Last Call For Collective Punishment, Inc.

The Trump regime is pulling out of its obligations to end aid to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and will start by shutting down the USAID operations there in the next few months.

The United States Agency for International Development announced that half of its employees in the West Bank and Gaza will be let go in the coming weeks and by early 2019, the operations will be completely shut down.

The humanitarian agency is one of the largest and most important in the region.

The U.S. State Department informed USAID last week that by next month the agency would have to present a list of 60 percent of its employees to be dismissed as the first step in the shutdown that will be finalized by 2019.

The U.S. federal government agency handles civilian assistance to various countries around the world. The USAID chapter in the West Bank and Gaza began operating in 1994, focusing mainly on economic issues including water, infrastructure, education and health. USAID has invested about $5.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza in the construction of roads, schools, clinics and community centers.

USAID also buys medical equipment, provides humanitarian assistance to those in need of medical care and teaches lifesaving techniques to doctors from Gaza and the West Bank via Israel and other countries. In recent years USAID has conducted in-service education for teachers, built schools and worked on projects to keep young Palestinians in the education system.

Last August, Israel approved the entry of containers with equipment needed for the completion of water projects into Gaza. USAID had been working on for the project for past year, including construction of a large desalination plant and eight large drinking water reservoirs. The project, whose cost was estimated at 60 million shekels ($16 million) was conducted USAID by American companies through a contractor in Gaza.

After U.S. President Donald Trump’s decided to freeze funding to various Palestinian relief organizations, USAID’s dozens of projects in the West Bank and Gaza were suspended, including those that had been partially completed. In the current budgetary year, the United States was projected to have transferred a total of $250 million in aid to various Palestinian organizations. $35 million of which was supposed to be allocated to the Palestinian Authority security forces and $215 million to economic development, humanitarian assistance and coexistence projects, some through USAID. Last August, the United States announced that the money would be diverted to matters were deemed higher priority to U.S. interests.

Some 180 employees working for the U.S. Embassy in Israel have yet to receive the budgeting for activities for either 2018 or 2019. The leftover money has been diverted to paying salaries and maintaining the organization. According to officials involved in the matter over the past few months, U.S. Ambassador David Friedman has shown no interest in USAID‘s needs and has not held meetings with USAID officials on projects.

USAID officials said that the policy of the ambassador and the Trump administration to stop funding aid is meant to put pressure on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to renew talks with the United States and Israel ahead of the peace plan the U.S. government is expected to present soon.

So what little medical aid is available in East Jerusalem will vanish, leaving nothing to take its place, and Palestinian suffering will increase, with more dying every day.  It's something that shouldn't come as a surprise, after all, Trump did the same thing here in the US to dozens of rural hospitals, cutting funding to them to shut them down by ending Obamacare programs and then blaming Obamacare in those areas.  It worked, as rural voters moved even more towards the GOP in 2018.

The guy's pretty good at causing human suffering as a negotiation tactic.

Facebook Gotta Face The Face

The British government has now grown tired of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to appear in front of Parliament, and it has grown tired of the Trump regime refusing to act to bring the tech giants to account, so our friends across the pond have taken matters into their own hands.

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order. When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said Collins, who also chairs an inquiry into fake news. “This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation. We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”

Zuckerberg should be absolutely terrified and for a very, very good reason.

The seizure is the latest move in a bitter battle between the British parliament and the social media giant. The struggle to hold Facebook to account has raised concerns about limits of British authority over international companies that now play a key role in the democratic process.

Facebook, which has lost more than $100bn in value since March when the Observer exposed how Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87m US users, faces another potential PR crisis. It is believed the documents will lay out how user data decisions were made in the years before the Cambridge Analytica breach, including what Zuckerberg and senior executives knew.

MPs leading the inquiry into fake news have repeatedly tried to summon Zuckerberg to explain the company’s actions. He has repeatedly refused. Collins said this reluctance to testify, plus misleading testimony from an executive at a hearing in February, had forced MPs to explore other options for gathering information about Facebook operations.

“We have very serious questions for Facebook. It misled us about Russian involvement on the platform. And it has not answered our questions about who knew what, when with regards to the Cambridge Analytica scandal,” he said.

“We have followed this court case in America and we believed these documents contained answers to some of the questions we have been seeking about the use of data, especially by external developers.”

At this point the Brits understand full well that the Trump regime will never investigate Facebook's ties to Russian propaganda and data misuse.  They are playing their own game of cricket now, and frankly they no longer care what the US thinks anymore.  Zuckerberg could end up in a UK prison at this rate.

Maybe the Brits will do us a favor and get rid of Google and Amazon too.

Sunday Long Read: Greasing Palms

Biofuels were supposed to be the cheap, sustainable power source of the future for a greening world.  Nothing however could have been further from the truth.  The problem is that it took more energy to produce biofuels than sustain them, leading the mass clearing of forests to create plantations, and over the last decade they have become a major source of carbon dioxide making the planet hotter.

The last thing anyone expected from President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address was a proposal for the largest-ever cut in the nation’s use of gasoline. The president was no climate champion — he had backed out of the Kyoto Protocol shortly after taking office in 2001 — but he did favor what he called “energy independence.” He had declared the United States “addicted” to foreign oil, yet dependence on Middle Eastern fuel continued. Hurricane Katrina, and the lingering damage it did to oil pipelines and refineries, had pushed up gas prices, renewed fears of global warming and kept a firm thumb on the economy.

Now, Bush proposed, homegrown energy could be drawn from the rural places most in need of an economic boost. Clean-coal initiatives would generate the electricity of the future, but it was biofuels — in particular ethanol, which is largely distilled from corn, and biodiesel, made with vegetable oil — that would power the vehicles of the future. Within 10 years, the country would replace 35 billion gallons of petroleum, or one-fifth of all the gas and diesel burned, with fuel made from plants. The measure, as he put it, would confront “the serious challenge of global climate change.” Unsaid, but clear to anyone paying attention, was that it would also please America’s agriculture industry, which had been lobbying for ethanol and advanced biofuel research for years. The House chamber erupted in applause.

On the night of the president’s address, Timothy Searchinger sat on his couch in Takoma Park, Md., just a few miles from the Capitol, and watched on television, struck by what seemed to him a glaring lapse in logic. “Oh, my God, what the hell is happening here?” he recalls wondering aloud.

Searchinger wasn’t a scientist; he was a lawyer, working with the Environmental Defense Fund. But he saw a serious flaw in the claim that the president’s proposal would ameliorate climate change. Searchinger knew that cropland had already consumed virtually every arable acre across the Midwest. Quintupling biofuel production would require a huge amount of additional arable land, far more than existed in the United States. Unless Americans planned to eat less, that meant displacing food production to some other country with unused land — and he knew that when forests are cut, or new land is opened for farming, substantial new amounts of carbon can be released into the atmosphere. Forests hold as much as 45 percent of the planet’s carbon stored on land, and old-growth trees in particular hold a great deal of that carbon, typically far more than any of the crops that replace them. When the trees are cut down, most of that carbon is released.

Scientists and lawyers who study environmental impact often deploy “carbon-life-cycle analysis” to determine just how much carbon a given product is removing from, or introducing to, the environment over the course of its production and consumption. When a truck burns biodiesel, the carbon emissions that come from its tailpipe aren’t much different from those of a truck burning petroleum. But a part of the biodiesel emissions aren’t counted, because — in theory — they have been balanced out: Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere when they grow, and fuel experts subtract that sequestered carbon from the tailpipe emission, completing a transaction that they say balances at zero.

In ideal circumstances — unvegetated land planted for the first time — this balancing out really happens. When corn grows, it soaks up carbon, and when it is consumed (whether as food or fuel), it releases that carbon back into the air. But the analysis breaks down when faced with the reality of land use. Almost everywhere in the world, planting more corn or soy for biofuel would involve creating more farmland, which in turn would involve cutting down whatever was already growing on that land. And that would mean releasing a huge amount of carbon into the air, with nothing to balance the books. As Searchinger watched Bush’s call for an unprecedented increase in biofuel production, his hunch was that the biofuel balance sheet would turn out to be tragically shortsighted.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, at the time a powerful 16-term Democrat from California who had presided over several failed efforts to pass climate legislation, was also skeptical about Bush’s plan. But he knew that one of the most vexing aspects of global emissions reduction was the question of how to replace transportation fuels. It was hard enough to upgrade several thousand electrical power plants to draw on wind or solar or even nuclear power. That would take years. But transforming the more than 100 million cars and trucks on America’s roads would take far longer, decades even, and in the meantime those vehicles were producing 28 percent of carbon emissions in the United States. Waxman thought a biofuel requirement could be a turning point in climate legislation, a moment when Washington stopped pretending.

Within months of Bush’s speech, the House and the Senate were reconciling a draft of a sprawling omnibus bill that would eventually be called the Energy Independence and Security Act, or EISA. In addition to requiring carmakers to improve fuel standards, a longtime priority for Democrats, the bill updated and expanded renewable-fuel standards, requiring fuel producers to mix in soy, palm and other kinds of vegetable oil with diesel fuel and to use ethanol from corn and sugar in gasoline. The bill also set tough standards for how much cleaner, in terms of carbon, each of those categories of fuel had to become — 50 percent for diesel, 20 percent for gas — and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to judge what qualified.

The expected gains were enormous. The switch to biofuels, the E.P.A. would later calculate, promised to stop the release of 4.5 billion tons of carbon over three decades, the equivalent of parking every single American automobile for more than seven years. Before the bill passed in December 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “the shot heard round the world for energy independence.”

The law had a profound effect. Biodiesel production in the United States would jump from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016. Imports of biodiesel to the United States surged from near zero to more than 100 million gallons a month. As fuel markets snatched up every ounce of domestic soy oil to meet the American fuel mandate, the food industry also replaced the soy it had used with something cheaper and just as good: palm oil, largely from Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the sources of nearly 90 percent of the global supply. Lawmakers never anticipated that their well-intentioned plan — to help the climate by helping American farmers — might instead transform Indonesia and present one of the greatest threats to the planet’s tropical rain forests. But as Indonesian palm oil began to flood Western markets, that is exactly what began to happen.

“We saw great promise,” Waxman told me recently, sitting in a glass conference room at Waxman Strategies, the Washington lobbying firm of which he is chairman. But he is no longer so hopeful. He is now also the chairman of the environmental organization Mighty Earth, which lobbies food and agriculture companies to deploy more climate-friendly production methods. In 2007, he and other lawmakers were focused on the benefits of biofuels and the bridge they promised to even greener technologies. Now the soft-spoken Waxman is far more concerned about the other side of the equation. “We didn’t think we were going to pay such a heavy price,” he said.

Bush knew exactly what he was doing, creating a new US fuel industry that didn't have to depend on digging holes in the ground, rather that it used massive amounts of farmland and meant the stripping of forests, and whoever controlled that land was going to be ridiculously wealthy.

And all that greed destroyed millions of acres of rain forest, accelerating our path to climate catastrophe that will render the earth unfit to sustain life. "We did this to ourselves" is what our descendants will say a century from now, that is if there are any human beings left.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Looks like that deal with Mexico to host US asylum seekers that I talked about yesterday is in jeopardy as now the incoming AMLO government is flatly denying any deal has been reached.

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border would stay in Mexico until their asylum claims were individually approved in U.S. courts, but Mexico’s incoming government denied they had struck any deal.

Mexico’s incoming interior minister said there was “no agreement of any type between the future government of Mexico and the United States.”

Olga Sanchez Cordero, also the top domestic policy official for president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who takes office on Dec. 1, told Reuters that the incoming government was in talks with the United States but emphasized that they could not make any agreement since they were not yet in government.

Sanchez ruled out that Mexico would be declared a “safe third country” for asylum claimants, following a Washington Post report of a deal with the Trump administration known as “Remain in Mexico,” which quoted her calling it a “short-term solution.”

The plan, according to the newspaper, foresees migrants staying in Mexico while their asylum claims in the United States are being processed, potentially ending a system Trump decries as “catch and release” that has until now often allowed those seeking refuge to wait on safer U.S. soil.

“Migrants at the Southern Border will not be allowed into the United States until their claims are individually approved in court. We only will allow those who come into our Country legally. Other than that our very strong policy is Catch and Detain. No “Releasing” into the U.S.,” Trump said in a tweet late Saturday.

Seems Mexico realized they were dealing with Trump, a guy who gladly would screw over anyone for a buck, and that maybe somebody in the incoming Lopez Obrador team started asking questions about what was in it for Mexico.

The answer: getting stuck with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of refugees every year while Trump laughs at how stupid Mexico is.

Suddenly everything is in flux, as they say.  Stay tuned.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Incoming Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is apparently really thrilled with the Trump regime's "Remain in Mexico" plan for US asylum seekers, and is eagerly signing on because he believes that if Trump closes the border, nobody will bother crossing into Mexico on the way from Central America.

The Trump administration has won the support of Mexico’s incoming government for a plan to remake U.S. border policy by requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their claims move through U.S. courts, according to Mexican officials and senior members of president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s transition team.

The agreement would break with long-standing asylum rules and place a formidable new barrier in the path of Central American migrants attempting to reach the United States and escape poverty and violence. By reaching the accord, the Trump administration has also overcome Mexico’s historic reticence to deepen cooperation with the United States on an issue widely seen here as America’s problem.

The White House had no immediate comment.

According to outlines of the plan, known as Remain in Mexico, asylum applicants at the border will have to stay in Mexico while their cases are processed, potentially ending the system Trump decries as “catch and release” that has until now generally allowed those seeking refuge to wait on safer U.S. soil.

“For now, we have agreed to this policy of Remain in Mexico,” said Olga Sánchez Cordero, Mexico’s incoming interior minister, the top domestic policy official for López Obrador, who takes office Dec. 1. In an interview with The Washington Post, she called it a “short-term solution.”

“The medium- and long-term solution is that people don’t migrate,” Sánchez Cordero said. “Mexico has open arms and everything, but imagine, one caravan after another after another, that would also be a problem for us.”

While no formal agreement has been signed, and U.S. officials caution that many details must still be discussed, the incoming Mexican government is amenable to the concept of turning their country in to a waiting room for America’s asylum system.

While they remain anxious the deal could fall apart, U.S. officials view this as a potential breakthrough that could deter migration and the formation of additional caravans that originate in Central America and cross through Mexico to reach the United States. They have quietly engaged in sensitive talks with senior Mexican officials, attempting to offer a diplomatic counterbalance to President Trump’s threats and ultimatums.

No US asylum, no caravans crossing Mexico.  Win-win for a pair of right-wing, authoritarian nationalist governments.  Also remember that the cruelty is the point, leaving these refugees stranded in cartel country is being done on purpose.

Besides, Trump is now claiming the border is sealed.

President Donald Trump insisted — twice — in an odd exchange with reporters Thursday that he already shut down the border with Mexico and even signed an order to do so.

“Actually two days ago we closed the border,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago during a meeting with journalists. “We actually just closed it. We said nobody’s coming in because it was out of control.” (See the video above at 16:10)

Then he walked back what he had just insisted, saying he would shut the border in the future if it’s necessary, “if we find that it gets to a level where we are going to lose control.”

But minutes later he returned to his insistence that he had already closed the border.

“I’ve already shut it down, I’ve already shut it down — for short periods,” he said in response to a question to clarify the shutdown.

“I’ve already shut down parts of the border because it was out of control with the rioting on the other side in Mexico. And I just said, ‘Shut it down.’ You see it. I mean, it took place two days ago.”

When someone asked if he had to sign an order to shut it down, Trump responded: “Yeah, they call me up, and I sign an order.”

Asked if the media could get a copy, Trump responded: “You don’t need it. Don’t worry. It’s not that big a deal. Maybe to some people it is.”

No order on closing the border has been released by the White House.

Not a big deal, in the last couple of weeks we've effectively militarized the border with Mexico, complete with troops authorized to use deadly force, in strict contravention of the law.  But don't worry, Dear Leader says.  We keep kids in cages, we separate families, soon we'll open fire on those trying to cross, but hey, America is being made great, so hooray for us.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction

The federal government's report on climate change is out, and it should be a wake-up call to the planet.

The federal government on Friday released a long-awaited report with an unmistakable message: The effects of climate change, including deadly wildfires, increasingly debilitating hurricanes and heat waves, are already battering the United States, and the danger of more such catastrophes is worsening.

The report’s authors, who represent numerous federal agencies, say they are more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans' health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources. And while it avoids policy recommendations, the report’s sense of urgency and alarm stand in stark contrast to the lack of any apparent plan from President Trump to tackle the problems, which, according to the government he runs, are increasingly dire.

The congressionally mandated document — the first of its kind issued during the Trump administration — details how climate-fueled disasters and other types of worrisome changes are becoming more commonplace throughout the country and how much worse they could become in the absence of efforts to combat global warming.

Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida and the United States' Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever-larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country’s sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.

The National Climate Assessment’s publication marks the government’s fourth comprehensive look at climate-change impacts on the United States since 2000. The last came in 2014. Produced by 13 federal departments and agencies and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the report stretches well over 1,000 pages and draws more definitive, and in some cases more startling, conclusions than earlier versions.

The authors argue that global warming “is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.” And they conclude that humans must act aggressively to adapt to current impacts and mitigate future catastrophes “to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

“The impacts we’ve seen the last 15 years have continued to get stronger, and that will only continue,” said Gary Yohe, a professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the report. “We have wasted 15 years of response time. If we waste another five years of response time, the story gets worse. The longer you wait, the faster you have to respond and the more expensive it will be.” 

Now understand that in every government facet of climate change response, we have gone hurtling backwards in the last two years under the Trump regime, undoing what minimal progress was made under eight years of Obama.

In many cases, we now have a worse climate policy than 15 or 20 years ago because we actively have governmental policies that make climate chance worse than before.

Things are only going to get worse from here until we get rid of the Republican party that will block climate change mitigation efforts.  It's not just politics, it's survival.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller excels at flipping smaller fish to get at bigger fish, and it looks like he's in the process of frying up some seafood for Thanksgiving.

Conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi is in plea negotiations with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to Corsi and another person with knowledge of the talks.

The talks with Corsi — an associate of both President Trump and GOP operative Roger Stone — could bring Mueller’s team closer to determining whether Trump or his advisers were linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails in 2016, a key part of his long-running inquiry.

Corsi provided research on Democratic figures during the campaign to Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. For months, the special counsel has been scrutinizing Stone’s activities in an effort to determine whether he coordinated with WikiLeaks. Stone and WikiLeaks have repeatedly denied any such coordination.

Stone has said that Corsi also has a relationship with Trump, built on their shared interest in the falsehood that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Corsi confirmed the plea negotiations after they were first reported by The Washington Post Friday. “It’s true. Your story is accurate,” he said, declining to comment further except to say there may be further developments next week.

David Gray, an attorney for Corsi, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mueller. An attorney for Trump declined to comment.

Corsi flips on Stone, Stone flips on bigger fish in Trump's circle, and maybe Trump himself.  That's how you build an impregnable, unassailable case, and Mueller's putting in the work to do just that.

On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler figures Corsi may be playing the game to get Trump to step in.

Is it possible that whatever Corsi would tell investigators is more damning than what Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort have presumably already said? Recall that Roger Stone, in several of his many efforts to deflect any attention on his own actions, has suggested that Corsi had his own relationship with Trump (perhaps trying to suggest that if anything Corsi learned made its way to Trump, it would have been directly).


Stone suggested that the special counsel may actually be interested in Corsi’s relationship with Trump.

Corsi was a leading proponent of birtherism, the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In 2011, he wrote the book “Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President.”

Around that time, Trump took up the conspiracy theory, questioning Obama’s citizenship and demanding that he release his birth certificate.

Stone said that during a conversation with Trump in 2011, “he said to me, ‘Who is this guy, Jerome Corsi?’” Stone recalled.

Stone said he asked Trump why he was inquiring about Corsi.

“I’ve been talking to him,” Stone recalled Trump saying.

Stone said that Corsi also met with Trump during the 2016 campaign.
And Corsi’s own lawyer has suggested Corsi declined to take part in criminal activity that Stone may have invited him to be a part of.


Gray said he was confident that Corsi has done nothing wrong. “Jerry Corsi made decisions that he would not take actions that would give him criminal liability,” he added, declining to elaborate.

Asked if Corsi had opportunities to take such actions, Gray said, “I wouldn’t say he was offered those opportunities. I would say he had communications with Roger Stone. We’ll supply those communications and be cooperative. My client didn’t act further that would give rise to any criminal liability.”

Of course, Corsi may not need a pardon to get himself out of the legal pickle he’s in. He may be counting on Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker to bail him out. Whitaker was appointed the day before Corsi’s attempts to work the media; when firing Jeff Sessions, John Kelly made it clear Whitaker needed to be in place that day. And the same day that Corsi started this blitz, November 8, Michael Dreeben suggested both that Mueller could do all the things that prosecutors do without pre-approval — seeking immunity, making plea agreements, and bringing indictments — but also noted that subpoenaing a journalist is one of the things that requires Attorney General approval.

We'll see where this goes.  A lot of this depends on what Corsi can offer at this late stage in the game...but hearing that Corsi is cutting a deal will certainly get Trump's attention, and maybe that's the point.

Buckeye State Blues

Here in 2018, the Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky tri-state area is now the heart of red-state Midwest America, and if Ohio Democrats ever want to win the 88% white state of Ohio (and getting whiter) again in the future, they're going to have to follow the Sherrod Brown model, argues American Prospect's John Russo.

The Ohio results make Republican dominance clear. The Ohio GOP won 73 of 116 Statehouse races while collecting just over 50 percent of the total vote. That sounds close, but Republicans did not even field candidates in nine races. They also won 12 of Ohio’s 16 congressional districts with just over 52 percent of the overall vote. The results reflect past gerrymandering by the Kasich administration—which will only get worse as Republicans will control reapportionment in 2020.

So what’s the matter with Ohio? Conventional wisdom says that Ohio is too white, too working class (by education), and too rural to support Democrats anymore. That might seem to explain voting patterns in the midterms. Republican Mike DeWine won the largely white exurban, small town, semi-rural, and rural areas that dominate the state. Cordray won in urban and some suburban areas, mostly in the northeast, where the population includes many people of color. Unfortunately, those areas are chiefly found in just nine of Ohio’s 88 counties. Some of those blue regions, especially the traditional Democratic strongholds of Cuyahoga, Mahoning, and Trumbull Counties, no longer deliver enough votes to overcome growing Republican power elsewhere in the state.

But conflating race, class, and region misses several complicating factors. First, Ohio illustrates a point made recently by John McCullough, writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: When pundits talk about the “working class,” they are usually not talking about class but about whiteness. According to a 2016 Brookings Institution report, Ohio is whiter than other rust belt states (82 percent, compared with 77.6 percent in Michigan). And while much of the state is rural, its suburban and exurban areas are growing, and their predominantly white populations include both working- and middle-class residents.

Ohio’s whiteness explains only part of the problem, though. The Democrats also created their own obstacles through inbred party leadership and poor messaging. Despite a series of defeats, the Ohio Democratic Party still relies on the same leaders, consultants, and lobbyists who failed in past elections and have not developed a bench of future candidates. Twelve years ago, the last time Democrats won Statehouse races in Ohio, the party capitalized on Republican scandals. Not this year. Further, as Alec MacGillis has written in The New York Times, the Ohio Democratic Party, unions, and some progressive organizations failed to support more progressive Democrats or to invest time or money in “areas where the party is losing ground.”

Cordray and other statewide candidates also failed to offer concrete proposals that would address the economic challenges facing both working- and middle-class voters. The only candidate who focused on such policies was also the only Democrat who won statewide: Senator Sherrod Brown. Why? Brown’s campaign embraced his small town Ohio roots and stressed his consistent support of policies—like protectionist trade rules, increasing the minimum wage, and reducing prescription drug prices—that would improve the lives of working people. This message, combined with his long-standing commitment to campaigning in every county, red or blue, ensured that his message appealed to broad range of voters across races, class affiliations, and regions.

Unfortunately, Cordray wasn’t able to follow Brown’s model. Despite Cordray’s leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which should have defined him as a progressive who would defend ordinary people from Wall Street and corporate misbehavior, he failed to directly address the economic anxieties of working people. While Cordray and Brown voiced some of the same concerns—like lowering the cost of college education or addressing the opioid crisis—Cordray waited until late in his campaign to emphasize the kind of economic policies that have long been at the core of Brown’s political identity. He also lacked Brown’s track record and his down-to-earth style.

Brown’s coattails were simply not long enough to carry other Democrats. In fact, Brown’s numbers may have been pulled down by the other statewide candidates. He won by only 6.4 percent, despite a weak Republican opponent and an 8-to-1 fundraising advantage, according to David Skolnick, political analyst for The Vindicator—the local paper in Youngstown, a Brown stronghold.

As the 2018 midterms make clear, Ohio Democrats cannot count on a strong organizing effort alone to yield victories. They also need the kind of clear message, wide-ranging outreach, and concrete proposals that Brown offered. If Democrats want to reclaim Ohio, they need to recognize that many Ohio Trump voters are also Sherrod Brown voters and vice versa.

So we're right back to the same argument that we were having in late 2016: Democrats must target white Trump voters and win them back locally, at the expense of ignoring other Democratic groups nationally.

Like it or no, the prospects of Democrats in the Buckeye state are pretty dismal.  And unlike Texas and Florida, Ohio is getting less diverse, not more diverse.  Ohio Dems may have to shift into Joe Manchin mode to survive, and it's not going to be a fun time, but the reality is that Ohio Dems right now are in even worse shape than KY Dems.

Which is why I don't think Brown has a chance in hell of any national campaign.  He might make a good Veep, but frankly, Dems can do better.

Deportation Nation, Con't

BuzzFeed News reporter Hamid Aleaziz broke this story last week and now the Washington Post is confirming that the Trump regime is going ahead with plans to force any asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their immigration cases are decided.

Central Americans who arrive at U.S. border crossings seeking asylum in the United States will have to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed under sweeping new measures the Trump administration is preparing to implement, according to internal planning documents and three Department of Homeland Security officials familiar with the initiative.

According to DHS memos obtained by The Washington Post on Wednesday, Central American asylum seekers who cannot establish a “reasonable fear” of persecution in Mexico will not be allowed to enter the United States and would be turned around at the border.

The plan, called “Remain in Mexico,” amounts to a major break with current screening procedures, which generally allow those who establish a fear of return to their home countries to avoid immediate deportation and remain in the United States until they can get a hearing with an immigration judge. Trump despises this system, which he calls “catch and release,” and has vowed to end it.

Among the thousands of Central American migrants traveling by caravan across Mexico, many hope to apply for asylum due to threats of gang violence or other persecution in their home countries. They had expected to be able to stay in the United States while their claims move through immigration court. The new rules would disrupt those plans, and the hopes of other Central Americans who seek asylum in the United States each year.

Trump remains furious about the caravan and the legal setbacks his administration has suffered in federal court, demanding hard-line policy ideas from aides. Senior adviser Stephen Miller has pushed to implement the Remain in Mexico plan immediately, though other senior officials have expressed concern about implementing it amid sensitive negotiations with the Mexican government, according to two DHS officials and a White House adviser with knowledge of the plan, which was discussed at the White House on Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the administration’s new plan, if a migrant does not specifically fear persecution in Mexico, that is where they will stay. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is sending teams of asylum officers from field offices in San Francisco, Washington, and Los Angeles to the ports of entry in the San Diego area to implement the new screening procedures, according to a USCIS official.

Of course this means no asylum will be granted for anyone, but the difference is with this method, asylum seekers will be stuck in Mexico, and become 100% Mexico's problem.  Nobody seems to know what Mexico thinks of the plan, but apparently it doesn't matter.   Previously, asylum seekers would at least be allowed entry into the US while their cases were decided.  Now, they'll be on the Mexico side.

And if they try to cross, well, now the US military will deal with them, not just the Border Patrol.

The White House late Tuesday signed a memo allowing troops stationed at the border to engage in some law enforcement roles and use lethal force, if necessary — a move that legal experts have cautioned may run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.

The new “Cabinet order” was signed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, not President Donald Trump. It allows “Department of Defense military personnel” to “perform those military protective activities that the Secretary of Defense determines are reasonably necessary” to protect border agents, including “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary), crowd control, temporary detention. and cursory search.”

However an earlier “decision memo” that came to the same recommendations that were contained in the “cabinet memo” was signed by President Trump, according to documents obtained by Newsweek.

There are approximately 5,900 active-duty troops and 2,100 National Guard forces deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Some of those activities, including crowd control and detention, may run into potential conflict with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. If crossed, the erosion of the act’s limitations could represent a fundamental shift in the way the U.S. military is used, legal experts said.

The Congressional Research Service, the non-partisan research agency for Congress, has found that “case law indicates that ‘execution of the law’ in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act occurs (a) when the Armed Forces perform tasks assigned to an organ of civil government, or (b) when the Armed Forces perform tasks assigned to them solely for purposes of civilian government.” However, the law also allows the president “to use military force to suppress insurrection or to enforce federal authority,” CRS has found.

Military forces always have the inherent right to self defense, but defense of the border agents on U.S. soil is new. In addition, troops have been given additional authorities in previous years to assist border agents with drug interdictions, but the widespread authorization of use of force for thousands of active-duty troops is unique to this deployment.

It really won't be long now until US military troops are drafted to help with ICE duties as well.  Then things get really interesting, and in a very, very bad way.

StupidiNews, Turkey Day Edition!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for you guys, and the fact that Dems may actually make it 40 seats after all.

Have a good long weekend, posting will be light.

Last Call For If You Come At The Queen, You Best Not Miss,Con't

Anyone who actually thought Nancy Pelosi wasn't going to be Speaker of the House after Election Day is a fool who shouldn't be trusted, because she's smarter than all of the pundits put together.

Rep. Brian Higgins of Buffalo got what he really wanted, and so did Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.

Higgins got his two legislative priorities at the top of the Democratic agenda when the party takes control of the House next month. And Pelosi got Higgins' support for what increasingly looks like her inevitable return to the House speakership.

After saying for months that he would not back Pelosi's leadership bid in the next Congress, Higgins reversed course Wednesday, all because she agreed to prioritize Higgins' top two issues: a big infrastructure bill and a measure to open Medicare to people over age 50.

"I have an agreement in principle with the Democratic leader that those are going to be two priorities, and that I will be the lead person on the Medicare buy-in," Higgins said in an interview with The Buffalo News where he announced his turnabout.

Higgins elaborated on his thinking in a statement released later Wednesday.

“Some will ask why I have changed my position," he said. "The answer is simple: I took a principled stand on issues of vital importance not only to my constituents in Western New York but also to more than 300 million Americans whose lives can be improved by progress in these areas. A principled stand, however, often requires a pragmatic outlook in order to meet with success."

Higgins' move comes five months after he first announced that he would not back Pelosi, 78, for the top Democratic position in the next House. Calling her "aloof, frenetic and misguided," Higgins said at the time that his problems with Pelosi stemmed from the fact that she was not pushing infrastructure investment and his Medicare bill as aggressively as he would have liked.

But in a statement, Pelosi indicated she will be happy to do that in the next Congress.

“For years, Congressman Higgins has been an extraordinary leader on the issue of achieving quality, affordable health care for all Americans," she said. “His Medicare buy-in proposal is an central to this debate, as we work to build on the Affordable Care Act."

In other words, the "Stop Pelosi" ploy only worked as long as the anti-Pelosi crew maintained enough votes to block Pelosi from getting to 218.  Whoever the first Democrat to come to Pelosi to break that blockade was going to get paid.  Marcia Fudge of Ohio rolled up as the first contestant and got what she wanted, to be chair of a restored Elections subcommittee.  Higgins is getting what he wanted and looks like a hero to upstate New York for getting it.  He's the one who made Pelosi fold, you see.

Both of them got what they wanted.

The other anti-Pelosi Dems, well...they got nothing and they will continue to get nothing in the future.

It happens when you come for the queen and miss.

Meat The Press, Con't

Donald Trump goes all in on backing the Saudi murder of a US reporter, because oil is more important than anything.

President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday to remain a “steadfast partner” of Saudi Arabia despite saying that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have known about the plan to murder dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month.

Defying intense pressure from U.S. lawmakers to impose tougher sanctions on Saudi Arabia, Trump also said he would not cancel military contracts with the kingdom. He said it would be a “foolish” move that would only benefit Russia and China, competitors of the United States in the arms market.

Trump said U.S. intelligence agencies were still studying the evidence around Khashoggi’s killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 and who planned it. Since the murder, Trump has taken varying positions on how to react, including possible sanctions.

But on Tuesday, Trump stressed Saudi Arabia’s weapons purchases and its role in keeping world oil prices low as influencing his decision.

“It’s all about, for me, very simple. It’s America first,” Trump said, adding: “I’m not going to destroy the world economy and I’m not going to destroy the economy for our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia.”

Speaking at the White House to reporters before departing for Florida, Trump said of the possibility that the Saudi crown prince had a hand in the murder: “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t” and argued that the CIA had not made a definitive determination.

His comments contradicted the CIA, which believes Khashoggi’s death was ordered directly by the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler widely known by his initials MbS.

Trump was accused by Democratic lawmakers of undermining his own intelligence agencies and failing to confront Saudi Arabia over a human rights atrocity.

To recap, holding Saudi Arabia responsible for killing a US resident will never happen, because it might hurt the global economy.  Saudi Arabia apparently is the most powerful economy on Earth and could destroy America and the world at any time.  Also, if you're an autocrat, feel free to kill American citizens because we won't lift a finger.

And America slides ever closer to authoritarian rule, complete with state media defending Dear Leader.

Sean Hannity tonight defended President Donald Trump at length over his statement on Saudi Arabia even as he repeatedly emphasized that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was “evil.”

Hannity made it clear he has little doubt that the crown prince ordered it before claiming “there’s nobody that’s been tougher on Saudi Arabia” than him.

“I’ve been their loudest critic, for good reason,” he continued, noting Saudi human rights abuses and how women have been treated in Saudi Arabia.

But then he went on to say that the world “is an ugly, dangerous, complicated place” and that “as evil as this kingdom is––as I have said over the years––the President is right.”

He said that America has always had to make “difficult strategic decisions” and deal with “evil international partners.” Hannity brought up Saudi Arabia’s role in the alliance against Iran and argued, “If the mullahs that chant ‘death to America, death to Israel’ want to wipe Israel off the map, if they ever get nuclear weapons, millions and millions of people can die. So we have to make a strategic decision. We can’t take that risk.”

"Iran will nuke us if we dare defy the regime that's killing US residents!" is an odd position, but here we are.  It's too complicated for you, citizen, only Dear Leader has all the information, so stop worrying about it.  Please ignore the Saudi payments to the US.

All hail Trump.

That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

It's not longer a question of "if" Donald Trump will order the Justice Department to go after his enemies, but when Acting AG Matt Whitaker will do it.

President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

The encounter was one of the most blatant examples yet of how Mr. Trump views the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. It took on additional significance in recent weeks when Mr. McGahn left the White House and Mr. Trump appointed a relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew G. Whitaker, as the acting attorney general.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump read Mr. McGahn’s memo or whether he pursued the prosecutions further. But the president has continued to privately discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second special counsel to investigate both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey, according to two people who have spoken to Mr. Trump about the issue. He has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Mrs. Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said.

A White House spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment on the president’s criticism of Mr. Wray, whom he appointed last year after firing Mr. Comey.

“Mr. McGahn will not comment on his legal advice to the president,” said Mr. McGahn’s lawyer, William A. Burck. “Like any client, the president is entitled to confidentiality. Mr. McGahn would point out, though, that the president never, to his knowledge, ordered that anyone prosecute Hillary Clinton or James Comey.”

But McGahn and Jeff Sessions are no longer there to tell him no, are they?

The closer Mueller gets to his indictments, the closer Trump comes to ordering the DoJ to start going after his enemies.  Again, who will stop him?  Mitch McConnell?  Lindsey Graham?  Please.

It's only a matter of time.

StupidiNews!

• The CDC is once again warning everyone to avoid romaine lettuce after people in 11 states have become ill with E. coli. infections, with 13 hospitalized so far.
• Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is calling a Tuesday ruling by the 9th Circuit staying Trump's move to end asylum "dangerous" and predicts it will "undoubtedly be overturned".
• Interpol's new head will be South Korea's Kim Jong-yang after concerns that Russia's Alexander Prokopchuk was not independent of Kremlin political directives.
• The S&P 500 is now negative for the year as stocks, oil, and bonds took a second beating this week on Tuesday, meaning the decade-long bull market run in the US appears to be coming to an end.
• Americans love new car smell, but in China it's a big problem for Ford, who has filed a patent to have its Chinese vehicles bake it out in the sun.

Last Call For The Man From Interpol

It's strange enough that the Chinese head of Interpol suddenly resigned last month, vanished for three days, and the resurfaced as a detained "guest" of Beijing's government.  But now the Russians are suddenly in the driver's seat to replace him as the new head of the world's biggest police agency, and as Magnitsky Act activist Bill Browder writes, Vladimir Putin appears to be pulling off a bloodless international coup under everyone's noses.

Early last month, the wife of Meng Hongwei, a Chinese national and the president of Interpol, reported that her husband had disappeared on a trip to China. Three days passed before the Chinese government admitted detaining him and placing him under investigation. Following that, Interpol received a notice of Meng’s resignation. Whether he wrote it or not is unknown.

Last Saturday, news began circulating that a Russian official is the front-runner to replace Meng as president of Interpol. At first, I thought this must be a joke. Russia has demonstrated some of the most criminal tendencies of any country in the world. Its agents used a military-grade chemical weapon in an attack in Salisbury in Britain. Russian missiles murdered 298 innocents on Flight MH17 over Ukraine. And the Kremlin’s operatives have interfered with elections in the United States and Europe. Russia shouldn’t even be on the list of countries that could provide a leader for Interpol.

Later this week, Interpol’s general assembly in Dubai will decide who becomes Interpol’s next president. The vote will take place on Wednesday, and the choice is between the Russian interior ministry officer Alexander Prokopchuk and Interpol’s current interim president, a South Korean named Kim Jong Yang.

No one should want to see a Russian elevated to this post, but I have a particular personal interest in seeing that it doesn’t happen.

In 2012, I succeeded in advocating for the U.S. government to pass the Magnitsky Act, named after my colleague Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned by Russian authorities after exposing high-level corruption, and who died in detention after being beaten and denied medical care. This law allows the United States to freeze the assets and ban visas for Russian human rights abusers. Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin has embarked on a vendetta against me. This has taken a number of forms, including death threats and plans for illegal renditions. But one of the most pernicious has been Moscow’s repeated attempts to misuse Interpol to try to have me arrested and extradited back to Russia, where they will likely torture and kill me.

Moscow first attempted to use Interpol to go after me in May 2013 with a request for an Interpol Red Notice. Interpol rejected this, stating that the Russian request violated Interpol’s constitution, since it was obviously politically motivated. Several months later, the Russians tried again to get a Red Notice for me — and once again, it was rejected.

After two explicit rejections, one might think Russia would give up trying to use Interpol to have me arrested. Instead, the Russians altered their tactics.

In October 2017, the Canadian Parliament unanimously passed its own version of the Magnitsky Act. In response, Putin’s government went after me using something called an Interpol “diffusion notice.” This was also an Interpol arrest warrant, but one that required far less oversight than a Red Notice.

Again, Interpol intervened, declaring it politically motivated.

Then, in May of this year, I was actually arrested in Madrid. I’d been invited there by a senior Spanish prosecutor to give evidence against Russian organized crime and money laundering taking place in Spain and connected to the Magnitsky case. I was arrested at my hotel by Spanish National Police, and released from custody only after Interpol intervened.

In reaction to the Madrid incident, Russia’s most senior law enforcement officer, Yuri Chaika, gave a news conference in Moscow, saying: “We will redouble our efforts to get Bill Browder. . . . He should not sleep peacefully at night.”

On Monday morning, the Russian government went one step further. Officials in Moscow held a news conference at which they absurdly accused me of murdering Sergei Magnitsky himself and described me as the leader of a “transnational criminal group” who needed to be apprehended.

In total, Russia has tried to use Interpol seven times to have me arrested. If there ever was a case for why Russia should not have any authority at Interpol, I am that case.

Bill Browder won't make it to 2019 as a free man if Alexander Prokopchuk is voted in as head of Interpol, that much seems certain.  Interpol is used to help hunt down criminals, not political dissidents, reporters, and whistleblowers, but if Putin gets his hands on Interpol, he will use it to do just that.

Turkey has also been using Interpol as its personal dissident arrest squad since Ergodan consolidated power in the failed coup attempt against him in July 2016, issuing piles of "red notices" to round up political enemies. 

Up until now, Interpol has been resisting this sort of clearly political behavior.  But unless you believe Bill Browder is an international terrorist who killed Sergei Magintsky and is really the dastardly mastermind behind all of Putin's recent European assassinations of former Russian agents, Putin getting full control of Interpol will be a complete nightmare.

Something Trump of course won't bat an eyelash at.