Last Call For The Late, Great, Planet Earth, Con't

Icelandic climatologists are mourning the country's first recordable glacier loss as the planet heats up and the Trump regime stands firmly athwart the globe as the world's biggest villain.

Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last.

laciers are more than just ice. They’re defined by receiving more mass from snow than they lose from summer melt, which allows them to slide down mountains and grind up rock. Climate change has, of course, changed the equation by causing more glacial melting, causing ice to recede around the world. An increasing number of glaciers have turned into stagnant, rotten ice patches or disappeared completely. The OK Glacier reached the latter status in 2014, making it the first glacier in Iceland to disappear. Researchers expect all glaciers to melt away by 2200 on the island, which led to them memorializing Ok.

The plaque will be installed on August 18 near Ok’s former stomping grounds in western Iceland. The plaque contains a melancholy message for future generations:

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

It also includes the figure “415 ppm,” a reference to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere recorded in May this year. Because the world keeps emitting carbon pollution, that record will be broken next year. But putting it on a plaque is perhaps the most poignant reminder of the choices we face. And this summer is a particularly somber atmosphere to do it.

The northern parts of the globe have borne the brunt of the rapid rise in carbon dioxide, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This summer has been one for the record books in particular, with Arctic heat helping drive this June to be the hottest June ever recorded. July is slated to follow suit and quite likely become the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. From Canada to Alaska to Siberia to Greenland, the impacts of the rising heat have become clearer than ever this summer. Installing an ode to a dead glacier in Iceland is the perfect eulogy to the increasingly imperfect world.

As the US east of the Mississippi broils under July heat this weekend, with temperatures in Cincinnati reaching the mid-90s today and tomorrow, the reminder is to get user to miserable summers like this, as they will be the new normal going forward.

We're not going to do a damned thing about it until it's far too late.

The Drums Of War, Con't

The military situation in the Strait of Hormuz just got significantly worse this week as Iran upped the stakes in retaliation for US sanctions by seizing a British oil tanker.

Britain on Saturday threatened Iran with “serious consequences” for seizing a British-owned oil tanker the previous evening as the government warned ships to avoid the crucial shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.

The British government said in a statement after an emergency meeting that it had “advised U.K. shipping to stay out of the area for an interim period.”

The crisis has caught Britain at a singularly vulnerable moment. Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to resign on Wednesday. A leadership contest within the governing Conservative Party to determine her successor has all but paralyzed the government. And now the uncertainty about Britain’s internal direction is compounding the problem of forming a response to Iran’s seizure of the tanker.

The British defense minister, Penny Mordaunt, said in a television interview on Saturday that the ship had been intercepted in Omani, not Iranian, waters and called the seizure “a hostile act.” By Saturday afternoon, Britain had summoned the Iranian ambassador to register its protest, and a second emergency cabinet meeting was set to begin.

The capture of the tanker — two weeks after British forces impounded an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar — sharply escalates a crisis between Iran and the West after three months of rising tensions that last month brought the United States within minutes of a military strike against targets in Iran. A fifth of the world’s crude oil supply is shipped from the Persian Gulf through the narrow Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, and oil prices spiked sharply on Friday even before the British warning.

But the next moves in the showdown over the tanker are likely to turn on the outcome of the British leadership contest, and the favorite, Boris Johnson, a flamboyant former mayor of London and former foreign minister, is famously unpredictable.

In other words, the odds of a joint US/UK operation against Tehran with the newly minted PM at the helm wanting to show strength (and Donald Trump definitely wanting to bury the Mueller testimony scheduled for this week on Capitol Hill) are significant.

I don't know for sure how this will shake out, but we already know Trump tried to attack Iran once and stood down for whatever reason.  A second such fake-out won't be in the cards, and when Trump does pull the trigger, all bets are off.

Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

What a surprise, as Donald Trump has now disavowed his disavowing of the "send her back" chant at his racism rally earlier this week, playing the village media for fools once again and laughing all the way home.

President Donald Trump has reversed his previous criticisms of a North Carolina campaign crowd that chanted “send her back” about a Somali-born congresswoman.

Trump on Friday defended the rally-goers as “patriots” while again questioning the loyalty of four Democratic lawmakers of color. His comments marked a return to a pattern that has become familiar during controversies of his own making: ignite a firestorm, backtrack, then strongly reaffirm his original, inflammatory position.

When reporters at the White House asked if he was unhappy with the Wednesday night crowd, Trump responded: “Those are incredible people. They are incredible patriots. But I’m unhappy when a congresswoman goes and says, ‘I’m going to be the president’s nightmare.’”

It was another dizzying twist in a saga sparked by the president’s racist tweets about Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who moved from Somalia as a child, and her colleagues Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

The moment took an ugly turn at the rally when the crowd’s “send her back” shouts resounded for 13 seconds as Trump made no attempt to interrupt them. He paused in his speech and surveyed the scene, taking in the uproar, though the next day he claimed he did not approve of the chant and tried to stop it.

But on Friday, he made clear he was not disavowing the chant and again laced into Omar, the target of the chant.

“You can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m president,” Trump said. “These women have said horrible things about our country and the people of our country.”

Two observations: First, I really hope somebody in Congress makes an issue of the overtime Donald Trump is directly causing while Capitol Police will beef up protective services around these four Democratic Congresswomen.  The potential for someone to get hurt here is massive.

Second, if Barack Obama had ever directed the words "You can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m president" to a white Republican in Congress, he would have been impeached and removed from office by the end of the week.

But as you all know by now, the racism is the selling point to the racist who voted for Trump.

Sugar Coats-ing The Problem

Last week Donald Trump made it clear that he not only wanted to fire Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, but eliminate the office Coats is occupying entirely as well.

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning a shakeup of his national security team. The news site Axios reported Friday that Trump is planning to oust Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and, along with several other outlets, identified the president’s preferred replacement as Fred Fleitz, John Bolton’s former deputy and a former CIA analyst best known for his association with a far-right, anti-Muslim think tank.

If appointed, Fleitz could play a key role in reducing the importance of the office itself—further empowering Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the process. A source told Axios that Trump wants to “downsize” the office and considers it “an unnecessary bureaucratic layer,” an argument identical to the one Fleitz made in a 2016 op-ed for the National Review. “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has developed into a huge additional layer of bureaucracy,” he wrote, “with far too many officials, that has made American intelligence analysis and collection less efficient and more risk-averse.”

With the Pentagon lacking a permanent leader since December and the National Security Council being remade in Bolton’s hawkish image, the intelligence community remains one of the few areas of the national security establishment that thus far has maintained some independence from Trump, (who compared intelligence analysts to Nazis just nine days before taking office). And that may be one reason Trump is eager to shake things up. He has long marginalized Coats, a former diplomat and Republican senator from Indiana, who leads the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies and serves as the president’s senior intelligence adviser. Trump “doesn’t listen to” Coats anymore, Axios reported, though their apparent lack of communication has been evident for quite some time. At the Aspen Security Forum last year, Coats acknowledged that he was unaware of Trump’s invitation for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to visit the White House and would have advised against it. A Senate hearing in January, in which Coats and other intelligence leaders exposed several contradictions between the views of the intelligence community’s and that of the President, provoked a series of angry presidential tweets. In them, Trump derided Coats and other intelligence leaders and told them to “go back to school.”

A big clue as to why Trump suddenly want Coats and the Director of National Intelligence position gone came up yesterday when the notoriously independent Coats decided to actually do something about the fact nobody was protecting US election systems against foreign hackers.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats has installed a new czar to oversee election security efforts across the spy world, he announced on Friday.
A veteran agency leader, Shelby Pierson, has been appointed to serve as the first election threats executive within the intelligence community, or IC, Coats said.

"Election security is an enduring challenge and a top priority for the IC," said Coats.

"In order to build on our successful approach to the 2018 elections, the IC must properly align its resources to bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue. There is no one more qualified to serve as the very first election threats executive than Shelby Pierson, whose knowledge and experience make her the right person to lead this critical mission."

Pierson has served within the intelligence world for more than 20 years. She was "crisis manager" for election security for the 2018 election within the office of the DNI and also has served in top roles in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, according to one official biography.

Her appointment isn't the only change Coats announced on Friday. He also is directing other agencies within the extended family of spy services to appoint their own executives responsible for election security efforts.
"These agency leads will work with the [election threats executive] to help ensure IC efforts on election security are coordinated and prioritized across all IC elements," Coats said.

Needless to say, with both Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell openly sabotaging an efforts to beef up election security, this move by Coats almost guarantees that Trump will fire him and replace him with Fred Fleitz very soon.

Last Call For The Fixer Gets Fixed

Remember our old friend George Nader?  Professional UAE fixer and facilitator who brought together Erik Prince and Donald Trump Jr., among others, for a secret international meeting in the Seychelles that Trump wanted well off the books because it involved Saudi Crown Prince MBS and Iran?

Well, seems Nader is a nasty loose end in the post-Mueller report world, so he has to be dealt with.

George Nader, who was a key witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, was hit with new federal charges of sex trafficking for allegedly having sex with a 14-year-old boy he transported from Europe.

An indictment unsealed Friday morning in Eastern District of Virginia also charges Nader with counts of child pornography and obscenity. The charges come on top of separate child-porn charges leveled by the same prosecutors last month.

Nader pleaded not guilty to all charges during a court appearance Friday.

Nader, a 60-year-old Lebanese-American businessman with deep political and financial ties to the United Arab Emirates, was a key cooperator in Mueller’s probe of foreign influence in the 2016 election. Nader met several times with individuals associated with the Trump campaign throughout the election and into the early days of the administration. He spoke with officials and advisers on matters ranging from a pitch by a foreign firm for the campaign to use social-media manipulation to regime-change in Iran. (He met with Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign advisors about the plan, which included a proposal to use fake avatars to garner support for Trump, but Trump officials deny they ever considered it.)

He also helped broker a key meeting between Erik Prince, the former Blackwater CEO, and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of one of Russia’s sovereign wealth funds, in the Seychelles in January 2017. That meeting came under intense scrutiny by Mueller’s team and was described in its report as one of the ways the Russians tried to influence the incoming Trump administration.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia argued last month in court that Nader should be held in jail before trial, based in part on his prior criminal history. That history includes a 2003 conviction in the Czech Republic on charges of abusing minors, including a charge of transporting of a minor boy to the U.S. for sexual purposes. Federal prosecutors said Nader has had “hands-on contact with more than a dozen minor boys.” Nader’s lawyers called the U.S. government’s argument weak because he was later acquitted of the Czech sex-trafficking charge.

Nader is also charged with transporting child pornography—a charge he’s faced in the past. In 1984, Nader was indicted for possessing child pornography in D.C. The charge was later dismissed after his attorneys argued that the material was found through an illegal search conducted on Nader’s possessions at Dulles. In 1990, again at Dulles, law enforcement caught Nader with films featuring minor boys. Nader pleaded guilty the following year.

Nader most recently faced allegations of possessing and transporting child pornography in 2018. Authorities stopped him at Dulles in January of that year and questioned him about his time working with the Trump team. Soon after, Nader began cooperating with Mueller, and in the spring of 2018 he departed for Dubai, where he lived until he attempted to re-enter the U.S. last month.

Naturally Nader can't be running around, and he certainly can't go down for a charge that might implicate Erik Prince or Donald Trump Jr, so they got him on child porn.  Solves that little problem, where Nader gets to be tossed into a dark hole for the crime of cooperating with Mueller against Trump, and he goes away for the rest of his life without any of his secrets coming to light.

Of course, there's the bonus that the man molests kids and needs to be in that dark hole for the rest of his life, but it would have been nice if Prince and Donny Junior could have gone down with him.

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

As usual, Republicans are scrambling away from the overt racism at Wednesday's Trump rally in North Carolina, so that they have plausibly deniability when it inevitably happens again at the next Trump rally, when they'll then shrug and lament, "well, what can you do?"

The chairman of House Republicans’ campaign arm on Thursday criticized the “send her back” chant that animated the crowd at Donald Trump’s Wednesday night rally and added a dimension to the president’s attacks on four Democratic freshman women.

“I didn’t watch the rally last night, but there’s no place for that kind of talk,” said Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who heads up the National Republican Congressional Committee and hails from the same state as the Democrat who was primarily targeted, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). “I don’t agree with it.”

Emmer, speaking at a breakfast with journalists hosted by The Christian Science Monitor, was pressed later whether the chant was racist. He declined to address that question, instead saying it was “not acceptable.”

Emmer also stopped short of directly criticizing Trump for his comments about Omar and three other Democratic lawmakers, all of whom are women of color, calling the controversy “manufactured.”

Trump wrote on Twitter this past weekend that the four women should “go back” to where they came from — even though the three other progressive lawmakers, Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, were all born in the United States.

“There’s not a racist bone in this president’s body,” Emmer said. “What he was trying to say, he said wrong. What he was trying to say is that if you don’t appreciate this country, you don’t have to be here. That goes for every one of us. That has nothing to do with your race, your gender, your family history. It has to do with respecting and loving your country.”

Understand that this isn't about denying the "send her back!" chant, this is about the fact that to Republicans, being called a racist is still worse than actually being a racist and saying racist things.  Since Republicans have no choice but to admit that the chant was racist, they're trying to do everything they can to separate Trump (not a racist bone in his body, that goes for every one of us) from the racism he's responsible for.

They have to do this, or else, well, they're racists.

Take Matt Bevin, still the most unpopular governor in America (please!) as an example.

President Donald Trump is "absolutely not" a racist, Kentucky's strongly pro-Trump governor said Wednesday while sidestepping questions about the president's tweet declaring that four congresswomen of color should go back to the countries from which they came.

Gov. Matt Bevin drew media questions about the explosive tweet after appearing at a Kentucky Farm Bureau forum with his Democratic challenger, Andy Beshear. Bevin routinely plays up his alliance with Trump, making it a big part of his reelection campaign.

Trump's weekend tweet said the four congressmen should back to the "broken and crime infested" countries they came from, ignoring the fact that all of the women are American citizens and three were born in the U.S.

Asked if the social media remark was racist, Bevin replied: "I will let the president speak for his own tweets. I will speak for any tweet that I put out. Do I think the president is racist? Absolutely not. I know him personally."
Trump's attack has drawn a scorching condemnation from Democrats who labeled the remarks racist and divisive.

Beshear told reporters Wednesday that the president's remarks "were wrong and ugly and he should have never tweeted them."

"I don't think anybody should ever be told to go back to another country," said Beshear, the state's attorney general. "Those are U.S. citizens. They ought to be treated with respect."

Because now the fight isn't over wheterwhat Trump said or did is acceptable, now the fight is over whether or not calling him a racist is acceptable.  The outcome of course allows his stochastic terrorism to continue.

This is how it works.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The SDNY federal investigation into Michael Cohen, Donald Trump, and hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels was ended this week by Attorney General Bill Barr, not because there wasn't evidence against Trump, but because there was.  So much so in fact that federal prosecutors were seriously considering indicting Trump, and that Bill Barr's first major act as Attorney General five months ago was to spike the case.

Federal prosecutors' decision to end an investigation into hush money payments to women claiming affairs with Donald Trump relied at least in part on long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime, a person familiar with the matter said Thursday.

The Justice Department told a federal judge on Monday that it had "effectively concluded" its investigation into efforts to silence the women in the final months of the 2016 campaign, but did not explain why it had done so. Prosecutors have said the payoffs violated a federal law that restricts campaign donations.

A person familiar with the case, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly, said it was unclear whether prosecutors made a determination that they had sufficient evidence to bring a case against Trump or anyone other than his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty last year. But the Justice Department's opinion that a president cannot be indicted factored into the decision to end the probe, the person said.

Federal prosecutors had repeatedly placed Trump at the center of the effort to silence pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal during the chaotic run-up to the 2016 election. Last year, they alleged in a court filing that Cohen had orchestrated illegal hush-money payments "in coordination with and at the direction of" Trump. And it revealed in unsealed court records on Friday that Trump participated in phone calls about the payments to Daniels.  

The investigation died screaming once Barr took over five months ago. Follow-up visits to the Trump Organization that were scheduled for late February never happened after Barr was sworn in. There's no other possible conclusion but that Barr committed massive obstruction of justice by interfering directly with an investigation into Donald Trump.

The decision by the FBI to unseal the investigation documents once the case ended is proof enough of this.

Donald Trump was repeatedly kept apprised of a scheme to keep adult film star Stormy Daniels silent just before the 2016 election about her alleged affair with the real estate mogul, court documents unsealed on Thursday show.

From start to finish, Trump was in regular contact with his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, who arranged the payment. In October, Trump was brought in on a conference call with his longtime communications adviser, Hope Hicks, to discuss efforts to purchase and kill Daniels’ story. Over the coming weeks, Trump had numerous phone calls with Cohen as he went back and forth with Daniels’ attorney. And days before the November election, after The Wall Street Journal published a story detailing a similar hush-payment Cohen also made during the campaign to Playboy model Karen McDougal, Cohen texted “he’s pissed,” an apparent reference to Trump.

The fresh details are contained in several applications for search warrants in the Southern District of New York in which FBI special agents described the evidence law enforcement had obtained showing that Cohen’s $130,000 payoff to Daniels constituted an illegal campaign contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign.

The newly unredacted portions of the applications show the FBI special agents detailing how the hush-money agreement was made — and how Cohen appeared to keep Trump in the know about the deal every step of the way. Cohen is now serving three years in prison for a series of campaign finance, tax fraud and lying charges.

Several media organizations, including POLITICO, obtained the documents through a federal judge’s order tied to the Cohen case. Among the items also released on Thursday is a letter sent earlier this week by Audrey Strauss, the lead U.S. attorney in New York on the Cohen case, notifying the judge that the government’s probe had concluded into who else might be criminally liable for the campaign finance violations to which the former Trump campaign lawyer has already pleaded guilty, as well as whether anyone else gave false statements or obstructed justice.

In other words, the FBI blatantly came clean with its documents to show that they had Trump dead to rights, but they were stopped from above.  The documents also prove former Trump aide Hope Hicks lied to Congress under oath about being involved in the conversations between Cohen and Trump about the hush money payouts.

Negotiations over the hush-money deal to silence Daniels appeared to begin in earnest just after The Washington Post in early October 2016 revealed the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump can be heard bragging about sexually assaulting women. In the days after that video’s release, Cohen began communicating with Daniels’ attorney, Keith Davidson, according to the FBI’s review of Cohen’s phone records, iCloud and email accounts.

“I believe that at least some of these communications concerned the need to prevent [Daniels] from going public, particularly in the wake of the Access Hollywood story,” an FBI special agent wrote in a search-warrant application.

On Oct. 8, 2016, the day the tape was released, Hicks, then the Trump campaign press secretary, called Cohen. Sixteen seconds later, Trump himself was dialed into the call, which continued for over four minutes. It was the first call Cohen had received or made to Hicks in at least several weeks, and Cohen and Trump had spoken only about once a month prior to that, according to the FBI. Cohen and Hicks spoke again for about two minutes after the call with Trump ended.

Over the next few weeks, Cohen worked to flesh out a deal with Davidson and American Media, Inc., the parent organization of the National Enquirer. The plan was to have AMI purchase and bury the story, a practice known as “catch and kill,” and Cohen would then reimburse AMI for their expenses. Cohen and Davidson worked on the arrangements with Dylan Howard, the chief content officer at AMI.

But again, nothing will happen because Bill Barr has ended the investigation.  Nobody will be prosecuted.  Nobody will be charged.  Well, except Cohen, who is taking the fall for his boss, "Individual-1".

The most corrupt White House in history rolls on.

StupidNews!

• Donald Trump says that a US naval ship downed an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz, calling the drone a "provocative and hostile" act of Tehran.
• NOAA has confirmed that June 2019 was the warmest June ever recorded, setting multiple daily and monthly heat records in Europe, Africa, Hawaii and the Gulf of Mexico.
• The White House says Donald Trump will nominate Gene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as the regime's new Labor Secretary, replacing Alex Acosta.
• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is expected to win their sixth national election on Sunday, making Abe the country's longest-serving Prime Minister. 
• "PharmaBro" former CEO Martin Shkreli has lost his appeal to dismiss his seven-year prison sentence, the three-judge panel delivered a ruling just three weeks after hearing his case.

Last Call For Weekend At Jeffrey's

The judge in Jeffrey Epstein's trial has ruled on his bail hearing, and Jeff is absolutely staying in jail.

A federal judge on Thursday denied bail to wealthy investor Jeffrey Epstein, citing the potential danger he poses to the public and the risk that Epstein will flee to avoid prosecution for child sex trafficking charges.

The decision by Judge Richard Berman means that the 66-year-old Epstein will remain in jail pending trial in the case, where he faces up to 45 years in prison if convicted.

“I doubt any bail package could overcome dangerousness .... to community,” Berman said during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, agreeing with the recommendation by prosecutors to keep Epstein locked up.

Berman said that risk was “the heart of this decision” to deny the financier release on bond.

He noted that two women who claim they were abused by Epstein gave “compelling testimony” at a court hearing on Monday, where they had expressed “fear for their safety.”

The judge also called Epstein’s proposal for bail “irretrievably inadequate.” 

Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, had asked Berman to release him on a bond of as high as $100 million or more.

Epstein had also suggested strict bail conditions, which could include requiring him to remain in his New York City mansion, round-the-clock security monitoring and an electronic trafficking device.

But Berman said that prosecutors had established that Epstein could be dangerous by “clear and convincing evidence,” and had shown by a “preponderance” of evidence that he could flee.
The judge noted that Epstein’s “great wealth and his vast resources,” which include private planes and a residence in Paris, France.

And Berman said Epstein’s possession of a passport issued by the country of Austria worried him.

That expired passport has Epstein’s photo but a different name on it, as well as stated residence in Saudi Arabia. It was used in the 1980s for travel, according to prosecutors. 

The odds of Epstein fleeing the country were about as close to 100% as it could get.  The guy had a second fake passport ready to go, quite literally.  Like I said before, he'd end up in a no-extradition country within 24 hours.

Judge Berman made the right call here, no doubt.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman sets the table for the discovery phase of the Jeffrey Epstein mess, with hundreds of pages of documents and dozens of very well-connected people holding their collective breath.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is an asteroid poised to strike the elite world in which he moved. No one can yet say precisely how large it is. But as the number of women who’ve accused the financier (at least, that’s what he claimed to be) of sexual assault grows to grotesque levels—there are said to be more than 50 women who are potential victims—a wave of panic is rippling through Manhattan, DC, and Palm Beach, as Epstein’s former friends and associates rush to distance themselves, while gossiping about who might be ensnared. Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, architect of the original 2007 non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein off with a wrist slap, has already been forced to resign. 

The questions about Epstein are metastasizing much faster than they can be answered: Who knew what about Epstein’s alleged abuse? How, and from whom, did Epstein get his supposed $500 million fortune? Why did Acosta grant Epstein an outrageously lenient non-prosecution agreement? (And what does it mean that Acosta was reportedly told Epstein “belonged to intelligence”?) But among the most pressing queries is which other famous people might be exposed for committing sex crimes. “There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Courtney Wild, one of the Epstein accusers who gave emotional testimony at Epstein’s bail hearing. “In due time the names are going to start coming out.” (Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to a request for comment.) 

Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel's ruling. The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.“Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.”

I have serious doubts over this case affecting politics the way Harvey Weinstein's fall affected Hollywood, but if a lot of obnoxious people with ten- or eleven-digit net worths get rounded up for child molestation, I won't lose a wink of sleep.

Of course, if Donald Trump isn't getting a wink of sleep because of this, well I'm not going to feel bad either.

Symbolic Gestures 101

Despite all the considerable drama this week, House Democrats did hold votes to find Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to respond to subpoenas.

The House voted Wednesday to hold Atty. Gen. William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with its subpoenas seeking information about why the Trump administration wanted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
It marked the first time the full House held Trump Cabinet officials in contempt since Democrats took over the chamber.

The mostly partisan 230-198 vote comes days after Trump, blocked by the Supreme Court from proceeding with the citizenship question, announced that he would give up the legal battle.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the reason Ross had provided for adding the citizenship question — to help in enforcing the Voting Rights Act — was “contrived.” The justices blocked the Commerce Department from adding the question unless administration officials could provide a more compelling rationale.

Critics say the real reason for adding the question was to suppress census turnout in Democratic-majority states like California, where large immigrant populations would be afraid to respond. That would lead to a drop in congressional seats and federal funds for those states.

The House Reform and Oversight Committee voted last month to advance the contempt resolution to the full House after Barr and Ross declined to share documents detailing the rationale behind the proposed citizenship question.

The contempt citation will be automatically referred to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for prosecution, but that almost certainly won’t happen, since Barr oversees the office.

It’s more likely that Democrats intend Wednesday’s vote as a symbolic gesture meant to show their disapproval. They could also turn to the courts for help in enforcing their subpoenas.

Oh.

Symbolic gesture.

Cool.

That would explain this then.

Whole bunch of symbolic gestures happening, with none of them getting a vote in the Senate because of Mitch.  The ones that House Democrats actually have full control over, well those are also symbolic gestures and go nowhere, so that's nice.  It's really great that House Democrats have passed scores of legislation that go nowhere and don't benefit anyone.

House Democrats passed another symbolic gesture today, actually.

The House voted Thursday to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, delivering a long-sought victory to liberals and putting the Democratic Party’s official imprimatur on the so-called Fight for $15, which many Democratic presidential candidates have embraced.

The bill would more than double the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour — about $15,000 a year for someone working 40 hours a week, or about $10,000 less than the federal poverty level for a family of four. It has not been raised since 2009, the longest time the country has gone without a minimum-wage increase since it was established 1938.

The measure, which passed largely along party lines, 231-199, after Republicans branded it a jobs-killer, faces a steep climb in the Senate. Only three Republicans voted for it, while six Democrats opposed it.

But it previews what Democrats would do if they capture the Senate and the White House in 2020, and it demonstrates how fast the politics have shifted since 2012, when fast-food workers began to strike in cities around the country, demanding $15-an-hour wages and a union.

At the time, the figure seemed absurdly high, and even Democrats thought it was politically impossible. In the years since, even Republican states like Arkansas and Missouri have raised minimum wages, encouraging Democrats on Capitol Hill. In 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, pushed the issue to the fore when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“This is an historic day,” declared Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who argued that raising the minimum would disproportionately help women, who make up more than half of minimum wage workers, and would particularly help women of color. Turning to Republicans, she said: “No one can live with dignity on a $7.25-per-hour minimum wage. Can you?”

Nancy Pelosi delivered on her promise, Democrats got it done, right?

Well, there's a problem. Mitch McConnell will never allow it to come up for a vote.  Never.  Because he's protecting America, you see.

Hiking the U.S. minimum wage to $15 per hour would give millions of Americans a raise but put a smaller share of people out of work, according to projections released Monday.

Raising the pay floor to $15 per hour by 2025 would boost wages for 17 million workers, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated. At the same time, 1.3 million people would lose jobs, according to the CBO projections.

So Republicans will say "We saved over a million jobs from Democrat socialism!"  And people will continue to vote for Republicans in the Senate to balance out those wacky Dems and their symbolic gestures because that's how the both sides game works.

Symbolic Gestures 101 is a fun class, no?

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

Our friends, neighbors, co-workers and family who are Republican voters are increasingly adopting Trump's "white identity" rhetoric when it comes to "making America great again" according to new Pew Research data.

A majority of Americans (62%) continue to say the country’s openness to people from around the world is “essential to who we are as a nation.”

But the share expressing this view is 6 percentage points lower than it was in September – a result of a shift in opinion among Republicans. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly take the view that openness is an essential characteristic of the nation.

Currently, 57% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that if the United States is too open to people from around the world, “we risk losing our identity as a nation.” Fewer (37%) say America’s openness to those from other countries is essential to who we are as a nation, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted July 10-15 among 1,502 adults.

Both last fall and in 2017, Republicans’ opinions on this question were divided. Since September, the share of Republicans who say America risks losing its identity if it is too open has increased 13 percentage points, while the share who view the nation’s openness to others as essential has declined 10 points.

Over the past two years, there has been virtually no change in Democrats’ attitudes. Today, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (86%) say America’s openness is essential to who we are as a nation; 85% said this last September.

Opinions about whether America’s openness to those from other nations is essential – or a risk – to its identity also differ by gender, race and ethnicity, and education.

Women are more likely than men to say America’s openness to foreigners is essential (70% vs. 55%). In addition, there are sizable age differences, with adults under 30 more likely than older people to express this view.

While majorities across racial and ethnic groups see American openness as essential, blacks are particularly likely to have this view (78%, compared with 66% of Hispanics and 58% of whites).

In addition, adults who have not completed college are less likely than those with at least a four-year college degree to regard America’s openness to foreigners as essential. Among whites, 71% of those with at least a four-year college degree say America’s openness to those from other countries is essential, compared with only about half of those who do not have a degree (51%).

A majority of Republicans now have adopted the basic core of white nationalist hatred, guys.  Immigrants are bad, and they dilute/destroy the American "identity", which of course is white supremacy lite.  Pretty soon everyone who's not that "identity" becomes a threat, and must be removed.

Down this road there is only bloodshed and violence.

Supporters at President Trump’s campaign rally on Wednesday chanted “send her back” about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) after the president launched into a diatribe against the first-term lawmaker and Somali refugee.
Trump tore into Omar early on in his rally in Greenville, N.C., a continuation of his days-long attacks against her and three other progressive minority congresswomen. The crowd raucously booed Omar at the first mention of her name.

The president went on to accuse Omar of demeaning U.S. service members and minimizing the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“She looks down with contempt on the hard-working Americans saying that ignorance is pervasive in many parts of this country,” Trump said.

The crowd then broke into a chant of “send her back” in reference to Omar, who came to the U.S. as a Somali refugee as child.

The country will not survive a second Trump term without massive and breathtaking violence.  Hell, it may not survive the first. Trump is a symptom.  The real problem are the people who voted for him and who still enable him.

"Send her back" doesn't just mean Rep. Ilhan Omar.  It means your black neighbors, the Guatemalan family at church, the Hmong kids your son plays soccer with,  it means your Indian co-workers, it means the Chinese couple in the park, but it sure won't mean the Russian woman who has come here to have a child.

No, it's going to get a lot worse from here, and quickly.

StupidiNews!

• Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul has blocked renewal of heathcare funding for 9/11 first responders, saying that the Senate must make cuts elsewhere to pay for it.
• Online fundraising platform ActBlue says it has raised more than $420 million from small donors so far in 2019 for Democratic candidates from 3.3 million supporters.
• At least 33 deaths have been reported along with dozens of injuries at an animation studio in Kyoto, Japan, police have an arson suspect in custody who has reportedly confessed.
• Donald Trump says he is sending 2,100 more Army Corps of Engineers support personnel to the US-Mexico border as court battles over using Pentagon money for the border continue.
• The World Health Organization now considers the year-long Ebola outbreak in the DRC as an international public health emergency as the agency hopes to get more funding to contain the virus.

Last Call For The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green forced Nancy Pelosi's hand on impeachment on Wednesday, filing articles of impeachment against Donald Trump and a vote that went down in absolute flames.

The House on Wednesday killed an attempt to impeach President Trump for statements that the chamber condemned this week as racist, turning aside an accusation that he had brought “ridicule, disgrace and disrepute” to his office.

But 95 Democrats signaled their support for impeachment, while 137 opposed it — a dramatic split signaling trouble ahead for a divided party.

The 332-95 vote to table the impeachment article drafted by Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, constituted the first action by the House since Democrats took control in January on a measure to impeach Mr. Trump, a significant move that Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and other party leaders have toiled to avoid. By agreeing to table the article, Ms. Pelosi and the Democrats put off — at least for now — a prolonged and divisive debate over whether Mr. Trump’s conduct warrants his expulsion.
But the measure highlighted the rifts among Democrats about how to deal with Mr. Trump, between progressives who want to challenge him more aggressively and moderates desperate to quash talk of impeachment and stick to a poll-tested agenda that includes improving health coverage and raising wages for working people.

Ms. Pelosi has been caught in the middle as she tries to maintain some semblance of control over the party’s agenda as Mr. Trump dictates the terms of the debate. Those dynamics have already dominated the House’s business this week. For two days, Democrats feuded with the president over nativist posts on Twitter about four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color, culminating in a nasty floor fight on Tuesday that left progressives energized but moderates fretting over wasted precious time.

“You have to give him credit: He’s a great distractor,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said of Mr. Trump on Wednesday. She waved off questions about whether the Democrats’ policy priorities were being eclipsed by the president’s antics, saying, “We’re not having him set our agenda; we’re setting our own agenda.”

Mr. Green’s resolution makes no mention of Robert S. Mueller III’s report or other instances of possible abuses of power by the president that are being studied by the House Judiciary Committee as possible grounds for impeachment. Instead, it contains a single article that refers to the vote on Tuesday to condemn Mr. Trump’s tweets as racist, and concludes: “Donald John Trump has, by his statements, brought the high office of the president of the United States in contempt, ridicule, disgrace, and disrepute, has sown seeds of discord among the people of the United States, has demonstrated that he is unfit to be president, and has betrayed his trust as president of the United States to the manifest injury of the people of the United States, and has committed a high misdemeanor in office.”

Ms. Pelosi said that she had no quarrel with Mr. Green, but that the House was already taking sufficient steps to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his conduct.

Well, the people that wanted IMPEACHMENT NOW got their wish, and it cratered spectacularly, plus Trump now gets to claim victory, and the Village will spout "Dems in disarray!" stories for months now. 

Any momentum towards getting Republicans to condemn Trump has died screaming, even though it was only four Republicans and Justin Amash, and two of those Republicans are retiring anyway.

So I guess we're going to blame Pelosi, demand her resignation, not vote next year out of rage when she doesn't resign, and then cry some because that will show Trump, huh?

While Rep. Green is 100% correct in his assessment and in his charges against Trump, absolutely serious question posed to the readership, what positive benefit did this accomplish for Team Blue?  How did this not hurt another impeachment attempt through inquiries?

Talk me down, guys.  Please.

Sister (White Evangelical) Christian

Steve M. posits that Trump picking an overtly racist fight with Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley is a losing proposition.

I'll repeat what I said yesterday: Trump can't possibly fire up his base more than he already has. They'll crawl through ground glass to vote for him. They're locked in. He's wasting energy selling them on a product they're already 100% certain to buy. It's not as if he can motivate them to vote for him more than once. But when he plays the race card this way, he motivates independents and women, including some who chose him in 2016, not to vote for him.

Trump's usual mode is barely concealed racism, but the Squad inspired him to dispense with even the tiny bit of deniability in his standard rhetoric. If he keeps up his vendetta against them in this way -- or if, perhaps, he's inspired to go full-on racist against, say, Kamala Harris if she's on the Democratic ticket -- I think he'll lose. The Squad may be the foil Trump wants, but what he wants might be the opposite of what he needs.

It's a good theory and it makes sense on the surface.

But I disagree strongly with it.

According to Public Religion Research Institute president and author Robert P. Jones, the numbers bear out record turnout among Trump's "white evangelical Christian" base.

Amid all the ongoing changes in the country that generally favor Democrats, is it still possible that President Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020? Because I study religious and demographic change, I hear this question a lot. Much of the early punditry on Trump’s reelection prospects has focused on complex Electoral College scenarios—insights that, while valuable, shed little light on the bigger picture. I’ve come to answer the question this way: Yes, it is possible Trump gets reelected. While Democrats have the long-term demographic winds at their back, Republicans have a time machine: a consistent skew in ethnic and religious voter-turnout patterns that, in national elections, has the effect of turning back the demographic clock eight or more years.

I first stumbled over this Republican secret weapon while analyzing the political implications of the changing U.S. religious landscape. In the decades since Ronald Reagan’s pivotal election in 1980, describing the political behavior of religious groups has been a simple task. Majorities of white Christian groups—including white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, and white Catholics—have voted for Republican presidential candidates, while majorities of every other group—including nonwhite Protestant and Catholic Christians, non-Christian religious Americans, and the religiously unaffiliated—have voted for Democratic presidential candidates. The upshot: Any significant change in white Christians’ share of the electorate has major partisan implications.

Yes, white evangelical Christians are shrinking in number, but their turnout percentage in elections is getting larger, to the point where their overall share of the electorate now is still exactly what it was in 2008: 26% of all votes cast.

Even though white evangelical Christians made up only 15% of the population in 2018, so many of them voted that they accounted for over a quarter of all votes.  There's every reason to believe that this trend will continue in 2020.

It explains why Democrats have won back the House in areas with growing urban populations and suburban areas, but have lost 14 net Senate seats in the last five elections as blue voters are moving away from the Midwest and Rust Belt.

Should Republicans be able to hyper-gerrymander the majority of states in 2022 as I expect, those gains in the House go away for the above reason.

Yes, as Steve says, his base is fired up as much as it can go.  Yes, that base is shrinking.  But they vote in increasing numbers, and given the 100 million people who didn't vote in 2018, some of them have to be Trump's base that sat out. 

And you know what?  They'll hold their nose and vote for his policies or hyper-nationalism and yes, white supremacy.  We know Trump's racism is not a dealbreaker with his base, it's a requirement.  Some sat out in 2016 because they were unsure if he could deliver the goods on immigration, judges, and owning the libs.

That won't be the case in 2020.  The election may be the highest turnout in decades.  We haven't seen it hit 60% since 1968, well before I was born.  We're going to hit that again next year, I'm sure of it.

It depends on which trend wins out.  I'm nowhere near as sanguine to believe that Trump won't get at least 60 million votes, and probably 65 million, and that means a huge hunk of GOP candidates enabling Trump will get votes too, people don't split tickets anymore.

We have to turn out regardless.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Five years after he was murdered by the NYPD, any possible justice for Eric Garner has been buried by the vile, racist Trump regime and Trump's vile, racist Attorney General, William Barr.

A contentious, yearslong debate inside the Justice Department over whether to bring federal civil rights charges against an officer in the death of Eric Garner ended on Tuesday after Attorney General William P. Barr ordered that the case be dropped. 

The United States attorney in Brooklyn, Richard P. Donoghue, announced the decision one day before the fifth anniversary of Mr. Garner’s death at the hands of police officers on Staten Island. 

The case had sharply divided federal officials and prompted national protests over excessive force by the police. 

Bystanders filmed the arrest on their cellphones, recording Mr. Garner as he gasped “I can’t breathe,” and his death was one of several fatal encounters between black people and the police that catalyzed the national Black Lives Matter movement. 

His dying words became a rallying cry for demonstrations that led to changes in policing practices across the United States. 

Still, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was captured on a video wrapping his arm around Mr. Garner’s neck. The federal civil rights investigation dragged on for five years amid internal disputes in the Justice Department, under both President Barack Obama and President Trump. 

In the end, Mr. Barr made the call not to seek a civil rights indictment against Officer Pantaleo, just before a deadline for filing some charges expired. 

His intervention settled the disagreement between prosecutors in the civil rights division, which has pushed for an indictment, and Brooklyn prosecutors, who never believed the department could win such a case.

Garner's family is understandably furious, and the officer who killed him, Daniel Pantaleo, is going to get off scot free.  Understand that in America, every black person you know is only still alive because a police officer hasn't found an excuse yet to end them. That includes myself, for it is only by that grace that I'm still writing this blog, because my day has not come yet.

Eric Garner's day came five years ago because he was selling loose cigarettes.

And yes, we ask ourselves at every public interaction, every passing police cruiser, every time we see a beat cop on the street or at a store or restaurant or park, "Is this my time?"

Because we know that should it come, the odds of justice are minimal.  It fills me with anger.  “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time" as James Baldwin said.

Every day that I get up and I'm still here is one more day I beat those odds.

Black lives still matter.