Sunday Long Read: Broken Like Me

I know at this point in the proceedings that articles on the fascinating pathology of the "economically anxious middle-aged white Trump voter" are passé but this one by WaPo's Stephanie McCrummen stood out, as she talked to Melanie Austin of Pennsylvania and her boyfriend, Kevin Lisovich.

The first time she had seen him, at a rally in June, she was just beginning to realize how many people saw the world the way she did, that she was one among millions. At the time, her hips were still sore from a series of injections intended to calm her. She had gotten them in February, during a difficult time in her life, when she had been involuntarily hospitalized for several weeks after what she called a “rant,” a series of online postings that included one saying that Obama should be hanged and the White House fumigated and burned to the ground. On her discharge papers, in a box labeled “medical problem,” a doctor had typed “homicidal ideation.”

Melanie thought the whole thing was outrageous. She wasn’t a person with homicidal ideation. She was anxious, sure. Enraged, definitely. But certainly not homicidal, and certainly not in need of a hospital stay.

“It never crossed my mind that I’m losing it,” she said several months after her release, and a big reason for this conviction was the rise of Donald Trump, who had talked about so many of the things she had come to believe — from Obama being a founder of the terrorist group ISIS, to Hillary Clinton being a co-founder, to the idea that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered in a White House plot involving a prostitute and a pillow.

“They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” Trump had told the talk-radio host Michael Savage, who was using his show to explain the scenario to his 5 million weekly listeners, who then spread it on Facebook, where it wound up in Melanie’s feed.

To Melanie, this was the glory of the 2016 presidential election. The truth about so many things was finally being accepted, from the highest levels of the Republican Party on down to the grass roots of America, where so many people like her didn’t care what some fact-checker said, much less that one day Trump would suggest that Obama wasn’t born in America, and on another say maybe he was.

More and more, she was meeting people who felt the same as she did, joining what amounted to a parallel world of beliefs that the Trump campaign had not so much created as harnessed and swept into the presidential election. As Melanie saw it, what she had posted about Obama was no different from what a New Hampshire state legislator and Trump campaign adviser had said about Hillary Clinton, that she “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”

“If it’s time to lock me up, it’s time to lock up the world,” Melanie remembered thinking when she had heard that.

And so when she was released from the hospital with instructions to “maintain a healthy lifestyle,” she did what seemed to her not only healthy but also patriotic. She began campaigning for Trump.

“Trumpslide 2016!” she posted on Facebook a few days after she got home in March.

“Lets build a winning team and GREAT UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!! #Vote for #Donald #Trump for #President!” she posted in May. “#STOPHILARYCLINTON #STOPBERNIESANDERS #SHUTUPMITTROMNEY.”

In June, Melanie heard that Trump was holding a rally in an airplane hangar near Pittsburgh, so off she and Kevin went. On a blazing Saturday afternoon, her red “Make America Great Again” hat bobbed amid the thousands streaming past hawkers selling “Trump that Bitch” T-shirts and “Bomb the Shit Out of ISIS” buttons and a man handing out pamphlets about the apocalypse.

There are millions of people out there like Melanie Austin, and they are sure as hell going to vote.  They've guzzled the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Infowars Kool-Aid for the last 20 years and they see Trump as their ticket back to the glory days.

This is the heart of the modern GOP.  They're not going gently into that good night and they will continue to have outsized control over our politics for decades.  And if we're not careful they're going to win it all in 2016.

The Master Debaters

As anticipated, Saturday Night Live's opening presidential debate sketch last night was hysterical with Alec Baldwin as The Donald and Kate McKinnon as Hillary.

“Good evening America,” Baldwin said as Trump. “I’m going to be so good tonight. I’m going to be so calm and so presidential that all of you watching are going to cream your jeans.”

At one point Baldwin refers to moderator Lester Holt as “jazz man” and perfectly pronounced China the way Trump often does. He then quickly takes credit for already winning the debate, “If Hillary knew how, she would have done it already. Period. End of story. I won the debate. I stayed calm. Just like I promised. And it is over.”

Holt then told him he couldn’t leave because it was a 90-minute debate.

“My microphone is broken,” Baldwin as Trump said, looking panicked. “She broke it with Obama. She and Obama stole my microphone and took it to Kenya and they broke it and now it’s broken.”

He then starts sniffling and pretends like it’s someone else before ultimately blaming it on Clinton. “She’s been sniffling all night.”

“Secretary Clinton, what do you think about that,” Holt asks.

“I think I’m going to be president,” McKinnon said.

I think Hillary's going to be president too.

Courting Disaster

The fall term of the US Supreme Court gets underway Monday, and it will only have 8 justices because Republicans took the unprecedented step of denying President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, even the courtesy of a confirmation hearing.  Now the court will attempt to go about its business and will remain shorthanded until one of two things happen: Democrats retake the Senate, or Republicans win the White House.

For the first time in decades, there will be only eight justices, not nine, to begin the new term. Also absent are the kind of big-ticket cases — involving immigration reform, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act — that in recent years have catapulted the Supreme Court to the fore of American civic life.

Instead, the short-handed court has assembled a docket of more-modest cases — albeit ones that touch on contemporary controversies such as the role of race in criminal justice and politics, free speech and perhaps the treatment of transgender students.

Of far greater consequence is the fate of the court’s ideological balance. And on that question, the court finds itself like the rest of the country: waiting to see what happens on Nov. 8.

It has been nearly a half-century since a presidential election promised such an immediate impact on the court. Senate Republicans have refused to take up President Obama’s choice of Judge Merrick Garland for the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, arguing that a newly elected president should fill that vacancy.

As of Sunday, Garland has been waiting 200 days for the Senate to act on his nomination. Obama tapped Garland a month after Scalia’s death in February. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been adamant that the Senate will not even hold a hearing on Garland, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The next president’s impact on the court could go well beyond that one choice and be felt for decades. Three of the current justices are now older than other members who recently retired from the court, suggesting more departures to fill.

A victory by Donald Trump would continue the modern tradition of courts dominated by Republican-appointed members. But Hillary Clinton’s success could upend the status quo at the Marble Palace, producing nominees who would cement abortion rights, affirmative action and gay rights, and challenge hard-won conservative victories on gun rights, strict voting laws and campaign finance.

Any discussion of the Supreme Court these days, Stanford law professor Pamela S. Karlan said at a recent preview session at William & Mary Law School, can be summed up in two words: “It depends.”

And so we move on.  But I will always remember that the Republican party reserved the unprecedented step of denying the first black President a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee...yet another indication that as awful as Donald Trump is, he is merely the symptom of a broken, racist, hateful party that controls Congress.

Last Call For Trumped By The Press

If it's October, it must be time for that famous Surprise we keep hearing about in politics, and wouldn't you know it, Donald J. Trump got a hell of one in the NY Times this evening.

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Stop. Rewind. Playback.

Which means Trump most likely skipped 18 years of income taxes.

Eighteen.  Years.

Although Mr. Trump’s taxable income in subsequent years is as yet unknown, a $916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.

“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. Mr. Rosenfeld offered this description of what he would advise a client who came to him with a tax return like Mr. Trump’s: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”

Mr. Trump declined to comment on the documents. Instead, the campaign released a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss.

Trump was such an awful businessman, that he lost nearly a billion dollars on casinos and real estate, but hey, he got to use that to skip out on nearly two decades of taxes.

But he's a man of the working class.

So how did the Times get a hold of Trump's 1995 returns, anyway?

The documents consisted of three pages from what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The pages were mailed last month to Susanne Craig, a reporter at The Times who has written about Mr. Trump’s finances. The documents were the first page of a New York State resident income tax return, the first page of a New Jersey nonresident tax return and the first page of a Connecticut nonresident tax return. Each page bore the names and Social Security numbers of Mr. Trump and Marla Maples, his wife at the time. Only the New Jersey form had what appeared to be their signatures.

The three documents arrived by mail at The Times with a postmark indicating they had been sent from New York City. The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.

So somebody with access to Trump's documents in Trump Tower sent this to the Times in order to do him in. He has a mole in the campaign and they just torched him.

Enjoy your weekend, Don.

The Other Side: She's A Master Baiter

The post-debate spin cycle that Trump was expected to try to recover from and move on to next week's Veep match-up and town hall debate a week from Sunday instead turned into several days of Hillary Clinton using the same tactic that worked so effectively in the debate itself against Donald Trump, and even the folks on the right like Hot Air's Jazz Shaw are wondering how much of a beating Trump's numbers will take due to his inability to prevent himself from taking Clinton's bait on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

The problem here is that this is absolutely working for Hillary Clinton and she’s jumping on the bandwagon as hard as she can. (It also reinforces her “man who can be goaded by a tweet” theme.) And why wouldn’t she? The debate probably didn’t go as well for Trump as it might have, but up until that point Clinton was on the ropes. There was one bad story after another about her with many of them being serious enough that the MSM couldn’t avoid talking about them. Her numbers were tanking nationally and in multiple swing states. Trump fans had reason to be at least cautiously hopeful because it wasn’t as if she was going to unveil yet another policy initiative which was suddenly going to turn the electorate around.

And then this happens. Some dusty old story about about a beauty pageant contestant who is far from a role model but does happen to hit the media narrative bullseye of being both Hispanic and in possession of two X chromosomes. And because Donald Trump apparently can’t stand seeing a moment of the day when everyone isn’t talking out him he decides to hoist this flag up to the yardarms and go charging into battle in the middle of the night. The major problem here is that having the media talk about somebody else (specifically Hillary) was actually working for Trump. We were at a point where all he needed to do was keep looking at least marginally serious about some significant campaign issues, even if they seemed a bit dry and boring, and allow Clinton to collapse into a pile on her own.

Now the worm has turned for the umpteenth time in this election and the cable news networks have a new shiny object to play with. Clinton’s numerous flaws and ethics problems slink off to the back burner again and the remaining undecided voters are handed a new reason to question Trump’s seriousness and credibility. It’s time to get off this Miss Universe train let the news about Clinton’s many problems pull her under. Can Donald do it? I’m starting to have doubts.

Trump's ego has always been his weakness, especially when the person attacking it is a woman.  It's a tactic Clinton saved until the final six weeks of the election and it was a smart move.  Trump can't help himself.  That "a man who can be baited by a tweet" line so perfectly encapsulates The Donald that it's comical to see him fall for it like a dipstick time and again.

The reason why it's so destructive is that as with any bully, once you rob them of the power to harm you, they end up looking like sputtering fools.  That's exactly what Clinton did here, and Donald can't shut up about calling women fat now on national television.  Before, taking Trump seriously was something that the Village media failed to do at their own peril, and it helped lead us directly to the moment we're in now.  But now everyone's laughing at him, and Trump cannot stand it.

He looks like a loser, the worse sin possible in the Book of Trump.  And Clinton's living rent-free inside his nightmares, exactly where she wants to be.

The Orange And The Red, Con't

Looks like The Donald's Russian friends didn't take too kindly to Newsweek's Thursday story about Trump breaking America's embargo with Cuba in the late 90's, as on Friday hackers mysteriously swamped the magazine's website and took it down.

"We don't know everything. We're still investigating," Newsweek editor in chief Jim Impoco told POLITICO. "But it was a massive DDoS attack, and it took place in the early evening just as prominent cable news programs were discussing Kurt Eichenwald's explosive investigation into how Donald Trump's company broke the law by breaking the United States embargo against Cuba."

A DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service attack, is when an attacker attempts to overwhelm a website or server with traffic, rendering it unable to function reliably. 

As of Friday afternoon, Impoco told POLITICO that the main IP addresses involved in the hack were Russian, but that there was "nothing definitive" about the ongoing investigation. 

The magazine’s cover story, “How Donald Trump’s company violated the United States embargo against Cuba,” was posted online around 5:30 AM on Thursday. By Thursday evening, a "fairly sophisticated" attack took Newsweek’s website down "for hours," Impoco said. Newsweek's IT team worked through the night to get the website back online, he said. 

"It would either be a big coincidence, or it had to do with this story," Impoco said Friday. " ... We were fortunate that some other sites picked up the story so that people could still read it."

So if you had trouble getting to the story yesterday in the post above, there's your answer.

The Orange and the Red, indeed.

Last Call For House Of Pain, Con't

And while the focus for many of us has been on Donald Trump's horrible antics, let's keep in mind even if Trump is soundly defeated, Republicans will most likely continue to control the House and will happily pass bills like these. 

The House voted 246-177 to delay by six months implementation of the Labor Department’s overtime rule. Republicans voted unanimously for the bill, along with five Democrats: Reps. Brad Ashford of Nebraska, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Daniel Lipinski of Illinois, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), who introduced an earlier bill to phase in the overtime threshold gradually over three years, voted against the six-month delay. The rule, set to take effect in December, will double (to $47,476) the salary threshold under which virtually all workers are guaranteed time-and-a-half pay whenever they work more than 40 hours in a given week. The Labor Department estimates the rule will extend overtime coverage to more than 4 million employees and cost businesses about $1.2 billion annually.

Prior to the vote, Rep Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), who introduced the legislation, said the overtime rule “burdens hard-working small business owners” and “jeopardizes vital services for vulnerable Americans.” He warned that “time is running out” and said lawmakers should “provide more time to those struggling to implement this rule before an arbitrary and unrealistic deadline.” But Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said the rule will create about 100,000 jobs and noted that when the overtime rule was last updated in 2004 under President George W. Bush, “only four months” passed between the final rule’s announcement and its implementation (compared to more than six months for the new rule). Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said the bill “takes money out of middle class Americans right before the holiday season.” He also objected to the bill being brought to the floor as an emergency measure.

And Senate Republicans are planning to go along, but...

Sen. James Lankford (R.-Okl.) introduced a companion bill Wednesday co-sponsored by Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.). Neither the House nor the Senate bill will likely go anywhere. The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama would veto Walberg’s bill.

So yeah.  Once again, this is why you want a Democrat in the White House.

Duterte Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap Con't

Philippines President Manuel Duterte has gone from Manila's Trump to Manila's Hitler in the space of about three weeks, and I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not an act.

President Rodrigo Duterte said Friday that he would like to kill millions of drug addicts in the Philippines, defying international criticism of his country’s bloody war on narcotics and escalating his brutal rhetoric with a reference to the Holocaust. 

“Hitler massacred three million Jews,” Mr. Duterte said after returning to the Philippines from a trip to Vietnam, understating the toll cited by historians, which is six million. “Now there is three million, there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” 

Killing that number of drug users would “finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition,” he said. 

Since Mr. Duterte took office in June promising a grisly campaign against crime and drugs, the Philippines has seen a surge in killings of drug suspects.

Well then.  Publicly advocating mass genocide as a final solution in the war on drugs seems a bit...much.

Philippine officials have counted about 3,000 deaths during the crackdown, about a third at the hands of the police. 

The police spokesman Dionardo Carlos said on Friday that the police had been overstating the number killed by the police. He said that the correct number was 1,120, not about 1,500, which the police had given earlier. He did not explain why the number had been revised. 

The police have also said that 1,500 nonpolice killings are under investigation and that hundreds of these also are believed to be drug-related. 

Responding to expressions of alarm about the killings from the European Union and other international bodies, Mr. Duterte said Friday that the European Union’s advisers on the issue were “pea-brained.” He criticized European officials for finding fault with his government while not doing enough to help migrants fleeing war-torn Middle Eastern countries.

“You allow them to rot, and then you’re worried about the death of about 1,000, 2,000, 3,000?” he said. 

Mr. Duterte complained that his foreign critics had depicted him as “a cousin of Hitler” and said that they were wrong to criticize him now that he was the country’s president. Doing so put all Filipinos “to shame,” he said. 

The president’s latest provocative remarks came days after he cast doubt on the Philippines’ longstanding military ties with the United States, announcing in Vietnam that the countries’ coming joint military exercises would be their last. Officials in his government later said that all military agreements with the United States were still in effect and that they were awaiting “clarification and guidance” from Mr. Duterte.

Well, if you want to avoid the Hitler comparisons, perhaps one shouldn't openly say that you're going to emulate his actions.

Yikes.

Board Of Disapproval

If you're such an awful presidential candidate that you make USA Today actually pick sides in the race against you (something the studiously bland, noncontroversial and neutral newspaper has never before done) then you might be Donald Trump.

In the 34-year history of USA TODAY, the Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race. Instead, we’ve expressed opinions about the major issues and haven’t presumed to tell our readers, who have a variety of priorities and values, which choice is best for them. Because every presidential race is different, we revisit our no-endorsement policy every four years. We’ve never seen reason to alter our approach. Until now.

This year, the choice isn’t between two capable major party nominees who happen to have significant ideological differences. This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency.

From the day he declared his candidacy 15 months ago through this week’s first presidential debate, Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.

Whether through indifference or ignorance, Trump has betrayed fundamental commitments made by all presidents since the end of World War II. These commitments include unwavering support for NATO allies, steadfast opposition to Russian aggression, and the absolute certainty that the United States will make good on its debts. He has expressed troubling admiration for authoritarian leaders and scant regard for constitutional protections.

That's as good as it gets for USA Today trying to save the Republic, for the paper still refuses to endorse any of the presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton.

Some of us look at her command of the issues, resilience and long record of public service — as first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of State — and believe she’d serve the nation ably as its president.

Other board members have serious reservations about Clinton’s sense of entitlement, her lack of candor and her extreme carelessness in handling classified information.

Where does that leave us? Our bottom-line advice for voters is this: Stay true to your convictions. That might mean a vote for Clinton, the most plausible alternative to keep Trump out of the White House. Or it might mean a third-party candidate. Or a write-in. Or a focus on down-ballot candidates who will serve the nation honestly, try to heal its divisions, and work to solve its problems.

Whatever you do, however, resist the siren song of a dangerous demagogue. By all means vote, just not for Donald Trump.

I've got news for you.  Voting for either of the third-party candidates or a write-in (Hi Bernie!) isn't going to save the country from Trump: because of our electoral college system, only Clinton can do that.  It wouldn't kill the paper to say so, but I guess it would, sort of.

"Dear God don't vote for the actual fascist racist" is better than standing idly by, I guess.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama, Vice-President Biden, former President Clinton and dozens of other global leaders attended the funeral of former Israeli President and PM Shimon Peres in Jerusalem on Friday.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren says President Obama should veto any end-of-year budget bill that weakens the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that she formerly headed.
• Hillary Clinton says her presidential campaign rival Donald Trump may have broken US laws after a Newsweek story broke that suggested Trump violated the US embargo of Cuba in 1998.
• Germany's Deutsche Bank is facing a rocky month after legal troubles and a record-low stock price are causing political problems for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
• House Science Committee Chair Republican Lamar Smith of Texas now wants Congress to weigh in on New York's investigation into ExxonMobil's climate change research in the 70s and 80s.

Last Call For Another Post-Racial America Update

We're all fine here in post-racial America, everything's okay, after all racism died off with the Boomers or something and we certainly don't have to worry about Millennials acting like th....

A white student at East Tennessee State University was arrested and charged with civil rights intimidation on Wednesday after showing up to a campus Black Lives Matter protest wearing a gorilla mask and handing out bananas to African American students.

Tristan Rettke, a freshman at the university, also carried a rope and a burlap sack painted with the Confederate flag and a marijuana leaf, according to WCYB. 

Rettke was first detained by campus police, then arrested and taken to Washington County Detention Center after discussion with public safety supervisors, campus administration and the District Attorney General’s office, WCYB reported. 

According to a Johnson City Police Department report obtained by WJHL, Rettke told officers he purchased the rope, bananas and gorilla mask on Tuesday after learning about the Black Lives Matter event on social media app Yik Yak. He then went to Wednesday’s protest “in an attempt to provoke the protesters,” the report noted.

Oh wait a minute, why should anyone be surprised after 400 years that we still have racist douchebags as America's true sustainable resource?

Racism didn't end, it's just getting on record here in the age of social media and instant news events.

Shutdown Countdown, Con't

Looks like House Republicans aren't anywhere near as stupid as I suspected they would be and have approved funding for combating the Zika virus and helping Flint as the Democrats win the day over Paul Ryan once again.

The House on Wednesday approved a bill to fund the federal government through December 9, averting a costly shutdown two days ahead of the deadline. 

The 10-week bill, which passed comfortably 342 to 85, now heads to the president’s desk and sends lawmakers back to their district early for campaigning. 

A majority of the Republican conference backed the bill, with just 75 Republicans opposing it. Ten Democrats voted against the bill.

Lawmakers agreed to keep federal agencies running through Dec. 9, while also funding a $1.1 billion emergency aid package to halt the spread of the Zika virus. Flood-stricken regions in Louisiana, West Virginia and Maryland will also receive a half-billion dollars. 

The months-long marathon to fund the government turned into a sprint Wednesday as lawmakers raced toward the exits. The pre-election adjournment comes just a few weeks after Congress was out of session for a two-month summer recess. 

The Wednesday evening vote caps a dramatic 24 hours of deal-making led by House SpeakerPaul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Both chambers signed off on the stopgap spending bill, just one day after the same bill was soundly rejected in the Senate. 

The bill collapsed in the upper chamber on Tuesday mostly due to Democrats’ gripes about Republicans leaving out money to deal with lead contamination in Flint, Michigan while agreeing to fund flood relief in other states. 

The dispute over Flint funding was swiftly – and quietly – resolved late Tuesday evening by Ryan and Pelosi, who huddled twice to work out an agreement. 

House GOP leaders agreed to waive a budget rule to put $170 million for Flint in a separate water resources bill in exchange for Democratic support to clear the continuing resolution.

A bipartisan amendment authorizing the Flint aid sailed through the House Wednesday afternoon on a 284-141 vote.

So now the House bill will go back to the Senate and we're not out of the woods yet,  It's still possible that Mitch and company could sink this bill again, or that Ted Cruz could step in and wreck the whole deal.

We'll see.  Less than 48 hours now.

The Orange And The Red

Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald continues to chase down Donald Trump's sordid financial past dealings and this week we discover that America's newest hero of trade protectionist policies and capitalist freedom violated the US embargo on Cuba in the late 90's to deal with the Castro brothers.

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corporation. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after-the-fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.

At the time, Americans traveling to Cuba had to receive specific U.S. government permission, which was only granted for an extremely limited number of purposes, such as humanitarian efforts. Neither an American nor a company based in the United States could spend any cash in Cuba; instead a foreign charity or similar sponsoring entity needed to pay all expenses, including travel. Without obtaining a license from the federal Office of Foreign Asset Control before the consultants went to Cuba, the undertaking by Trump Hotels would have been in violation of federal law, trade experts say.

Officials with the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to emails seeking comment on the Cuba trip, further documentation about the endeavor or an interview with Trump. Richard Fields, who was then the principal in charge of Seven Arrows, did not return calls seeking comment.

But a former Trump executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said the company did not obtain a government license prior to the trip. Internal documents show that executives involved in the Cuba project were still discussing the need for federal approval after the trip had taken place.

OFAC officials say there is no record that the agency granted any such license to the companies or individuals involved, although they cautioned that some documents from that time have been destroyed. Yet one OFAC official, who agreed to discuss approval procedures if granted anonymity, said the probability that the office would grant a license for work on behalf of an American casino was “essentially zero.”

Oops.

In other words, Double-Dealing Donald broke the law, big time, sending a team of consultants to scout out Havana as casino territory while screaming he would never spend a dime in Castro's Communist Cuba. I bet South Florida Republicans are going to be really happy with this news, especially since Trump launched his initial 2000 third-party presidential bid in Miami as Bill Clinton was taking the first steps to try to loosen the embargo.

He wanted in on Cuba cash 16 years before Obama made it cool, and in the end he lied to try to make it look like a charity operation to hide his true intent of looking for a way to open a casino with international partners.

Seems like Trump has a seriously long history of using charities as fronts for his scams.  No wonder Republicans have been attacking the Clinton Foundation since Trump got into the race.

We'll see how this plays nationally but I'm betting this story is going to get noticed "bigly" where it will hurt Trump the most: Florida's poll numbers.

StupidiNews!

• Two Pakistani soldiers were killed in a firefight with Indian troops in the disputed Kashmir border region, India insists it was stopping terrorist attacks, Pakistan calls the incident "naked aggression".
• Congress has overwhelmingly voted to override President Obama's veto of legislation allowing US 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act now becomes law.
• The Pentagon is considering tougher options for dealing with Russia's continued assault on the Syrian city of Aleppo as a US-Russian brokered cease fire ended two weeks ago.
• Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf faces another round of grilling on Capitol Hill as fallout from the bank fraudulently opening millions of accounts to charge consumers continues.
• Tens of thousands of internet security cameras have been compromised by hackers, forming a botnet of considerable power to launch the largest coordinated denial of service attacks ever seen.

Last Call For Still Putin Us On

International prosecutors have laid out the case this week that the missile that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 two years ago over Ukraine was indeed a Russian weapon system launched by pro-Putin rebels in the area.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a missile fired from a launcher brought into Ukraine from Russia and located in a village held by pro-Russian rebels, international prosecutors said on Wednesday. 

The findings counter Moscow's suggestion that the passenger plane, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014, was brought down by Ukraine's military rather than the separatists. All 298 people on board, most of them Dutch, were killed. 

The conclusions were based on thousands of wiretaps, photographs, witness statements and forensic tests during more than two years of inquiries into an incident which led to a sharp rise in tensions between Russia and the West. 

Among the key findings were: the plane was hit by a Russian-made Buk-9M38 missile; the missile was fired from the rebel-held village of Pervomaysk in eastern Ukraine; and the launcher was transported into Ukraine from Russia. 

"This Buk trailer came from the territory of the Russian Federation, and after the launch it was returned again to the territory of the Russian Federation," said Wilbert Paulissen, chief investigator with the Dutch national police. 

The Ukrainian government said the findings pointed to Russia's "direct involvement". Russia - which has always denied Moscow or pro-Russian rebels were responsible - rejected the prosecutors' conclusions, saying they were not supported by technical evidence and the inquiry was biased.

Except they are completely supported by the evidence.  Oops.

Look, Putin got caught here and Russia is scrambling to fix it, period.  Not doing such a great job of it either.

Sure hope the next president can deal with him.