Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So here's what we know about Paul Manafort and his lawyers right now: First, Manafort should immediately fire his legal team because they accidentally (or on purpose maybe at this point, who knows) forgot to make the redactions stick in his latest court filing with the Mueller team, and second, because of those missing redactions, we know get to see that  Robert Mueller believes Paul Manafort has been a very, very bad boy.

Paul Manafort shared 2016 presidential campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee whom the FBI has said has ties to Russian intelligence, according to a court filing.

The apparently inadvertent revelation indicates a pathway by which the Russians could have had access to Trump campaign data.

The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing from his defense team that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about that and other issues.

In his rebuttal to the special counsel’s claims of dishonesty, Manafort exposed details of the dispute, much of which centers on his relationship with Kilimnik. The Russian citizen, who began working for Manafort’s consulting firm starting in 2005, has been charged with helping his former boss to obstruct Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election. He is believed to be in Moscow.

The special counsel alleged Manafort “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign,” according to the unredacted filing, and discussed Ukrainian politics with Kilimnik during that time.

“Manafort ‘conceded’ that he discussed or may have discussed a Ukraine peace plan with Mr. Kilimnik on more than one occasion,” his attorneys quote the special counsel as saying, and “’acknowledged’ that he and Mr. Kilimnik met while they were both in Madrid.”

In his filing, Manafort’s lawyers said any inconsistencies in those interviews were unintentional.

“Issues and communications related to Ukrainian political events simply were not at the forefront of Mr. Manafort’s mind during the period at issue and it is not surprising at all that Mr. Manafort was unable to recall specific details prior to having his recollection refreshed,” they wrote. 

Mueller also said Manafort lied about contacting Trump administration officials after Trump took office. Manafort had told investigators he had no direct or indirect contact with White House officials since Trump’s inauguration, but Manafort had been in touch with officials as recently as the spring, according to the filing.

Manafort told a colleague in February — four months after he was indicted — that he was in contact with a senior administration official through that time, prosecutors said. And in a text message, he authorized another person to speak with a White House official on May 26, they alleged.

In Tuesday’s filing, Manafort’s attorneys said that person was “asking permission to use Mr. Manafort’s name as an introduction in the event the third-party met the President,” which “does not constitute outreach by Mr. Manafort to the President.”

Sorry Don.  Your campaign chairman gave internal campaign data to a foreign power in exchange for help.  That's collusion, period.  At this point, Marcy Wheeler figures, Manafort is going to keep letting redactions slip until Trump pardons him.

I have no idea whether this non-redaction was a colossal mistake or whether this was a cute way to disclose what evidence Mueller has shared with Manafort (remember: these five lies were not the only ones that Manafort told; just the only ones that Mueller wanted to describe).

But even ignoring the redaction fail, the filing feels very contemptuous, as if they’re still playing for a pardon.

Effectively, they’re admitting their client maybe lied or just conveniently forgot to minimize his ongoing conspiracy with someone even Rick Gates has said has ties to Russian intelligence — the same Russian intelligence agency that hacked Democrats. But they don’t think that’s a big deal. They’re just going to double down on obtaining more information on the evidence Mueller has while they wait for the pardon.

Seems about right.

The Cruelty Is The Point, Con't

Trump voters elected Donald Trump because he would not only use the power of the federal government to "Make America Great Again" but to specifically crush Obama coalition voters, so that never again would those people be allowed to elect a black president...or a woman.  They voted specifically for a government to help the "good, Christian people" of rural America and let urban America burn to the ground.

That's the implicit covenant Trump made., to roll back rights, to remove political and economic power, to put us in our place. Trump voters voted for payback, they voted for  punishment, they voted for, as Adam Serwer says to make cruelty the point. And under the tariffs and market plunges and now the government shutdown, in the Florida panhandle where Hurricane Michael ripped through not three months ago,  Trump voters are openly starting to question whether Trump is holding up his end.

Though Mr. Trump said on Twitter over the weekend that “most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats,” that is far from true in places like Jackson County, Fla., where Marianna is the county seat. It is a Republican bastion so deeply conservative that it was illegal to sell liquor by the drink until November 2017. The president and his plan for a wall along the border are popular here, as they are across much of the state, which might explain why Florida Republicans in Congress have done little to pressure party leaders in the Senate to put an end to the shutdown.

“Everybody I talk to wants the wall,” James Grover, 72, a car salesman from nearby Blountstown, said over breakfast on Saturday at the Waffle Iron, a diner on Route 90 that opens six days a week even though its facade, destroyed by the hurricane, is temporarily made up of plastic sheeting and plywood.

Few prison guards interviewed leveled any criticism at the president or his border policy, instead blaming the impasse on both Republicans and Democrats in Congress who have failed to reach any agreement.

“You can point fingers at both sides,” said Jason Griffin, 44. “I point fingers at everyone. If they want to get something done, they can.”

Mr. Vinzant, the union president, said he believed a wall was necessary because he trusted fellow public employees who work for the Border Patrol. “Those guys will sit there and say, ‘We need help,’” he said. “So I have to agree with it. We don’t have a choice.”

But that solidarity does not make the prison officers’ situation any easier, especially since they face an added stress: The Bureau of Prisons as a general condition of employment requires that its workers pay their debts in a timely fashion. Failure to do so can result in discipline.

“I hate the shutdown,” said Joseph Sims, 37, a corrections officer of six years. “Sometimes you’ve got to do stuff to get stuff done,” he said of Mr. Trump’s stance, “but now it’s starting to take a toll on everybody at work.”

On Saturday, Mr. Sims stood in his living room as his wife, Melissa Sims, a prison nurse, prepared to hug their 3-year-old twins before embarking on the nearly seven-hour drive to work for two weeks in Mississippi.

“Mommy’s got to go bye-bye,” she told her son, Eli, who shrieked: “No! You can’t!”

“Oh my gosh, don’t make me cry,” said Ms. Sims, 39.

The day after she is scheduled to return, her husband will have to leave for Yazoo City himself, so they will hardly see each other. And the shutdown seems likely to delay repairs at the Marianna prison, which workers fear will remain effectively closed for at least a year.

“We can handle a month or two, but if it gets much longer than that, I’m going to look for another job — a job in the private sector,” Ms. Sims said of working without pay.

She blamed Mr. Trump for the shutdown, a point on which she disagreed with her husband and most of her colleagues. “This definitely is making me more political than I have been in the past,” Ms. Sims said. She has been researching how Congress passes budget bills.

“My stance is that if there’s a wall, they’re going to find a way to get past it — legal or not,” Ms. Sims said.

“I believe there should be a barrier,” her husband countered.

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.

That's why they voted for him, you know.  This isn't a retired boomer in her 70's saying this, the typical example of "dying racism" in America.  This is somebody my age, my generation, saying this.  This is somebody born in 1981, a older Millennial.  Somebody who works in a prison as a secretary in the state with the highest incarcerated black population in America.  She knows exactly what she means when she says "the people he needs to be hurting" about Donald Trump.

The cruelty is the point.  I will keep saying this until people get this. Not just of Trump's cruelty, but the cruel power fantasies of Trump voters.  They voted for cruelty against people they feel aren't representative of their America.  They voted to get rid of us, to make us a permanent underclass in their America, so it is "great again".  They voted because their parents grew up in a time where black folk and brown folk had no rights, weren't their co-workers, definitely not their bosses, absolutely not their president.  They want that back because they are miserable under Trump, and they voted for making us miserable, not themselves.

Trump's getting close to blowing it.  That's why he needs the wall.  Everyone knows it.

The cruelty is the point.

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump has already lost the government shutdown fight that he stupidly picked, and only now are Republicans in Congress beginning to realize just how much of a disaster this is going to be for them.

Several dozen House Republicans may cross the aisle this week to vote for Democratic bills to reopen shuttered parts of the federal government, spurring the White House into a dramatic effort to stem potential GOP defections.

White House officials and Republican congressional leaders worry that GOP support for the shutdown is eroding, weakening President Donald Trump’s hand as he seeks billions of dollars for a border wall that Democrats have vowed to oppose, according to GOP lawmakers and aides.

Hoping to sway skeptics in his party and the broader public, Trump will make an Oval Office address Tuesday night to discuss what he called the “Humanitarian and National Security Crisis on our Southern Border," he announced on Twitter. That will be followed by a Trump trip to the border region on Thursday.

Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will address House Republicans on Tuesday evening. The House on Wednesday is scheduled to vote on a Democratic bill designed to fund the IRS and several other agencies, the first of four bills Democrats hope to use to peel off Trump's GOP support in the House.

Without more money, the IRS could have a problem processing tax refunds. Russ Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, reversed course on Monday and said refunds will be paid out, another move by the White House to ameliorate the impact of the shutdown.

It's very possible that Trump's primetime address tonight isn't to sell the Democrats on the wall, or even to declare a national emergency.  Maybe it's to sell his base on losing the wall fight.  If that's the case, tonight ought to be a lot of fun for the Democrats.

On the other hand, the kinds of things Trump can do right now under existing national emergency scenarios is outright frightening.

The premise underlying emergency powers is simple: The government’s ordinary powers might be insufficient in a crisis, and amending the law to provide greater ones might be too slow and cumbersome. Emergency powers are meant to give the government a temporary boost until the emergency passes or there is time to change the law through normal legislative processes.

Unlike the modern constitutions of many other countries, which specify when and how a state of emergency may be declared and which rights may be suspended, the U.S. Constitution itself includes no comprehensive separate regime for emergencies. Those few powers it does contain for dealing with certain urgent threats, it assigns to Congress, not the president. For instance, it lets Congress suspend the writ of habeas corpus—that is, allow government officials to imprison people without judicial review—“when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” and “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

Nonetheless, some legal scholars believe that the Constitution gives the president inherent emergency powers by making him commander in chief of the armed forces, or by vesting in him a broad, undefined “executive Power.” At key points in American history, presidents have cited inherent constitutional powers when taking drastic actions that were not authorized—or, in some cases, were explicitly prohibited—by Congress. Notorious examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent during World War II and George W. Bush’s programs of warrantless wiretapping and torture after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Abraham Lincoln conceded that his unilateral suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War was constitutionally questionable, but defended it as necessary to preserve the Union.

The Supreme Court has often upheld such actions or found ways to avoid reviewing them, at least while the crisis was in progress. Rulings such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, in which the Court invalidated President Harry Truman’s bid to take over steel mills during the Korean War, have been the exception. And while those exceptions have outlined important limiting principles, the outer boundary of the president’s constitutional authority during emergencies remains poorly defined.

Presidents can also rely on a cornucopia of powers provided by Congress, which has historically been the principal source of emergency authority for the executive branch. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, Congress passed laws to give the president additional leeway during military, economic, and labor crises. A more formalized approach evolved in the early 20th century, when Congress legislated powers that would lie dormant until the president activated them by declaring a national emergency. These statutory authorities began to pile up—and because presidents had little incentive to terminate states of emergency once declared, these piled up too. By the 1970s, hundreds of statutory emergency powers, and four clearly obsolete states of emergency, were in effect. For instance, the national emergency that Truman declared in 1950, during the Korean War, remained in place and was being used to help prosecute the war in Vietnam.

Aiming to rein in this proliferation, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976. Under this law, the president still has complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration—but he must specify in the declaration which powers he intends to use, issue public updates if he decides to invoke additional powers, and report to Congress on the government’s emergency-related expenditures every six months. The state of emergency expires after a year unless the president renews it, and the Senate and the House must meet every six months while the emergency is in effect “to consider a vote” on termination.

By any objective measure, the law has failed. Thirty states of emergency are in effect today—several times more than when the act was passed. Most have been renewed for years on end. And during the 40 years the law has been in place, Congress has not met even once, let alone every six months, to vote on whether to end them.

As a result, the president has access to emergency powers contained in 123 statutory provisions, as recently calculated by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where I work. These laws address a broad range of matters, from military composition to agricultural exports to public contracts. For the most part, the president is free to use any of them; the National Emergencies Act doesn’t require that the powers invoked relate to the nature of the emergency. Even if the crisis at hand is, say, a nationwide crop blight, the president may activate the law that allows the secretary of transportation to requisition any privately owned vessel at sea. Many other laws permit the executive branch to take extraordinary action under specified conditions, such as war and domestic upheaval, regardless of whether a national emergency has been declared.

So yeah, if Trump wanted to, he could do a lot.  He hasn't.

Yet.

StupidiNews!

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are challenging networks to give Democrats equal time in response to Donald Trump's primetime speech tonight.
• Outgoing Tennessee GOP Gov. Bill Haslam will commute the sentence of Cyntoia Brown, who will be free in August after serving 15 years of a 51-year sentence for killing her attacker.
• North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un is vising China this week just days after threatening taking an "alternate path" if the US does not agree to Pyongyang's demands on rolling back sanctions.
• California's lawsuit against the Trump regime opened in a San Francisco courtroom Monday as both the Golden State and New York are suing over planned citizenship questions on the 2020 Census.
• The 4th Circuit has unanimously ruled that a Virginia county executive who blocked a critic on Facebook is in violation of the First Amendment.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump really, really, really wants to sell America a wall.

President Trump announced on Monday that he would address the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening to discuss what he called the crisis at the southern border, and the White House said that later in the week he would travel to the border as part of his effort to persuade Americans of the need for a wall — the sticking point in negotiations with Democrats which caused a government shutdown.

It was not immediately clear which outlets would carry his address. The four major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC — confirmed receiving the White House request on Monday for Mr. Trump to speak during the 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time slot, but producers had not decided whether to grant him the time. Pre-empting prime-time coverage is an expensive proposition for television executives, who have sold millions of dollars’ worth of advertising against entertainment programming.

Mr. Trump’s remarks could also be covered by cable news networks, which have a much smaller audience. CNN has agreed to air the address, a spokeswoman said on Monday. But cable news stations are accustomed to cutting in for breaking news, and they reach a far smaller audience than traditional broadcast stations.

In the recent past, White House requests to interrupt prime-time programming on the nation’s broadcast networks were rare and usually reserved for moments of national import, like the death of Osama bin Laden, and networks usually granted the requests. There have been instances, however, where such requests were rejected by producers as insufficiently newsworthy.

So, another loyalty oath check for the news media, and it allows Trump to either scream and threaten the press with destruction again or they cover his sales pitch in prime time, a win-win for Trump.  But Steve M brings up a very good point: when it comes to that national emergency that he wants so badly to declare, why not just get it over with and do it?

I know I'm supposed to regard Trump as a potential fascist dictator, but he seems reluctant to take a heavy-handed approach in this case.

I think I know why. Trump sells himself as the world's greatest dealmaker. He claims to be a guy who always triumphs as a dealmaker (no win-win scenarios for Trump). So it seems that he'd rather be seen as the Great Persuader than as the Great Dictator. He wants congressional Democrats to agree to give him 100% of what he wants.

Trump as the ultimate dealmaker is an important part of his mythos and once again his narcissism is getting in the way of what his party wants.

Trump could try brute force, but it's killing him that he can't sweet-talk America into the wall (especially when Fox keeps telling him that all real Americans want it). This is a weakness of Trump's. His party would let him get away with even greater abuses of power than he's attempted, but he'd rather prove that he's the world's greatest salesman. He really can't bear the thought that this might not be true.

That theory makes a lot of sense, actually.  He knows he needs to get a win on the wall, and he's convinced that he can sell Democrats and the entire country on it rather than try to force it. Of course, the "dealmaker" image is so much garbage in reality, as Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien points out.

Trump, in reality, was never a peerless or even a particularly skillful dealmaker, and many of the most significant business transactions he engineered imploded. Instead, he made his way in the world as an indefatigable self-promoter, a marketing confection and a human billboard who frequently licensed his name to buildings and products paid for by others.

In Trump’s professional life, his inept dealmaking often came home to roost in unmanageable debts and serial bankruptcies. In his more recent political and presidential life it has revealed itself through bungled, hapless efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act; forge a nuclear agreement with North Korea; wage trade wars with China, Mexico and Canada; retain control of the House of Representatives; turn military and diplomatic strategy on its head; lay siege to sensible immigration policy; and, now, force a government shutdown to secure funding for a prized project — a wall along the U.S.’s southern border.

Striking lasting deals requires intimacy with the finer points of what every party wants out of a negotiation, realistic goals, maturity, patience, flexibility — and enough leverage so the other side can’t simply stall or walk away from the table. Trump hasn’t met any of those prerequisites in his repeated efforts to fulfill his campaign promise to build a wall, a promise that played to the most xenophobic and bigoted portion of his base while not addressing any of the real shortcomings or necessary enhancements of federalimmigration policy.

“Policy” and “Trump” don’t really coexist, of course. The president lacks the interest or sophistication to steep himself in policy details, so he enters the immigration debate and dealmaking for his wall at a distinct disadvantage. For as much as he disparages politicians and public service, Trump is surrounded by Democrats and Republicans who have immersed themselves in immigration discussions for years. Expertise does matter, after all — and Trump doesn’t have it.

The most visible reminder of the raw amateurism that has undermined Trump’s dealmaking came in December during a memorable White House visit with a pair of Democrats, Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer. As the trio gradually became unsettled over policy differences that could lead to a government shutdown, Trump, ready to perform for the media he had invited to observe the chat, sallied forth in a burst of bravado.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” Trump told Schumer. “I will take the mantle. I will shut it down. I'm not going to blame you for it.”

Unforced error.

So what happens when Trump is unable to make the sale and once again it doesn't work?

We'll find out soon, I imagine.  It could be that Tuesday's address will be the emergency declaration anyway.

Who knows with Trump?

The Year In Tech Wrecks

It's once again time for Ars Technica's yearly Deathwatch party, where the website predicts the demise of various technology companies (or at least a big enough sea change to merit getting on the list), and I have to say, this year, if correct, is going to be really something.  First, last year's review:

To be a candidate for the Deathwatch, a company or product division of a company should have experienced at least one of the following:

• An extended period of lost market share in their particular category
• An extended period of financial losses or a pattern of annual losses
• Serious management, legal, or regulatory problems that raise questions about the business model or long-term strategy of the company or product line

Last year’s class has a high survival rate (for now). Faraday Future was looking like a dead car company walking before reaching a new investor agreement. Management changes at Uber have kept the company driving despite leaping into other markets—but it now faces a whole host of new competition in every segment, on top of its problems with its driverless car business. Twitter became profitable somehow (at least on paper) in 2018, despite the bad press the company garnered over Twitter being the favorite platform of government-sponsored information operations worldwide.

A few honorees remain on life support, however. SoundCloud has been treading water since it nearly ran out of cash in 2017, and it’s not clear what the survival strategy is for the company. HTC somehow also managed to eke out a profitable quarter in 2018—just one, mostly thanks to a cash infusion from a partial acquisition by Google. But that acquisition basically handed Google most of HTC's cell phone operations, so we’re counting HTC out for this year. LeEco, the company previously managed by Faraday Futures’ CEO, is also looking like roadkill in the US. Much of its operations have shut down as the company explores ways to recover.

We also put network neutrality on the Deathwatch last year. No matter how much the Internet mourns, it’s dead. It probably won’t be back any time soon. 

And this year, after putting Twitter and Uber on notice, Ars Technica goes straight for the jugular: the Social Network itself.

Last year, we left Facebook off our list for a number of reasons, starting with its insane profitability. While some readers called Facebook a “bubble,” it was clear that Facebook is the Internet’s version of “too big to fail”: deep pockets, well-entrenched, semi-diversified (with the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp), and billions of users. Little Twitter may finally be profitable, but TWTR’s most recent quarterly earnings are a mere five percent of Facebook’s.

And yet, here we are, putting Facebook on Deathwatch. The reasons have only a little bit to do with financials. We don’t expect that Facebook will go away, but this year is going to probably determine whether Facebook’s management team will continue as it is—or whether there’s a stockholder rebellion, or a government lawsuit, or some combination of both that drives CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others out.

Facebook is in crisis, thanks to a stream of what some might refer to by the technical term “really bad management decisions” moves made by the company over the past six years to accelerate the company’s growth while skirting the limits placed by a settlement reached with the FTC over privacy issues finalized in 2012. The Cambridge Analytica “data breach” scandal, other privacy concerns, fake news, and Russian troll ops blowback created a perfect storm that left Zuckerberg looking like a deer in the headlights in front of a series of US congressional hearings (and his subsequent refusal to testify before legislators in seven other countries).

I have to agree.  I don't see how Zuck survives as CEO...well, unless he throws COO Sheryl Sandburg into the blender, which he very well might.

Also on Ars's Deathwatch this year: the unholy monstrosity that is the sutured-together corpse of Yahoo! and AOL now known as Verizon's Oath spinoff, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, and Essential, the weirdest smartphone that precisely nobody bought.

We'll see how this all pans out, but if Zuck went out of pasture (along with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) I think the world would be a much better place.

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

The Trump Shutdown is now into its third week with no end in sight as the National Park Service has been reduced to taking the technically illegal step of using entrance fees to pay for cleanup and protection of national monuments and lands.

The National Park Service will take the unprecedented step of tapping entrance fees to pay for expanded operations at its most popular sites, officials said Sunday, as the federal government shutdown threatens to degrade some of the nation’s iconic landmarks.

Under a memorandum signed Saturday by the Interior Department’s acting secretary, David Bernhardt, and obtained by The Washington Post, park managers will be permitted to bring on additional staff to clean restrooms, haul trash, patrol the parks and open areas that have been shut during the more-than-two-week budget impasse. In a statement Sunday, National Park Service Deputy Director P. Daniel Smith acknowledged that the administration’s practice of keeping parks open but understaffed has become unsustainable at some of its most beloved sites.

“As the lapse in appropriations continues, it has become clear that highly visited parks with limited staff have urgent needs that cannot be addressed solely through the generosity of our partners,” Smith said. “We are taking this extraordinary step to ensure that parks are protected, and that visitors can continue to access parks with limited basic services.”

The move, which some critics said could be illegal, shows the extent to which the Trump administration’s decision to keep the national park system open to visitors is straining its capacity and potentially exposing public lands to long-term damage. During such shutdowns under the Clinton and Obama administrations, the Park Service chose to block access to its sites rather than leave them open with a skeleton staff on board. Trump officials chose the opposite course, and as trash has begun to mount and key habitat has been imperiled, the administration is struggling to manage the problems.

Congressional Democrats and some park advocates question whether the park-fee move is legal, because the fees that parks collect under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act are expressly designated to support visitor services instead of operations and basic maintenance. The secretarial order authorizes parks that have “available balances” of these fee funds to spend them on operations that include trash collection and sanitation, road maintenance, campground operations, law enforcement and emergency operations, and entrance staff “as necessary to provide critical safety operations.”

Meanwhile as trash and toilet paper overflow the nation's national parks, the nation's air travel system is now bordering on collapse as the nation's largest airline pilots union rips into Trump.

Delta and United Airlines pilots -- and those of JetBlue and many other airlines -- have had enough.

In a scorchingly fact-based letter to President Trump, the Air Line Pilots Association -- which represents 61,000 pilots -- used simple words.

Its president, Captain Joe DePete wrote:

I am writing to urge you to take the necessary steps to immediately end the shutdown of government agencies that is adversely affecting the safety, security and efficiency of our national airspace system.
DePete explained that the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security operate as both regulators and service providers.

Mechanical inspections, drone oversight and new enhanced communications systems are all threatened.

Worse, air traffic controllers, airspace system maintenance personnel and air marshals are working unpaid.

Moreover, CNN now reports that hundreds of TSA screeners are calling in sick. Could the fact that they're not being paid have an influence?

This, too, says DePete, could jeopardize safety:

The pressure these civil servants are facing at home should not be ignored. At some point, these dedicated federal employees will encounter personal financial damages that will take a long time from which to recover, if at all.

By writing directly to the president -- and merely copying congressional leaders -- the pilots appear to be holding him responsible for the potential dangers flowing from the shutdown.

It's a remarkably forthright approach, one that might make some uncomfortable, given that it has inevitable political overtones.

By saying that only the president can and should take the necessary steps, the pilots seem to recognize that, whatever the merits (or demerits) of a wall, it isn't worth risking airline safety for what some believe is a symbol of power, rather than an effective security measure.

And now we find out that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, will start to be evicted as HUD housing grant programs expired on January 1.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development sent letters to 1,500 landlords Friday as part of a last-minute effort to prevent the eviction of thousands of tenants. A lot of those tenants live in units covered by a HUD program that many agency officials didn’t realize had expired on Jan. 1 and that they are now unable to renew.

The letters instruct the landlords to use their reserve accounts so that no one is evicted, HUD spokesman Jereon Brown said. He said the budget and contract staff are “scouring for money” to figure out how to fund the contracts on an interim basis.

And all of that is now solely on Donald Trump's head.

StupidiNews!

• At least 40 are reported dead in northern Afghanistan after the apparent collapse of a gold mine, ten miners were injured.
• Harold Brown, Defense Secretary under Jimmy Carter, and architect of the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, has passed at age 91.
• There were fresh protests in France over the weekend, once again French President Emanuel Macron is calling for peace after protesters user a forklift to enter a government compound in Paris.
• UK Prime Minister Theresa May is warning of "uncharted territory" if Parliament rejects her Brexit deal this month, May once again stressed that there can be no second referendum on Brexit.
• IBM is being sued over its Weather Channel mobile app for violating data privacy laws, the lawsuit contends that IBM sold location data to third parties for years while claiming it would not do so.

Last Call For A Syria's Reversal

Donald Trump ignored his own Defense Secretary who quit rather than take the heat for withdrawal from Syria, ignored Republicans in his own party, and of course ignored Democrats, who all said pulling out of Syria and leaving it to Iran and Russia was an impending disaster.

And then Benjamin Netanyahu said something, and now Trump has done a 180.

President Trump’s national security adviser sought to reassure allies Sunday that the United States would be methodical about withdrawing troops from Syria, promising that the pullout would not occur until the Islamic State was fully eradicated from the country and Turkey could guarantee the safety of Kurdish fighters who have fought alongside American personnel.

John Bolton’s comments, reported by the Associated Press, contradict Trump’s mid-December promise to bring troops home from Syria “now,” an announcement that surprised allies and advisers, sparked an outcry from lawmakers, and prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It is also the clearest statement yet from any of the president’s surrogates about how they plan to slow the implementation of his pullout plans.

“There are objectives that we want to accomplish that condition the withdrawal,” Bolton said while speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, on a trip intended to allay Israeli leaders’ concerns about Trump’s announcement. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.”
Trump touched off global confusion and panic when he announced via Twitter on Dec. 19 that he would order the withdrawal of the 2,000 troops stationed in Syria to help fight the Islamic State. “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back and they’re coming back now. We won,” Trump said at thet time.

Days later, while visiting U.S. troops in Iraq after Christmas, Trump told reporters traveling with him that he would deny any request from the military to extend the mission in Syria. “They said again, recently, ‘Can we have more time?’ ” Trump said of U.S. generals. “I said: ‘Nope. You can’t have any more time. You’ve had enough time.’ We’ve knocked them out. We’ve knocked them silly.”

But in statements since then, including remarks to reporters at the White House Sunday, the president has suggested that the pullout would not be completed so quickly, adding to the uncertainty about the timing of his plans.

Both allies and critics of the president warned that a hasty pullout of American forces could upset the balance of power in the Middle East, emboldening Russia and Iran, and threaten what tenuous stability U.S.-aligned forces had been able to achieve in Syria.

Bolton’s comments come amid reports that Trump had agreed to extend his initial 30-day deadline for withdrawal to four months. When asked whether Bolton’s comments would affect that timeline, a senior administration official said that “there is no specific timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, and reports to the contrary are false.”

Nonetheless, the plans and assurances the national security adviser offered in Israel were confirmation that withdrawal plans are on hold until conditions on the ground match the president’s stated assessment of the situation in Syria. As part of his announcement, Trump said the United States had “defeated ISIS” there — a claim that his advisers and political allies have disputed. ISIS is an alternative acronym for the Islamic State.

Russia wanted the US gone, so Trump said withdraw.  Then Israel said no, and we're back to "staying until ISIS is defeated".  At least in this instance, Israel's control of the US is stronger than Russia's.

But what really prompted this move?  Remember that Trump believes he is America's greatest leader, and he wants an historic legacy, to do what Clinton, Bush, and Obama could not.  Trump wants an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, and the sudden pullout in Syria prompted Bibi to pick up his ball and go home.

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said Sunday that the Trump administration's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan - the "deal of the century" - will be presented "within the next several months."

The comments came during National Security Advisor John Bolton's visit to Israel this week. Bolton arrived on Saturday evening, and is scheduled to meet Netanyahu Sunday night. He was last in Israel in August, and this will be his second visit to the country since taking over as National Security Advisor in April. He will travel from Israel to Turkey for talks there expected as well to focus on the situation in Syria.

"It is not clear in which century Trump intends to announce his 'deal of the century,'" Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg said in response to Friedman's announcement Sunday." But we do not need to wait for anyone in order to begin the most important thing for the future of the State of Israel: a peace accord with the Palestinians. Netanyahu has already been negligent for a decade while not starting negotiations, and it is sad that Trump's way to help him in the elections is to delay announcing his plan, instead of accelerating it."

Trump's long-awaited plan has been delayed time after time. With Israel heading toward elections on April 9, a further delay was likely.

On one hand, Trump’s peace team says it cannot be responsible for embarrassing the country, the president or the administration by publishing a plan that falls flat on its face out of the gate. Yet it also refuses to give up, insisting that circumstances will serendipitously change just enough for the world to take the plan seriously.

Trump’s team – led by Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; Jason Greenblatt, his special assistant and envoy to the process; and David Friedman, his ambassador to Israel – have floated trial balloons on some of their proposals. Some have flown and some have not. But no one knows precisely what their initiative entails – many in Washington doubt a full draft actually exists – and so it is fair to say that its contents might still surprise the region and reframe discussion around the peace process in more productive terms.

Bibi has his own issues, facing imminent indictment for bribery and corruption charges, he dissolved the Knesset and called for new elections for April.  Of course that means Jared Kushner's pet project will have to be delayed as well, and that finally got Trump's attention.

So suddenly we're back in Syria for the foreseeable future.  Surprise!

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

The Trump regime is about to come to a head over the shutdown, and we're headed for a very dark and dangerous place.

President Donald Trump is inclined to declare a national emergency to secure military funding for his long-promised southern border wall if talks between administration officials and top lawmakers from both parties continue to stall, a White House official told CNN on Saturday. 

While not the administration's preferred plan, the use of emergency powers to fund the wall "provides a way out" amid a series of contentious meetings and disagreements among Department of Homeland Security officials and Democratic lawmakers over basic facts related to border security, the official said. 

"We can only stay like this for so long," said the official, who attended both meetings with congressional officials at the White House led by Trump this week, explaining that factual disputes have hung up discussions. 

As the partial government shutdown enters a third week over the funding dispute, Trump has publicly said he would reject any plan that includes less than $5.6 billion for a border wall. The President acknowledged the possibility of using emergency powers to fund the wall during remarks in the Rose Garden on Friday, saying "we can call a national emergency because of the security of our country." 

"I haven't done it. I may do it," Trump said. "We can call a national emergency and build it very quickly."

Three observations, first, in the context of the shutdown itself, this is a bare naked threat.  Every time we ask "Wow, Trump won't really go there, will he?" he does. Especially if the subject is immigration or self-aggrandizement, he absolutely does, so a Great Wall of Trump to keep out those people would be something Trump has to have, and have on his terms.  He's in trouble without it.

Second, history tells us no leader of a country ever declares a national emergency for political reasons, assumes new emergency powers, and then voluntarily gives that power back. And yes, again, I believe Trump will do exactly what he's threatening to do because this is the kind of thing that people resign over when they don't agree with it, and we're already seeing resignations.

Kevin Sweeney has resigned as Pentagon chief of staff after serving the defense secretary for two years. 

"I've decided the time is right to return to the private sector. It has been an honor to serve again alongside the men and women of the Department of Defense," Sweeney said in a short statement posted on the Department of Defense website late Saturday night. 

A knowledgeable source told CNN's Jake Tapper that the White House forced Sweeney out. The source did not provide further information about the reason.

I absolutely guarantee you that the reason Adm. Sweeney resigned involves Trump's national emergency declaration, and to use the military as his own personal ICE force. Trump has always had the goal of not just ending "illegal immigration" and not just even ending all immigration, but in fact to begin mass deportations of refugees and foreign nationals as a signal to his white supremacist base.

Third, Trump believes if the government is shut down, Mueller and the Democrats can't investigate, indict, or impeach him.  He's more than happy to not sign anything right now, wall or not.  He's wrong, of course, but he's terrified.  He also figures that the national emergency would mean he'd be safe from any consequences of the Mueller probe too (also wrong).

Still, that means that there's a method to this madness.  Trump wants to militarize the border, and militarize mass deportations, under a "national emergency" and use that power to block Mueller.

Now I could very well be wrong. Steve M. thinks a national emergency could be a face-saver for Trump and that he'll back off after.

Maybe that's how this stalemate will end: Trump issues his declaration, then signs the bills to reopen the government. The declaration is approved in the Senate on a party-line vote, but it's tied up in the courts for the rest of the year and then into 2020. Trump gets a symbolic victory. Democrats get one too: They approve no wall funding. The wall can is kicked down the road the way the Dreamer can has been kicked down the road by the courts since the last battle over the wall. I don't think will ever give in, so this might be one of the less bad options.

Maybe that's how it shakes out, a national emergency that gets tied up in the courts, especially if it was tied up well past the 2020 election, would let Trump off the hook with his base, he could then campaign on getting a third SCOTUS pick.

I don't think that would be the case because of the immigration and Mueller angles though.

The darkest, bloodiest chapters in world history tell us how it ends from there.

Sunday Long Read: Mueller's First Big Case

Thirty years ago, well before Robert Mueller was Special Counsel investigating the most corrupt individual to ever enter the Oval Office, well before he was FBI Director or even before he was Deputy Attorney General, he was a federal prosecutor assigned to what was at the time the most shocking terror attack in American history: the December 1989 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. 

TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

“There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

The Lockerbie case defined Mueller's career as a prosecutor, only for politics to see justice denied and the man he helped to convict sent back to Libya by Scotland as a peace offering to the Qaddafi regime.

The Lockerbie bombers got away after doing tremendous damage.  Robert Mueller knows full well the cost of politics in justice.

And he will not let Trump get away.

It's About Suppression, Con't

With Democrats now in charge of the House, it's time to talk about the GOP efforts to steal the NC-9 House election, and what Democrats now have the power to do to stop them.

House Democrats are preparing to launch their own investigations into the disputed congressional election in North Carolina, where Republican Mark Harris’ campaign is facing fraud allegations and the state elections board had refused to certify the results. 

Harris’ campaign has sued in state court to be seated in Congress, despite an ongoing investigation by the elections board that suffered a setback when the board was dissolved at the end of 2018. Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in the unofficial vote count, but voters and election workers have filed numerous affidavits detailing irregularities during the election, including reports that McCrae Dowless, a subcontractor for Harris’ campaign consultants, ran an operation that collected and marked voters’ absentee ballots. 

The House Democratic investigations could pave the way for a new election in the district, even if the court orders the board of elections to certify Harris as the winner instead of the board ordering a re-vote itself. The House Administration Committee, now controlled by Democrats, has the authority to call for another election after investigating the 2018 results. 

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who is slated to chair an election-focused subcommittee of the House Administration Committee, told POLITICO that the House will intervene if the North Carolina court ordered the election certified for Harris before the state investigation has concluded. Any House member could object to seating Harris and block him, triggering an investigation by Fudge's committee. 

Fudge said that three House panels — the Oversight, Judiciary and Administration committees — have started discussing the situation and will be meeting over the next week “to determine what all of our options are.” 

“It is our hope that the courts in North Carolina would do the right thing,” Fudge said. “If they chose not to the right thing, or if for some reason he brings a certification here, we would challenge the propriety of seating him at that point until such time as there was a proper investigation done by the House.” 

Fudge added that the full House could possibly go so far as to sue the state of North Carolina. If a judge orders that Harris be declared the winner, Fudge said, she is “confident that the House would bring an action against the state of North Carolina." 

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the new chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he could begin requesting documents “like paychecks, any kind of agreements” between Harris’ campaign and Dowless this month. Cummings, who now wields subpoena power in the majority, also threatened to call Dowless to Washington for an interview. 

“It’s quite possible that we’ll want to bring in [Dowless],” Cummings said. “We’re certainly are looking at it very carefully.” 

“When it comes to a state’s electoral process I think we have to be very careful and try to allow that state to provide due process. But at the same time we cannot just turn our heads to alleged voter fraud,” Cummings added. “It would be almost legislative malpractice if we fail to consider at least getting some preliminary information.”

If Harris is smart, he absolutely starts begging for a new election and as soon as he can.  NC Republicans of course will never countenance that, so we're about to find out all of Harris's dirty laundry and to shine a floodlight on the dirty machinery Harris used to steal this election.

And when everything's done, I'm betting Dan McCready is the 41st new House Democrat this Congress, and that Mark Harris is going to jail.

Stay tuned.

Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

With the Bush administration, the question usually was "Are they stupid or evil?" and depending on the policy, you didn't always know if it was staggering ignorance or wanton cruelty.  With the Trump regime however, the answer is always "Why not both!" and the primary example of this so far is the current government shutdown, now entering week three.

Food stamps for 38 million low-income Americans would face severe reductions and more than $140 billion in tax refunds are at risk of being frozen or delayed if the government shutdown stretches into February, widespread disruptions that threaten to hurt the economy.

The Trump administration, which had not anticipated a long-term shutdown, recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact, several senior administration officials said. The officials said they were focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.

Thousands of federal programs are affected by the shutdown, but few intersect with the public as much as the tax system and the Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the current version of food stamps.

The partial shutdown has cut off new funding to the Treasury Department and the USDA, leaving them largely unstaffed and crippling both departments’ ability to fulfill core functions.

The potential cuts to food stamps and suspension of tax refunds illustrate the compounding consequences of leaving large parts of the federal govern­ment unfunded indefinitely — a ­scenario that became more likely Friday when President Trump said he would leave the government shut down for months or even years unless Democrats gave him money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The SNAP program is rare among federal initiatives because it requires annual funding from Congress, even though its existence is automatically renewed. 

Congress has not allocated funding for SNAP beyond January, and the program’s emergency reserves would not cover even two-thirds of February’s payments, according to past disbursements. Last September, the most recent month for which data is available, SNAP disbursed $4.7 billion in benefits to recipients across every U.S. state.

Lawmakers last year appropriated $3 billion into a “contingency” fund for SNAP. USDA officials would not comment on the status of the $3 billion, but if all of that money is still available, it would cover just 64 percent of February’s obligations.

Agency officials have not said how they would address the shortfall, including whether they would prioritize who receives food aid or cut benefits for everyone across the board.

If the shutdown continues through March, there would be no remaining money for benefits.

As I've said in the past, Donald Trump's wall is his chief symbolic covenant with his white supremacist base, representing not only a policy to end illegal immigration, but to end legal immigration as well as making the tenets of white supremacy into government policy.   To put it simply, if he folds on the wall, he's done.  His base will not save him from impeachment and removal, enough of them will walk away that at the very least, he loses in 2020.

At the same time, if the government remains shuttered, he's also going to lose in 2020.  The majority of SNAP beneficiaries are white working class Americans, the one who voted for Trump.  If they can't feed their families, they might blame Democrats, sure.  But some of them are going to start to blame Trump.

I don't know how this will end, other than Donald Trump loses.  The question is how much damage he does on the way out.


 

Last Call For The Dark Side Of History

When leaders of democracies do things like "invoke emergency powers to undertake domestic policies as an end run around existing systems" then nothing good happens, see the bulk of the last 80 years.

President Donald Trump said Frday he is considering declaring a national emergency to help pay for his long-desired border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The president, when asked by ABC News' senior national correspondent Terry Moran during a press conference, acknowledged that he would consider declaring a national emergency to help get funds to build the wall "for the security of our country".

Trump did not elaborate on the details of such a process.

Earlier Friday, multiple sources familiar with the ongoing discussion told ABC News that options could include reprogramming funds from the Department of Defense and elsewhere – a move which would circumvent Congress.

Sources tell ABC News the discussions are still on the "working level" adding that there's a range of legal mechanisms that are being considered before such a decision is announced.

The discussions have intensified as the president is now 14 days into a partial government shutdown, facing newly empowered House Democrats who are refusing to budge issue of wall funding. "We are not doing a wall," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday, calling the proposed structure an "immorality."

If you think Donald Trump would stop at "just building a wall" when it comes to invoking emergency powers, history is full of autocrats that indicate otherwise.

She Said A Wordy Dird

Newly-minted Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib said what we've all been thinking for the last two years, and this has Serious People Upset At The Democrats.

Newly elected Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Friday shied away from moving forward with impeachment at this time, calling it a "divisive" option. But she said that a colleague's use of an expletive to describe President Donald Trump was no "worse" than some of the language the president himself has used.

"I do think that we want to be unified and bring people together. Impeachment is a very divisive approach to take and we shouldn’t take it ... without the facts," Pelosi said during an MSNBC town hall at Trinity University in Washington, her alma mater.

Her comments came the morning after a newly elected member of Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., told a progressive audience that Democrats are going to "impeach the motherf---er."

Pelosi said, "Generationally, that would not be language I would use, but nonetheless, I don’t think we should make a big deal of it."

Pelosi also said that what Tlaib said was "nothing worse than the president has said," and that the episode "consolidates his base, but I don’t think they need much consolidation."

She added that while she was "not in the censorship business ... I don't like that language, I wouldn't use that language, but I wouldn't establish language standards for my colleagues."

Good for Nancy Pelosi to defuse this manufactured outrage, but of course CNN's Chris Cillizza is Very Concerned™!

The point here is simple: Trump didn't win because voters thought he was a great guy. They knew he wasn't. Many of them disapproved of the way he ran his campaign -- and the way he acted in his life. They just decided that other things, namely that he represented radical change in Washington, mattered more. 

Calling Trump names -- even explicit ones -- isn't going to convince people who are on the fence about him in 2020 to cast their vote for a Democrat. Remember that Hillary Clinton's general election campaign was largely based on this flawed premise: We're not going to elect someone like this guy as president, are we? 

People did. And so it looks -- at least to me -- like the height of folly for Democrats to pursue a strategy over the next two years built around the idea of lowering themselves to Trump's rhetorical level.

And Jonathan Turley is Rather Upset™!

Tlaib quoted her son telling her, “Look mama you won. Bullies don’t win.” Tlaib reportedly replied, “You’re right, they don’t. And we’re gonna go in and impeach the motherf**ker.”

There may or may not be grounds for impeachment in the Mueller report expected. However, being a bully is not one of them. More importantly, the glee expressed by Tlaib is concerning enough but there also seems a lack of concern over the actual proof of a high crime and misdemeanor under the constitutional standard. Impeachment is not meant to be a partisan tool or some cathartic act. That might be a better — and less profane — lesson to share with one’s son.

Other Democrats are Livid And Furious™!

“Mueller hasn’t even produced his report yet!” said Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. “People should cool their jets a little bit, let the prosecutors do their job and finish the investigation.”

“Inappropriate,” added Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.). “As elected officials I think we should be expected to set a high bar… It’s not helpful.”

Even Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who introduced an impeachment resolution earlier this week, was shocked. His eyes bulged in disbelief when a reporter read him Tlaib’s comments and he was speechless for several seconds.

After he regained his composure, Sherman said that kind of language is detrimental to the cause: “That’s not language I would use … I think the office of the presidency should be treated with respect.”

Party elders also sought to calm talk of impeachment without criticizing Tlaib directly. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, called Talib’s comments “inappropriate” and said, “We need to be patient.”

“You can’t accomplish very much of anything unless you have civility and show respect for your colleagues,” Cummings said. “Those kind of comments do not take us in the right direction.”

Maybe Rep. Tlaib should sound less like DOnald Trump.

Of course, maybe Donald Trump should sound less like Donald Trump, and not be doing the things Donald Trump is currently doing, and maybe we should all be far more concerned with that.

Just saying.