Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

Me, yesterday on the news that Trump wanted acting Attorney Matt Whitaker to end the Mueller probe:

The immediate question I have is "Does Bill Barr do what Matt Whitaker wouldn't and end the Mueller probe?" He probably won't. 

Probably.

CNN, today, answering my question in less than 24 hours:

Attorney General Bill Barr is preparing to announce as early as next week the completion of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, with plans for Barr to submit to Congress soon after a summary of Mueller's confidential report, according to people familiar with the plans. 

The preparations are the clearest indication yet that Mueller is nearly done with his almost two-year investigation. 

The precise timing of the announcement is subject to change. 

The scope and contours of what Barr will send to Congress remain unclear. Also unclear is how long it will take Justice officials to prepare what will be submitted to lawmakers. 

But with President Donald Trump soon to travel overseas for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Justice officials are mindful of not interfering with the White House's diplomatic efforts, which could impact the timing. 

The Justice Department and the special counsel's office declined to comment.

Two schools of thought on this.  One:

Folks, the Mueller report is about to be buried.  It will never see the light of day.  House Democrats will get whatever summary William Barr wants them to have and not a word more, and then the rest vanishes into the void.  They will no doubt subpoena the whole thing and it will get tied up in the courts for eternity.

If Robert Mueller has any of those contingency plans in place, he'd better have already been using them.  Trump was never going to let this come out.

It may be all up to the SDNY and NY state investigations now.

Two: Mueller is wrapping this up on his terms and next week is going to be very, very uncomfortable for Trump.

An adviser to President Trump said there is palpable concern among the president’s inner circle that the report might contain information about Trump and his team that is politically damaging, but not criminal conduct.

Even before he was confirmed by the Senate, Barr had preliminary discussions about the logistics surrounding the conclusion of Mueller’s inquiry, a second person said. At that time, though, Barr had not been briefed on the substance of Mueller’s investigation, so the conversations were limited.

CNN first reported Wednesday that Mueller could send a report to Barr as early as next week.

A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment, as did a Justice Department spokeswoman.

How detailed either Mueller’s report and the attorney general’s summary of the findings will be is unclear. Lawmakers have demanded that Mueller’s report be made public, but Barr has been noncommittal on that point, saying that he intends to be as forthcoming as the regulations and department practice allow. He has pointed, however, to Justice Department practices that insist on saying little or nothing about conduct that does not lead to criminal charges.

We'll know before the end of the month, I suspect.

A Supreme Victory For Once

In a massively important and unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued today by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the nine justices declared that the Constitution's 8th Amendment provisions on excessive fines applies directly to local and state governments and civil forfeiture.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines applies to state and local governments, limiting their abilities to impose fines and seize property.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on just her second day back on the bench after undergoing cancer surgery in December, announced the decision for the court, saying that the 8th Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause protects against government retribution.

“For good reason, the protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history: Exorbitant tolls undermine other constitutional liberties,” Ginsburg wrote. “Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies . . . Even absent a political motive, fines may be employed in a measure out of accord with the penal goals of retribution and deterrence.”

The court ruled in favor of Tyson Timbs of Marion, Ind., who had his $42,000 Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling a couple hundred dollars’ worth of heroin.

He drew wide support from civil liberties organizations who want to limit civil forfeitures, which they say empower localities and law enforcement to seize property of someone suspected of a crime as a revenue stream.

Some justices, too, had become worried about the state and local efforts.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a recent opinion that civil forfeitures have “become widespread and highly profitable.”

“This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” Thomas wrote, referring to reporting by The Washington Post and the New Yorker.

At oral argument, Timbs’s lawyer said the case was a simple matter of “constitutional housekeeping.”

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights protects against actions of the federal government. But the Supreme Court over time has applied it to state and local governments under the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. In 2010, for instance, the court held that the Second Amendment applied to state and local government laws on gun control.

The Eighth Amendment states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Two of those commands — regarding bail and cruel and unusual punishments — have been deemed to apply to state and local governments. But until now, the ban on excessive fines had not been.

This may be the only unambiguously good news from this Supreme Court term.  Incorporation of the 8th Amendment's excessive fines prohibition has been long overdue, with cops using the lack of that clarity to seize property worth exponentially more than allowed for simple misdemeanors.  The defendant in this case lost his SUV over what was essentially a drug fine.

What Timbs v Indiana means is that states are going to have to rewrite their laws very quickly when it comes to maximum civil forfeiture penalties and fines.  Local governments have been using this loophole for years in order to collect billions from people.

As of today, now this practice is strictly unconstitutional.

Good for Justice Ginsburg for a ruling that will guide the country for decades to come.

Skinned Like Flynn, Con't

If you're wondering why the Trump regime is so completely obsessed with helping the Saudis in general and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan in particular, it's because right after Trump took office, Michael Flynn was pushing a plan to reward the Saudis for their money laundering operation into Trump's 2016 camping with something Tehran has wanted for decades: American nuclear technology.

Whistleblowers from within President Donald Trump's National Security Council have told a congressional committee that efforts by former national security adviser Michael Flynn to transfer sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia may have violated the law, and investigators fear Trump is still considering it, according to a new report obtained by NBC News.

The House Oversight Committee has formally opened an investigation into the matter, releasing an interim staff report that adds new details to previous public accounts of how Flynn sought to push through the nuclear proposal on behalf of a group he had once advised. Tom Barrack, a prominent Trump backer with business ties to the Middle East, also became involved in the project, the report says.

Just days after Trump's inauguration, backers of the project sent documents to Flynn for Trump to approve, including a draft Cabinet memo stating that the president had appointed Barrack as a special representative to implement the plan and directing agencies to support Barrack's efforts, the report says.

Career national security officials objected to the plan, citing what they deemed Flynn's conflict of interest, and also that the proposal sought to bypass a policy review that is required whenever nuclear technology is transferred to another country, the report says.

The proposal, which involved enlisting the U.S. nuclear power industry to build nuclear plants across the Middle East, was backed by a group of retired generals who formed a firm called IP3. Flynn described himself in financial disclosure filings as an "advisor" to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 — at the same time he was serving as Trump's national security adviser during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition, the report says.

The report quotes one senior Trump official as saying that the proposal was "not a business plan," but rather "a scheme for these generals to make some money," and added, "OK, you know we cannot do this."

Click here to read the House Oversight Committee report.

"The whistleblowers who came forward have expressed significant concerns about the potential procedural and legal violations connected with rushing through a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia," the report says.

"They have warned of conflicts of interest among top White House advisers that could implicate federal criminal statutes. They have also warned about a working environment inside the White House marked by chaos, dysfunction, and backbiting."

My first question is "Is this John Bolton's Mustache's doing?"

It certainly doesn't want to give the Saudis nuclear technology, John Bolton's Mustache despises them and blames them for basically everything wrong in the Middle East.  It's hard to imagine after Bolton cleaned house when he got Flynn's job as National Security Adviser that anyone left would go running to the press about this without John Bolton's Mustache's tacit blessing, let alone without its knowledge.

On the other hand, there's no quicker way to goad Iran into immediately violating every nuclear sanction possible than for the Saudis to get nuclear technology, thus laying the groundwork for another decade plus of war in the Middle East.

On the gripping hand, John Bolton's Mustache is currently busy planning the US military invasion of Venezuela.

Any actions by the Venezuelan military to condone or instigate violence against peaceful civilians at the Colombian and Brazilian borders will not be forgotten. Leaders still have time to make the right choice.

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) February 20, 2019

Lots of fun, right?

Still, giving nuclear tech to the Saudis now, after the whole Jamal Khashoggi murder came to light, is not going to go over well even with Senate Republicans.  We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A major snowstorm is expected to drop snow from Omaha to Boston over the next few days, with the heaviest snowfall in Iowa and the Twin Cities and flooding possible in the Tennessee River Valley.
• West Virginia lawmakers have defeated a charter schools bill that was opposed by both teachers' unions and GOP Gov. Jim Justice.
• Poll workers in North Carolina testified to the state Board of Elections that they illegally viewed absentee ballot results early as part of a vote fraud scheme on behalf of GOP NC-9 Rep. Mark Harris.
• Donald Trump is expected to name Treasury Department official Jeffrey Rosen to replace Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is expected to leave his post next month.
• The FDA is warning Americans against infusions of blood plasma from young people as an "anti-aging treatment" and says there's no medical evidence to suggest the plasma has any benefits.

Last Call For That Whole Saturday Night Massacre Thing, Con't

It's pretty clear from this week's NY Times team piece on Trump's acting AG Matt Whitaker that Donald Trump clearly expected Whitaker, who was running the Justice Department up until William Barr was confirmed last week, to end the Mueller investigation and fully take the lightning bolts for doing it.  He also wanted Whitaker to end the Southern District US Attorney investigation into Cohen (and into the Trump Organization, too). Whitaker didn't, and that only pissed off Trump even more, and all of it is part of a two-year plus long Trump effort to obstruct justice.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan gathered evidence late last year about President Trump’s role in silencing women with hush payments during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called Matthew G. Whitaker, his newly installed attorney general, with a question. He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge, since Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s public war on the inquiry has gone on long enough that it is no longer shocking. Mr. Trump rages almost daily to his 58 million Twitter followers that Mr. Mueller is on a “witch hunt” and has adopted the language of Mafia bosses by calling those who cooperate with the special counsel “rats.” His lawyer talks openly about a strategy to smear and discredit the special counsel investigation. The president’s allies in Congress and the conservative media warn of an insidious plot inside the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to subvert a democratically elected president.

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama. 

White House lawyers wrote a confidential memo expressing concern about the president’s staff peddling misleading information in public about the firing of Michael T. Flynn, the Trump administration’s first national security adviser. Mr. Trump had private conversations with Republican lawmakers about a campaign to attack the Mueller investigation. And, there was the episode when he asked his attorney general about putting Mr. Berman in charge of the Manhattan investigation.

Mr. Whitaker, who earlier this month told a congressional committee that Mr. Trump had never pressured him over the various investigations, is now under scrutiny by House Democrats for possible perjury.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said that the White House had not asked Mr. Whitaker to interfere in the investigations. “Under oath to the House Judiciary Committee, then Acting Attorney General Whitaker stated that ‘at no time has the White House asked for nor have I provided any promises or commitments concerning the special counsel’s investigation or any other investigation,’” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec. “Mr. Whitaker stands by his testimony.”

The White House declined to comment for this article.

The story of Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations has been voluminously covered in the news media, to such a degree that many Americans have lost track of how unusual his behavior is. But fusing the strands reveals an extraordinary story of a president who has attacked the law enforcement apparatus of his own government like no other president in history, and who has turned the effort into an obsession. Mr. Trump has done it with the same tactics he once used in his business empire: demanding fierce loyalty from employees, applying pressure tactics to keep people in line, and protecting the brand — himself — at all costs.

The immediate question I have is "Does Bill Barr do what Matt Whitaker wouldn't and end the Mueller probe?"  He probably won't.

Probably.

Meanwhile, the FBI is confirming Andrew McCabe's account that it moved quickly to secure Russian collusion evidence after James Comey was fired.  It's precisely because there are so many angles of investigation into the corrupt Trump regime that makes shutting down the investigation tough,

Another Hat Lands In The Ring, Con't

As expected, Bernie Sanders will be running for President in 2020.  Whether or not it's on the Democratic ticket is anyone's guess.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose 2016 presidential campaign grew from a left-wing insurgency to a force that reshaped the Democratic Party, announced Tuesday that he will seek its nomination for president again in 2020.

Sanders wrote in an email sent to supporters Tuesday that he was building “an unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign” that would draw on people across the country.

“Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history. It is not only about winning the Democratic nomination and the general election,” he wrote. “Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”

The senator, an independent, cited health care, climate change, student debt, the “demonization” of undocumented immigrants, income inequality, gun violence and the myriad problems of America’s needy as propelling him into his second presidential contest.

“In a sense, this campaign is a continuation of what we did in 2016,” Sanders said during an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.”

Asked how this bid would differ from his first run, Sanders said, “We’re gonna win.”

During an earlier interview with Vermont Public Radio, where he first announced his bid, Sanders called Trump “an embarrassment to our country.

“I think he is a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”

Sanders, who has held dozens of political rallies across the country since the 2016 election, enters the race with the biggest social media following — and biggest mailing list — of any candidate for the Democratic nomination. His decision came after a number of groups that spun out from his 2016 run, such as Our Revolution and People for Bernie, held house parties to mobilize his old supporters, and to find new ones.

After coming a few hundred delegates short of victory in 2016, Sanders begins a 2020 race with some advantages. He is one of the best-known and most admired figures in Democratic politics, though he is not a member of the party. He built campaign operations in every primary and caucus state.

But unlike Hillary Clinton, who recovered from her 2008 primary defeat to become the party’s front-runner in 2016, Sanders has not built on his support from the prior campaign. In early polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he won 50 percent and 60 percent of the vote, support for the senator from Vermont has ranged from the low teens to 30 percent.

The problem for Sanders this time around is that Hillary Clinton isn't in the race, and he lost to her anyway.

The field is wide-open and he has a lot more competition now, on top of the fact that he still has all the old baggage from 2016: we still haven't seen his tax returns, he still undervalues black and Latino voters, and most importantly he's still expecting to be nominated for a party he refuses to join outright.

Case in point from his interview this morning with Vermont Public Radio:

When asked by VPR's Bob Kinzel about concerns that he no longer best represents "the face of the new Democratic Party," Sanders, 77, said:

"We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age," Sanders said. "I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for."

"Representation doesn't matter" is a hell of a message, Bern.

We'll see what happens.

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

Trump's base now feels it can safely and publicly call for the return of the KKK to "clean out enemies of America", which of course was the point all along.

The editor of a small-town Alabama newspaper published an editorial calling for "the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again" against "Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats [who] are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama."

Goodloe Sutton — who is the publisher of the Democrat-Reporter newspaper in Linden, Alabama — confirmed to the Montgomery Advertiser on Monday that he authored the Feb. 14 editorial calling for the return of a white supremacist hate group.

"If we could get the Klan to go up there and clean out D.C., we'd all been better off," Sutton said.

Asked to elaborate what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.," Sutton suggested lynching.

"We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them," Sutton said.

When asked if he felt it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position.

"... It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?" Sutton said.

This is what every single Republican means by "making America Great Again", an America where they rule, and the rest of us are suffered to exist only by the grace of their tolerance.  We're not Americans to people like Sutton, not even people, only obstacles to be slaughtered in genocide, meat to be burned, skin and bones to crackle and split in the flames.

In the newspaper editorial, Sutton wrote:

Democrats in the Republican Party and Democrats are plotting to raise taxes in Alabama. They do not understand how to eliminate expenses when money is needed in other areas. This socialist-communist ideology sounds good to the ignorant, the uneducated, and the simple-minded people.
When asked if he recognized the KKK as a racist and violent organization, Sutton disagreed, comparing the Klan to the NAACP.

"A violent organization? Well, they didn't kill but a few people," Sutton said. "The Klan wasn't violent until they needed to be."

Sutton said he didn't know any Klan remaining in the area, stating most died out after the 1960s.

The editor said he welcomed people to call him, write him a letter or boycott him.

The time to start killing Democrats is at hand, according to this man.

Would that I believed for a second that Donald Trump didn't agree with him, 100%.

StupidiNews!

• California and fifteen other states have officially filed a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's emergency declaration for border wall money, several NGO groups have also filed suits.
• The sailor kissing a woman in Times Square in an iconic Time Magazine V-J Day photograph from 1945 has died at the age of 95, George Mendonsa died after a seizure Sunday.
• Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is expected to step down from his position in mid-March, the Mueller investigation will continue to be overseen by newly confirmed AG William Barr.
• China aims to make Hong Kong and Macau into the new Silicon Valley with a major infrastructure project dubbed "The Greater Bay Area".
• With more American streaming video rather than watching on Blu-ray discs, Samsung says it will no longer make Blu-ray players for the US.

Last Call For Even Less Qualified, Con't

Me, two days ago on Trump's UN ambassador pick, Heather Nauert, crashing and burning over the weekend months into not even having a official nomination to the post yet:

I'm sure Trump will find somebody even more worthless for the job.  Why not Ivanka?

Bloomberg News, today:

President Donald Trump is considering four people to be his next UN ambassador: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Dina Powell, the current ambassadors to Canada and Germany, Kelly Craft and Richard Grenell, and John James, a former Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan, according to people familiar with the matter.

The people asked not to be identified because Trump hasn’t made a decision. Top White House aides have also discussed nominating Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump if no front-runner emerges.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert withdrew her nomination to replace former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in the job, partly due to issues that arose around a nanny Nauert once employed. The nanny was a legal U.S. immigrant but wasn’t authorized to work, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Powell is a veteran of the Trump administration who served as a deputy national security adviser before returning to Goldman Sachs last year. Craft was deeply involved in Trump’s renegotiation of Nafta and is married to Joe Craft, a billionaire Republican fundraiser and executive at coal producer Alliance Resource Partners.

Grenell manages the U.S. relationship with the German government, which has grown tense because of a variety of conflicts with the Trump administration, including a dispute over a gas pipeline deal between Germany and Russia and the president’s consideration of tariffs on imported cars.

James fell short in an attempt to unseat Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow last year, but the Michigan businessman is well liked within the White House and has been considered for other administration jobs.

It's literally a collection of people who bought their way into GOP politics, failed at 2018 runs against better Dems, and expect repayment, and Trump's scammer daughter.  This regime is so laughably corrupt it should be funny, but it's the dark, awful reality we now exist in.

The Devil Ran Scams In Georgia

He was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind, 'cause he was way behind,
He was willing to make a deal...

David Shell has a long record of beating up women.

He once beat his ex-wife so badly she blacked out, her left eye nearly swollen shut, then he locked her in their home so she couldn’t reach a hospital, she said.

Another time, he threw a girlfriend to the ground and slapped and choked her, court records show.

So when another bruised and bloodied girlfriend told police he had flown into a rage and head-butted her and bit her finger at a camper park in Ellijay, Shell faced serious consequences. A grand jury charged him as a repeat offender, which could mean up to 20 years in prison for aggravated assault.

Yet more than four years after his indictment, Shell remains a free man, the charges against him stymied. A big reason: He paid a large retainer fee to hire an attorney who is also one of Georgia’s most powerful lawmakers, state Speaker of the House David Ralston.

Just as Ralston has done for other clients charged with violent or heinous crimes, he used his elected position to delay hearings and court dates, preventing the case from moving forward in the Gilmer County justice system.

“That’s why I gave him 20,000 bucks,” Shell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He’s worth every penny of it.”

When I say Donald Trump is merely the crowned boil on the ass of America, the metastasized tumor in the body politic, I mean that the Republican Party as a whole is corrupt, blackened, and broken beyond repair, and David Ralston is a prime example why.

A joint investigation by the AJC and Channel 2 Action News found that Ralston appears to be misusing the power of his public office to benefit his private law practice. By doing no more than writing letters to judges declaring that court dates interfere with his lawmaking duties, he has been able to keep cases perpetually off the docket. But his tactics can thwart justice, harm crime victims and put the public at risk.

Ralston has tied up cases for clients charged with child molestation, child cruelty, assault, terroristic threats, drunk driving and other crimes.

Often, he writes letters that stave off cases in bulk. That keeps his clients free on bond, while their chances of escaping harsh punishment get better with every passing year.

“Please be advised that I am hereby requesting a continuance of these three cases from the criminal calendar call,” reads one of Ralston’s typical letters. “I hereby certify to the Court that my legislative duties and obligations will require that I be elsewhere on that date.”

Under a state law dating back to 1905, judges and prosecutors must defer to the legislative schedule of any practicing attorney who serves in the General Assembly. Other attorney-lawmakers, though, are mainly relegated to claiming the exemption during the annual 40-day legislative sessions.

As House speaker, Ralston, who practices law in the rural, mountainous counties of North Georgia, can claim conflicts year-round. In 21 cases examined in four counties over a two-year period, he filed 57 requests for continuances.
Of the 93 days he claimed to be unavailable for court, 76 were outside of legislative sessions and special sessions. Speaker duties during those times could include overseeing legislative offices and staff, appointing committee chairs and members, and appearing at conferences, civic meetings and party functions.

Ralston declined to grant an interview for this story, instead issuing a written statement through a spokesman.

“Legislative leave is a long-established provision of Georgia law which recognizes the unique needs of a citizen-legislature and protects the independence of the legislative branch of state government,” the statement said. “Like other members of the General Assembly, I utilize this provision outside of the legislative session, when necessary, to attend to my legislative duties as both a state representative and Speaker of the House.”

Hire the Speaker of the Georgia House as your defense lawyer and you're free on bond for good.  That's the Republican answer to "criminal justice reform" now isn't it?  It's like plenary indulgences of old, or paying the medieval magistrate to look the other way.  The suits may have changed but the scams remain the same.

He who has the gold, makes the rules...

It's Mueller TIme, Con't

Last night's Andrew McCabe interview on 60 Minutes had Trump so rattled that he tweeted this ahead of it:

Again, this is the man in the Oval Office retweeting Rush Limbaugh's call to jail Robert Mueller as well as anyone investigating him.  That's a lot of people this tinpot dictator wants jailed, and it's because McCabe dropped the hammer on him last night in his interview with Scott Pelley.

Scott Pelley: How long was it after that that you decided to start the obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president?

Andrew McCabe: I think the next day, I met with the team investigating the Russia cases. And I asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward. I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.

Scott Pelley: You wanted a documentary record—

Andrew McCabe: That's right—

Scott Pelley: —That those investigations had begun because you feared that they would be made to go away.

Andrew McCabe: That's exactly right.

McCabe says that the basis for both investigations was in Mr. Trump's own statements. First, Mr. Trump had asked FBI Director Comey to drop the investigation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Then, to justify firing Comey, Mr. Trump asked his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to write a memo listing the reasons Comey had to go. And according to McCabe, Mr. Trump made a request for that memo that came as a surprise.

Andrew McCabe: Rod was concerned by his interactions with the president, who seemed to be very focused on firing the director and saying things like, "Make sure you put Russia in your memo." That concerned Rod in the same way that it concerned me and the FBI investigators on the Russia case.

If Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein listed the Russia investigation in his memo to the White House, it could look like he was obstructing the Russia probe by suggesting Comey's firing. And by implication, it would give the president cover.

Scott Pelley: He didn't wanna put Russia in his memo.

Andrew McCabe: He did not. He explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo. And the president responded, "I understand that, I am asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway."

When the memo justifying Comey's firing was made public, Russia was not in it. But, Mr. Trump made the connection anyway, telling NBC, then, Russian diplomats that the Russian investigation was among the reasons he fired Comey.

Andrew McCabe: There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts, to open the investigation. The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt…

President Trump on Feb. 16, 2017: Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven't made a phone call to Russia in years.

Andrew McCabe: ...publicly undermining the effort of the investigation. The president had gone to Jim Comey and specifically asked him to discontinue the investigation of Mike Flynn which was a part of our Russia case. The president, then, fired the director. In the firing of the director, the president specifically asked Rod Rosenstein to write the memo justifying the firing and told Rod to include Russia in the memo. Rod, of course, did not do that. That was on the president's mind. Then, the president made those public comments that you've referenced both on NBC and to the Russians which was captured in the Oval Office. Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed. The president may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey.

Scott Pelley: What was it specifically that caused you to launch the counterintelligence investigation?

Andrew McCabe: It's many of those same concerns that cause us to be concerned about a national security threat. And the idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia's malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, "Why would a president of the United States do that?" So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?

Scott Pelley: Are you saying that the president is in league with the Russians?

Andrew McCabe: I'm saying that the FBI had reason to investigate that. Right, to investigate the existence of an investigation doesn't mean someone is guilty. I would say, Scott, if we failed to open an investigation under those circumstances, we wouldn't be doing our jobs.

And remember, for this, McCabe was run out of the FBI, the same organization that cleared his information in his book.

The obstruction of justice happened, the only question is whether not it's actually prosecuted...

StupidiNews!

• NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin took the checkered flag at this year's Daytona 500 after a massive 22-car wreck at the end of the race, no driver injuries were reported.
• A former Coca-Cola executive is facing espionage charges after allegedly stealing corporate secrets from the beverage giant on behalf of China.
• The Trump regime's expected report on auto parts and imported cars ordered last year could result in steep tariffs on all foreign imports to the US, something the auto industry is already angry about.
• Sen. Lindsey Graham is vowing to investigate the FBI and Justice Department about an "attempted coup" to investigate invoking the 25th Amendment over Donald Trump.
• A major new Indiana University study finds a college instructor's views on intelligence and growth affects the grades that students get, particularly African-American, Latino, and Native students.

Last Call For Farming It Out

The Trump regime continues to wreck the the US economy, and once again it continues to do it in a way that hurts both his most ardent supporters while helping Russia.

A wave of bankruptcies is sweeping the U.S. Farm Belt as trade disputes add pain to the low commodity prices that have been grinding down American farmers for years.

Throughout much of the Midwest, U.S. farmers are filing for chapter 12 bankruptcy protection at levels not seen for at least a decade, a Wall Street Journal review of federal data shows.

Bankruptcies in three regions covering major farm states last year rose to the highest level in at least 10 years. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, had double the bankruptcies in 2018 compared with 2008. In the Eighth Circuit, which includes states from North Dakota to Arkansas, bankruptcies swelled 96%. The 10th Circuit, which covers Kansas and other states, last year had 59% more bankruptcies than a decade earlier.

States in those circuits accounted for nearly half of all sales of U.S. farm products in 2017, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

The rise in farm bankruptcies represents a reckoning for rural America, which has suffered a multiyear slump in prices for corn, soybeans and other farm commodities touched off by a world-wide glut, made worse by growing competition from agriculture powerhouses such as Russia and Brazil.

Trade disputes under the Trump administration with major buyers of U.S. farm goods, such as China and Mexico, have further roiled agricultural markets and pressured farmers’ incomes. Prices for soybeans and hogs plummeted after those countries retaliated against U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs by imposing duties on U.S. products like oilseeds and pork, slashing shipments to big buyers.

Low milk prices are driving dairy farmers out of business in a market that’s also struggling with retaliatory tariffs on U.S. cheese from Mexico and China. Tariffs on U.S. pork have helped contribute to a record buildup in U.S. meat supplies, leading to lower prices for beef and chicken.

Trump has done everything he can to wreck US commodity prices with his idiotic tariffs, and nobody's buying American farm products.  Increasingly they are turning to Brazil and more importantly Russia for food, and the US can no longer compete.

Farms are going under at a record pace now, and it really won't be long until the rest of the economy catches the Trump cancer.  When that happens, it'll make 2008 look like a picnic.

But of course, Trump's base will be told to blame everyone but Trump, and that only "the Businessman President" can fix it with a second term...

...And they will vote for him anyway, because Trump isn't the problem with America.  His base is.

President Trump and his political team plan to make his years-long quest for a border wall one of the driving themes of his reelection effort — attempting to turn his failure to build such a project into a combative sales pitch that pits him against the political establishment on immigration.

Trump has declared a national emergency to secure the funds Congress has repeatedly denied him despite his own admission that the move is likely to get tied up in court. This move has galvanized many of his supporters even as others on the right remain dubious and disappointed.

His campaign is fundraising off his showdown with congressional Democrats over the border — portraying the opposition party as more interested in political games than the public’s safety.

And faced with the fact that he has yet to build an inch of the concrete or steel wall he promised, Trump and his campaign have started relying on a rhetorical sleight of hand: speaking the wall into existence.

“Now, you really mean, ‘Finish that wall,’ because we’ve built a lot of it,” Trump falsely claimed at a campaign rally Monday in El Paso after supporters broke out in chants of “Build that wall!”

As he spoke, giant placards with the words “Finish the Wall” hung from the rafters, an unmistakable signal Trump’s aides say reflects the campaign’s growing push to convince the president’s supporters that the border barrier they imagined him building is already real.

These endeavors underscore the extent to which Trump and his allies are attempting to make 2020 a repeat of 2016 — centered on a portrayal of the nation as under siege from criminal immigrants and other dark forces, and reliant upon a die-hard base of older whites in rural areas. 

The wall will never be finished, and the national emergency Trump declared over the wall this weekend will never end, and it will be the winding road that will lead us to autocracy.  We're only a few years away at most from Trump rounding up "illegals" anyway.

We had a good run, I guess.

The Drums of War, Con't

By all accounts, this weekend's annual Munich Security Conference in Germany was a complete and total diplomatic disaster for the Trump regime.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Mike Pence and America to schisse off with Trump's plans to attack Iran, and that there would be no European "Coalition of the Willing" for this little adventure in Tehran.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany delivered a strong rejoinder on Saturday to American demands that European allies pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and gave a spirited defense of multilateral institutions in a world increasingly marked by great-power rivalry.

In an uncharacteristically passionate speech, Ms. Merkel said the nuclear deal was the best way of influencing Iranian behavior on a range of non-nuclear issues, from missile development to terrorism.

Without mentioning President Trump or the United States by name in what may be her last speech to this major security conference, Ms. Merkel criticized other unilateral moves, such as Mr. Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of Syria, a suggestion that he would withdraw quickly from Afghanistan and his decision to suspend the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty with Russia, which directly affects European security.

“We sit there in the middle with the result,” she said.

Ms. Merkel spoke immediately before the United States vice president, Mike Pence, and addressed a packed auditorium with an audience that included Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, as well as the Russian foreign minister and a high-ranking Chinese official, who all pointedly remained seated when the chancellor received a standing ovation.

Her reception was in sharp contrast to the polite near-silence that greeted Mr. Pence’s address. Aware of a growing anxiety among European allies that the United States administration’s erratic leadership stance was a threat to their security, the vice president came to Munich laser-focused on the Trump administration’s message.
He repeated his demand from this past week in Warsaw that Germany, France and Britain should join Washington in pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

“The time has come for the Europeans to leave the Iranian nuclear deal,” Mr. Pence said.

In contrast to the chancellor, Mr. Pence focused less on working together and more on a list of demands for American allies based on American interests, with a heavy emphasis on a combative approach to Iran.

“The Iranian regime openly advocates another Holocaust, and it seeks the means to achieve it,” Mr. Pence said.

The two speeches were a reminder of how far apart Europe and the United States are on a range of global issues.

In fact, the conference was such a disaster that Europe has now all but given up on any sort of productive relationship with America as long as we're infected by MAGA fever.

European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words and Twitter messages could undo a trans-Atlantic alliance that had grown stronger over seven decades. They had clung to the hope that those ties would bear up under the strain.

But in the last few days of a prestigious annual security conference in Munich, the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete, diplomats and analysts say.

A senior German official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on such matters, shrugged his shoulders and said: “No one any longer believes that Trump cares about the views or interests of the allies. It’s broken.”

The most immediate danger, diplomats and intelligence officials warned, is that the trans-Atlantic fissures now risk being exploited by Russia and China.

Even the saturnine Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, happily noted the strains, remarking that the Euro-Atlantic relationship had become increasingly “tense.”

“We see new cracks forming, and old cracks deepening,” Mr. Lavrov said.

The Europeans no longer believe that Washington will change, not when Mr. Trump sees traditional allies as economic rivals and leadership as diktat. His distaste for multilateralism and international cooperation is a challenge to the very heart of what Europe is and needs to be in order to have an impact in the world.

But beyond the Trump administration, an increasing number of Europeans say they believe that relations with the United States will never be the same again.

Karl Kaiser, a longtime analyst of German-American relations, said, “Two years of Mr. Trump, and a majority of French and Germans now trust Russia and China more than the United States.”

Trump's damage to the US-EU relationship may never be fixed in my lifetime.  The rest of the world is passing America by, as we are led by a dolt, elected by reactionary fools, and no longer deserving of anything but epithets and epitaphs. 

Germany is straining under the pressure of being the world's new Western leader, as the UK and France are increasingly paralyzed.  Canada and Australia have their own problems.  It is Russia and China right now who are running rampant, and the 21st century will belong to them, not us.

Sunday Long Read: Climate Of Uncertainty

Author Emily Raboteau asks the big question about America's post-Millennial kids: Why isn't climate change, the effects of which Generation Z will be dealing with for their entire lives, not the most important subject in school, in culture, in their entire existence, with their parents and grandparents and the man in the Oval Office all lining up telling them that it doesn't matter?

Our son’s love of trains was once so absolute I never foresaw it could be replaced. New York City is a marvelous place to live for train-obsessed boys. When he was three and four, we spent many a rainy day with no particular destination, riding the rails for the aimless pleasure of it, studying the branching multicolored lines of the subway map, which he’d memorized like a second alphabet. I’d hoist him up to watch the dimly lit tunnel unfurl through the grimy front window of the A train’s first car as it plunged us jerkily along the seemingly endless and intersecting tracks. Some rainy mornings, our destination was 81st Street, where we exited the B or C with dripping umbrellas and his little sister in tow to enter the American Museum of Natural History.

There, at a special exhibition called “Nature’s Fury,” our son’s attention turned like a whiplash from trains to violent weather. Even before this show, the museum demanded a certain reckoning with the violence of the Anthropocene. What grownup wouldn’t feel a sense of profound regret confronting the diorama of the northern white rhinoceros in the Hall of African Mammals, or the Hall of Ocean Life’s psychedelic display of the Andros Coral Reef as it looked in the Bahamas a century ago? Meandering the marble halls of the Natural History Museum is like reading an essay on losing the Earth through human folly. Yet none of its taxonomies of threatened biodiversity, not even the big blue whale, moved my kindergartner like “Nature’s Fury.”

The focus of the immersive exhibition was on the science of the worst natural disasters of the last fifty years—their awesome destructive power and their increasing frequency and force. Accompanied by a dramatic score of diminished chords and fast chromatic descents, the exhibit meant to show how people adapt and cope in the aftermath of these events, and how scientists are helping to plan responses and reduce hazards in preparation for disasters to come.

“Are they too young for this?” my husband questioned, too late. Our impulsive boy had darted ahead and cut the line to erupt a virtual volcano. I supposed it made him feel less doomed than like a small god that, in addition to making lava spout at the push of a button, the kid could manipulate the fault lines of a model earthquake, set off a tsunami, and stand in the eye of a raging tornado.

In the section on hurricanes at a table map of New York, the boy was also able to survey the sucker punch that Hurricane Sandy delivered to the five boroughs. This interactive cartography was a darker version of the subway map he’d memorized, detailing the floodplains along our city’s 520 miles of coast. I can still see my boy there, his chin just clearing the table’s touchscreen so that his face was eerily underlit by the glow of information while my girl crawled beneath. Seventeen percent of the city’s land mass flooded, leaving two million people without power, seventeen thousand homes damaged, and forty-three people dead. On the map, the water was rising to overtake the shorelines at Red Hook, Battery Park, Coney Island… All across the Big Apple, the lights were going out.

“Come away from there,” one or the other of us called uneasily, because we weren’t prepared to confront what climate change would mean for our children, to say nothing of our children’s children. The boy was five at the time. The girl was three. In their lifetimes, according to a conservative estimate in a recent report by the NYC Panel on Climate Change, they could see the water surrounding Manhattan rise six feet. We pulled them away from that terrifying map of our habitat to go look at dinosaur bones—an easier mass extinction to consider because it lay in the distant past.

What strikes me now as irrational about our response isn’t our ordinary parental instinct to protect our kids from scary stuff. It was our denial. Their father and I treated that display as a vision we could put off until later when it clearly conveyed what had already transpired. “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now,” preached Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 in one of his lesser-known sermons, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” He may as well have been speaking on climate change. Sandy made landfall in 2012, the year after the boy was born, while I was pregnant with the girl. It gave a preview of what the city faces in the next century and beyond, as sea levels continue to rise with melting ice sheets. The storm exposed our weaknesses, and not just to flooding. I remember that when the bodegas in our hood ran out of food, some folks shared with their neighbors. But when the gas station started running out of fuel, some folks pulled out their guns.

As much as we may worry about our kids’ future, it’s already here.

Avoiding the map didn’t annul its impact on our son. The subject of storms had gripped his consciousness as surely as his author-father’s had been gripped by horror films. That part of the boy’s brain that previously needed to know the relative speed of a Big Boy steam engine to a Shinkansen bullet train now needed to know what wind speed differentiated a category-four hurricane from a category-five. Soon enough, and for months afterward, Mr. Wayne, the friendly librarian at the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library, would greet our boy with an apology. There were no more books in the children’s section on the subject of violent weather than those he’d already consumed.

At bedtime, while his sister sucked her thumb to sleep, I offered my son reassurance that we weren’t in a flood zone; that up in Washington Heights—as the name suggests—we live on higher ground. “You’re safe,” I told him.

“But the A was flooded during Sandy,” he reminded me, matter-of-factly. “The trains stopped running and the mayor cancelled Halloween.” Then he’d go on rapturously about the disastrous confluence of the high tide and the full moon that created the surge, while I tried to sing him a lullaby.

Eventually, a different fixation overtook extreme weather, and another after that. Such is the pattern of categorical learners. It may have been sharks before the Titanic, or the other way around—I’ve forgotten. Two years have passed since we saw “Nature’s Fury”; a year and a half since our president led the US to withdraw from the Paris climate accords. The boy is seven now, what Jesuits call “the age of reason.” The girl is five and learning to read. If current trends continue, the world is projected to be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by the time they reach their late twenties. The scientific community has long held two degrees Celsius to be an irreversible tipping-point. Two degrees of global warming, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), marks climate catastrophe.

At two degrees, which is our best-case climate scenario if we make seismic global efforts to end carbon emissions, which we are not on course to do, melting ice sheets will still pass a point of no return, flooding NYC and dozens of other major world cities; annual heat waves and wildfires will scrub the planet; drought, flood, and fluctuations in temperature will shrink our food supply; water scarcity will hurt four hundred million more people than it already does. Statistical analysis indicates only a 5 percent chance of limiting warming to less than two degrees. Two degrees has been described as “genocide.”

In fact, we’re on track for over four degrees of warming and an unfathomable scale of suffering by century’s end. By that time, if they’re lucky, our children will be old. It’s pointless to question whether or not it was ethical to have them in the first place since, in any case, they are here. Their father writes about imaginary horrors. For my part, I’m only beginning to see that the question of how to prepare our kids for the real horrors to come is collateral to the problem of how to deal as adults with the damage we’ve stewarded them into.

I honestly believe these kids will look at the adults in their lives and their message to us in the future will be "You failed us utterly, and we will never forgive you.  We will do everything we can to never make your mistakes again."

Maybe Generation Z can fix this in the future.  Maybe they won't, and human civilization will be sharply curtailed on Earth.

I figure I have another 40 years if I'm lucky.  But there are kids alive today who will live to see 2100 on Earth, and they will remember what life was like today, and they will grow to hate those who came before them for what they failed to do.

The rest of this century is triage for humanity, and that's the rosy scenario.