Last Call For A Syria's Fold

And GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has now completely reversed his position on Syria in order to bend the knee to Dear Leader, because he was told to do so.

In an interview with Fox News Channel, Graham said a conversation he had with Trump over the weekend had fueled his optimism that a solution could be reached where the security of Turkey and the Kurds was guaranteed and fighters from Islamic State contained.

“I am increasingly optimistic that we can have some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years if we play our cards right,” Graham said.

Graham said Trump was prepared to use U.S. air power over a demilitarized zone occupied by international forces, adding that the use of air power could help ensure Islamic State fighters who had been held in the area did not “break out.”

Senator Jim Inhofe, a Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Saturday that Trump understood the need for the United States to maintain air power in the region.

“The U.S. must retain air power to keep the pressure on ISIS, prevent our adversaries Russia and Iran from exploiting this situation and protect our partners on the ground,” he said in a statement. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.

Graham also said he believed the United States and Kurdish forces long allied with Washington could establish a venture to modernize Syrian oil fields, with the revenue flowing to the Kurds. “President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham said of Trump’s thinking on oil.

“The president appreciates what the Kurds have done,” Graham added. “He wants to make sure ISIS does not come back. I expect we will continue to partner with the Kurds in Eastern Syria to make sure ISIS does not re-emerge.”

So now the reality is "We helped the Syrian Kurds by abandoning them to the tender mercies of Assad and Erdogan" because it's "outside the box".  And we'll "continue to partner with them" because I guess we figure they have no choice or something.

Lovely arrangement, yes?

And the Republican opposition to Trump's Syria debacle vanishes like a fart in a tornado.

Trump's Tech Tall Tale Tornado

Donald Trump is drowning right now in his own criminality, under a quadrillion tons of pigeons coming home to roost and facing impeachment, but the reality is he most likely won't be removed from office, will remain the GOP's candidate for 2020, and he already is burying 2020 Democrats with the same digital ad dirty tricks that won the election in 2016, and Dems have done absolutely nothing to counter him.

On any given day, the Trump campaign is plastering ads all over Facebook, YouTube and the millions of sites served by Google, hitting the kind of incendiary themes — immigrant invaders, the corrupt media — that play best on platforms where algorithms favor outrage and political campaigns are free to disregard facts.

Even seemingly ominous developments for Mr. Trump become fodder for his campaign. When news broke last month that congressional Democrats were opening an impeachment inquiry, the campaign responded with an advertising blitz aimed at firing up the president’s base. 

The campaign slapped together an “Impeachment Poll” (sample question: “Do you agree that President Trump has done nothing wrong?”). It invited supporters to join the Official Impeachment Defense Task Force (“All you need to do is DONATE NOW!”). It produced a slick video laying out the debunked conspiracy theory about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ukraine that is now at the center of the impeachment battle (“Learn the truth. Watch Now!”). 

The onslaught overwhelmed the limited Democratic response. Mr. Biden’s campaign put up the stiffest resistance: It demanded Facebook take down the ad, only to be rebuffed. It then proceeded with plans to slash its online advertising budget in favor of more television ads. 

That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message. While the Trump campaign has put its digital operation firmly at the center of the president’s re-election effort, Democrats are struggling to internalize the lessons of the 2016 race and adapt to a political landscape shaped by social media. 

Mr. Trump’s first campaign took far better advantage of Facebook and other platforms that reward narrowly targeted — and, arguably, nastier — messages. And while the president is now embattled on multiple fronts and disfavored by a majority of Americans in most polls, he has one big advantage: His 2020 campaign, flush with cash, is poised to dominate online again, according to experts on both ends of the political spectrum, independent researchers and tech executives. The difference between the parties’ digital efforts, they said, runs far deeper than the distinction between an incumbent’s general-election operation and challengers’ primary campaigns. 

The Trump team has spent the past three years building out its web operation. As a sign of its priorities, the 2016 digital director, Brad Parscale, is now leading the entire campaign. He is at the helm of what experts described as a sophisticated digital marketing effort, one that befits a relentlessly self-promoting candidate who honed his image, and broadcast it into national consciousness, on reality television.

The campaign under Mr. Parscale is focused on pushing its product — Mr. Trump — by churning out targeted ads, aggressively testing the content and collecting data to further refine its messages. It is selling hats, shirts and other gear, a strategy that yields yet more data, along with cash and, of course, walking campaign billboards.

“We see much less of that kind of experimentation with the Democratic candidates,” said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who tracks political advertising on Facebook. “They’re running fewer ads. We don’t see the wide array of targeting.”
The Trump campaign, she said, “is like a supercar racing a little Volkswagen Bug.”

The Dems are betting impeachment will break Trump.  Trump is betting their digital bullshit flood and Russian manipulation ops will win for them again.

There's zero reason to believe Dems will prevail.  None.  Democrats are losing this fight completely and they're only now starting to vaguely realize that no matter who the 2020 candidate is, Trump will have a year-plus head start on them.

If this keeps up, a second Trump term is all but assured and America is through.

Sunday Long Read: Extremely Rural Broadband

Our Sunday Long Read this week recalls that Kentucky's experiment with a statewide program to expand rural broadband turned into a multi-billion dollar disaster after Matt Bevin got through with it.  But as Austin Carr at Bloomberg recounts for us, probably the only state where rural broadband has been a worse deal for taxpayers has been Alaska, whose rural broadband scam by convicted fraudster Elizabeth Pierce was so ridiculous it made Kentucky look brilliant.

When he discovered that the ship’s underwater plow was stuck at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, 50 miles off Alaska’s coast, Frank Cuccio thought of Ernest Shackleton. In October 1915, the British explorer was forced to make a desperate escape from the Antarctic after pack ice and floes crushed his ship, the Endurance. The vessel Cuccio was aboard, the Ile de Batz, had been laying fiber-optic cable along the inhospitable route known as the Northwest Passage. But the Ile de Batz’s 55-ton excavator, which had been cutting a trench for the cable, had dug too deep in the hard-clay seabed. If they didn’t unclench it fast, the ocean surrounding them would soon freeze. “I realized we don’t have time to fool around, or we’re going to get trapped in a Shackleton situation,” Cuccio recalls. “The weather was getting uglier, and other ships had been gone for weeks.”

Cuccio worked for Quintillion Subsea Holdings LLC, a telecommunications startup in Anchorage that was trying to build a trans-Arctic data cable it said would improve web speeds for much of the planet. This idea captivated the public, but by the time the Ile de Batz’s plow got stuck, in September 2017, the company was struggling. Co-founder Elizabeth Pierce had resigned as chief executive officer a couple months earlier amid allegations of fraud. 

Pierce had raised more than $270 million from investors, who had been impressed by her ability to rack up major telecom-services contracts. The problem was that the other people whose names were on those deals didn’t remember agreeing to pay so much—or, in some cases, agreeing to anything at all. An internal investigation and subsequent federal court case would eventually reveal forged signatures on contracts worth more than $1 billion. In a statement about the controversy, a Quintillion spokesman says, “The alleged actions of Ms. Pierce are not aligned with how Quintillion conducts business. Quintillion has been cooperating fully with the authorities.” Pierce, through her lawyer, declined to comment.

The company resolved the Ile de Batz crisis, coordinating with Cuccio and dozens of partner engineers and divers to hoist the plow from the depths. But it’s unclear whether Quintillion’s business will find momentum again. Last week, Pierce began serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft. The U.S. Department of Justice has said it believes nearly all the investment capital she secured was acquired fraudulently. The company is trying to repair its reputation while planning the extension of its internet pipeline from Asia to Europe. “I don’t care what Elizabeth’s original plan was,” says George Tronsrue, the company’s interim CEO. “Short of the headlines she grabbed with her bad behavior, she’s irrelevant to Quintillion’s future.”

Much of Pierce’s behavior, though, wasn’t so different from that of other tech founders and CEOs promising financiers vast rewards right over the horizon. A Bloomberg Businessweek review of hundreds of pages of court documents, as well as interviews with three dozen people familiar with Pierce’s Quintillion fraud, suggest that her ability to conjure up a Shackleton-esque vision of achieving the impossible proved as captivating as her forged signatures. “Elizabeth was so committed to making Quintillion successful that she just dreamt all this shit up,” says a former company executive, who, like many sources, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “The question is not why Elizabeth did it, but rather, how did she think she’d get away with it?” 

Arctic fiber has been an entrepreneurial fantasy for decades. Soaring demand for broadband helped drive companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon.com, to spend tons on high-speed underwater cables that keep customers watching Netflix and YouTube with minimal delay. But many of those lines run in parallel in the Atlantic and Pacific along well-established ocean routes, leaving the world’s internet vulnerable to earthquakes, sabotage, and other disasters both natural and human-made. A trans-Arctic route would help protect against that while offering a more direct path, potentially making internet speeds much faster. 

From Quintillion’s inception in 2012, Pierce focused her ambitions on her home state of Alaska. The state’s satellite internet was slow and expensive. In the lower 48, connections approaching 1 gigabit per second hover around $70 a month. Rural Alaska customers could pay double that for dial-up speeds. “If you wanted to watch Game of Thrones, you’d be better off getting a friend to record it on a CD and mail it,” says Quintillion engineer Daniel Kerschbaum. 

In theory, this meant a big opportunity, particularly as climate change warmed open more paths for construction in the Arctic. Pierce and her co-founders, who all had experience working at Alaskan telecom companies, figured they could develop faster, fiber-based broadband and then sell it wholesale to local internet service providers. The team spent most of 2013 conducting research, assessing environmental concerns, and negotiating cable routes with indigenous tribes. Even without completing any intercontinental routes, wiring Alaska for fiber would end up requiring 14 ships and 275 government permits and rights-of-way authorizations. “The dream of a Northwest Passage makes sense on paper,” says Tim Stronge, vice president of research at the consulting company TeleGeography. “But it’s so hard to get funding.” 

Not so hard to get funding when you sign billions in fraudulent contracts and create a massive Ponzi scheme using them to pay off other players.  Kentucky's failure was just mismanagement, although a massive mess that Dinosaur Staeve started and Matt Bevin made worse every day of his term.  But Liz Pierce defrauded everyone, everywhere, and it's amazing how she only got five years instead of the fifty she deserved.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Lawrence Hogan, Sr., the late father of current Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan, was the House Judiciary's only Republican who voted to advance all three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon out of committee.  It essentially cost him his House seat and his political career. He famously said about Nixon:

The thing that's so appalling to me is that the President, when this whole idea was suggested to him, didn't, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, 'Get out of here, you're in the office of the President of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent? This is the Presidency of the United States.' But my President didn't do that. He sat there and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn't come to light.

I bring up Hogan, who died in 2017, because the Republican party needs a person like him right now to say the same about Trump. It might...might...have found one.

Rep. Francis Rooney is one of the few Republicans in the House of Representatives who seems open to the impeachment of President Donald Trump. 

Rooney, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the center of the inquiry, said Friday that he had not yet come to a conclusion on whether the President committed a crime that compels his removal from office, a striking view among House Republicans defensive of Trump. 

The Florida Republican said that Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, confirmed Thursday what Trump had denied, that the President engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine. Rooney also said he was eager to learn from the witnesses coming in next week. 

"Every time one of these ambassadors comes and talks, we learn a lot more," the congressman said. 

Rooney is not a typical rank-and-file House Republican. Before winning his first election in 2016, the 65-year-old wealthy businessman's company oversaw construction projects including not only the presidential libraries for both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and the stadiums for the Texas Rangers, Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans, but the Capitol Visitor's Center, where the witnesses of the investigation dash to enter a secure facility and give their testimonies. He is on now at least his third career, after serving as the US ambassador to the Holy See under the last GOP president. 

He knows that speaking out against Trump may end his career as a Republican in Congress, but he wants to see where the investigation leads. The President has gone after other critics from his own party, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, whom Trump in one Twitter post called "a pompous 'ass.'" He added "#IMPEACHMITTROMNEY" on another. But Rooney doesn't seem to be concerned. 

"What's he going to do to me? He can say bad things but it's -- it just is what it is," said the congressman. "Let's just let the facts speak." 

Rooney did acknowledge that some Republicans might be afraid of being rebuked by the party if they expressed skepticism about the President, saying "it might be the end of things for me...depending on how things go." 

"I didn't take this job to keep it," he said. 

Rooney's still a lifelong Republican and a terrible human being because of it, but in order to get rid of Trump, some Republicans have to come along.  The more who toss him overboard, whether through a cynical redemption arc or enlightened self-interest, the more Trump is in trouble.  To make this all the more interesting, Rooney now says he's retiring.

Expecting Republicans, any Republicans, to do the right thing at this point after enabling Trump's crimes for three years is too much to ask.  But at some point, these bastards are going to want to save themselves at the very least.

We'll see.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Attorney General William Barr has been nearly invisible for the last month or so, except for a speech last week at Notre Dame in which he railed against "secularists" and all but promised that the Justice Department's top priority was to transform America into a white supremacist Christian Dominionist theocracy.

In a speech at University of Notre Dame’s law school Friday, Barr blamed “secularists” and “so-called progressives” for wreaking havoc on American society. Barr’s depiction of a war between the non-religious and people of faith shocked legal experts, who saw Barr’s defense of religious freedom as an assault on the First Amendment’s protection against the government’s establishment of any religion.

“This is not decay,” Barr said. “This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion & traditional values.” (Barr spent years profiting off of these same industries he is attacking. He served as general counsel at Verizon for eight years, held a had a paid position on the board of Time Warner for nine, and represented telecoms giant GTE in the 1990s.) 

In his address Friday, Barr thundered against what he described as a “moral upheaval.” “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground,” he said. “Along with the wreckage of the family we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and the deadly drug epidemic.” 

Barr pointed particularly to public schools, according to an account of the speech from the Indianapolis Star. “Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools,” Barr said. “To me this is the most serious challenge to religious liberty today.” There is decades of Supreme Court caselaw removing religion from public schools because the First Amendment bans the government from establishing or giving primacy to a religion.

It's terrifying enough for America's top legal officer to spout nonsense about religion in schools and declare separation of church and state to be all but dead.  But first, it seems his investigation into the Mueller probe is much further along than previously thought.

Federal prosecutors reviewing the origins of the Russia investigation have asked witnesses pointed questions about any anti-Trump bias among former F.B.I. officials who are frequent targets of President Trump and about the earliest steps they took in the Russia inquiry, according to former officials and other people familiar with the review.

The prosecutors, led by John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, have interviewed about two dozen former and current F.B.I. officials, the people said. Two former senior F.B.I. agents are assisting with the review, the people said.

The number of interviews shows that Mr. Durham’s review is further along than previously known. It has served as a political flash point since Attorney General William P. Barr revealed in the spring that he planned to scrutinize the beginnings of the Russia investigation, which Mr. Trump and his allies have attacked without evidence as a plot by law enforcement and intelligence officials to prevent him from winning the 2016 election.

Closely overseen by Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and his investigators have sought help from governments in countries that figure into right-wing attacks and unfounded conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, stirring criticism that they are trying to deliver Mr. Trump a political victory rather than conducting an independent review.

This is the wild card in any impeachment inquiry by the Democrats.  Barr's counter-attack is this move to undermine the Mueller probe and the impeachment inquiry in one fell swoop.  Certainly Republican partisans have visions of dozens of FBI, CIA, and State Department "deep state" agents led off in cuffs for a "huge conspiracy against Donald Trump", arrests that would include former Obama administration officials and "evidence" that would fatally taint the House and Senate investigations as well.

It's a race to see which side can present their case the best, I fear.  So far the arrests haven't come, and they may never will, Barr may be defeated well before his plan can come to fruition, or maybe he's waiting for the Senate acquittal of Trump to make his move.

But it's definitely in motion.  Of all the Trump regime, Barr is definitely the most dangerous.

Ukraine In The Membrane

One Trump/Ukraine quid pro quo has led to another, it seems, and it's a big one: remember our old Russian fixer friend, Dmitri Firtash?  He's been hiding out in Vienna for years, trying to avoid extradition to the US on conspiracy charges.  He's also the guy behind all the fabricated dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden. Josh Marshall:

As I noted yesterday, material that has been surfacing from The Hill’s ‘opinion’ reporter John Solomon and then echoed by Giuliani seems to originate with one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful oligarchs who is a former business partner of Paul Manafort and had to flee Ukraine after the overthrow of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. He is in Austria, fighting extradition to the United States to face bribery charges.

His name is Dimtry Firtash. 

Viktor Shokin is the ‘fired prosecutor’ at the center of all these stories. As part of Firtash’s effort to avoid extradition from Austria to the United States, he asked Shokin to swear out the affidavit in which Shokin accuses Biden of getting him fired to protect his son Hunter. (There is no evidence any of this happened. There was no investigation of Hunter Biden or the company on whose board he sat at the time Shokin was fired.) 

So to review, former Manafort business partner Firtash asks Shokin to swear out an affidavit in which he accuses Biden. The affidavit quickly gets into the hands of Giuliani and Solomon. And who just recently went to work for Firtash’s legal team? None other than diGenova and Toensing, as reported just this week by the Kyiv Post and other publications. 

So the duo who we now learned has been working on behalf of the President with Rudy Giuliani to extort the Ukrainian government just signed on to represent the oligarch behind the affidavit in which the disgraced prosecutor says Joe Biden got him fired. And yes, the oligarch who got booted from Ukraine in 2014 and is a former business partner of Paul Manafort.

So, bottom line Giuliani is working with Firtash, and has retained the services of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, all to create stuff on the Bidens.

Got it?  Good, because it gets much worse.

Associates of a Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition to the U.S. were working to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden last summer in an effort to get Rudy Giuliani’s help in the oligarch’s legal case, according to three people familiar with the exchanges.

Dmitry Firtash, charged with conspiracy by the U.S. and living in Vienna, shuffled lawyers in July to add Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, vocal supporters of President Donald Trump who had worked with Giuliani. Around that time, some of Firtash’s associates began to use his broad network of Ukraine contacts to get damaging information on Biden, the people said.

DiGenova and Toensing have billed Firtash about $1 million for their work, one of the people said. That includes costs for Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate, as a translator and important contact, the person said. Parnas was arrested last week along with several associates and accused of conspiring to violate campaign-finance laws.

People working on Firtash’s behalf collected a witness statement from Viktor Shokin, a former Ukrainian prosecutor-general. The statement, dated early September, helped Giuliani renew an assertion that he’d been advancing for months -- that Biden had tried in 2016 to sway Ukrainian politics to help his son. U.S. and Ukrainian officials have disputed Shokin’s account.

Shokin, though, had been promised his statement wouldn’t be made public, according to the people. Giuliani went on to cite it repeatedly, waving it around on cable news as evidence of Biden’s alleged corruption. The Hill and other media outlets provided links to it, with Giuliani later suggesting he had a role in making it public. “This is the affidavit I put out,” he said during a Fox News interview this month.

As a result of the publicity Giuliani generated with Shokin’s statement, two of the people said they believe the odds of the Justice Department dropping the case against Firtash have plummeted, because it would look like a quid pro quo. Others connected to the case agreed.

U.S. lawmakers conducting a presidential impeachment inquiry are bearing down on whether favors were traded for influence. They are examining Giuliani’s efforts to turn up evidence in Ukraine and allegations that the Trump administration withheld crucial aid until the country’s president agreed to investigate the Bidens.

In other words, Firtash cooperated because he expected the Justice Department to drop the case...but then Giuliani double-crossed him by making his false statement public.  On top of that, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the Giuliani associates that tried to flee the country last week when they were arrested, were headed to Vienna in order to meet with Firtash.

Along with Giuliani.

This is going to be fun.

Last Call For But Her Emails

After nearly four years, the internal State Department investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails found that no deliberate wrongdoing occurred.

A multiyear State Department probe of emails that were sent to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s private computer server concluded there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information by department employees, according to a report submitted to Congress this month.

The report appears to represent a final and anticlimactic chapter in a controversy that overshadowed the 2016 presidential campaign and exposed Clinton to fierce criticism that she later cited as a major factor in her loss to President Trump.

In the end, State Department investigators found 38 current or former employees “culpable” of violating security procedures — none involving material that had been marked classified — in a review of roughly 33,000 emails that had been sent to or from the personal computer system Clinton used.

Overall, investigators said, “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” The report cited “instances of classified information being inappropriately” transmitted, but noted that the vast majority of those scrutinized “were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them.”

The release comes as Trump continues to raise the Clinton email issue to attack Democrats, even as new evidence has emerged of apparent security lapses by senior officials in his own administration.

Diplomats involved in pressuring Ukraine to pursue investigations that would politically benefit Trump used private phones and texting apps to trade messages about their efforts, according to records released by leaders of the House impeachment inquiry.

The State Department probe focused on internal communications that were up to nine years old.

So, that's it.  Four wasted years, three under the Trump regime, and they couldn't find any reason to lock her up.  Of course, it cost her the election anyway, as I've said multiple times, thanks to our worthless media, but she didn't do anything wrong.

Oh well.

The Blue Wall Rises

Democrats are ready to defend their 2018 House gains in Trump districts and they have the resources to win even more in 2020.

Democrats are building a financial bulwark around their House majority that’s going to be tough for Republicans to breach in 2020.

Thirty-three of the 44 most vulnerable House Democrats have stashed an impressive $1 million or more in the bank well before the election year even begins. And their fundraising pace is not slowing down as they gear up to defend the chamber.

Federal Election Commission reports filed this week illustrate Democrats’ formidable advantage: The 44 Democrats in the most competitive seats banked a collective $59 million so far. Nearly 30 raised $500,000 or more in the third quarter, according to a POLITICO analysis of the fundraising filings. And all but six of the so-called “frontliners” have at least half a million more banked than their challengers, if they have any challenger at all.

“Last cycle, there were a lot of people talking about this massive Democratic online fundraising as if it was somewhat of an aberration," said Cam Savage, a veteran GOP operative. "I think it’s the new normal.”

The GOP is struggling to adapt to a changing landscape; They can no longer dismiss the strong fundraising as an anomaly when it has remained steady throughout the first three quarters of 2019. And while operatives insist the disparity is not insurmountable, Democrats have undoubtedly amassed a head start in a battle that will be waged in suburban districts that lie in the most expensive media markets in the country.

For comparison, only nine the 30 Republican incumbents who lost reelection last November had more than $1 million in the bank after the third quarter of 2017.

Still, top Republican strategists remain undaunted, citing the potential for impeachment backlash to motivate voters and lessen the potency of their opponents’ cash advantage. They acknowledged the Democratic cash influx may continue but brushed aside concerns it would derail their shot at taking back the House.

“Their base is fired up, and ActBlue has done a brilliant job. But I think we’re going to close that gap,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a former National Republican Congressional Committee chairman. “People know it’s going to be a very consequential election so there’s going to be plenty of money moved behind our challengers.”

The GOP isn't giving up of course, but it's about time that Democrats realized that they didn't have to reinvent the wheel every two years either.  And impeachment is going to hurt Trump in the suburbs, not the Dems.

It's starting to come together for Team Blue here.

A Syria's Mistake

Bloomberg's Eli Lake doesn't beat around the bush, calling the phony "ceasefire" deal negotiated by VP Mike Pence and Turkish President Erdogan as "total capitulation" by Trump, and oh yeah, it opens the door to the ethnic cleansing and genocide of millions of Syrian Kurds.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been open about this. Just this week, he outlined his plans: “We will secure the area extending from Manbij to the Iraqi border and then facilitate 1 million Syrian refugees’ return home in the first phase and, later on, the return of 2 million people.”

But this safe zone is an area that is for the most part historically Kurdish. If the Turkish military and its allied militias are allowed to dominate the area, then it is a near certainty that Kurdish civilians will suffer. 

And while it’s hard to confirm early reports in the fog of war, that appears to be exactly what is happening. New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi tweeted the grisly autopsy report of a murdered Kurdish politician. Public violence like this is meant to send a message that all civilians are targets. In essence, America has agreed to let Turkey solve its Syrian refugee problem by creating a new Kurdish refugee problem. 

Then there is the message this sends to Erdogan himself. The Turkish leader has humiliated Trump and the U.S. in recent weeks and months. He went ahead with the purchase of a Russian S-400 air defense system this summer, over several U.S. objections, and has faced no sanctions. He ordered his military to violate an earlier safe-haven agreement that to which Turkey had previously agreed. His forces fired artillery on a U.S. outpost last week. And he has metaphorically — and literally, according to the BBC — thrown Trump’s “Don’t be a tough guy” letter into the trash. 

In exchange for this disrespect and petulance, Erdogan got what he has wanted all along. He started a war to create a buffer zone in northern Syria, then got the U.S. to agree that he be allowed to keep it. Trump is even now repeating Erdogan’s talking points, claiming (without evidence) that the Syrian Kurds have launched attacks into Turkey. “In all fairness they’ve had a legitimate problem with it,” Trump said Thursday, referring to the safe zone. “They had to have it cleaned out. But once you start that, it gets to a point where a tremendous amount of bad things can happen.” 

That point has already been reached. Bad things are indeed happening, and will continue to happen. And there’s little reason to believe Trump’s capitulation in Ankara will do much to stop them.

And let's remember, Trump is doing this because Vladimir Putin has told him to do it.  We're firmly on the side of Putin, Erdogan, Bashar al-Assad, and other dictators and strongman.

America is no longer the good guys, folks.

And the rest of the world will eventually stop tolerating us.

StupidiNews!

• New York City plans to close its infamous Rikers' Island jail cells in favor of newer, more modern, and smaller facilities after a City Council vote and Mayor de Blasio's plans to approve the measure.
• The latest Brexit deal between UK PM Boris Johnson's government and EU negotiators has come apart after Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party rejected the measure.
• Turkey has agreed to a US proposal to halt attacks on Syrian Kurdish positions for five days in order to facilitate humanitarian aid and evacuation measures.
• Energy Secretary Rick Perry is confirming his departure from the Trump regime at the end of the year as the Ukraine scandal continues to grow to involve his trips to Kiev.
• A bipartisan Senate bill would drastically limit non-competition clauses for employees, with the legislation aiming to fix "the worst abuses" in keeping workers from going to competitors.

Last Call For Making A Buck

At this point Donald Trump is just openly, brazenly corrupt and no longer cares what anyone thinks.

President Trump has awarded the 2020 Group of Seven summit of world leaders to his private company, scheduling the summit for June at his Trump Doral golf resort outside Miami, the White House announced Thursday.

That decision is without precedent in modern American history: The president used his public office to direct a massive contract to himself. The G-7 summit draws hundreds of diplomats, journalists and security personnel and provides a worldwide spotlight.

The announcement that the president’s club would host the international summit comes as Trump is in the midst of twin crises that are consuming his presidency — a hasty and confused American retreat in Syria and a growing impeachment inquiry in Congress.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who announced the decision, said the administration was not worried about the appearance of a conflict of interest, while he touted what the president’s resort has to offer.

Doral was far and away the best physical facility for this meeting,” Mulvaney said. He said that the administration examined 10 sites before choosing this one. Mulvaney quoted an anonymous site selection official who he said told him, “It’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.” Mulvaney did not say what other sites were vetted.

Mulvaney said it was Trump’s idea to pursue the idea of hosting the event at his resort.

“What about Doral?” he said, recounting the president’s comments in the White House dining room.

And so Trump has awarded a massive, multi-million dollar government contract to his own resort, openly, in public, says there's no conflict of interest despite the Constitution making it clear that it's a violation of the Emoluments Clause and that's that.

In fact, if Trump gets away with this, he knows he'll never be removed from office.  He's daring the GOP to defend him now.  And I'll bet not one Republican senator complains about it.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Trump's EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland had plenty to say about not wanting to go to prison for his role in Donald Trump's little military aid for fabricated Joe Biden dirt scheme, and his defense basically consisted of "I was too stupid to know what Rudy Giuliani was up to."

In his opening statement, which was obtained by The Daily Beast, Sondland wrote that any plot to encourage a foreign government to influence an American election would have been “wrong.” 

“I did not understand, until much later, that Mr. Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign,” he will say, according to the written version of his opening statement. 

Sondland's role in the pressure campaign on the Ukrainian president was first revealed by The Daily Beast. He and Giuliani encouraged President Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens. It has been alleged that there was a quid pro quo whereby Zelensky would be rewarded by the White House with a meeting between the presidents in return for launching an investigation into one of Trump's potential 2020 rivals. 

“Please know that I would not have recommended that Mr. Giuliani or any private citizen be involved in these foreign policy matters. However, given the President’s explicit direction, as well as the importance we attached to arranging a White House meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky, we agreed to do as President Trump directed,” Sondland wrote. 

“Based on the President’s direction, we were faced with a choice: We could abandon the goal of a White House meeting for President Zelensky, which we all believed was crucial to strengthening U.S.-Ukrainian ties and furthering long-held U.S. foreign policy goals in the region; or we could do as President Trump directed and talk to Mr. Giuliani to address the President’s concerns.”

Keeping in mind a quid pro quo still isn't necessary for Trump's impeachment in this case and that Trump asking Zelensky for a "favor" as he did is enough for removal from office, the White House response from acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is that the quid pro quo happened anyway and so what.

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told reporters that the release of military aid to Ukraine this summer was linked in part to White House demands that Ukraine’s government investigate what he called corruption by Democrats in the 2016 American presidential campaign. 

It was the first time a White House official has publicly acknowledged what a parade of current and former administration officials have told impeachment investigators on Capitol Hill. 

“The look-back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” Mr. Mulvaney told reporters, referring to Mr. Trump. “And that is absolutely appropriate.” 

He said that the aid was initially withheld because, “Everybody knows this is a corrupt place,” and the president was demanding Ukraine clean up its own government. But Mr. Trump also told Mr. Mulvaney that he was concerned about what he thought was Ukraine’s role in the 2016 campaign. 

“Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the D.N.C. server? Absolutely. No question about that,” he said. “But that’s it, and that’s why we held up the money.” 

Mr. Mulvaney was referring to Mr. Trump’s discredited idea that a server with Hillary Clinton’s missing emails was being held by a company based in Ukraine. 

Mr. Mulvaney’s comments undercut the president’s repeated denials that there was a quid pro quo linking his demand for an investigation that could politically benefit him to the release of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, which is battling Russian-backed separatists on its eastern border.

We've reached the "Yeah we did it, so what" phase of the Ukraine scandal.

The "so what" is impeachment.

Right?

BREAKING: House Democratic Stalwart Elijah Cummings Dead At 68

House Democratic Oversight chair and 22-year veteran Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings died early this morning at Johns Hopkins after a long bout with health issues.

Cummings was born in 1951 and raised in Baltimore, where he continued to live.

He was one of seven children of Robert Cummings Sr. and Ruth Elma Cummings, née Cochran, who were sharecroppers on land where their ancestors were enslaved. The couple moved to Baltimore in the late 1940s.

As a child, Cummings struggled in elementary school and was assigned to special education courses. However, after showing promise in high school at City College, he won Phi Beta Kappa honors at Howard University in Washington. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. He graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law and passed the state bar in 1976.

After graduating from law school, Cummings joined a small Baltimore law firm and later set up his own practice, pooling expenses with two other lawyers. He soon transitioned to his second aspiration as a public servant. His longtime mentor is Larry Gibson, the Baltimore attorney and author who was active in the 1960s civil rights movement.

In 1982, with the support of several established city officials, Cummings ran for state delegate and won. He served in the Maryland General Assembly for 14 years and became the first African American in Maryland history to be named speaker pro tem.

In late 1995, Cummings decided to run for Maryland’s 7th congressional district in the U.S. House after Rep. Kweisi Mfume announced he would resign to become the head of the NAACP. Cummings served as a congressman since 1996.

Cummings was an active member of New Psalmist Baptist Church — he was there habitually for an early service — and was married to Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, who was elected chair of the Maryland Democratic Party in December 2018.

“It’s been an honor to walk by his side on this incredible journey,” his wife said in a statement. “I loved him deeply and will miss him dearly.”

One of Trump's most strident critics in the House, Cummings was one of the early leaders of the House's impeachment efforts.  I am only saddened to see that he will not see his wrk finished.

But finished it will be.  And soon.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Rudy Giuliani is, at this point, in violation of a House subpoena, but House Dems don't seem to be in a rush to actually do anything about it.

In a letter, Giuliani’s attorney—who was dropped by his client shortly after said letter went out—said the subpoena was “overbroad, unduly burdensome, and seeks documents beyond the scope of legitimate inquiry.”

In addition to Giuliani, the Department of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget faced a Tuesday deadline to produce documents that were requested in Democrats’ subpoenas. OMB said it would not be complying, but Pentagon chief Mark Esper has said he would turn over at least some documents that would help lawmakers better understand the role that the hold-up in security security aid played in Trumpworld’s campaign to pressure the Ukranians. “We will do everything we can to comply,” Esper told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday.

Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, faced a Tuesday request—not a subpoena—for documents illuminating his role in the Ukraine saga. But his office announced on Tuesday that it would not comply with any of the Democrats’ requests, casting their impeachment inquiry as illegitimate.

The moves echo past attempts from Trumpworld to stiff-arm subpoenas during the Mueller investigation, which prompted intense hand-wringing among House Democrats over how to respond. Ultimately, they did vote in June to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for ignoring subpoenas. These were largely symbolic votes, however, and their ramifications were murky at best, leaving Democrats struggling to explain their import to the public.

That frustration is clearly animating some lawmakers’ desire to reconsider ways to assert their punitive authority—including the avenue of inherent contempt, which empowers the legislative branch to take would-be witnesses into custody until they comply with duly issued congressional orders.

“This is another example of why the House needs to revisit inherent contempt,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) of Giuliani. “We need to enforce our own subpoenas. We can and we should.”

But others on Capitol Hill look back on those struggles and see a reason to simply move past it to focus on what they believe really matters. “If the administration, and the president’s private sector accomplices, are going to follow through on their promise not to comply with the investigation, including ignoring lawful subpoenas, and if the only recourse (court action) allows them to run out the clock on an active criminal scheme involving U.S. national security and elections, then the House has no choice but impeachment,” said a House Democratic aide.

Another House Democratic aide put it more bluntly: “They already have the Watergate tapes,” the aide said of the impeachment investigators, underscoring why the party was unlikely to pursue a punishment outside the normal legal system for those defying subpoenas.

To be fair, Rudy's already in a ridiculous amount of legal peril.

For months, investigators looking into Rudy Giuliani's business dealings in Ukraine have dug into everything from possible financial entanglements with alleged corrupt Ukrainian figures to counterintelligence concerns raised by some of those business ties, according to people briefed on the matter. 

The counterintelligence part of the investigation indicates that FBI and criminal prosecutors in Manhattan are looking at a broader set of issues related to Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, than has been previously reported. 

Kenneth McCallion, a New York attorney, says that investigators first approached him earlier this year to ask about Giuliani's ties to Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Giuliani associates indicted last week on campaign-finance related charges. 

McCallion says FBI counterintelligence agents in February or March asked questions about some of Giuliani's Ukrainian business dealings. 

The counterintelligence probe hinges in part on whether a foreign influence operation was trying to take advantage of Giuliani's business ties in Ukraine and with wealthy foreigners to make inroads with the White House, according to one person briefed on the matter. 

"I was just asked whether I or any of my clients knew of any dealings that these two guys had with Giuliani," McCallion said. "They were on the radar with regard to possible counterintelligence issues."

The theory of "We have enough to impeach Trump" is nice, but it depends on Democrats actually drawing up articles and putting them to a vote.  Doing that will almost certainly trigger a House GOP counterattack. 

Meanwhile, an official impeachment inquiry vote would open the door to House Republicans to start issuing subpoenas and that would mean weeks, if not months of endless hearings on Hunter Biden, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Linda Page, James Comey, Jim Clapper, maybe even Robert Mueller.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is signaling that political reality means he'll actually have a Senate trial after all.  A very short one, anyway.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Senate Republicans on Wednesday that he expects Speaker Nancy Pelosi to approve articles of impeachment as early as Thanksgiving, according to five people familiar with Wednesday’s party lunch. McConnell then surmised that the Senate could deal with the trial by Christmas, concluding the impeachment proceedings before the Democratic presidential primaries begin.

While they said there’s no deal between Pelosi and McConnell, Republican senators believe it’s in both parties’ interest to move quickly.

“He thinks Democrats are of the same mind: let’s not drag this out for five weeks,” said one attendee of the lunch.

McConnell’s comments and PowerPoint presentation on Wednesday were in part an acknowledgment that impeachment is exceedingly likely to come to the Senate, and much of the discussion centered on the ins and outs of Senate procedure.

McConnell told senators they would be unable to speak during the trial and that only the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the president’s defenders and the House managers could talk, said one person familiar with the meeting.

A spokesman for McConnell did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

That McConnell clearly doesn't share the White House opinion that the impeachment proceedings are "illegitimate" is a major tell, but I still expect a 100% party line vote on each article and Trump's eventual acquittal, followed by eleven months of THEY TRIED TO IMPEACH YOU ads.

But then again...

StupidiNews!

• Professional boxer Patrick Day is dead at age 27 after succumbing to a brain injury suffered Saturday night in a Super Welterweight title fight against Charles Conwell.
• The US House passed legislation supporting Hong Kong's independence from China by voice vote, China is warning the measure could end up sinking any trade deals with the US.
• The head of Mexico's oil workers' union has resigned amid a graft and bribery scandal, Carlos Romeros Deschamps says he will fight the charges in court.
• Former US President Barack Obama has endorsed Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party government ahead of an expected tight national election contest on Monday.
• In a 3-2 party line vote the FCC has approved the mobile carrier merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, but the deal faces state antitrust lawsuits from multiple attorneys general.