Last Call For Sing A Song Of Sick Pence, Con't

Trump's "Nixon in the Bunker" routine has gotten so bad now that he's openly questioning if VP Mike Pence is after his job and maybe helping Mueller behind his back or something.

President Trump’s post-midterm election news conference at the White House last week took a surprising turn when a reporter asked about locking down his 2020 ticket.

“Mike, will you be my running mate?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Pence, who stood up, raised his hand, and nodded.

“Will you? Thank you. O.K., good,” the president said. “That was unexpected, but I feel very fine.”

But in private Mr. Trump is apparently not feeling so fine. In recent weeks, with his electoral prospects two years from now much on his mind, Mr. Trump has focused on the person who has most publicly tethered his fortunes to him. In one conversation after another he has asked aides and advisers a pointed question: Is Mike Pence loyal?

Mr. Trump has repeated the question so many times that he has alarmed some of his advisers. The president has not openly suggested dropping Mr. Pence from the ticket and picking another running mate, but the advisers say those kinds of questions usually indicate that he has grown irritated with someone.

The answers Mr. Trump gets to his question have varied, depending on whom he asks.

Within the White House, most people he has talked to have assured the president that Mr. Pence has been a committed soldier, engaging in activities that Mr. Trump has eschewed, such as traveling to Hawaii to receive the remains of veterans of the Korean War, or visiting parts of the globe that Mr. Trump has avoided.

But some Trump advisers, primarily outside the White House, have suggested to him that while Mr. Pence remains loyal, he may have used up his utility. These advisers argue that Mr. Trump has forged his own relationship with evangelical voters, and that what he might benefit from more is a running mate who could help him with women voters, who disapprove of him in large numbers.

Now perhaps this is just a trial balloon fed to Maggie Haberman by Trump to see if anyone wants Pence's job, maybe it's a test of Pence's loyalty through what's coming, or maybe Trump's just looking for someone to blame for the coming storm and Pence is a novel target.  But maybe Trump is breaking down completely and seeing ghosts in the walls and he's one step short of talking to White House portraits, too.

At this point any of those are real possibilities.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Robert Mueller's flip of two of Trump's biggest fixers, Michael Cohen and George Nader, are the gifts that keep on giving (and we know Rick Gates continues to provide information too).  We've yet to see the real fruits of these efforts but they are coming, Cohen has led to the Trump Organization case currently being run by the AG of New York's office, and Nader's turn has led to some major international players.

On that last front, now we're learning that Nader is leading us to back to the Trump transition team and Republican operatives who are now in boatloads of trouble, starting with Dick Cheney's former national security aide, John Hannah.

Dick Cheney’s former top national-security aide has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, two people with knowledge of the probe tell The Daily Beast. It’s the latest sign that Mueller’s probe has expanded beyond the narrow bounds of Russian interference in American politics.

Mueller’s team has been looking into the communications and political dealings of John Hannah, the former Cheney adviser who later worked on Trump’s State Department transition team. This includes interactions with Lebanese-American businessman and fixer George Nader, who brokered meetings between foreign dignitaries and Team Trump, and Joel Zamel, a self-proclaimed social-media guru with deep ties to Israeli intelligence. The Daily Beast previously reported that the three men met with a top Saudi general in the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration to discuss plans to undermine and overthrow the government of Iran.

Hannah, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, is close with Nader and Zamel, both of whom the special counsel has questioned, according to two people with knowledge of those relationships. Hannah is listed on the website of one of Zamel’s firms, Wikistrat, as a member of its advisory council. Nader worked with Hannah on Iraq policy during the George W. Bush administration, according to four people who worked with the two or who knew of their interactions during the war. Hannah is now a senior counselor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank known for its criticism of the Iranian regime.

Hannah and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The Special Counsel’s Office declined to comment. A representative for Nader declined to comment. And a lawyer for Zamel did not respond to requests for comment.

Nader and Zamel have both been questioned by the Special Counsel’s Office and are reportedly cooperating with its probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Nader has been questioned about his ties to high-level officials in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, his relationship with Zamel, and his interactions with the Trump campaign. Mueller has questioned Zamel about his role pitching top campaign officials on an influence operation to help Trump win the election—which could have broken federal election laws.

Mueller’s interest in Hannah’s communications and interactions with the two suggest the special counsel’s probe is broader than previously understood.

“Mueller might be opening another front here,” said John McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA. “His mandate is to examine Russian collusion, but there’s the clause in his mandate that’s very open-ended—to the effect of ‘and any associated matters.’ It could be a separate line of inquiry about efforts to influence the election by foreigners.”

Everyone is expecting more indictments soon.  They could come at any time, but my experience tells me Mueller likes to ruin people's weekends on Friday afternoons.

We'll see.

A Heaping Helping Of Julian Fries, Or Wacky Leaks

The DoJ is coming for WikiLeaks founder (and Russian disinformation peddler) Julian Assange.  And we know this because the Justice Department appears to have...well...leaked...the information.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under seal, prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a recently unsealed court filing — a development that could significantly advance the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and have major implications for those who publish government secrets.

The disclosure came in a filing in a case unrelated to Assange. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing.”

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have long been investigating Assange and, in the Trump administration, had begun taking a second look at whether to charge members of the WikiLeaks organization for the 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents that the anti-secrecy group published. Investigators also had explored whether WikiLeaks could face criminal liability for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cybertools.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also has explored WikiLeaks’ publication of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. Officials have alleged that the emails were hacked by Russian spies and transferred to WikiLeaks. 

So I'm not sure if this was an amazingly dimwitted accident, or something done on purpose to give Assange a major heads up that he should get gone.  If this is the first really big leak out of the Mueller probe, more indictments and charges could be coming, but something about this entire mess stinks.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Broward County Florida failed to reach its recount deadline by 2 minutes, so results will not be recounted for Governor, meanwhile for the Senate race, all votes will be hand recounted.
• Alabama 17th Judicial Circuit DA Greg Griggers is in stable condition after being shot in the face by a former Alabama state trooper, police killed the gunman at the scene.
• The Pentagon has failed its first true comprehensive audit, the $2.7 trillion Defense Department has a long way to go to resolve fiscal issues that could take years to complete.
• UK Prime Minister Theresa May vows to fight on as Tory hardliners are threatening a no-confidence vote over the country's Brexit deal.
• A federal judge in Montana has ruled that Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer is not subject to First Amendment protections in a lawsuit filed by an online harassment victim.

Last Call For Low-Hanging Orange Fruit

Cook Political Report's Amy Walter ran the numbers on the Democratic party's blue wave last week and found that Trump's support may be a mile-wide in districts that he claimed in 2016, but only an inch deep as Trump didn't get 50% of the vote in a lot of districts.  These shallow districts are where the Democrats targeted their House wins, and they peeled the GOP apart like an orange.

Not long after the November 2017 elections, I had lunch with David Petts, a Democratic pollster and longtime veteran of congressional campaigns. He remarked that the Republican gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey performed within one to four points of President Trump in every congressional district in the state. The good news for the Republicans was that they didn’t lose districts that Trump easily carried. The bad news, even a GOPer not named “Trump” did not perform any better in districts Trump narrowly won or narrowly lost in 2016.

Petts handed me a spreadsheet that arranged the GOP-held congressional districts by Trump 2016 vote and argued Democrats should target every single district in which Trump took 55 percent of the vote or less. The theory being that Trump’s vote in 2016 would be the high-water mark for GOP candidates in 2018. As important to note were the significant number of districts that Trump won, but where his margin of victory masked his anemic vote share. Take New Mexico’s 2nd district. Trump won that district by 11 points, yet took just 50 percent of the vote. It was Clinton who underperformed there.

I tacked that chart onto the wall near my computer and watched it closely throughout the year. And, as Trump replayed his 2016 “all-base-all the time” strategy as president, it became clear he wasn’t going to be any more popular in the places that he lost, nor any less popular in the places that he won big. As such, the vote Trump took in a district in 2016, remained an accurate barometer for GOP vote share in 2018 in those districts.

Petts’ theory proved to be prescient. Of the 47 districts where Trump took less than 51 percent of the vote, Democrats have (so far) won 32 of them. If we exclude Utah’s four districts (in which Trump’s vote share was depressed thanks to the presence of third-party candidate and Utah native Evan McMullin), Democrats will have won at least 74 percent of the districts held by Republicans where Trump was the weakest in 2016.

Moreover, thirteen of those 32 districts were ones that Trump carried in 2016. In other words, using the number of seats held by Republicans that Trump lost (25) was the wrong metric. Vote share was the more appropriate standard.

For all the talk that open seats are what doomed Republicans, well-prepared incumbents weren’t any more resilient to the wave than GOP challengers. Only seven (non-Utah) Republicans outperformed Trump in their districts by more than five points. Five of those Republicans were incumbents; two were in open seats. Of those seven, only two of these strong over performers won: Reps. Mario Diaz Balart (FL-25) and John Katko (NY-24).

In two races that are yet to be called, but where the Democrat is favored - ME-02 (Poliquin) and NJ-03 (MacArthur) — Trump took just 51.4%. And, even the three ‘surprise’ wins for Democrats — SC-01, OK-05 and NY-11 — were in districts that Trump won with less than 54 percent.

In fact, at this point, there’s not one district that Democrats won that Trump carried by more than 54 percent of the vote.

Democrats took aim at the widespread weakness of the GOP nationwide and they won.  As as Trump only gets more unpopular as we head towards 2020, expect another tier of House Republican districts to become vulnerable in two years.

That Little Domestic Terrorism Problem Of Ours, Con't

At this point America needs to be asking where and when another synagogue is going to be attacked, because the overt anti-Semitism in this country is getting worse on a daily basis.

A man shouted a pro-Nazi and pro-Trump salute during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre on Wednesday night in an outburst that some audience members feared was the beginning of a shooting.

Audience member Rich Scherr said the outburst happened during intermission. The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”

The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued. But Scherr, 49, said it was hard to focus on the play after that. “My heart was just racing. I didn’t even really pay attention to the second act.”

“Fiddler” tells the story of a Jewish family as it faces persecution in tsarist Russia. It’s based on “Tevye the Dairyman,” a fictional story originally written in Yiddish. The play opened Tuesday and runs through Sunday in Baltimore. A spokesman for the Hippodrome could not be reached late Wednesday.

Scherr, who is a contributing sportswriter for The Baltimore Sun, posted a video from after the incident onto Facebook. 

It's getting worse because there is an entire political party dedicated to making it so in order to try to preserve its dwindling power.

The United States has seen a recent surge in anti-Jewish incidents, including a shooting last month at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 people inside.

Anti-Jewish incidents reported to police in Maryland jumped 47 percent in 2017 to 78 incidents, according to a Baltimore Sun review of records. That was amid a 35 percent increase of overall hate or bias incidents reported to police statewide last year.

Hate crimes are up under the hatemonger in the White House.  Who could have known? White nationalist rallies are now a regular feature of the American landscape.

It’s a biting cold Saturday morning in Little Rock and a hush has descended around the Arkansas State House. The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is in town for a demonstration.

“It’s sad,” an elderly traffic warden says as we wait for NSM’s convoy of minivans and clapped-out SUVs to arrive. “They need the Lord.”

Around two dozen black-clad NSM members eventually show up for this latest rally, supposedly to protest against “Human Rights violations in South Africa,” but police are still taking no chances. The streets surrounding the Capitol have been sealed off, armored MRAPs wait nearby and snipers line a nearby rooftop. Throughout the afternoon, a police helicopter and drone buzz around in the air, monitoring the protest and counter-demonstration.

It could be argued that the heavy law enforcement presence is giving NSM — founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell as an offshoot of the America Nazi Party, and which was present at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — exactly the kind of attention it craves. But when you consider how heavily-armed this group is, as well as its constant threats about being ready to defend itself against the so-called Antifa threat, the police response starts to make some sense.

Actual Nazis, armed, demonstrating in public.  Trump gave them permission. They're his base, after all.

Pretty soon these guys won't stick to just protests.

We live in a country where people have now been conditioned to entertain the possibility, if not expect it, of being involved in a mass casualty shooting to kill black people or Jewish people or just a bunch of people.

Welcome to America in the Trump era.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Everything seems to be pointing to some major indictments very soon in the Mueller probe.  CBS News was reporting that the charges could be unsealed as early as last Tuesday, but so far, it's been 48 hours and nothing new.  We head into Thursday with two stories indicating that when Mueller does drop the hammer, it will be epic.  First up, I keep telling people that Roger Stone is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that's because his friends are idiots.

Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Roger Stone had a text message conversation with a friend about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records obtained exclusively by NBC News.

“Big news Wednesday,” the Stone pal, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”

“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.

“Great,” Credico wrote back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.” 

Credico turned out to be wrong on one count — nothing incriminating about Clinton came out that Wednesday. But two days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.

Stone, a confidante of then-candidate Donald Trump and notorious political trickster, has denied any collusion with WikiLeaks.

But the text messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. In the texts, Credico told Stone he had insights into Assange's plans through a longtime friend, who was also Assange’s lawyer, according to the text messages.

Reached Wednesday, Credico downplayed the text exchanges. “There's absolutely nothing there that I had any knowledge of anything that Assange was going to do because I didn't,” he told NBC News.

"Where's the smoking gun?" he added.

I'll let Robert Mueller handle that.  But trust me when I say Stone will die in prison.  Because if he doesn't go under for being the Trump regime's conduit to the Russian spy operation at WikiLeaks, he's going down for witness intimidation of Credico.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is exploring whether longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone tried to intimidate and discredit a witness who is contradicting Mr. Stone’s version of events about his contacts with WikiLeaks, according to people who have spoken to Mr. Mueller’s investigators.

In grand jury sessions and interviews, prosecutors have repeatedly asked about emails, text messages and online posts involving Mr. Stone and his former friend, New York radio personality Randy Credico, the people said. Mr. Stone has asserted that Mr. Credico was his backchannel to WikiLeaks, a controversial transparency group, an assertion Mr. Credico denies.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are probing whether Mr. Stone had direct contact with WikiLeaks and knew ahead of time about its release of stolen Democratic emails, as he claimed during the campaign and now denies. Mr. Stone says he is angry at Mr. Credico because his ex-friend has “refused to tell the truth” about being his conduit to WikiLeaks.

Filmmaker David Lugo, who knows both men, said in an interview he has testified before Mr. Mueller’s grand jury about a blog post Mr. Stone helped him draft that was harshly critical of Mr. Credico. Another witness, businessman Bill Samuels, said he was questioned by Mr. Mueller’s team about Mr. Credico’s reaction to allegedly threatening messages sent by Mr. Stone.

Prosecutors also are examining messages between Messrs. Stone and Credico that involve the radio personality’s decision to assert his Fifth Amendment before Congress, according to a person familiar with the probe.

Ahh, what tangled webs we weave, when we leave text messages on our phones.

Stay tuned.  Stone's going in a box very, very soon.

StupidiNews!

• Multiple news outlets, including Fox News and CBS News, are filing briefs in favor of CNN's lawsuit against the Trump regime over the pulling of WH reporter Jim Acosta's press credential. 
• A California jury has cleared Johnson & Johnson of all liability in a lawsuit involving a woman's claims the company's talc powder caused her cancer.
• House Republicans have elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy as their new Minority Leader in January, McCarthy takes over for retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan.
• Incoming House Trade subcommittee chair Rep. Bill Pascrell says that the Trump regime will need significant changes to the new Canada/Mexico trade deal before Democrats will support it.
• Kepler telescope data shows one of our closest galactic neighbors, Barnard's star, has a large super-Earth sized planet orbiting it.

Last Call For Another #MeToo Moment, Con't

The awful part (besides the violence towards women here) is that nobody should be shocked by Michael Avenatti's behavior and arrest.

Michael Avenatti, the outspoken attorney who represents porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal battles against President Donald Trump, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in Los Angeles, police said.

The alleged incident occurred Tuesday and a report was taken, police said.

Avenatti was arrested Wednesday by officers with the West Los Angeles station.

The oldest of sins, Avenatti apparently beat his wife and the charges are felony-level domestic violence, in California that usually means with a weapon, unacceptable in any fashion.

Hopefully this is the last we hear from him other than sentencing.

And if you thought for a moment that he was going to "save" the Dems in 2020, reexamine your biases and get your crap together, he was a grifter from square one.

That Little Domestic Terroism Problem Of Ours, Con't

White supremacist and self-proclaimed Nazi Jeffrey Clark was arrested on gun charges only after his family basically told the FBI that he was planning to kill people.

Jeffrey Clark, the 30-year-old man federal agents arrested here Friday after he called the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting a “dry run” and his relatives worried he might try to launch a race war, wasn’t shy about being a neo-Nazi.

In April 2017, when someone asked Clark at a White House rally organized by “alt-right” coiner Richard Spencer whether he considered himself a fascist, he said no ― he considered himself a Nazi. Antifa activists photographed him at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. He has posed for pictures in front of Nazi symbols and holding Nazi memorabilia.

On Gab, the favored social network of racists and anti-Semites, Clark had the username @PureWhiteEvil and called himself “DC Bowl Gang,” a reference to Dylann Roof, the bowl-cut racist who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Many alt-right white supremacists worship Roof, and Clark used an image of the killer and balaclava-clad gunmen as the header for his Gab page. His pinned image was an altered still from the video game “Doom” that depicted Roof executing black people in a church.

This April, Clark threatened a HuffPost reporter, warning that the reporter would be going “feet first into a woodchipper.” The reporter told police about the threat in August. They did nothing at the time. In late October, D.C. police did come to Clark’s house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood after the death by suicide of his brother, Edward, but did not arrest him.

Clark told family members he had been “friended” on Gab by Robert Bowers, the man charged with murdering 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27. Clark, court documents said, told family members the victims “deserved it.” He wrote on Gab that the attack was a “dry run for things to come” and that “the fucking kikes that got shot by the hero #RobertBowers were all active supporters of pedophilia … and every last one of them deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse,” according to court documents. Pedophilia-centric conspiracy theories are popular among members of the far-right; in 2016, a North Carolina man armed with a rifle drove to a Washington, D.C., pizza place he falsely believed was the center of a vast pedophilia ring. No one was injured in the shooting.

It wasn’t until November, after Clark’s own family contacted law enforcement, that the FBI finally found the allegedly illegal weapons that have him facing gun charges. Court documents, as well as photos and videos obtained by HuffPost, suggest Clark’s late brother, Edward Clark, shared a similar ideology. That both men were able to spew neo-Nazi rhetoric, amass an arsenal of weapons, and openly threaten journalists and critics for months without consequence shows just how much freedom far-right extremists have to operate in the U.S. — and how far their behavior has to escalate before law enforcement takes it seriously.

Despite months, if not years of active threats towards people in public and online, Clark was only arrested and his threat was only taken seriously when his family ratted out his illegal weapon collection.  It had to get that far before Clark was considered a threat.

The fact that Clark could have easily used legal and obtainable weapons to slaughter dozens doesn't seem to have registered with anyone.

As with any terrorist, we should be asking where, who, and how behind Clark's radicalization, but of course the answer is America's law enforcement, America's military, and America's executive branch, and we can't take too close of a look at any of that.

The First Lady's Last Nerve

Turns out that First Lady Melania Trump is just as venal, vindictive, and mean as her husband, she just has slightly better impulse control.

A feud with the first lady's office is expected to cost a senior national security adviser her job after she sparred with East Wing staff and other key members of the Trump administration. 

The dispute spilled into public view in extraordinary fashion on Tuesday when the first lady's office released a statement calling for deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel's ouster as reports surfaced that President Donald Trump would fire the official. 

A White House official confirmed to CNN that Trump has told people that Ricardel will be fired. But the official said she has been given some time to clear out her desk. It was not immediately clear when she would officially make her exit. 

"It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that (Ricardel) no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House," the first lady's communications director Stephanie Grisham said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The statement amounted to a stunning public rebuke by a first lady of a senior official serving in her husband's administration. It came after reports surfaced earlier Tuesday indicating Ricardel would be pushed out of her post after less than seven months on the job. 

Neither Ricardel nor spokespeople for the National Security Council responded to CNN requests for comment. 

Ricardel was one of John Bolton's Mustache's sidekicks on Trump's National Security Council.  The fight apparently started when Ricardel's staff accompanied Melania Trump's staff on her utter failure of a goodwill trip to Africa last month, and quickly devolved into an episode of House of Cards.

Not that I'm sad to see of the Mustache's minions get the boot, but Bolton will just replace Ricardel with somebody worse.  The bigger problem is apparently DOnald Trump is willing to fire anyone to keep his wife happy.  I'm trying to recall Michelle Obama being this much of a Disney villain, and of course she isn't and never was.  Lord knows if she had publicly hung up a head on her mantle like this, official Washington would have gone bonkers calling her names.

I don't expect anyone to do the same to Melania Trump.  At least, not to her face.

Methinks Ricardel won't be Melania's last head on a pike, either.  I wonder how much exposure she has to the whole Mueller probe.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A former US Navy captain has plead guilty to criminal conflict of interest charges in connection with the massive "Fat Leonard" bribery scandal, he faces up to five years in prison.
• A federal judge will hear Wednesday CNN's lawsuit against the Trump regime for violating Jim Acosta's First Amendment press freedom rights when the White House pulled his press pass.
• Phermaceutical gian Pfizer has lost its $5 billion patent case in the UK on its pain drug Lyrica, Britain's high court has ruled that the drug's secondary patent as a pain treatment is invalid.
• It's May's way or the highway as UK's Prime Minister Theresa May is asking all cabinet members to back her Brexit plan or resign in protest.
• A California man has plead guilty to causing the death of a Wichita man by "swatting", calling in a false law enforcement threat over a spat over video games.

Last Call For Under New Mismanagement

The wipeout of the House GOP was always going to be followed by a wipeout of Trump cabinet members and other senior officials.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions is already gone, fired by Trump and replaced by a crony who will tell Dear Leader what he wants and let the courts figure it out, and WH counsel Don McGahn left in October.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly are expected to be gone in the next few weeks, Zinke and Ross are guaranteed to face House Democratic investigations over corruption and misuse of funds, so Trump will jettison them. Kelly has long been rumored to want out, and he will, just as soon as he's done being Trump's hatchet man and firing everyone else. 

The next person on that list however may be current Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who is not expected to survive the month.

President Trump has told advisers he has decided to remove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and her departure from the administration is likely to occur in the coming weeks, if not sooner, according to five current and former White House officials.

Trump canceled a planned trip with Nielsen this week to visit U.S. troops at the border in South Texas and told aides over the weekend that he wants her out as soon as possible, these officials said. The president has grumbled for months about what he views as Nielsen’s lackluster performance on immigration enforcement and is believed to be looking for a replacement who will implement his policy ideas with more alacrity.

The announcement could come as soon as this week, three of these officials said.

Trump has changed his mind on key personnel decisions before, and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is fighting Nielsen’s pending dismissal and attempting to postpone it, aides say. But Kelly’s future in the administration also is shaky, according to three White House officials.

DHS officials who work with Nielsen declined to address her potential departure Monday. “The Secretary is honored to lead the men and women of DHS and is committed to implementing the President’s security-focused agenda to protect Americans from all threats and will continue to do so,” spokesman Tyler Q. Houlton said in a statement.

Nielsen has been reluctant to leave the administration before reaching the one-year mark as secretary on Dec. 6, but she has been unhappy in the job for several months, according to colleagues. Trump has berated her during Cabinet meetings, belittled her to other White House staff and tagged her months ago as a “Bushie,” a reference to her previous service under President George W. Bush and meant to cast suspicion on her loyalty.

When Nielsen has tried to explain the laws and regulations that prevent the government from drastically curtailing immigration or closing the border with Mexico, as Trump has suggested, the president has grown impatient and frustrated, aides said. 

It's that last part there that should concern everyone.  Nielsen was Kelly's personal choice for the position after Kelly left DHS to become WH Chief of Staff, and she dared to tell Trump "no" when it came to shutting down the border completely and mass deporting people.

Expect her replacement to be much more sanguine about kids in cages in camps, tens of thousands in ICE custody becoming hundreds of thousands, and more troops on the southern border because that will be the job description.

Sinema Paradiso, Or A Flake Bi-Product

The last batch of mail-in votes counted in Arizona's Senate race put Democrat Rep. Kyrsten Sinema up by almost 40,000 votes, nearly two percentage points, the AP called the race, and GOP Rep. Martha McSally has conceded.

Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has made history by becoming the first woman elected to represent Arizona in the Senate. She defeated Republican Rep. Martha McSally after several days of ballot counting.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Sinema led McSally 50 percent to 48 percent when The Associated Press called the race six days after Election Day.

Sinema’s victory also marks the first time in 30 years that a Democrat has won a Senate seat in Arizona.

The race’s results were unknown for several days due to roughly 500,000 votes, mostly from Maricopa County, that still had to be counted after Election Day.

Arizona Secretary of State Michele Regan explained in a statementthat vote tabulation can take days due to security measures and the high volume of early vote ballots dropped off at polling places on Election Day. Officials must verify someone who turned in an early ballot on Election Day did not also mistakenly vote in person at the polling place.

Sinema’s historic win could appear surprising in a state where women had early success running for statewide office. But long-serving male senators kept Senate seats elusive, until the two women faced off this year to replace retiring GOP Sen. Jeff Flake.

Don't feel bad for McSally.  She'll more than likely be joining Sinema in the Senate as Jon Kyl, who is holding John McCain's seat, is largely expected to step aside and allow GOP Gov. Doug Ducey to name her to the position.

After John McCain's passing in August, the responsibility fell to Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to appoint an interim replacement for the beloved senator in Washington. Ducey made a safe choice in former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who retired from office in 2013. Kyl, however, only committed to serve in the role until early January, after which Ducey will once again have to choose a replacement until Arizonans make their choice to fill the seat in a 2020 special election.

So who are the potential candidates? There was speculation over the summer that Ducey might appoint his own chief of staff to the role or even Cindy McCain -- the Arizona senator's widow. But should Sinema eek out a win after ballot counting is completed, McSally will be out of a job, having vacated her seat in Congress to campaign.

If Ducey decides to appoint McSally, that could leave both candidates serving in the Senate until at least 2020. After that, the Republican appointee will have to decide whether or not to run in the special election.

Ducey has left no indication so far about his intentions for the appointment, but McSally's name certainly isn't out of the picture.

It's only a matter of who Ducey picks, and McSally just became the frontrunner, naturally she conceded gracefully.  She knows she doesn't have to fight for a Senate seat.

Stay tuned.

The Pyongyang Shuffle

Looks like Kim Jong Un has left Donald Trump an early Thanksgiving gift, and of course Tang the Conqueror looks like a giant turkey as North Korea's suddenly revealed new missile bases are now in play.

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.

“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”

His statement was true in just one sense. Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to the halt of missile flight tests, which have not occurred in nearly a year. But American intelligence officials say that the North’s production of nuclear material, of new nuclear weapons and of missiles that can be placed on mobile launchers and hidden in mountains at the secret bases has continued.

And the sanctions are collapsing, in part because North Korea has leveraged its new, softer-sounding relationship with Washington, and its stated commitment to eventual denuclearization, to resume trade with Russia and China.

Moreover, an American program to track those mobile missiles with a new generation of small, inexpensive satellites, disclosed by The New York Times more than a year ago, is stalled. The Pentagon once hoped to have the first satellites over North Korea by now, giving it early warning if the mobile missiles are rolled out of mountain tunnels and prepared for launch.

But because of a series of budget and bureaucratic disputes, the early warning system, begun by the Obama administration and handed off to the Trump administration, has yet to go into operation. Current and former officials, who said they could not publicly discuss the program because it is heavily classified, said there was still hope of launching the satellites, but they offered no timeline.

The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington. 

In other words, Trump was outmaneuvered completely by North Korea, and he now looks more like a fool.  Kim has gotten everything he could want: broken sanctions, US legitimacy, trade with Russia and China, and total diplomatic victory over the United States.

Democrats should absolutely hold hearings on Trump's abject failure, but there really isn't much to discuss here: Trump is simply a moron, and so are all the people working for him.