Nazis, nope.

And Iowa keeps re-electing this scumbag.  Can we not?  Can we elect Democrat J.D. Scholten instead, guys?

After topping eight-term U.S. Rep. Steve King in campaign cash for a fourth straight period, Democratic challenger J.D. Scholten says he's financially set to competitively challenge the incumbent over the final three weeks to election day.

Scholten, a former paralegal and professional baseball player from Sioux City, raised $661,013 in the three-month period ended Sept. 30. That's more than four times the $161,673 King collected during the quarter, according to reports filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission.

Scholten and King, a Republican from Kiron, are competing in the Iowa 4th district race with Libertarian Party nominee Charles Aldrich, of Clarion in the Nov. 6 election.

Scholten, a first-time candidate for public office, has outraised King in four consecutive quarters, dating to the report that ended the 2017 year. In the previously quarter, he tripled the amount King raised through June 30, with Scholten's taking in $269,162, compared to the $70,601 collected by the congressman.

Combining the last four quarters, Scholten has raised $1.38 million, while King has brought in just over $515,000.

"Anyone who doesn’t think we can win this race hasn’t been paying attention," Scholten said in a news release Tuesday. "Increasing our fundraising numbers for a fourth quarter in a row shows the momentum our campaign is building.

Scholten is a long shot, but he's gaining ground.  I would LOVE for this to be one of the big upsets nobody saw coming, even though the polls mostly show King with a safe lead.  Nobody's giving him a chance, and basically no polling has been done.  King isn't even bothering to debate him.

But man, wouldn't this be great? Show him some love.

Sunday Long Read: The Company Line

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from The New Yorker's Sheelah Kolhatkar on Sinclair, arguably the biggest media threat to the US today. I've talked multiple times before about Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing conglomerate that owns nearly two hundred local broadcast stations and forces pro-Trump, pro-GOP, pro-corporate propaganda on its local news broadcasts. The man behind Sinclair is David D. Smith, who makes no effort to hide the fact that he is there to spread the message of the Trump GOP for his 20 million daily viewers in dozens of TV markets around the country, whether they like it or not.

Sinclair has largely evaded the kind of public scrutiny given to its more famous competitor, Fox News, and David Smith sometimes expresses frustration that his business doesn’t command as much respect as Rupert Murdoch’s company, 21st Century Fox, which owns the channel. Fox News is the highest-rated cable property, with 2.5 million viewers during prime time. But twenty million or so U.S. households don’t have cable or streaming television, and therefore rely on local stations such as Sinclair’s. A Republican operative who has worked with Smith told me, “He has a shtick that he does not deviate from: ‘People watch broadcast television, and there’s a shitload of people in this country who do not have cable.’ And he’s right. Local TV is still where a significant cross-section of the population gets their news, and a lot of what’s going on in cable television is just totally irrelevant. It’s not a sexy business, but he’s laughing all the way to the bank.”

Sinclair was founded by Smith’s father, Julian Sinclair Smith, who worked in aerospace engineering before applying to the F.C.C., in 1965, for a license to operate a television station in Baltimore. In 1971, Julian Smith launched Channel 45, also known as WBFF. The airwaves are considered a publicly owned resource, and broadcasters must agree to devote a portion of their programming to serving the public interest. Julian’s four sons—Fredrick, Duncan, Robert, and David—grew up watching the family’s channel, known as “the BFF,” for Baltimore’s Family Features, which showed old movies and children’s shows. The Smith family ate dinner with the TV on, so that they could keep an eye out for technical problems. Julian encouraged his sons to help at the WBFF offices by hauling out garbage.

David was the most entrepreneurial of the boys. In the nineteen-seventies, when he was in his twenties, he became a partner in a company called Ciné Processors, which produced copies of pornographic films, including “Deep Throat.” (Smith’s colleague in the enterprise told the Los Angeles Times that Ciné Processors later went out of business after a police raid.) David also founded, and then sold, a company that made television transmitters. In the nineteen-eighties, as Julian’s health declined, the Smith sons began to take a more active role in running Sinclair. In 1991, the Baltimore Sun portrayed the brothers as role models in the business community. “Listen as they gather in the stately Roland Park home of the parents to talk about themselves and the station, the sons joking and wisecracking and chiding one another as if they are at some sort of bawdy class reunion, adding to each other’s thoughts, and ultimately deferring almost solemnly to the father,” the reporter wrote.

Sinclair had recently introduced its first hour-long newscast, after David pointed out that Baltimore was one of the only top television markets without a 10 p.m. national news program. Soon, under David’s direction, Sinclair began buying new stations. “I didn’t want to be a digit head; I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” David told Forbes in 1996. “My father was too much of a visionary to care about profits. What I wanted was purely to make money.”

At the time, F.C.C. rules prohibited a company from owning two stations in the same market, but Smith found a work-around. Sinclair bought a television station in Pittsburgh, WPGH, even though Sinclair already owned its main rival, WPTT. The first Iraq War had just started, and the stock market was dropping, but Smith paid a high price—fifty-five million dollars—for the station. “Everybody thought it was the end of the world,” Smith said. “I didn’t. I believed that certain things were going to happen in the television industry, the most important being consolidation.”

To comply with the F.C.C., Sinclair would have to divest one of the two stations to an independent owner. Instead, Smith sold WPTT to its manager, a Sinclair employee named Edwin Edwards, Sr., and then signed an agreement that gave Sinclair day-to-day control over the station. A few years later, Sinclair replicated this strategy in Baltimore, divesting one station to a company called Glencairn, which was jointly controlled by Edwards and Smith’s mother. These “duopolies” gave the company leverage in purchasing syndicated television shows like “Friends” and “Cheers.” The fact that Edwards is African-American meant that Sinclair qualified for tax benefits for companies selling to minority owners. Although Sinclair told the F.C.C. that the divested stations were independent, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicated that they were Sinclair assets.

By 1998, Forbes reported, Sinclair had made twelve of these so-called sidecar purchases, with eight more pending. All were made through Glencairn, Smith family members, or Sinclair executives, allowing the company to circumvent another F.C.C. regulation: an ownership cap dictating that no corporation can control more than thirty-five per cent of the national market, a figure that has since been raised to thirty-nine per cent. When reached for comment, Sinclair said that the company “used these legally permissible operating efficiencies to continue to survive in a very competitive business landscape,” and added that the sidecar deals were “similar in all material respects to arrangements in which many other broadcasters frequently engage.”

None of this would have been possible without the willful blindness of the F.C.C. Andrew Schwartzman, who has been involved in litigation against Sinclair, told me that Sinclair “pushed the envelope and the rules aggressively, time after time after time,” and that the company had “an unparalleled track record of getting away with stuff.” Emboldened by the sidecar strategy, Sinclair made a flurry of new purchases. In 1998, it announced plans to buy Sullivan Broadcast Holdings, which owned thirteen stations in places like Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Dayton. Around the same time, the F.C.C., under pressure from lobbyists, modified the duopoly rule to be more lenient. Sinclair responded by buying all but two of the Glencairn stations, for a fraction of their market value.

Public-interest groups and media organizations complained to the F.C.C., arguing that Glencairn was a front for Sinclair, and that the situation had allowed the company to build a near-monopoly in many markets. In 2001, an F.C.C. investigation found that Sinclair had exercised de-facto control over Glencairn, but the commission fined the two companies a mere forty thousand dollars each. The pattern continued, with Sinclair buying back divested stations when regulations loosened. Glencairn changed its name to Cunningham Broadcasting, and promised that it would be under new management—which, it turned out, meant Sinclair’s former president Robert Simmons. Shortly afterward, Sinclair filed applications to acquire five stations licensed to Cunningham, at what critics said was a tenth of their true market value.

And on and on.  Sinclair was the man behind the "Stolen Honor" movie in 2004 that was essentially a two-hour campaign commercial attacking John Kerry.  It ran on all of Sinclair's Ohio stations, cost Kerry the state, and the election.

Smith is right up there with Steve Bannon and his ilk as the most consistently powerful and dangerous media mogul in America.  It's safe to say Trump would not be president without his broadcast stations in Michigan (8 stations), Ohio (9 stations), Pennsylvania (9 stations), and Wisconsin (5 stations) and his pro-Trump propaganda there which basically amounted to tens of millions in free advertising in 2016.

How much damage has he done in 2018?

We'll know soon, I suspect.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

I mentioned this in StupidiNews on Friday where the Trump regime was asking for the courts to block a lawsuit by a number of young climate change activists over America's lack of climate change policy.  I figured the Ninth Circuit would agree to an injunction, but apparently Chief Justice John Roberts himself stepped in to effectively end the lawsuit.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a high-profile climate change lawsuit brought by young activists who accuse the federal government of violating their constitutional rights with policies that have caused a dangerous climate.

Chief Justice John Roberts signed an order freezing the trial that was set to start in 10 days in federal court in Oregon until lawyers for the young people provide a response and the high court issues another order.

It marked a victory for the government, which under the Obama and Trump administrations has tried unsuccessfully for years to get the case dismissed. An expert says the Trump administration tried again before the Oct. 29 trial as the court shifted to the right with the confirmation this month of Brett Kavanaugh.

The Supreme Court refused to toss the lawsuit in July, calling it “premature.”

Justice Department lawyers asked again Thursday, arguing that the claim aims to redirect federal environmental policies through the courts rather than through the political process.

Julia Olson, a lawyer representing the young plaintiffs and chief legal counsel for Our Children’s Trust, said they are confident the trial will move forward once the justices receive their response, which is due by Wednesday.

The Supreme Court has recognized in other cases that review of constitutional questions “is better done on a full record where the evidence is presented and weighed,” she said in an email. “This case is about already recognized fundamental rights and children’s rights of equal protection under the law.”

The young people say government officials have known for more than 50 years that carbon pollution from fossil fuels was causing climate change and that policies on oil and gas deprive them of life, liberty and property. They also say the government has failed to protect natural resources as a “public trust” for future generations.

The lawsuit wants a court to order the government to stop permitting and authorizing fossil fuels, quickly phase out carbon dioxide emissions to a certain level by 2100 and develop a national climate recovery plan.

The Trump administration got a temporary reprieve on the case after also asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected the request in July.

“The latest attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the trial does not appear to be based on any new evidence or arguments. The only new element is an additional Supreme Court justice,” said Melissa Scanlan, a professor at Vermont Law School, who is not involved in the case.

I guarantee you Kavanaugh was the deciding factor in this injunction and the reason why the trial was stopped.  I also guarantee you that the trial will never, ever go forward now, and will be dismissed out of hand.  People have badly underestimated just what Kavanaugh's presence on the bench means.

Things will only get worse from here.

Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was attacked six years ago by Republican state auditor Josh Mandel over domestic violence allegations that supposedly led to Brown's then 26-year-old divorce.  Mandel lost by a significant margin and Brown has gone on to be one of the Senate better Democratic liberal voices.

But now, Brown is up against GOP Rep. Jim Renacci, and Brown is now facing assault accusations from a number of women brought forward by the Republican who says Brown not only needs to drop out of the race, but as with Al Franken, needs to retire from the Senate immediately.

Earlier this week, Republican Senate candidate and Congressman Jim Renacci revealed to The Enquirer "multiple women" contacted him with allegations they were abused by his Democratic opponent and veteran U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Renacci wouldn't reveal who they were. Late Thursday night, an attorney released a statement on behalf of one of the women.

In the statement, Canton, Ohio area attorney Laura Mills described a sexual encounter her client had with Brown in the late 1980s. Brown was Ohio's Secretary of State at the time and the unnamed woman had met Brown in the course of her work.

According to Mills, Brown pushed her client up against a wall.

"She described an unexpected, uninvited, unwanted, and sudden advance, roughly pushing her up against a wall," Mills said in the statement. "It did stop after she expressed dismay and very firmly pulled away, explaining that was not her style nor why she was there. He then said he remembered what she had on the day they had met some time earlier and that he had been attracted to her."

Mills, who has served as Renacci's lawyer and has donated to his campaigns, said her client wants to remain anonymous. She was able to "defuse the situation" but was shaken up by it, Mills said in the statement.

Brown's campaign on Thursday sent a cease and desist letter to Renacci, demanding he stop "false and libelous statements."

"At the very least you were acting with reckless disregard to the truth, as you must have been aware that the statements you were making had no basis in fact," Brown's attorney Marc Erik Elias wrote in the email.

Brown's campaign spokesman, Preston Maddock, in a statement, pointed out Mills is a former business partner of Renacci. The campaign plans on pursuing "all legal means" against Renacci.

Renacci has been attacking Brown over the now 32-year-old domestic violence allegations, which Brown's ex-wife, Larke Recchie, denies.  Renacci has been trailing Brown for the entire race, but that's before this week's allegations has come forward.

Brown now has a problem, and a potentially very serious one.  His response has been to completely deny the allegations, but I'm not sure if that's going to hold up here in a post-Kavanaugh America.

We'll see.

The Drums of War, Con't

The Trump regime grows ever closer to the bad old days of the Cold War, as both Trump and Putin have decided that the 80's-era bilateral treaty on mid-range nukes no longer works with an ascendant China in the picture.

The Trump administration is preparing to tell Russian leaders next week that it is planning to exit the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in part to enable the United States to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, according to American officials and foreign diplomats.

President Trump has been moving toward scrapping the three-decade-old treaty, which grew out of President Ronald Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. While the treaty was seen as effective for years, Russia has been violating it at least since 2014 in an effort to menace other nations.

But the pact has also constrained the United States from deploying new weapons to respond to China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and to keep American naval forces at bay. Because China was not a signatory to the treaty, it has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which can travel thousands of miles.

The White House said that no official decision had been made to leave the treaty, known as I.N.F., which at the time of its signing was considered a critical step in defusing Cold War tensions. But in the coming weeks, Mr. Trump is expected to sign off on the decision, which would mark the first time he has scrapped an arms control treaty, the American officials said.

Now that the treaty is largely in tatters, the question is whether the decision to leave it will accelerate the increasingly Cold War-like behavior among the three superpowers: the United States, Russia and China.

As Russia has flown bombers over Europe and has conducted troop exercises on its borders with former Soviet states, the United States and its NATO allies have been rotating forces through countries under threat. Ukraine has become a low-level battleground, with ground skirmishes and a daily cyberconflict. China and the United States are jostling for position around reefs in the South China Sea that Beijing has turned into military bases, and they are both preparing for any possibility of war in space.

It's absolutely true that Russia walked away from the INF treaty in 2014, but the EU, particularly Germany, didn't want another European arms race.  However, John Bolton's Mustache has prevailed, and the treaty will be scrapped soon, and as Russia plays both the US and China against the middle, it's Putin who will get the last laugh.

Hell, he might be the only around to laugh when the fallout stops.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Justice Department on Friday brought charges against a Putin ally in a Russian plot to interfere in the 2018 elections.  This is not a drill, this is the DoJ charging Russians with trying to mess with our elections right now.

Russians working for a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin engaged in an elaborate campaign of “information warfare” to interfere with the midterm elections, federal prosecutors said on Friday in announcing they had charged one of them in the plot.

The woman, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, of St. Petersburg, was involved in an effort “to spread distrust towards candidates for U.S. political office and the U.S. political system,” prosecutors said.

Ms. Khusyaynova managed millions of dollars for a company owned by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who was previously indicted on charges of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, to finance foreign influence activities directed at the United States. Some of the money was spent on advertising on social media in the United States, buying internet domain names and “promoting news postings on social networks.”

The conspirators seized on divisions in American politics, prosecutors said, including immigration, guns, race relations, women and even the debate over the protests by National Football League players during the national anthem. They adopted a variety of ideological perspectives, writing on varied topics and from opposing views, prosecutors said. No one was named in court papers besides Ms. Khusyaynova.

The conspirators “took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists,” prosecutors wrote.

Russian bots are purposely making our divisive society worse by picking fights, and them amplifying those fights using social media. And let's not forget that for the last two years, the Trump regime has been not only actively denying that this was happening, but going out of their way to make our elections more vulnerable.

The bigger issue is that these attacks are going on and Trump is doing nothing to stop them.  It's good then that the FBI is working to try to defend the country, but they sure aren't going to get any help and any support from Trump.  Remember, for two years, Russian meddling in the elections has been "fake news".

Now we have federal charges filed that not only say that it's not fake news, but that it's happening now, in real time, and most likely is still happening.

The Russians are attacking our elections now.  Right now.  Openly.

And Ms. Khusyaynova here?  The accountant paying for all of this.

Prosecutors said Khusyaynova is the chief accountant for a Russian umbrella effort called Project Lakhta, funded by a Russian oligarch whose Concord companies were named in the July indictment brought by Mueller involving attempted meddling in the 2016 election.

Concord Management is owned by Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, also known as "Putin's chef," who is closely linked to the Russian president. It provides food services at the Kremlin.

Mueller has indicted Prighozin as part of his probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller's office indicted Prighozin and 12 other Russian nationals in February on charges including interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In June, Mueller said in a filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that the government believes foreign "individuals and entities" are continuing to "engage in interference operations like those charged in the present indictment." The filing sought to protect evidence requested by Prighozin's company.

Follow the money, and you'll find Vlad behind it, I guarantee.

Stay tuned.

I Dunno, Alaska If I Get The Chance, Con't

A few days ago I noted that the nation's only independent governor, Bill Walker of Alaska, had his Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott resign over "inappropriate comments to women" almost overnight.  This was odd enough with three weeks to go in the race, but I noted these comments in the story that were actually far more interesting.

Walker campaign manager, John-Henry Heckendorn, told the Associated Press that the campaign has been in conversations with Begich's campaign for several days about a "path forward for Alaska." He declined to go into details, but he said the conversations were prompted by concerns about Dunleavy and the dynamics of a three-way race. The talks so far have been "inconclusive" but will continue, Heckendorn said.

The polls showed the Republican in the race, former state Senator Mike Dunleavy, was ahead in the three-way contest with both Walker and Begich, with Dunleavy in the upper 40's and both Walker and Begich splitting the rest, which would make Dunleavy the easy winner.

But it looks like Walker realized he has no chance to win...and Friday he dropped out of the race to support Begich.

“I believe we cannot win a three-way race,” said Mr. Walker, a former Republican who left his party to win election as an independent in 2014. Mr. Walker said he had concluded that former United States Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat, “has a better chance of running a competitive race” against their Republican opponent, Mike J. Dunleavy, a well-financed Republican former state senator.

“Alaskans deserve a choice other than Mike Dunleavy,” Mr. Walker said. He urged his followers to vote for Mr. Begich even though his own name will still be on the ballot.

And not only is Walker dropping out of the race, he's wrecking any chance of going back to the Alaska Republican party.

As governor, Mr. Walker was careful not to burn bridges with Republicans in trying to get legislation passed. But in his statement to Alaskans on Friday, he went ahead and lit the flames. Mr. Walker made it clear, in a point-by-point analysis of Mr. Dunleavy’s record and statements on campaign trail, his view that Mr. Dunleavy was a wrong choice for the state on everything from taxes to health care.

“On balance, it is my belief that despite my many differences with Mark Begich, his stance on the important issues I have listed above more closely align with my priorities for Alaska,” Mr. Walker said.

There's more there, a lot more.   I wonder what it is, but Walker tossing a Molotov cocktail over his shoulder on the way out the door like this makes me think a hell of a lot is going on where there's more to this story.

Stay tuned.

And go Mark Begich...

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

The Saudis are apparently going ahead with their...umm..."explanation" of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi's "unfortunate death" and Donald Trump shrugs and says he finds the tale credible.

Saudi Arabia said Saturday that Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist who disappeared more than two weeks ago, died after an argument and fistfight with unidentified men inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Eighteen Saudi men have been arrested and are being investigated in the case, Saudi state-run media reported without identifying any of them.

State media also reported that Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy director of Saudi intelligence, and other high-ranking intelligence officials had been dismissed. They did not say whether the men’s firing had a connection to the Khashoggi case or whether they were being investigated for playing a role in it.

Saudi Arabia has offered various, changing explanations for Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance — initially claiming that he had left the consulate alive.

But international outrage mounted as Turkish officials leaked lurid details from their own investigation suggesting that he was murdered inside the consulate and dismembered by a team of 15 Saudi agents who flew in specifically to kill him.

The case has battered the international reputation of the kingdom and its 33-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who has sought to sell himself to the world as a young reformer shaking off his country’s conservative past. But suspicions that such a complicated foreign operation could not have been launched without at least his tacit approval have driven away many of his staunchest foreign supporters.

The Trump administration had built strong ties with Crown Prince Mohammed, seeing him as a strong partner in its ambitions to counter Iran, forge a deal between Israel and the Palestinians, and reconfigure the Middle East.

In a statement, the White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the United States “acknowledges” the announcement from Saudi Arabia “and that it has taken action against the suspects it has identified so far.”

“We will continue to closely follow the international investigations into the tragic incident and advocate for justice that is timely, transparent and in accordance with all due process,” the statement said. 

So now we get to see if the Saudis get away with this.

Every indication of course is that they will.  The EU won't do anything, Congress will eventually go supine, and the Saudis will spread some money around to lobby for forgiveness.  By January things will be back to normal and it will be because "wise" King Salman has stepped in to "contain" his son.

So grave is the fallout from the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that King Salman has felt compelled to intervene, five sources with links to the Saudi royal family said.

Last Thursday, Oct. 11, the king dispatched his most trusted aide, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca, to Istanbul to try to defuse the crisis.

World leaders were demanding an explanation and concern was growing in parts of the royal court that the king’s son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to whom he has delegated vast powers, was struggling to contain the fallout, the sources said.

During Prince Khaled’s visit, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agreed to form a joint working group to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The king subsequently ordered the Saudi public prosecutor to open an inquiry based on its findings.

“The selection of Khaled, a senior royal with high status, is telling as he is the king’s personal adviser, his right hand man and has had very strong ties and a friendship with (Turkish President) Erdogan,” said a Saudi source with links to government circles.

And so everything will be back to normal.

Until the next journalist is killed. 

But then, of course, that will be the new normal.

It's About Suppression, Con't

I said back in June that the Supreme Court decision that found Ohio's voter purges to be legal meant that red states were going to continually disenfranchise millions of black and Latino voters and black and Latino votes, every election cycle, every time, until they are stopped.  

North Carolina is doing it, eliminating early voting by making it as prohibitive as possible, and only recently was stopped from purging millions of voters through a loophole by a federal judge.

Georgia too has voter purge laws that remove voters for a host of reasons, possibly the worst ones in the nation, and GOP Secretary of State Brian Kemp is using every one of them to disenfranchise as many black voters as he can so he can win his race for governor against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Georgia officials removed an estimated 107,000 people from voter rolls because they decided not to vote in prior elections, according to a new report.

An APM Reports analysis found the voters were removed under the state's "use it or lose it" law, which starts a process for removing people from voter rolls if they fail to vote, respond to a notice or make contact with election officials over a three-year period.

After that three-year span, those who don't vote or make contact with authorities in two elections can be purged from the voter rolls under the Georgia law.

Such laws, generally enacted by GOP governments, have been growing more common, with at least nine states now having them, according to APM Reports.

And of course, the overwhelming majority of these purged voters were black and registered as Democrats

Kemp is Georgia's secretary of state, and his office oversees elections. Abrams has argued that Georgia laws and Kemp's office have acted to suppress the votes of African-Americans in the state. Kemp says his office is following Georgia law and that he has acted to prevent voter fraud.

The two are locked in a tight race that could be decided by a relatively small number of voters.

The APM investigation concluded that many people struck from voter rolls under "use it or lose it" laws do not know that they have been dropped and are likely to be surprised if they are turned away from the polls on Nov. 6.

 Surprise!  You have to fill out a provisional ballot, which means Kemp's office will find a way not to count it, since he's still in charge of counting all the votes for the contest.

That's right.  Kemp has yet to resign or recuse himself from overseeing his own election.
Oh, but it gets worse.  Unless your absentee ballot signature perfectly matches that of your voter registration form in the judgment of Kemp's office, your vote is thrown away.

Say you live in Georgia. You’re eager to vote in this year’s election—a tight race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Trump acolyteBrian Kemp—so you fill out an absentee ballot and mail it in. Then, days or weeks after the election, you receive a notice in the mail. The signature on your absentee ballot, it explains, looked different from the signature on your voter-registration card. So an election official threw out your ballot. There is nothing you can do. Your vote has been voided.

If Georgia’s signature-mismatch law remains in effect through the November election, this fate will befall thousands of would-be voters. The statute directs elections officials to apply amateur handwriting analysis to voters’ signatures and reject any potential “mismatch.” Nearly 500 ballots in Gwinnett County alone have already been rejected for mismatch, a disproportionate number of them cast by minority voters. Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is suing, demanding that the state give all citizens an opportunity to cure ballots rejected for mismatch. Its suit will help determine how successfully Georgia will suppress minority votes in the upcoming race.

And Kemp's office is definitely targeting black voters in Atlanta for this methodology of disenfranchisement.

That’s the case in Georgia. The epicenter of the current mismatch crisis is Gwinnett County, the most diverse county in the state. While Gwinnett has just 12 percent of the state’s total mail-in ballots, it’s already responsible for 40 percent of statewide rejections this election cycle. Voters who cast absentee ballots very early may receive their rejection letters before Election Day, which allows them to try again by voting in person. But there is no requirement that the state send these letters speedily, so many receive them far too late. And even worse, there is no procedure by which a voter can cure her ballot—by, say, verifying her identity to an election official. If she wants to cast a ballot that counts, she must start from the beginning. And if the election is over, she has no ability to exercise her right to vote.

The ACLU argues that this scheme violates due process. It’s well established that qualified voters have a liberty interest in casting a ballot that counts, and so the government must provide some process before depriving citizens of that right. Georgia grants them none. Under long-standing Supreme Court precedent, courts must decide “what process is due” by weighing the interests at stake, the risk of violating those interests, the value of additional safeguards, and the burdens they will impose on the government.

The ACLU should win this suit.  But guess who gets the final say?

The Supreme Court.

Stay tuned.

The Problem Child

With just weeks to go before the 2018 midterms, I've noticed, this week especially, a number of articles describing the "Hillary Clinton problem" that Democrats have.  Daily Beast columnist Liz Mair makes it very clear that she wants Clinton not only gone from the spotlight, but from gone from Democratic politics altogether.

Hillary remains caught up in the delusion that the only reason she lost in 2016 was because of Russian interference. She does not seem to have fully processed the fact that she lost the electoral college, the only vote that counts. She touts the fact that she got nearly three million more votes than Trump while conveniently leaving out that her tally of the vote still fell well below 50 percent.

Both of the major party nominees in 2016 were so unlikable, flawed and—let’s be candid—unethical that lots of us just couldn’t pull the lever for her even if we couldn’t stand Trump. According to a study from American National Election Studies, the words most associated by voters with Hillary in 2016 were “experienced liar.” Is it logical that she’d want to rehab her image, given all this? Perhaps. Is it possible? No. Do we need to watch her try? Definitely, definitely, definitely not.

That might be especially the case if you’re a Democrat.

Hillary’s continual pursuit of limelight and headlines ensures that the image of the Democratic Party remains an outdated, outmoded, and frankly despicable for far too many voters. This comes at a time when leading Democrats are attempting to focus voters’ attention on the future—2020, and beating Trump—and jostling for the role as the new party leader.

It also undercuts Democrats’ positioning as the only party that really cares about #MeToo and that will fight for survivors, a contrast Dems are only too keen to spotlight in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and ongoing allegations about President Trump’s treatment of women. Only sheer partisan convenience could allow someone to insist that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony is credible while downplaying the numerous allegations of mistreatment (and worse) made by women against Bill Clinton.

For the Democratic Party, about the best that can come of this latest Clinton revival is that no matter how unpalatable any of its leading lights—Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Cory Booker, or others—are individually, they’ll look like downright appealing the longer Hillary hangs about.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is somewhat less aggressive towards Clinton, but she still wants her gone.

Speaking of Bill Clinton, there was his wife on CBS’s “Sunday Morning,” being asked about workplace conduct in the clarifying light of the #MeToo movement. “In retrospect, do you think Bill should’ve resigned in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal?” asked correspondent Tony Dokoupil.

Clinton, without hesitation: “Absolutely not.”

Dokoupil: “It wasn’t an abuse of power?”

Clinton: “No, no.”

Dokoupil: “There are people who look at the incidents of the ’90s and they say, ‘A president of the United States cannot have a consensual relationship with an intern, the power imbalance is too great.’ ”

Clinton, interjecting mid-sentence: “Who was an adult. But let me ask you this: Where’s the investigation of the current incumbent against whom numerous allegations have been made and which he dismisses, denies and ridicules?”

Who was an adult . How can she say that, as if that is relevant in any way? Lewinsky’s technical adulthood is no defense for Bill Clinton’s behavior — in the workplace, as her superior (not to mention president), as a man old enough to be her father. And whatever the reasons for Hillary Clinton’s instinctive defense of her husband’s behavior then, her summary dismissal of it now diminishes her claim to feminism.

Would it not be possible for her to choke out something like: “We’ve all had some time to think about this and, yes, this was unacceptable workplace behavior. I don’t think a president who was elected by the country should have resigned over it, but I also think this conduct was seriously wrong.”

But this is not, it never has been, in Hillary Clinton’s emotional repertoire. She does not cede a millimeter; like Trump, she is allergic to apology. Like Trump, she is prone to whataboutism. If what Bill Clinton did was wrong, why does it matter if what Trump has done is wronger, if indeed it was? Whataboutism is an argument for losers, whichever side deploys it.

And so we are left with this depressing juxtaposition: a president who never hesitates to stoop in demeaning women. And a should’ve-been-president who is a champion for women, except those mistreated by her husband. If Trump never fails to infuriate, Clinton consistently disappoints.

NY Times op-ed board member Michelle Cottie says Democrats cannot bury Clinton quickly enough to get her out of the midterm picture.

This is the sort of moral arrogance and self-justification that has long troubled even many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton. The former first lady, turned senator, turned secretary of state may have been one of the most qualified nominees ever to run for president. But widespread ambivalence about her among not only swing voters but also her own base set the stage for her to lose the presidency to arguably the least qualified individual ever to hold that office.

Two years since that loss, Mrs. Clinton remains broadly unpopular. As of late September, her favorability rating still hovered at 36 percent, down several points from where it was at the time of the election.

Mrs. Clinton remains a singular obsession of Mr. Trump and his followers. The higher her profile, the more Republican leaders can use her as a rallying point for their voters. Months ago, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee boasted of his party’s plan to hang her around Democrats’ neck in the midterms: “We’re going to make them own her.”

Hillary Clinton is a woman of extraordinary achievement who has earned the right to share her views on whatever topic she sees fit. But this close to Election Day, discussing hot-button issues in national interviews is nothing but problematic for her party — and, ultimately, her own legacy. She and Mr. Clinton are set to begin a series of joint speaking appearances soon after the elections. Perhaps she could save her more incendiary observations for then.

Politico's Annie Karni goes so far as to describe "the Clinton problem" for Democrats and to ask if anybody has the "courage" to stand up to her and intervene.  They want her fundraising abilities...but not her.

The strange position Clinton currently occupies is perhaps best illustrated by her relationship with the Andrew Gillum campaign. On election night, Hillary and Bill Clinton both called the Tallahassee mayor, who is seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party and who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, to congratulate him and offer themselves as surrogates for anything he needed in his gubernatorial campaign, a source familiar with the call said. Since then, the Gillum campaign hasn’t invited Bill Clinton to do anything—closed- or open-door. And the campaign experienced some blowback from liberals for announcing that Hillary Clinton would campaign for Gillum.

“Even Hillary voters don’t want to see or hear from her again,” Miami filmmaker Billy Corben tweeted.

Clinton was widely reported to be joining Gillum on the trail. But a spokesman for the Gillum campaign clarified that she was only supporting the candidate through closed-door fundraisers. It was not clear whether the plans had changed.

Most of the incoming requests for Clinton are to raise money, said one former adviser familiar with her plans. She’s been working closely with Gov. Howard Dean, who has partnered with her on her PAC, Onward Together.

“The real future in this party is under 35, and that’s what we’re funding,” Dean said in an interview. “She’s the best fundraiser in the Democratic Party, and she’s pretty far-sighted. We’ve been working together to connect her donor base to all these young groups. What you’re seeing is that we’re facilitating the takeover of the Democratic Party by people who are under 35 years old. This is a big piece of what she is doing politically.”

But despite being the first woman to clinch her party’s presidential nomination, Clinton is seen as a discordant fit to publicly stump for many young, progressive female candidates. She has received some requests to campaign, in places where she is seen as a surrogate who can move suburban women to come out and vote. Earlier this month, for instance, she participated in a roundtable event with J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic candidate for governor in Illinois.

In 2020, however, it remains to be seen who wants to campaign with her, and how much.

“If I was running, I could see certain circumstances in which she could be helpful, from a rally perspective, in certain locations, on a limited basis,” said Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who has shot to fame representing porn star Stormy Daniels and who is considering a presidential bid of his own. He added: “I think there’s still a lot of people that support her, and for that reason she could certainly play a positive role in some capacity in 2020.”

Personally, the reaction to Clinton getting involved by the Village media, who has literally despised her and wanted to destroy her politically for well over two decades, is way over the top and only making things worse.  Like it or not, she is who the Democratic voters chose in the primaries. I do not understand the incandescent hatred for her.

Having said that...having said that.

Perhaps this isn't the best time for her to be picking fights.

StupidiNews!

• Under heavy pressure from voting rights groups, and in the wake of a lawsuit four years ago, Florida is easing voting registration requirements for counties affected by Hurricane Michael.
• The Trump regime is once again asking a federal court to toss a 2015 lawsuit by 21 young climate change activists, the lawsuit is set to go to trial at the end of month unless blocked.
• Taliban militants in Afghanistan are taking credit for the assassinations of the country's top police commander and a local intelligence chief, a US general present in the area was not harmed.
• Donald Trump is once again warming Saudi Arabia of "severe" consequences as US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin will not attend next week's Saudi investors' conference.
• Scotland's Orkney Islands could be the initial deployment grounds for short-range small electric passenger planes, Scottish airline Loganair say it plans to make 10 inter-island routes all electric.

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

You know things have gotten bad when the NY Times fully admits in the headline that the Saudis are trial ballooning the naming of a Saudi intelligence official to take the fall for the state-sanctioned murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

The rulers of Saudi Arabia are considering blaming a top intelligence official close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, three people with knowledge of the Saudi plans said Thursday.

The plan to assign blame to Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, would be an extraordinary recognition of the magnitude of international backlash to hit the kingdom since the death of Mr. Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident. A resident of Virginia and contributor to The Washington Post, Mr. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

Blaming General Assiri could also provide a plausible explanation for the killing and help deflect blame from the crown prince, who American intelligence agencies are increasingly convinced was behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkish officials have said they possess evidence showing that 15 Saudi agents assassinated and dismembered Mr. Khashoggi in the consulate.

After two weeks of blanket denials and mounting pressure from Turkey and Washington, Saudi Arabia said it would conduct its own investigation to determine who was responsible. 

But even with the investigation still ostensibly underway, the Saudis are already pointing to General Assiri as the culprit, according to the three people familiar with the Saudi plans. People close to the White House have already been briefed and given General Assiri’s name.

Whether that move will be enough to calm the international crisis and what it may mean for Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, remain to be seen.

It's not going to be, not with coverage like this in full view.  And let's not forget that four of the members of the team that allegedly killed Khashoggi are part of the Crown Prince's security detail.  Of course, the real issue is why Trump is helping cover up the murder, and the answer is that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is neck deep in the mess.

Jared Kushner reportedly told President Donald Trump to stand by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — despite mounting evidence that the royal was involved in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi two weeks ago.

Kushner’s reasoning? International outrage over other incidents, like Saudi Arabia’s bombing of innocent children in Yemen and kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister, decreased with time. The scandal over the disappearance of Khashoggi, a US resident and Washington Post writer, would similarly go away, he argued.

Nice guy, huh.  Again, Kushner is convinced that Trump can make this blow over.  Why does he want that so badly?

To a certain extent, Kushner is correct — public attention did shift from the recent Yemen tragedy and Saad Hariri’s kidnapping, although they have since informed the realization that Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, is a reckless autocrat. But what’s notable here is that Kushner doesn’t want the US to respond to Khashoggi’s alleged murder in any way. He simply wants America to forget the incident ever happened.

That’s perhaps not so surprising. Kushner has cultivated a personal relationship with MBS while serving as senior White House adviser for Middle East affairs. He and the crown prince even text on WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging app. Because of his close ties to the Saudi royal, Kushner has purposely stayed out of the spotlight during the scandal.

But for MBS, the news is another reason to stay in close contact with Trump’s son-in-law. The royal once bragged that Kushner was “in his pocket,” and the New York Times story will likely only add to that perception.

Not a good look for either one of them.  The other person who has a lot of exposure here to the Crown Prince is another Prince...in this case, our old merc friend, Erik, whose plans to privatize the Afghanistan permawar were sunk by the Afghans themselves right after Khashoggi's disappearance.

It's almost like they knew a man best known for running one of the biggest private merc outfits on earth had done something wrong that ended any hope of negotiations, when we later find out a team of Saudi mercs magically appeared in Turkey to mulch a journalist.

So no, Trump was never going to lay a finger on the Saudis over this, and they'll get the green light to murder more dissidents, because America is ruled by an autocrat.

The Swift-Planing Of Amy McGrath

Whenever a Democratic military veteran runs for federal public office, odds are very good their service record is going to be attacked by Republican liars, especially if the GOP candidate hasn't even done so much as to own a Swiss Army knife.  

It cost John Kerry the White House, and Republicans know it works, so it should come as no surprise that here in Kentucky, retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, trying to unseat Republican Rep. Andy Barr, is running into attacks that outright lie about her time in the military. 

Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath’s military background has been one of her greatest assets in her campaign to represent Kentucky’s Sixth Congressional District.

It was a major feature in her campaign announcement video, which went viral and caught the attention of national donors. It has helped her connect with conservative Democrats in the district. And it’s an attribute she frequently highlights to hammer home her pledge to put country over political party.

But as Election Day nears in her nationally-watched race against U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, some veterans in the 19-county district are accusing McGrath of misrepresenting her role in combat missions as she speaks to voters.

Jim Lucas, an Army veteran from Berea, said he and a group of about six veterans plan to petition the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame to have her removed for allegedly misrepresenting her military record in campaign commercials. In particular, Lucas accused McGrath of “stolen valor” for creating the false impression that she piloted F-18 fighter jets into combat.

“We’re not doing this as a political thing,” said Lucas, a registered Republican. “We’re going to continue whether she gets elected or not.”

McGrath, though, has been consistent about her role in the military and careful to say she was the first woman Marine to fly in an F-18 into combat. She served as the back-seat weapons system operator during her 89 combat missions, not as the front-seat pilot. She did later become a front-seat pilot, but never steered an F-18 during a combat mission.

A Herald-Leader review of McGrath’s commercials and many of her public comments found no evidence that she has ever claimed to have piloted an F-18 during combat, though some political groups supporting her and some media reports have gotten it wrong.

“I just think it’s part of this climate where you have to try to tear somebody down and make them seem like someone you can’t trust,” McGrath said Thursday when asked about Lucas’ claims. “I’ve never tried to embellish my record, ever.”

Michael Estorer, who served with McGrath and now lives in Lexington, said everything the McGrath campaign has said about her military service is accurate.

“It is a little bit of a smear campaign,” Estorer said. “People are taking little facts and attacking them to misrepresent her service.”

Perhaps it's because McGrath and Barr are running a dead heat here in the Bluegrass State that would explain this sudden "stolen valor" idiocy, while Barr can claim plausible deniability and say he has nothing to do with the false attacks.

And let's remember, these assholes don't just want to McGrath to lose next month, they want to drive her out of politics for good, they want her erased from the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame, and they want to charge her and imprison her under stolen valor laws.

They want her gone, permanently, for daring to challenge Andy Barr.  They want to use her as a warning shot against Democratic military veterans in 2020: if we can do this to the first female Marine fighter pilot, we can do this to anyone.

The Revenge Of The Son Of Austerity Hysteria, Con't

As I predicted time and again, after it became clear that the 2017 GOP tax cut scam was going to skyrocket the deficit and add trillions of the national debt over ten years to give tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest one percent, Republicans were going to insist Democrats had to cut Social Security and Medicare, and Medicaid and make them take 100% of the blame for it.

We've reached that stage of the con now.

Republicans have removed all doubt: When it comes to the federal deficit, the problem is Medicare and Social Security — not their own tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Fresh off the news that the deficit is increasing under President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Bloomberg News that Congress should target Social Security and Medicare for cuts to address the growing federal debt.

The federal deficit grew by nearly $800 billion over the first fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, during which the Republican Congress passed a tax cut targeted mostly to corporations and the wealthy, which is projected to add more than $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.

The White House and GOP leaders promised that despite all projections to the contrary, the tax cuts would pay for themselves. That hasn’t materialized so far.

But, of course, a growing federal deficit hasn’t caused Republican leaders to reconsider their tax policy. Instead, they argue that entitlement reform — Republican-speak for cuts to popular social safety net programs — is what’s really needed to address the federal deficit.

From McConnell’s interview with Bloomberg this week:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

Republicans were actually signaling during the tax debate, before the bill ever passed, that this was their strategy: pass a deficit-exploding tax cut and then argue that the real problem is federal spending on health and retirement benefits.

Massive, massive cuts are coming, and Republicans are going to blame Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats when they come. The fact that the GOP tax scam bill exploded the deficit?  Irrelevant, it only serves as proof that Democrats aren't serious about budgets when they refuse to cut spending, and our media will play dumb like they always do.

Even worse, Republicans will simply say "Democrats will raise taxes on tens of millions of middle-class Americans" unless they go along, setting up Trump for his key issue in 2020.  And should the Dems be dumb enough to capitulate, they'll take 100% of the blame, and the Myth of the Fiscally Responsible GOP will continue to be the truth for the majority of voters and pundits.

We've seen this game before, we saw it coming for over a year, and Dems still don't know how to counter it.