Last Call For Johnny Come Lately

Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson says that health issues are forcing him to retire at the end of 2019, meaning both of Georgia's senate seats will be up for grabs in 2020.

Isakson, a three-term Republican, said he decided to resign because of the “mounting health challenges” that include several falls from Parkinson’s disease and surgery this week to remove a growth on his kidney.
“It goes against every fiber of my being to leave in the middle of my Senate term, but I know it’s the right thing to do on behalf of my state,” the 74-year-old Isakson said in a statement.

Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, will appoint a replacement for Isakson, who was elected to a third term by a wide margin in 2016. Though Isakson’s term doesn’t expire until 2022, the timing of his retirement means the seat will be on the ballot next year.

Three Georgia Democrats have already announced challenges to U.S. Sen. David Perdue, a first-term Republican who is up for election in 2020. Isakson’s seat will likely draw several other Democrats, who see Georgia as increasingly competitive.

It’s not yet clear who Kemp will appoint to fill Isakson’s seat, though potential candidates include Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, state Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

Among the potential Democratic contenders for the seat are the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; Jon Ossoff, a former candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; Jason Carter, the runner-up for governor in 2014; and Michelle Nunn, who was defeated by David Perdue in the 2014 Senate race.

Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost last year’s race for governor and earlier ruled out a 2020 bid for Perdue’s seat, said through a spokesman that she would not run next year. Instead, she said, she’s focused on an expansion of her voting rights initiative.

“While she will not be a candidate herself, she is committed to helping Democratic candidates win both Senate races next year,” said the spokesman, Seth Bringman.

So to recap, Isakson is retiring, Brian Kemp gets to name a replacement for 2020, both Senate seats are up from grabs, and Stacey Abrams isn't running for either one.

Dems just got handed the opportunity of a generation here, a shot at two Senate seats in a rapidly purpling Southern state with a wildly unpopular Trump at the top of the ticket.

Let's see this done, guys.

The Great Wall Of Fascism

In any remotely sane section of the multiverse, this Washington Post story would be the end of the Trump regime.

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.

When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.

“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.

I mean, that would be it right there.  Both House and Senate Republicans would say this is unacceptable and that they would expect Mr. Trump to resign immediately.

Sadly, nothing will happen.  Well, right up until armed troops come in and start taking people's land for the wall, that is.

But he's joking, right?

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for his involvement in the Muller investigation.  More than anyone else, Trump sees McCabe as a traitor, because to Donald Trump, the chief goal of the FBI is to protect DOnald Trump and his interests.  McCabe refused to play that game and was fired days before his retirement pension became effective.  Trump has been grumbling about McCabe on Twitter ever since.

But last week McCabe was hired by CNN as an on-air commentator, and that was Trump's final straw.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who became one of President Donald Trump’s top enemies within his own administration, is joining CNN as a contributor, a network spokesperson said. His first day is Friday.

McCabe spent two decades in the FBI before he was fired in March 2018 by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions just more than 24 hours before his planned retirement.

The CNN gig comes as McCabe is fighting that termination in court. Earlier this month, McCabe filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging that his removal was part of a scheme by the president to remove government employees “because they were not politically loyal to him.”

McCabe’s hiring was reported earlier by CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.

The Justice Department said he was fired because he broke FBI rules by improperly disclosing information to the press related to an investigation into Hillary Clinton. A Justice Department inspector general report later found McCabe had “lacked candor, including under oath” in describing those disclosures to investigators.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment. A formal response to McCabe’s lawsuit is not due in court until October.

That was last week.  Over the weekend, Trump decided that McCabe is going to jail and his Justice Department is going to bury McCabe in a box somewhere.

Federal prosecutors in Washington appear to be in the final stages of deciding whether to seek an indictment of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director and a frequent target of President Trump, on charges of lying to federal agents, according to interviews with people familiar with recent developments in the investigation.

In two meetings last week, Mr. McCabe’s lawyers met with the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who is expected to be involved in the decision about whether to prosecute, and for more than an hour with the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, according to a person familiar with the meetings. The person would not detail the discussions, but defense lawyers typically meet with top law enforcement officials to try to persuade them not to indict their client if they failed to get line prosecutors to drop the case.

An indictment of a former top F.B.I. official is extremely rare and would be the latest chapter in the saga of Mr. McCabe, who was fired last year over the issue now under criminal investigation — whether he failed to be forthcoming with internal investigators examining the F.B.I.’s dealings with the news media.

An indictment would be certain to draw praise from Mr. Trump, who has made his attacks on Mr. McCabe a centerpiece of his yearslong campaign to discredit the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the Russia investigation.

As Ben Wittes of Lawfare points out, the fact that this story made the NY Times means McCabe is now absolutely facing imminent political prosecution.

Let me translate this paragraph for you: Such meetings generally take place when indictment is imminent; they happen when the government plans to bring charges. You should thus expect charges against McCabe to be forthcoming any day. And if such charges don’t happen, that doesn’t mean they weren’t planned but, rather, that some extrinsic event has intervened.

Why is that shocking? Because as best as I can tell, the facts available on the public record simply don’t support such charges. The only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President Trump demanding McCabe’s scalp.

To be sure, the inspector general’s report that prompted McCabe’s firing paints a deeply troubling portrait of McCabe’s conduct. It describes, in brief, how McCabe authorized an October 2016 disclosure on background to the Wall Street Journal and then misrepresented his role in the story on several occasions—including to the inspector general. I have no reason to disbelieve the inspector general’s account of this episode and no interest in defending McCabe’s alleged conduct. While McCabe has disputed the findings, he has not—at least not as of yet—presented a plausible alternative narrative that accounts for the facts the inspector general recounts. My point here is thus not to suggest that McCabe did nothing wrong.

But criminal charges? At least based on what’s in the inspector general’s report, this is very far from a criminal case. Criminal dispositions on false statements matters in internal investigations are exceptionally rare. Absent some gross aggravating factor, I struggle to think of any other examples. Workplace false statements are normally handled through internal disciplinary means, not criminal charges. There are countless public cases of gross misconduct and lies about that misconduct that are routinely declined as criminal matters.

But not this time, because Trump called up his Attorney General over the weekend and said "This McCabe asshole is not gonna be on CNN, you put him in prison or else."  You can make the argument that CNN messed up by hiring McCabe because he's too close to the news still and it probably did.

But sending him to prison is far worse and far more indicative of corruption and abuse of power. Bill Barr is doing what Trump hired him to do.

Expect more political prosecutions coming.  Lots more.  

StupidiNews!

• The Department of Veteran Affairs is investigating 11 deaths at a West Virginia VA hospital, with the state's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin confirming at least one death is a homicide.
• GOP LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans has lost an Executive Director and several board members over the group's decision to endorse Donald Trump for 2020.
• A federal judge has blocked Missouri's ban on abortion procedures after 8 weeks of pregnancy, state GOP AG Eric Schmitt says his office will review the ruling before deciding on an appeal.
• German financial giant Deutsche Bank confirms it has tax returns sought by House Democrats, but will not confirm if the returns are that of Donald Trump.
• Indonesian President Joko Widodo has announced plans to move the nation's capital from Jakarta to Borneo as the city of 10 million faces flooding and sinking due to climate change.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Under the Trump regime, where right-wing nutjobs are busy screaming about how college campuses are "indoctrination centers" and where "free speech" is supposedly no longer tolerated, if you're a university student here on a visa, your social media history is grounds for deportation now.

With classes scheduled to start next week, incoming Harvard freshman Ismail B. Ajjawi, like many of his fellow students, was set to arrive on campus for the first time this week. But the 17-year-old Palestinian’s hard-won education at perhaps the world’s preeminent university is now in doubt. American immigration officials stopped Ajjawi, a Palestinian resident of Tyre, Lebanon, at Boston Logan International Airport on Friday night, the Crimson reports, where he was held in custody for eight hours and subjected to invasive questioning by a female immigration officer, who then abruptly told him his study visa was being canceled and that he was being deported.

“Upon arrival, Ajjawi faced questioning from immigration officials along with several other international students. While the other students were allowed to leave, Ajjawi alleges an immigration officer continued to question him about his religion and religious practices in Lebanon,” according to the Crimson. “The same officer then asked him to unlock his phone and laptop, and left to search them for roughly five hours, Ajjawi alleges. After the search, the officer questioned him about his friends’ social media activity.”

“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell [someone] about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” Ajjawi wrote in a statement. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.” University officials told the Crimson they still are trying to resolve the situation in time for Ajjawi—whose enrollment at Harvard was made possible by a scholarship from a nonprofit organization—to be in class when the semester starts Sept. 3.

“I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics,” Ajjawi wrote. “I responded that I have no business with such posts and that I didn’t like, [s]hare or comment on them and told her that I shouldn’t be held responsible for what others post.”

Doesn't matter though, he's a Palestinian coming to Harvard on a full ride, and white Christian America can't have that happen.  Not in a million years.

Free speech means whatever the Trump regime is willing to allow you to say.  And that goes for all of us these days.

Meanwhile, better hope there aren't any Atlantic hurricanes this season that his the US, because all of FEMA's disaster emergency funds just went to ICE for more concentration camps.

The Trump administration is pulling $271 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum-seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico, according to department officials and a letter sent to the agency by a California congresswoman.

To fund temporary locations for court hearings for asylum-seekers along the southern border, ICE would gain $155 million, all from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, according to the letter from Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., which was seen by NBC News.

The allocations were sent to Congress as a notification rather than a request, because the administration believes it has the authority to repurpose these funds after Congress did not pass more funding for ICE detention beds as part of an emergency funding bill for the southwest border in June.

Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security will lose $116 million previously allocated for Coast Guard operations, aviation security and other components in order to fund nearly 6,800 more beds for immigrant detainees, the officials said.

“We would not say this is with no risk but we would say that we worked it in a way to…minimize the risk. This was a must pay bill that needed to be addressed,” said a DHS official, who noted that the funds would begin transfer immediately to fund ICE through Sept. 30.

The only infrastructure in America that gets built these days are concentration camps for more undocumented.  Better hope there's no hurricanes, wildfires, or earthquakes in the next few months, because there are zero dollars for FEMA to respond with as of right now.

Not in Trump's America.

Time To Pound The Pavement, Dems

For the 2020 Democratic nominee to beat Trump, former Obama organizer Joy Cushman says Democrats are going to have to do what worked so well for Barack Obama in 2008 and for House Democratic candidates in 2018: go door to door and earn every single vote the hard way.

Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods.

This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people. 

The other side, louder and better funded, says that data, technology and analytics should drive campaign strategies and voter outreach programs. So campaigns hire tech companies to create lists of potential supporters based on algorithms and statistical modeling. And they develop apps through which supporters are meant to blast, but not actually engage, their social networks. Staff members and volunteers parachute into communities to knock on doors and recite poll-tested scripts. 

Over the past decade, the party elites — consultants, strategists and donors — have caught the data-and-analytics fever and largely abandoned organizing. This has meant that entire neighborhoods have been politically redlined out of engagement in our most fundamental democratic practice.

Those of us who have spent our lives talking to regular folks on campaigns now walk around neighborhoods with lists created by someone at a computer far away. We have skipped many doors and missed entire families because the data experts didn’t have addresses or phone numbers for poor people, young people, people of color or people who moved a lot — many of those who carried Barack Obama to victory. 

Going into 2020, Democrats cannot fall into the trap of being overly seduced by shiny tech-only tricks. They must get back to the hard work of pounding the pavement to organize the people who already want to vote for them. That’s how we’ll create the power to build a movement that attracts others. In fact, data from 2016 and 2018 show that organizing increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger. 

Part of the reason the debate has unfolded this way is because the story that took hold about how Barack Obama won, and has since permeated the voting industry, is that sophisticated data, technology and analytics twice won him the White House, not organizing or volunteers. That a few dozen tech nerds in the Chicago headquarters tipped the campaign to victory. This story, and the realignment of progressive interests and infrastructure around it, has baffled me and other top campaigners. 

People won Mr. Obama’s campaigns. From the black beauticians in South Carolina to the white and black retirees in Pennsylvania to the Latinx supporters in Nevada, hundreds of thousands of volunteers knocked on doors and made calls from the primaries through the general elections. And Barack Obama saw them, spoke to them and loved them.

Barack Obama used both data and organizing to win.  He did it better than anyone else. Dems need to get back to that era, where Obama took Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy and ran with it.  I'm tired of hearing about "battleground states" like the other 45 don't matter, because we're giving away state legislatures in a Census and redistricting year.

We have to contest everything in 2020.  Every seat, every vote, every legislature, every governor's mansion, everything.

Beshear Beatng Bevin Bigly

With ten weeks to go before the 2019 gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, the polls have Democratic AG Andy Beshear up substantially over GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.

An internal poll from the campaign of Andy Beshear shows the Democratic attorney general leading Gov. Matt Bevin by 9 percentage points in the race for governor, with a little over two months until the election.

The Courier Journal obtained a copy of the polling memo from the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, which surveyed 501 likely voters in Kentucky from Monday through Thursday last week.

The poll found 48% of respondents would vote for Beshear, while 39% said they would vote for Bevin. Libertarian candidate John Hicks picked up 6% in the poll.

Of the 501 people surveyed, 43% self-identified as Republican and 37% self-identified as Democrat, while 48% considered themselves as conservative and 22% as liberal.

The results closely resemble an internal poll conducted by the Democratic Attorneys General Association a week earlier, which found Beshear leading Bevin by the exact same margin.

The last independent polling of Kentucky's race for governor came from the Gravis Marketing Survey in June. It found Bevin leading Beshear 48% to 42%.

If anything the poll favors Bevin, and yet the numbers clearly show Bevin has burned a number of bridges in the last three-plus years: with state and local government employees, teachers, farmers, and miners.

Still, if anything, Bevin shouldn't be sweating in the least.

Polling of statewide races in Kentucky has been notoriously flawed in recent years, especially the race for governor in 2015, when the Bluegrass Poll found Democrat Jack Conway leading Bevin by 5 percentage points late in the race. Bevin wound up winning on Election Day by 9 percentage points.

Bevin is fond of bringing up the erroneous polling from 2015 whenever he is asked about surveys showing him with a low approval rating, saying they are not a true indicator of the support he has throughout the state.

He's not wrong.  That Bluegrass poll from 2015 was cataclysmically wrong, off by 14 points.  In every instance turnout was much, much higher than anticipated and Kentucky voters turned out for Matt Bevin.  Bevin doesn't feel the need to do anything differently because he simply dismisses all polls showing Beshear ahead.  He's counting on that to happen again.

But they can't all be wrong, can they?

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Dorian is expected to become a minimal hurricane before threatening Hispaniola and Puerto Rico on Tuesday.
• Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania says universal firearms background check legislation has a "chance" of passing, but no votes have been scheduled on legislation in the Senate.
• Election security officials say the biggest threat to US election systems could be Election Day ransomware attacks that hold entire voting precincts hostage and throw voting into total chaos.
• Donald Trump says he won't risk America's energy sector on "windmill dreams" and is vowing again to increase coal, gas, and nuclear power plants across the US.
• The DEA confirms that the agency is planning increased cannabis research and that some -- emphasis on some -- CBD products sold in the US are indeed legal.

Last Call For The Court War On Drugs

Oklahoma Republicans took opioid manufacturers to court to recover some of the billions the state has spent dealing with opioid addiction.  The first of those cases against Johnson & Johnson reached a verdict today and it was a whopper: more than a half-billion in damages awarded.

A judge Monday found Johnson & Johnson responsible for fueling Oklahoma’s opioid crisis, ordering the health care company to pay $572 million to redress the devastating consequences suffered by the state and its residents.

Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman’s landmark decision is the first to hold a drugmaker culpable for the fallout of years of liberal opioid dispensing that began in the late 199os, sparking a nationwide epidemic of overdose deaths and addiction. More than 400,000 people have died of overdoses from painkillers, heroin and illegal fentanyl since 1999.

“The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma and must be abated immediately,” Balkman said, reading part of his decision aloud from the bench Monday afternoon.

With more than 40 states lined up to pursue similar claims against the pharmaceutical industry, the ruling in the first state case to go to trial could influence both side’s strategies in the months and years to come. Its impact on an enormous federal lawsuit brought by nearly 2,000 cities, counties, Native American tribes and others, which is scheduled to begin in October, is less certain.

“As a matter of law, I find that defendants’ actions caused harm, and those harms are the kinds recognized by [state law] because those actions annoyed, injured or endangered the comfort, repose, health or safety of Oklahomans,” Balkman wrote in the decision.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter (R) had brought suit in 2017 against three major drug companies, accusing them of creating “a public nuisance” by showering the state with opioids, while downplaying the drugs’ addictive potential and persuading physicians to use them even for minor aches and pains. Before the late 1990s, physicians reserved the powerful drugs primarily for cancer and post-surgical pain and end-of-life care.

More than 6,000 Oklahomans have died of painkiller overdoses since 2000, the state charged in court papers, as the number of opioid prescriptions dispensed by pharmacies reached 479 every hour in 2017.

Oklahoma settled with Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin, in March, accepting $270 million from the company and its owners, the Sackler family. Most of that will go to a treatment and research center at Oklahoma State University, although the federal government is seeking a portion of the money.

In May, two days before the trial began, the state settled with Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli-based manufacturer of generic drugs, for $85 million.

That left corporate giant Johnson & Johnson, which denied any wrongdoing and chose to fight the accusations in what became a seven-week trial before Balkman. There was no jury.

Should have settled out of court, boys.

Another Republican Heading For The Exits

The latest Republican to leave the House is Wisconsin GOP Rep. Sean Duffy, retiring at the end of next month to be with his family.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) will resign from Congress at the end of September, the most recent in a string of Republicans who have decided against running for re-election.

Duffy, who was elected in 2010 during a GOP wave, said he and his wife are expecting a child in late October who will "will need even more love, time, and attention due to complications, including a heart condition."

"With much prayer, I have decided that this is the right time for me to take a break from public service in order to be the support my wife, baby and family need right now," Duffy said in a statement posted to his Facebook page. "It is not an easy decision – because I truly love being your Congressman – but it is the right decision for my family, which is my first love and responsibility."

Duffy will leave Congress on Sept. 23. Duffy's district, anchored in the northern reaches of Wisconsin, has been solidly Republican in recent years. Duffy won re-election by 22 points, and Donald Trump won the district by 21 in 2016.

Yeah, Sean "from MTV's Real World Boston" Duffy, same guy.  Arguably the most famous Gen Xer in politics, married Rachel Campos from Real World San Francisco.  Again, this is a safe GOP district, no real danger of it flipping blue, Wisconsin's 7th covers the area north of Eau Claire and the Wisconsin Dells all the way up to the border with the UP of Michigan, it's reliably rural and red.

But Duffy is only 47.  He could have had this district for another 30 years, and frankly being a member of Congress means you and your family get excellent medical care options.

He's out nonetheless.

Yes, We'll Take You Up On That

Native American activism has been growing exponentially across the country this decade and the Cherokee Nation is finally taking up the US government on the treaty put in place after the Trail of Tears that allows for the appointment of a delegate to the US House.

The Cherokee Nation announced Thursday that it intends to appoint a delegate to the US House of Representatives, asserting for the first time a right promised to the tribe in a nearly 200-year-old treaty with the federal government. 

It was a historic step for the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation and its nearly 370,000 citizens, coming about a week after Chuck Hoskin Jr. was sworn in as principal chief of the tribe. The Cherokee Nation says it's the largest tribal nation in the US and one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. 

The move raises questions about what that representation in Congress would look like and whether the US will honor an agreement it made almost two centuries ago. 

Here's what's at stake.

The Cherokee Nation's right to appoint a delegate stems from the same treaty that the US government used to forcibly remove the tribe from its ancestral lands. 

As a result of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokee were ultimately made to leave their homes in the Southeast for present-day Oklahoma in exchange for money and other compensation. Nearly 4,000 citizens of the tribe died of disease, starvation and exhaustion on the journey now known as the Trail of Tears. 

A delegate in the House of Representatives was one of the ways the US government promised to compensate the Cherokee Nation.

So why is the tribe only taking up the offer now? 

Ezra Rosser, a law professor at American University, told CNN that the US government has long made it difficult for tribes to exercise rights afforded to them in treaties. But now, tribes are asserting themselves in a way that demands the attention of non-Native Americans. 

"We have to recognize that we imposed a genocide on tribes and we imposed harsh measures toward any government structure that they had," Ezra Rosser said. "To me, it's not surprising that it would take somewhat deep into the self-determination era for tribes to be in a position to assert some of these rights." 

Hoskin echoed that sentiment, telling CNN that "the Cherokee Nation is today in a position of strength that I think is unprecedented in its history."

Not that my opinion is in a position to chance anything on this subject, but I'm 100% behind this and I think 2020 Democrats should be falling all over themselves embracing this across the country.   I don't know how much Republicans will try to block this, but pissing off 300,000 Oklahomans seems like a bad idea for even the GOP in the state.

This seems like the kind of thing there should be bipartisan support for.

Naturally, I expect Trump to find a way to foul it up.

StupidiNews!

• A gas main explosion destroyed part of a shopping center in Maryland Sunday morning, no injuries were reported but the building is in danger of collapse and will be condemned.
• Donald Trump reportedly asked national security and Pentagon advisers if the US could use nuclear weapons to destroy Atlantic hurricanes before they could threaten the US coast.
• Brazilian military planes are dumping water on Amazon rainforest fires as President Jair Bolsonaro is relenting to international pressure to protect "the lungs of the Earth".
• A side G-7 invitation by French President Emanuel Macron to Iran's Foreign Minister risks incurring the wrath of Donald Trump, according to Bloomberg News.
• A new study finds banning hate groups online often leads to the same group simply popping up on the internet with another country providing access.

Last Call For Enemies of the State

The White House is significantly escalating its war on press, using conservative outlets to specifically target critical journalists in order to discredit and destroy them with opposition research, and the operation is already under way.

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.
It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation is Arthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”

The information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and re-election campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the Times editor, the news was first published by Breitbart, immediately amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, and quickly became the subject of a Breitbart interview with Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary and communications director.

To recap, the White House has a operation to go after specific journalists, and we've already seen attacks on April Ryan, Don Lemon, Sarah Jeong, and NY Times editor Jon Weisman in the last week.  A lot more is coming.  The White House will be calling for the firing of journalists on a regular basis and expect the Perpetual Outrage Machine™ to do it for them.  A lot of them will be fired.

Our free press is going to be dismantled in order to get Trump a second term.

Watch.

The Once And Futureless Steve King

Sensing his demise in Iowa, Republican donors in Rep. Steve King's district are flocking to his primary challenger Randy Feenstra instead as the avowed white supremacist has finally become too much of an albatross, even in the era of Trump.

As he gears up for a difficult re-election cycle, Rep. Steve King’s campaign is strapped for cash. Individual donations to the Iowa Republican have continued to flow but support from corporate donors and King’s own colleagues have vanished entirely.

King has not received a single contribution this year from a political action committee associated with a sitting member of Congress. Corporate PACs and interest groups have also completely shunned him. Through the first six months of the year, King received just two contributions from third party political entities: $2,000 donations from PACs associated with two former members of Congress, Lamar Smith (R-TX) and the infamous Todd Akin (R-MO).

It is a remarkable though not entirely unpredictable abandonment of a sitting member of Congress. Though he was always controversial and further to the right than most of his colleagues, King has burned virtually all his bridges in the party this year with outlandish comments about white supremacy and abortion.

But while those comments have made King a pariah in the party—with House Republican leaders stripping him of his committee assignments—King has refused to leave office. Now, as he faces the toughest campaign since he was first elected in 2002, he is doing so with a potentially catastrophic lack of resources. The $18,365 that King’s campaign had in the bank at the end of June was the least cash on hand he’s ever reported after the first six months of a cycle.

King is dealing with that lack of resources as he faces very immediate threats to his incumbency. His 2018 Democratic opponent, former professional baseball player J.D. Scholten, lost by fewer than three points last year, and is making another run for the seat. This time around King also has a formidable Republican primary opponent, state senator Randy Feenstra, who has already scored endorsements from influential Iowans such as evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. At the end of July, Feenstra’s campaign committee reported having $337,314.30 cash on hand, compared to King’s $18,000.

Things weren’t always so financially dire for King. Throughout his time in the House, he has received more than $3 million from political groups associated with private companies, trade associations, members of Congress, and ideological advocacy groups. That support peaked during the 2012 cycle, when such groups donated nearly $700,000 to his re-election campaign.

King’s top industry donors throughout his career, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records, were the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Homebuilders, AT&T, Crystal Sugars, and the Rain and Hail Insurance Society. All of them last donated to King during the 2018 election cycle but have so far declined to do so in this cycle.

In fact, some are even funding his primary challenger. At least six industry PACs that have donated to King in the past, including those affiliated with shipping giant UPS and trade associations representing construction and agricultural firms, have chipped in to Feenstra’s campaign this year instead.

Contributions from Republican Party organs have also evaporated completely. King never relied too heavily on such donations—he generally received about $5,000 per cycle from GOP committees, with the most, about $32,000, coming during the 2010 cycle. But it appears he’ll be fighting for re-election next year without any financial assistance from his party, which is raising record sums this year.

Even Liz Cheney has abandoned King at this point. Expect a major effort to get behind Feenstra from the GOP for the rest of the year.

Of course the actual answer to Iowa's Steve King problem is Democratic candidate J.D. Scholten, who came within three points of toppling King in 2018.



Toss him a few bucks, eh?

Sunday Long Read: A Car Detective Named Ford

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Esquire's Stayton Bonner: the story of Joe Ford, the man millionaires call to get their priceless stolen cars back, and his white whale of a $7 million case he's been tracking down for six years.

Joe, sixty-two, is more Magnum P.I. than Sam Spade—tall, trim, tan, usually wearing a fitted polo or a Hawaiian shirt. Drinks sweet tea by the gallon and speaks like the New Orleans native he is. (“I grew up in east New Orleans, near the Ninth Wah-ard.”) Likes to swim and dive for lobsters and drive boats. He recently cruised on a sixty-­five-footer down to Utila, “this coral-reef island off the coast of Honduras,” he says. “It was incredible—diving with whale sharks and drinking with outlaws. One guy didn’t come back.”

People end up doing all kinds of jobs in this life. You sometimes wonder if, given a few left turns and different choices, the guy playing center field at Yankee Stadium could have ended up a taxi driver instead. Or vice versa. But Joe . . . Joe Ford is what happens when a particular set of skills, personality traits, and turns of phrase lead a person into the only thing he should be doing. It’s rare. And when you see him at work—when you see him move easily among both the shady creatures of criminality and the millionaires on those yachts—you wonder whether you, like him, have found your place in the world.

The FBI agent was calling about a new lead in Joe’s current case. It’s a big one, the kind that could set Joe up for a long time. Maybe help him get his own boat, his own rare sports car. Help his daughter be more comfortable as she copes with the disease that’s taking away her eyesight. Help him disappear into the sunset.

He’s been working this case for six years. “Everyone loves cars, but this is different,” Joe says. “At this level, it’s about bragging rights for the rarest and the best. That’s what makes the Teardrop so coveted.”
The Teardrop. Otherwise known as the 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C SS teardrop coupe, chassis number 90108, current value $7.6 million. Built by two men, names of Figoni and Falaschi—Italian immigrants to France who ran the world’s top custom-car shop in Paris from the thirties through the fifties—the T150 is a prime example of a model that the Robb Report once called “the most beautiful car in the world.” One of only two models built with a race-car engine, it’s an art deco masterpiece, a long, sleek body powered by ground-shaking horsepower. The C stands for competition—it gets 140 bhp out of a 3,996cc six-cylinder engine—but the Teardrop was built as rolling art, a metallic blue car with a red leather interior and red wire wheels. It’s shaped like a teardrop, pure aerodynamics.

When it debuted, its wealthy owners commissioned custom wardrobes to match its colors and lines—society-page fixtures using it to make grand entrances at balls.

The T150, chassis number 90108, however, now holds another distinction: It was stolen in one of the boldest automobile heists in history. In fact, one of the most brazen and spectacular heists of any kind at all.

And Joe Ford, a P.I. from Fort Lauderdale nursing a Corona who has to get home to walk his girlfriend’s teacup poodle after she goes to work, is working his ass off to get it back.

“Some cars speak to me,” he says, finishing his beer and heading to get his parking validated. “This one screams.” 

The rare-car market is like a pyramid.

The base layer is mostly American cars of the fifties—Bel Airs and Packards in garages across the U. S. that can sell for up to $125,000. Next come the muscle cars and rarer European cars—Mustangs, Mercedes, Jaguars. They can go for up to $350,000. At the top are the European racers and one-of-a-kind creations whose blend of history and craftsmanship can put their value in the millions: a Ferrari raced at Le Mans, perhaps, or a ’68 Mustang driven by Steve McQueen. A 1927 Bugatti Royale, one of six ever made, a twenty-one-foot-long, seven-thousand-pound commercial failure upon its debut, would be worth an estimated $100 million should one ever become available. In 2017, classic cars topped the Coutts Passion Index, a list of the British bank’s top passion investments, increasing in value by more than 300 percent in the past decade to bypass assets like wine, jewelry, and artwork.

Like jewelry and artwork, valuable cars are stolen. Thieves have pulled off elaborate heists of million-dollar vehicles, sometimes smuggling them to international locales, retrofitting them with fake paperwork, and then reselling them on the global market.

That’s when people call Joe.

Settle in for a good heist story worthy of Steven Soderbergh or Guy Ritchie, folks.