StupidiNews!

• A rash of anti-Semitic bomb threats made at Jewish Community Centers across the country last month are under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI.
• Texas is siding with the Trump regime over wanting immediate reinstatement of a Muslim immigration ban from seven countries.
• Activists across the country are protesting the Muslim ban with "A Day Without Immigrants", walkout actions from schools, places of business and more are expected nationwide.
• Malaysian police have now arrested three suspects in connection with the apparent murder of the exiled half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Monday.
• The newest entry into the Mars colonization race is the UAE's "Mars 2117" project, as Dubai believes humanity can colonize the red planet in a "more realistic timeline" of a century hence.

Last Call For Trump's Syria's Business

The Trump Regime is staggering across the landscape right now facing the Flynn/Russian disaster and a growing movement to impeach.  What better way to get back in the game by throwing a rally in Florida?

Trump will appear at a rally in Melbourne, Fla., on Saturday. The event details were posted to his website, and Trump later tweeted the news.

Trump rallies were a constant presence during the 2016 presidential campaign. He often held multiple events per day, dominating the cable news airwaves. 

He held a series of campaign-style thank-you rallies after Election Day. Saturday’s event will be Trump’s first rally as president. 

It will also mark the third straight weekend Trump is spending in Florida. Last week, Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.

Of course, Trump's going to need some "good" news to counter the endless stupidity coming out of the White House, and here's what I think will be formally announced this weekend at that rally: we're going to war, kids!

The Defense Department might propose that the US send conventional ground combat forces into northern Syria for the first time to speed up the fight against ISIS, CNN has learned. 

"It's possible that you may see conventional forces hit the ground in Syria for some period of time," one defense official told CNN. 

But the official emphasized that any decision is ultimately up to President Donald Trump, who has ordered his defense secretary to come up with a proposal to combat ISIS before the end of the month. 

The move would significantly alter US military operations in Syria if approved and could put troops on the ground within weeks. 

Until now, only small teams made up largely of Special Operations forces have operated in Syria, providing training and assistance to anti-ISIS opposition groups on the ground.
Conventional units operate in larger numbers and would require a more significant footprint of security protection both on the ground and in the air. 

US officials are characterizing the concept of deploying ground troops as a point of discussion, stopping short of saying it's a formal proposal. 

What their exact mission would be is not yet clear, but one goal of their their presence would be to help reassure Turkey that Kurdish forces are not posing a threat to Ankara's interests. It's possible some troops would deploy first to Kuwait and then move into Syria.

Forget the "might" part.  Trump needs a war to rally the country *now*.  If we don't get the announcement that we're sending in troops to Syria at this rally this weekend, he'll move it down a few days, but yeah, this was always going to be in the cards of a Trump regime military plan.

We've just moved the timetable up.

Stay tuned.

A Nowhere To Bridge

Meanwhile here in Cincy, the Brent Spence Bridge is running out of time and nobody has a plan to actually replace the damn thing yet.

A bridge that carries highway traffic across the Ohio River near Cincinnati has been serving tens of thousands more vehicles a day than it was designed to handle.

Time and traffic are wearing on the Brent Spence Bridge, which is frequently cited as a location where major infrastructure upgrades are needed, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported. 

It is increasingly showing rust and cracks, but maintenance officials maintain that it remains structurally sound. 

"And we are committed to keeping it that way," said Bob Yeager, chief engineer for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet's District Six, which oversees maintenance of the 53-year old bridge. "But you've got two interstates converging and diverging at one end and that creates issues and traffic patterns we just can't fix overnight. 

The Brent Spence was made to handle 80,000 vehicles in 1963, and the addition of a fourth lane in 1985 brought that capacity to 120,000. But the most recent data indicate the bridge had daily traffic of over 185,000 vehicles in 2015, nearing a record amount.
That has meant more crashes there, too — usually at least two per week. 

Accidents reached an all-time high in 2015, when there were 121 collisions along the span. Crashes on the Brent Spence were up 52 percent between 2010 and 2015 in comparison with the previous six years.

And it'll be $2 billion to replace.  Ohio doesn't want to pay for it.  Kentucky doesn't want to pay for it. And lawmakers aren't about to make local residents pay for it, I guarantee you it'll cost them their jobs, particularly GOP Reps. Thomas Massie and Steve Chabot (the Senators involved wouldn't do much better.)

So, nobody has a plan yet and the Brent Spence is at 150% capacity on a near daily basis.  And the reason is because of the GOP.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

So the Flynn/Russia story has gone from "nobody talked to Russia, are you nuts" to "OK, so maybe Flynn had a conversation but he's only being fired because he lied about that" to today, where the story is now "OK, so several Trump camp officials besides Flynn had multiple conversations with Russian intelligence officers before the election".

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

The other folks besides Manafort?  Carter Page and Roger Stone. Oh, and Flynn.  Again.  Multiple times.  In other words the FBI has known about this investigation for months and yet FBI Director Comey still pulled his little October Surprise stunt with Clinton's "investigation" and assured America that there were no Trump/Russia links before the election.

We now know that's all a lie.  Oops.

The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.

On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said the news about Mr. Flynn underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”

Mr. Warner said Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.”

So now things are getting very interesting.  Meanwhile, House Republicans are scrambling to make this look like the real problem are the people who leaked the investigation, and not the fact our government is compromised by a foreign power.
 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) says he won’t open an investigation into President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing executive privilege.

But the committee will investigate who leaked the story that led to Flynn’s resignation and why Trump's national security adviser was being recorded, CNN reported Tuesday.

Good luck with that, kids.  This just turned into a real scandal that makes Watergate look like a middle school production of the Phantom Tollbooth, and these guys want to go after Woodward and Bernstein.

I've said for months the Russia story was important and wasn't going anywhere, and what do you know.

StupidiNews!

• A woman in Malaysia has been arrested in connection with the death of the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un earlier this week.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening his own cabinet with polygraph tests after leaks from Israel's latest cabinet meeting over Netanyahu's visit to the US this week.
• With the end of the Humana-Aetna merger of health insurance giants earlier this week, it now seems competitors Anthem and Cigna are parting ways over their planned merger as well.
• Arctic oil drilling off the coat of Norway could reach record numbers in 2017 as both oil companies and the Norwegian government are looking for a big payoff in the Barents Sea.
• The Air Force's uncrewed X-37b space plane could be coming home this week after a long-haul mission orbiting the earth beneath the International Space Station.

Meanwhile In Congress, Con't

With all the serious allegations surrounding the Trump regime right now, it's important to note that House Republicans have their own agenda, and at the top of the list is burying Obamacare and throwing tens of millions of people off various Medicaid expansion programs. The GOP hardliners led by NC Rep. Mark Meadows in the House Freedom Caucus aren't waiting around for this to magically happen (surprise, they don't trust Paul Ryan) so Meadows and his Tea Party crew say they want it gone completely by this time next month.

The situation: Republicans have two different opportunities to pass major legislation without Democrats through a process called budget reconciliation. The plan has been to use the first reconciliation bill on Obamacare repeal and replace and the second on tax reform. But while leadership has been exploring how much of a replacement it can fit into the repeal bill, Meadows — along with a growing number of conservatives — are saying they want repeal and replacement done in separate bills voted on at the same time. He then wants to use the second reconciliation to replace Obamacare, along with tax reform. 

Here's what he wants: 

1. Within the next 30 days, a vote on full repeal of Obamacare. This includes the individual mandate, the employer mandate and the law's insurance regulations. While these laws weren't included in a 2015 repeal bill because of reconciliation rules, Meadows thinks there are ways around that.
2. Immediately vote on a replacement plan, also within the next 30 days. The replacement must include a way of dealing with pre-existing conditions. Assume it doesn't pass the Senate filibuster.
3. Potentially vote on a tax reform package under normal procedure, without the border adjustment tax. Meadows thinks this would have a chance of passing with some Democratic support in the Senate.
4. Include Obamacare replacement in the second reconciliation bill "that is, quote, being used for tax reform, but it doesn't have to be just used for tax reform."

House conservatives are generally united in their Obamacare strategy. 

Ahh, but when you talk about tax reform and separate, multiple votes, that starts making Republicans nervous, and Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the Dems may yet have an opening to strike.

Ok, but: Putting an Obamacare replacement and tax cuts in the second reconciliation bill — without a border adjustment tax — will cost a ton of money. It's unclear where that money will come from, but it could very well require the bill to need 60 votes in the Senate if it's not paid for. Democrats are very unlikely to help pass anything Republicans put forward after an Obamacare repeal, especially if they also don't like the tax components. Republicans know this and could be very unwilling to jeopardize tax reform in this way.

In other words, by tying expensive tax cuts for the wealthy to Obamacare repeal in order to get the double whammy, the GOP may have bitten off more than they can chew and left the door open for the Democrats to scrap the entire plan.  Impatient GOP House conservatives are getting a lot of static from constituents about not having this done already, and the pressure on them is about to get turned up to 11.

For the past three weeks, Democratic protesters have swarmed Republican town hall events across the country, booing, shouting down and trying to embarrass GOP lawmakers seeking to gut ObamaCare. 

In the coming weeks, grassroots conservatives will be fighting back. 

FreedomWorks, the Tea Party-aligned outside group, beginning next month will be organizing rallies and urging its nearly 6 million activists to turn out at town hall events to ensure members of Congress are also getting an earful from ObamaCare detractors.

“There will be more grassroots hand-to-hand combat than we’ve seen in Washington for a long time,” FreedomWorks President and CEO Adam Brandon said Monday during an interview in his office near the Capitol. 

“The conservative [lawmakers], they need to see us out there pushing. And if they see that, they’ll be bold,” he continued. “If they don’t see grassroots there on the ground, they’ll start slipping.”

In other words, the odds that House GOP blockheads are going to move too far, too fast on Obamacare is increasing exponentially, and that the whole thing my come apart at the seams. It certainly wouldn't be the first time Obama-era legislation would be saved by GOP incompetence, and it would certainly not be the last.

Skinned Like Flynn, Con't

Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is OUT, resigning late last night.  His ties to Putin became too much to ignore after the questions raised this weekend over communication with the Russian ambassador over sanctions before Flynn or Trump were even in their jobs, and especially after the Washington Post dropped the bombshell that Trump was warned about Flynn's ties by the Justice Department.

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.

The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that ­Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice ­President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.

Flynn resigned Monday night in the wake of revelations about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

You remember Sally Yates, right?  The acting Attorney General who was dismissed by Trump over advising the President that his Muslim ban was unconstitutional?   Turns out Yates had warned the White House along with Jim Clapper and John Brennan that Flynn was compromised by the Russians and was a threat to national security.

But here's the explosive stuff:

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates’s concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House. They feared that “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position” and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

A senior Trump administration official said before Flynn’s resignation that the White House was aware of the matter, adding that “we’ve been working on this for weeks.”

The current and former officials said that although they believed that Pence was misled about the contents of Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador, they couldn’t rule out that Flynn was acting with the knowledge of others in the transition.

The FBI, Yates, Clapper and Brennan declined to comment on the matter.

Pence is the Vice-President.  There's only one other person who outranks him in the Trump camp, and that's Mango Mao himself.

Supposedly Flynn is being fried up and served over hot coals because he lied to Pence.  I'm wondering why he's being fired at all, the Trump regime said at late as yesterday afternoon that they had "full confidence" in Flynn and that he wasn't going anywhere.

That's all garbage of course.  But things have shifted in the Trump regime.  Nobody at this point believes the Trump line that Flynn acted on his own.  Democrats have been handed the keys to dismantle the Trump regime, and possibly to go straight for Trump, but they can't do it without help.

And that leads us to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.  Sooner or later something's got to give there.

Whether or not Flynn ever testifies to Congress remains very much unknown.

StupidiNews!

• There's still no word when nearly 200,000 California residents near Lake Oroville will be able to return to their homes after being evacuated Sunday due to an overloaded dam spillway.
• Missouri police have arrested the wife and son of Klan leader Frank Ancona whose body was found floating in the Big River last week, he may have been killed over wanting a divorce.
• Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood financier Stephen Mnuchin, was confirmed yesterday in a 53-47 Senate vote mostly along party lines.
• Trump's Labor Secretary pick, Hardees/Carl's Jr. CEO Andy Puzder, is facing possibly fatal opposition from Senate Republicans over his hiring of an undocumented housekeeper.
• Drugmaker Marathon Pharmaceuticals says it will pause the rollout of a new drug for muscular dystrophy after outrage over the treatment's $89,000 per year price tag.

Last Call For Public Safety Dance

Cops and firefighters across America voted for the Trump and the Party of Law And Order® and all that, and they expect Republicans to treat them well.  The problem with that is cops and firefighters are still government employees with strong public sector unions, pensions, and benefits, and Republicans will not let those remain.  Iowa is a good example of this, where first responders are finding out the hard way that they voted themselves into oblivion.

In the highly contentious battle to extinguish public worker rights, Iowa Republicans have attempted a divide-and-conquer approach to pit unions against each other. Their legislation splits public workers into two groups, one that’s “public safety workers,” and one that isn’t. The idea was to strip away nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public employees, but keep most of it for police and firefighters, who are politically more difficult to go after.

It didn’t work.

Hundreds of helmeted firefighters have flooded the Statehouse in the last week and police officers and sheriffs have lined up at committee hearings to speak against it. They don’t trust that this carve-out for their jobs will last long, nor do many of them feel it’s appropriate to deny the bargaining rights they have to fellow workers who have also had them for over 40 years.

And several police officers and firefighters warned that Republicans’ plan to create a special “public safety” class for negotiations wouldn’t work in many cases. John Thomas, a police officer from Mitchellville, explained last week that some sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t get classified as “public safety” workers because there’s more jailers and clerks in the bargaining unit. The Republican bill only classifies workers as “public safety” employees if a majority of workers in a bargaining unit is made up of police or firefighters.

That has many police officer, who voted for Republicans in large numbers this year, particularly upset.

“It’s collective begging, that’s what it is,” Thomas labeled the bill at a subcommittee hearing. “Half of law enforcement folks I work with are Republicans. And we voted for Republicans because of conservative values. But we didn’t vote for Republicans to get stabbed in the back while we’re trying to dodge cars and bullets.”

Even for those who do get covered as “public safety” workers, the other changes in the bill would still have damaging consequences. Removing the provisions for “just cause” firings means public workers could get the ax at whatever whim of their boss, with no potential recourse of action. Firefighters cautioned that could lead to a chilling effect on discussions over best safety practices.

“After a fire … we sit down as a group, around a table and we talk about the fire,” explained Doug Neis, head of the Iowa Professional Fire Fighters union. “We talk about what went good, what went bad, and about how to improve. In those meetings we need to be able to be critical sometimes of our administration and the decisions they make. This bill removes just cause. Our members across the state will be fearful of speaking up and being critical when they need to … People are going to be in danger, our members and citizens.”

Iowa cops and firefighters realize their necks on next on the blocks.  I'm glad to see them fighting back, but it would have been better to see them vote Democratic too.  Maybe they will in 2018, that is if there's anything left of public-sector unions by then.

National Insecurity Council, Con't

Just over three weeks in, and there's no greater evidence that the Trump regime is descending into complete chaos than the National Security Council, which is already coming apart at the seams.

Three weeks into the Trump administration, council staff members get up in the morning, read President Trump’s Twitter posts and struggle to make policy to fit them. Most are kept in the dark about what Mr. Trump tells foreign leaders in his phone calls. Some staff members have turned to encrypted communications to talk with their colleagues, after hearing that Mr. Trump’s top advisers are considering an “insider threat” program that could result in monitoring cellphones and emails for leaks.

The national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, has hunkered down since investigators began looking into what, exactly, he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the last days of the Obama administration, and whether he misled Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations. His survival in the job may hang in the balance.

Although Mr. Trump suggested to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he was unaware of the latest questions swirling around Mr. Flynn’s dealings with Russia, aides said over the weekend in Florida — where Mr. Flynn accompanied the president and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe — that Mr. Trump was closely monitoring the reaction to Mr. Flynn’s conversations. There are transcripts of a conversation in at least one phone call, recorded by American intelligence agencies that wiretap foreign diplomats, which may determine Mr. Flynn’s future. 

Stephen Miller, the White House senior policy adviser, was circumspect on Sunday about Mr. Flynn’s future. Mr. Miller said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that possibly misleading the vice president on communications with Russia was “a sensitive matter.” Asked if Mr. Trump still had confidence in Mr. Flynn, Mr. Miller responded, “That’s a question for the president.”

This account of life inside the council — offices made up of several hundred career civil servants who advise the president on counterterrorism, foreign policy, nuclear deterrence and other issues of war and peace — is based on conversations with more than two dozen current and former council staff members and others throughout the government. All spoke on the condition that they not be quoted by name for fear of reprisals.

“It’s so far a very dysfunctional N.S.C.,” Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a telephone interview.

In a telephone conversation on Sunday afternoon, K. T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, said that early meetings of the council were brisker, tighter and more decisive than in the past, but she acknowledged that career officials were on edge. “Not only is this a new administration, but it is a different party, and Donald Trump was elected by people who wanted the status quo thrown out,” said Ms. McFarland, a veteran of the Reagan administration who most recently worked for Fox News. “I think it would be a mistake if we didn’t have consternation about the changes — most of the cabinet haven’t even been in government before.”

At best it's paranoia in the bunker, at worst it's outright chaos. Oh, but ladies and gents, it gets worse.  If the parts of the cabinet who haven't "been in government before" are baffled newbies, those who have are openly pushing their own dangerous agendas.

Mr. Trump’s council staff draws heavily from the military — often people who had ties to Mr. Flynn when he served as a senior military intelligence officer and then as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency before he was forced out of the job. Many of the first ideas that have been floated have involved military, rather than diplomatic, initiatives.

Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was exploring whether the Navy could intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. The potential interdiction seemed in keeping with recent instructions from Mr. Trump, reinforced in meetings with Mr. Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, to crack down on Iran’s support of terrorism.

But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked, a threat to security that has helped fuel the move for the insider threat program. But others doubt whether there was enough basis in international law, and wondered what would happen if, in the early days of an administration that has already seen one botched military action in Yemen, American forces were suddenly in a firefight with the Iranian Navy.

I guarantee you this part is coming soon.  I don't want to hear about war with Russia (which precisely zero people want) when the Trump regime badly, badly wants a shooting war with Iran.  And these idiots are going to make it happen.

The Paper Chase

And the Trump regime claims their first head at a major newspaper: Op-ed editor Mark Lasswell of The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor has left the paper following tensions over the section drifting in a pro-Donald Trump direction.

News of the departure of Mark Lasswell, who edited op-eds for the Journal, comes as the paper’s internal tensions over Trump have begun to spill into public view. The reliably hawkish, pro-trade, small government conservative Journal op-ed page has been challenged by the rise of the populist, nationalist Trump movement. The Journal’s opinion pages have been a showcase for the intra-right divide over Trump, featuring Trump-sympathetic writers like Bill McGurn alongside anti-Trump columnists such as Bret Stephens. Lasswell appears to be a casualty of that divide, and his dismissal a victory for the pro-Trump faction on the editorial staff.

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Lasswell was in effect phased out over a period of months from the paper. He took a book leave during the election following conflict with his boss Paul Gigot, the editorial page director, about the extent to which the page should run material sympathetic to Trump.

"We don't talk about internal personnel or editorial deliberations, but suffice to say your information is false in multiple respects,” Gigot said in a statement. “We appreciate Mark Lasswell's contributions to the Journal and wish him well. The Journal editorial page's coverage of Donald Trump speaks for itself, including numerous op-eds from outside contributors and staff editorials pro and con throughout the campaign and now as President. That coverage will continue.” A Wall Street Journal spokesperson declined to identify any false information.

More will follow.  Again, it will be the "Never Trump" forces on the right cleansed first.  That battle is going to be rough and judging by the time frame, quick in its brutality.

So we'll see who's next, but I seriously doubt he will be the last.

Last Call For Miller Time (and Space)

Apparently since Kellyanne Conway is grounded or something, the Trump regime sent Bannon sidekick Stephen Miller around to the Sunday shows today to make some sort of magical case for "massive voter fraud" that Trump keeps screaming about, but nobody was having it.

White House policy adviser Stephen Miller on Sunday insisted that the Trump administration has provided ample evidence of widespread voter fraud, an unsubstantiated claim that President Trump has said cost him the popular vote. 

“The White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud, with respect to people being registered in more than one state,” Miller told ABC’s “This Week.”

“Dead people voting, non-citizens being registered to vote. George, it is a fact and you will not deny it that are massive numbers of non-citizens in this country who are registered to vote.”

ABC host George Stephanopoulos specifically asked about Trump’s recent claim that voter fraud is the reason he lost in New Hampshire. 

Stephanopoulos pushed back against Miller, telling him he did not provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud. 

“You have provided zero evidence of the president’s claim that he would’ve won the general — the popular vote if 3 [million] to 5 million illegal immigrants hadn’t voted. Zero evidence for either one of those claims,” Stephanopoulos said.

Oops.  In fact it didn't go well at all.

After appearing on four Sunday news shows, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, was ruthlessly mocked on Twitter. 

Broadcasting from the White House briefing room, Miller repeated the same talking points in interviews with CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. The Trump adviser likely refused to appear on CNN due to the White House’s ongoing campaign against the cable network. 

Miller defended Trump’s travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries by fear mongering and insisting that the judiciary was not the “supreme” branch of government for deciding what is constitutional. He also claimed that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was “always” 100 percent correct.

So at this point Miller is on TV screaming so loudly about voter fraud that nobody believes him.  Of course, as I've said before, when a tyrant continues about things that aren't true, he plans to act like they are.

Spies Dislike Trump

It seems America's Intelligence Community has finally had enough of the Trump regime, and that they're starting to make things extremely uncomfortable for him. John Schindler:

How things are heating up between the White House and the spooks is evidenced by a new report that the CIA has denied a security clearance to one of Flynn’s acolytes. Rob Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer selected to head up the NSC’s Africa desk, was denied a clearance to see Sensitive Compartmented Information (which is required to have access to SIGINT in particular). Why Townley’s SCI was turned down isn’t clear—it could be over personal problems or foreign ties—but the CIA’s stand has been privately denounced by the White House, which views this as a vendetta against Flynn. That the Townley SCI denial was reportedly endorsed by Mike Pompeo, the new CIA director selected by Trump himself, only adds to the pain.

There is more consequential IC pushback happening, too. Our spies have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.

In other words, the CIA, FBI, and especially the NSA are proceeding as if the Trump regime is already fully compromised, which between Mike Flynn,  Trump's adult sons Eric and Donald Jr., and Paul Manafort still lurking about, should be absolutely considered as true.

And if the NSA is withholding actionable intel from Trump that could lead to something bad because of the Russians wholly owning the regime, what then?

What's it going to take before Trump gets kicked out?

Sunday Long Read: Defining DeVos

If you want to know what awaits America's public education system under the Trump regime and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, you have to go no further than Grand Rapids, Michigan as a primary example.

Mid-century Michigan conservatives no doubt felt their ideological zeal ratcheting up because, for much of the post-war era, unions called most of the shots in the state’s political economy. Especially during the 1970s, when Amway was hitting its stride and the young DeVoses and Princes—whose ranks included Betsy’s brother Erik, who would gain plenty of infamy of his own as the founder of the private-army concern Blackwater—were coming of age, union power was peaking in the state. By 1974, unions represented more than 40 percent of workers in Michigan, the highest rate in the country. The shift in the balance of power between labor and capital, set off when the auto workers sat down in Flint in 1936, had been tilting steadily in the workers’ direction ever since. Worse still for free-market ideologues of the DeVosian stripe, public sector workers in Michigan—its teachers, police and firefighters—had collective bargaining rights too. Not only was the government “in our pockets,” it was handing over the money it confiscated to the Detroit Federation of Teachers.

The union tide that swept across Michigan never reached the western part of the state, though. As Jeffrey Kleiman documents in his history of the great Grand Rapids furniture strike of 1911, that action, which paralyzed the city’s major industry for six days, ended in a near total loss for labor. Not only did the thousands of workers who’d walked off the job fail to win a single concession from their bosses, the strike also concentrated the power of local businessmen, bankers and industrialists. In a pamphlet called “What’s the Matter with Grand Rapids?” the Industrial Workers of the World argued that ethnic tensions kept the city’s workers divided, while high rates of homeownership and churchgoing kept them conservative. Local historian Robert P. Swierenga has a more straightforward explanation: the west Michigan Dutch, with their legendarily strong work ethic, didn’t really go in for unions. Polish workers were the main force behind the furniture strike, and the Dutch crossed the picket line. “The aura of a willing labor force and strong work ethic has not been lost on industrialists coming into the region,” Swierenga writes.

In 2012, the DeVoses pulled off something that would have seemed unimaginable to their free-market forebears: they made Michigan a right-to-work state. Workers in the state are finally free; they can no longer be compelled to join a union as a condition of employment. A subsequent law has made it illegal for employers to process union dues, while simultaneously making it easier for corporations to deduct PAC money from employee paychecks. By 2015, just 15 percent of workers in Michigan were union members. “They won,” former state Rep. Ellen Lipton told me. “It may have taken them longer than they wanted, but they won.” Lipton was referring to the DeVoses’ remarkable success in shaping the state to conform to their hardcore laissez-faire vision over the past two decades. This improbable crusade was immeasurably aided by Michigan’s strict term-limit laws, which keep legislators beholden to donors and party apparatchiks rather than to their constituents. 

The tourist motto for Grand Rapids these days is “cool city.” It’s a nod to a campaign by Michigan’s last democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, whom Dick DeVos tried and failed to unseat in 2006. Granholm donned sunglasses to dramatize her fealty to the trendy development counsel of urbanologist Richard Florida. Across Michigan the word went forth: the key to a bright future for the state’s battered cities was to make them cool, filling them with the sorts of amenities that the young and college educated find irresistible, such as farmers markets, lofts, and art. The right-wing Mackinac Center for Public Policy, funded by the DeVoses, mocked the concept, arguing that “cool cities” discriminated against the extractor class, people who “build things and use energy and emit pollution — things that are not considered environmentally correct by the political ruling class.” Success was mixed. Flint and Pontiac never made it onto the cool list, while Detroit was somehow too cool to be included. But Grand Rapids took the business of being cool seriously.

“It’s a cool place, for a company town,” Mary Bouwense told me over craft beers at one of the city’s many brew pubs. There are more than a dozen breweries in Grand Rapids—including one at Gerald Ford International Airport. Bouwense, who is the president of the local teachers union, offered to take me on a tour of DeVos-related sites, but the snow once more intervened. Founders, the brew pub where she brought me instead, was packed on a Sunday afternoon, a sign, perhaps, of the diminishing influence of the once all-powerful Dutch Christian Reformed Church that helped incubate the moral conviction of the DeVoses. Since the tour was off, Bouwense, who is of Dutch descent, was helpfully guiding me through the theological divides separating the Christian Reformed and the Dutch Reformed. She also confirmed that the DeVoses are apostles of a different sort of Protestant ethic altogether, where conspicuous consumption no longer provokes much anxiety on the part of the believer. “I can see their helicopter coming and going from my office window,” she says.

The DeVos family is selling the American dream as a pyramid scheme through Amway.  Now they have control of America's entire education system with intent to do the same.

And it's your kids on the bottom of that pyramid.  I guarantee it.

Meanwhile In Congress

As I keep saying, Trump's not going anywhere until Republicans in Congress decide he's outlived his usefulness as a lightning rod for all the draconian cuts they plan.  Maybe they'll get rid of him at some point, but not until he signs everything the GOP in Congress have been waiting decades to get.

A House Republican is sponsoring legislation to do away with large portions of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including environmental justice and greenhouse gas programs. 

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) introduced the Wasteful EPA Programs Elimination Act on Thursday, saying it would save $7.5 billion annually. That would leave the agency with a budget of less than $1 billion. 

Major EPA climate change programs would be eliminated under the measure.

The legislation would also close all of the EPA’s regional offices, halt new regulations on ground-level ozone pollution and require the agency to lease unused property. 

“As a fiscal conservative, I believe Washington should be a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars,” Johnson said in a statement. 

“Part of being a good steward includes reining in unnecessary spending, holding agencies accountable for ‘waste,’ and getting rid of politicians’ ‘pet projects.’ For example, American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the EPA’s many vacant and underutilized properties that the EPA’s own Inspector General identified as wasteful,” he said.

Of course this has nothing to do with money, not when the Trump regime plans trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy that will explode the national debt.  But cutting the EPA by 90%?  That's a victory for GOP corporate greed that will pay off a hundredfold in donations down the road, and they know it.