StupidiNews!

• Police in Melbourne, Australia say an SUV that plowed into a crowd of pedestrians injuring 18 was a deliberate act, but stopped short of calling it terrorism.
• Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken will step down from office on January 2nd after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced earlier this year.
• Fishermen in the Philippines rescued hundreds from the sea as a ferry capsized near Manila, killing four as bad weather sank the craft.
• Defections by North Korean soldiers in 2017 reached their highest rate in years as another soldier defected across the DMZ early Thursday morning.
• Apple is working on a plan to allow software publishers to create a single app that will run on both iOS mobile devices and MacOS computers.

Last Call For Ballot Barrage

Like I said, I'm feeling really, really good about the Dems winning in 2018.  2020, not so much.  It only took voters 2 years to fully turn upon the Democrats in 2010 and wipe them out in the House.  The good news is, as I said, that works against the GOP too (at least in the short term).  CNN's latest generic ballot finds Democrats now with a whopping 18-point lead.

Democrats' already wide advantage over Republicans in a hypothetical Congressional matchup has grown, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. At the same time, enthusiasm about voting next year has increased among Democrats nationwide following an unexpected win in Alabama's Senate special election and a strong showing in Virginia's state government elections last month. 

Among registered voters, 56% say they favor a Democrat in their congressional district, while 38% prefer a Republican. That 18-point edge is the widest Democrats have held in CNN polling on the 2018 contests, and the largest at this point in midterm election cycles dating back two decades. The finding follows several other public polls showing large double-digit leads for Democrats on similar questions. 

Related: Full poll results 

Independent voters favor Democrats by a 16-point margin, 51% to 35%, similar to the 50% to 36% margin by which they favored Democrats in fall of 2005, ahead of Democrats' 2006 recapturing of the House and Senate. The Democrats hold a larger lead overall now because Republicans make up a smaller share of the electorate than they did in 2005. 

And those Republicans who are still in the electorate are less enthusiastic about voting next year than Democrats. Overall, 49% of registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting for Congress next year, compared with 32% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters who say the same.

That's not the funny part.  This is.

The poll was conducted before the passage of Republicans' signature tax reform bill this week, which the GOP hopes will boost their electoral prospects next year. Findings from the same poll released earlier this week found that the bill's unpopularity on the rise, with few expecting tangible benefits for themselves once it becomes law.

It's going to actually get worse for the GOP.in 2018, believe it or not.  In the crosstabs of the poll, Dems lead with men 49-42%, women 59-34%(!!!), and are tied with white voters at 46% each.  Non-white voters go with Dems 70-23%.

White non-college voters still favor the GOP, 52-40%, but they are offset by college-educated white voters, who favor the Dems by 21 points, 58-37%.  Dems also lead all age groups, even age 50-64 Boomers 46-44%.  Among Gen X voters 35-49, Dems win by a staggering 60-29%.

It's going to be a good year in 2018 for Dems unless you know, that war comes along and we rally around the flag.  Also keep in mind Dems had a 2 point lead in this same CNN poll in October 2014 and the GOP smashed the Dems thanks to record low turnout.

Somehow I think people are going to be motivated in November to vote however.

The New Normal, Con't

David Corn recaps 2017 as the year Donald Trump broke America.

Creeping authoritarianism, creeping autocracy, creeping kleptocracy—call it what you want. But the creep has turned into a sprint. The offenses to good government and fundamental values are happening each day, often several times a day—and in such a fusillade that there is often not enough time to ponder the horrendous implications of each one. And not enough space to consider the fundamental deterioration under way. Another aquatic metaphor: We are too busy being slammed by what’s coming out of the fire hose to see the water damage that is being done.

In recent days—like any set of recent days—the outrages have been many. During a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Trump, according to a White House “readout,” thanked the Russian leader “for acknowledging America’s strong economic performance in his annual press conference.” And they discussed working together to “resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea.” Apparently they spoke not a word about Russia’s attack on the United States during the 2016 campaign. Which seems to be the pattern. Since Trump took office, there has not been a single sign he has pressed Putin regarding Moscow’s operation to subvert American democracy. And as a much-noticed Washington Post piece pointed out, Trump has throughout the last year adamantly refused to accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia engaged in information warfare to help him win the presidency—and has taken no measures to prevent a rerun. So here we have an American president abdicating—out of pique—his most fundamental obligation: to protect the nation from foreign attack. And his party colleagues barely bat an eye at Trump’s negligence. 

If a dogcatcher refused to catch dogs, he would be deemed unfit for the position. But Trump has abdicated the top responsibility of the commander in chief, and this does not scandalize the congressional majority. The Constitution awards power to the president so he can safeguard the nation. Trump uses this power to safeguard his own power.
Trump’s reckless disregard for norms and rules has been embraced by his champions and foot soldiers. Claiming to be a law-and-order sort of guy, he has viciously attacked law enforcement that might affect him and his cronies. Angered by the ongoing FBI investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, he claimed the bureau is “in tatters.” And Fox News, a for-profit state news organ, dutifully puts on air a conservative activist who compares the current FBI to the KGB and essentially calls for the entire bureau to be shut down. (About a year ago, Trump equated the US intelligence community with Nazi Germany.) Others on and off Fox cheer for Trump to become a strongman leader who readily dispatches his perceived enemies. Though Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, Trump’s minions still rally to the cry of “Lock Her Up” and demonstrate their belief that extremism in the name of defending Trump is no vice. It’s not just party over country; it’s Trump over party over country. 

Trump and his comrades regularly assault the institutions of government that can impose a check on a president. Trump dismissed FBI chief James Comey in an attempt to protect himself. And Trump’s congressional allies in the past weeks have intensified their criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller, devoting far more vitriol to his investigation than to Putin’s secret war on a US election. The same folks who were fine with over a dozen Benghazi inquiries now look to undermine a duly authorized probe—led by a Republican!—that threatens to reveal truths inconvenient for the president. And they are eager to shutter or distract the congressional investigations that are supposed to deliver to the public the truth about the 2016 campaign. These GOPers are joining Trump in embracing political power instead of principle and, like the president, making it easier for a foreign foe to assault the United States and then escape consequences. This is a violation of their oath of office, and they don’t care. 

Nope.  And until we get rid of them, they will continue not to care.  Maybe the 55% of America who didn't (or couldn't) vote in 2016 will give a damn in 2018, I dunno.  It would be nice if we could overcome the GOP once and for all, but the reality is that there's tens of millions of us who are actively cheering for Trump's authoritarian regime actively and violently punishing the Obama Coalition, because they think they'll be in charge.

They won't be, but they'll still be better off than those people and that's all that matters anymore to them when they turn out in 2018 and 2020 for Trump and the GOP.  It's okay with them as long as they suffer less as white Christians than everyone else in establishing a new baseline of misery.

Taxing Our Patience, Con't

The Great GOP Tax Scam will soon be law, and while Republicans are more than happy to congratulate themselves on "saving the American people more of their own money" the reality is that most of us are screwed.

The hostility to redistributive democracy at the ideological center of the American right has made standard policies of successful modern welfare states, happily embraced by Europe’s conservative parties, seem beyond the moral pale for many Republicans. The outsize stakes seem to justify dubious tactics — bunking down with racists, aggressive gerrymandering, inventing paper-thin pretexts for voting rules that disproportionately hurt Democrats — to prevent majorities from voting themselves a bigger slice of the pie. 

But the idea that there is an inherent tension between democracy and the integrity of property rights is wildly misguided. The liberal-democratic state is a relatively recent historical innovation, and our best accounts of the transition from autocracy to democracy points to the role of democratic political inclusion in protecting property rights. 

As Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and James Robinson of Harvard show in “Why Nations Fail,” ruling elites in pre-democratic states arranged political and economic institutions to extract labor and property from the lower orders. That is to say, the system was set up to make it easy for elites to seize what ought to have been other people’s stuff. 

In “Inequality and Democratization,” the political scientists Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels show that this demand for political inclusion generally isn’t driven by a desire to use the existing institutions to plunder the elites. It’s driven by a desire to keep the elites from continuing to plunder them.

It’s easy to say that everyone ought to have certain rights. Democracy is how we come to get and protect them. Far from endangering property rights by facilitating redistribution, inclusive democratic institutions limit the “organized banditry” of the elite-dominated state by bringing everyone inside the charmed circle of legally enforced rights. 

Democracy is fundamentally about protecting the middle and lower classes from redistribution by establishing the equality of basic rights that makes it possible for everyone to be a capitalist. Democracy doesn’t strangle the golden goose of free enterprise through redistributive taxation; it fattens the goose by releasing the talent, ingenuity and effort of otherwise abused and exploited people.

At a time when America’s faith in democracy is flagging, the Republicans elected to treat the United States Senate, and the citizens it represents, with all the respect college guys accord public restrooms. It’s easier to reverse a bad piece of legislation than the bad reputation of our representative institutions, which is why the way the tax bill was passed is probably worse than what’s in it. Ultimately, it’s the integrity of democratic institutions and the rule of law that gives ordinary people the power to protect themselves against elite exploitation. But the Republican majority is bulldozing through basic democratic norms as though freedom has everything to do with the tax code and democracy just gets in the way.

We live in, and have lived in all my life dating back to the Reagan era when I was a toddler, an era where protecting the wheels of government from getting dirty from the unwashed masses has always been the point of the federal government.

With the singular exception of Obamacare (which will soon be completely broken thanks to this tax bill) the American federal government has always been classified as "the enemy of the people" while simultaneously I have been told all my life that the word "democracy" itself is dirty word, that it represents the basest tyranny of the majority, but only when the wealthiest among us disagree with that majority.

This bill is going to wreck the economy and the Republicans know it, the real test comes when the GOP is voted out of office and they can go back to blaming the Democratic majority voted in next year for not fixing things quickly enough in 2019, something that should lead to a brand-new GOP majority in Congress in 2020 (and a second Trump term) by my calculations.

By the way, this is where wealth inequality in America was at five years ago, before the GOP bill makes it exponentially worse.  We're already the most unequal developed country on earth by a long shot.  We're now headed deep into New Gilded Age territory.



Maybe I'm a cynic, but Poly Sci has been a pretty harsh mistress all my life, and History is far more violent than she is.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans have passed their $2.2 trillion tax cut bill for the rich in a 51-48 vote overnight, the bill will get one final House GOP vote before going to Donald Trump's desk.
• Disgraced former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, died in Rome at the age of 86, Law was known for covering up the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals.
• The man accused of a plot to assassinate British PM Theresa May earlier this month will go on trial in June for charges under British terrorism law.
• Uber has been classified as a transport service by the EU's highest court, meaning the ride-share service must meet taxi and limo licensing regulations across Europe.
• House Republicans are looking into passing legislation that would permanently end net neutrality and prevent states and the FCC from regulating internet service providers at all.

Last Call For Vote Like It Matters

Next time somebody tells you your vote doesn't matter in local and state races, remember 2017 in Virginia.

A Republican seat flipped Democratic in a wild recount Tuesday - with the Democrat winning by a single vote - creating a rare 50-50 tie between the parties in the House of Delegates and refashioning the political landscape in Richmond.

Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th District of the House of Delegates, seizing the seat from Republican incumbent David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.

Of the 23,866 votes cast in the Newport News district on Election Day, Yancey held a tenuous lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.

But five hours and much nailbiting later, after painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed before it gradually disappeared and then reversed, allowing Simonds to beat him by one vote.

The final tally: 11,608 for Simonds to 11,607 for Yancey.

Power sharing in the House of Delegates is an awkward exercise. Committee chairs have to be negotiated as does the person who will serve as Speaker. With the parties split 50-50, there is no mechanism to break ties and any legislation short of 51 votes does not advance. Republicans hold a slight 21-19 edge in the state senate but with a Democratic lieutenant governor to break ties, and a Democratic governor with veto power, Republicans may be forced to advance a more bipartisan agenda.

One vote flipped a seat from GOP to Democratic.  That one flipped seat in turn tied up the State House of Delegates rather than giving the GOP control.

One single vote.

One single vote may be the difference between Medicaid expansion in Virginia and no expansion, which the GOP in the House of Delegates swore to block.

One single, solitary vote.

No wonder the GOP is trying to do everything they can to disenfranchise Democratic voters.  One vote can change everything.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Mueller probe continues (for now at least) and so do the House and Senate investigations. They're following the money, separately and in tandem, and apparently the trail of Russian meddling and the 2016 election has led to the doorstep of one third-party candidate: Green Party gadfly Dr. Jill Stein.

The top congressional committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has set its sights on the Green Party and its nominee, Jill Stein.
Dennis Trainor Jr., who worked for the Stein campaign from January to August of 2015, says Stein contacted him on Friday saying the Senate Intelligence Committee had requested that the campaign comply with a document search. 

Trainor, who served as the campaign’s communications director and acting manager during that time, told BuzzFeed News that he was informed of the committee’s request because during his time on the campaign, his personal cell phone was “a primary point of contact” for those looking to reach Stein or the campaign. That included producers from RT News, the Russian state-funded media company, who booked Stein for several appearances, Trainor said. 

“Then I was told by Jill just to wait for further instructions,” Trainor said, adding that he was told the campaign would contact him in the next week with instructions, presumably from the Senate Intelligence Committee, for executing the document search, including precise search terms. That has not happened yet, Trainor said. 

When asked Monday what the committee was looking for from the Stein campaign, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the committee’s chairman, responded, "collusion with the Russians." Burr said that the committee is "just starting" its work investigating two campaigns, but did not elaborate. 

Stein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trainor, who has done on-and-off work for Stein since formally leaving the campaign in 2015, said he is inclined to cooperate with the committee’s request but wants to first seek legal counsel. He said he believes Stein plans to comply as well and post the documents on her own website “in an effort to show complete transparency and kind of wage her own war against [...] what I imagine she thinks is an overblown investigation into collusion.” 

Stein has not previously been a major focus during the Russia investigations on Capitol Hill, but her name has surfaced occasionally. The Senate Judiciary mentioned her in a letter to Donald Trump Jr. in July, requesting copies of “all communications to, from, or copied” to the president’s son that related to Stein and a long list of other, more prominent figures in the investigations. 

Trainor said he would be surprised if Stein ever communicated with Trump Jr., who participated in an interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors for more than nine hours last Wednesday. “Don Jr. has been incredibly cooperative with the committee,” Burr said Thursday. 

Stein’s name has also come up in the context of a 2015 dinner hosted by RT in Moscow. Stein sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn, who served as Donald Trump’s first White House national security adviser until he was ousted just 24 days into the job. Flynn recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting a criminal investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. 

Trainor said he expects the Senate Intelligence Committee will want to know more about the Moscow dinner, but that he wasn’t employed by the campaign at that time and therefore wouldn’t have any documents related to the event. Stein has said that unlike Flynn, she was not paid to attend the dinner and paid for her own travel costs.

That Russia Today dinner with Flynn and Putin has always struck me as weird, if not outright bad news.  Sure, you couldn't find a better third-party foil to mess up America's elections than Jill Stein, especially if you were trying to throw the election away from Clinton by attacking her from the left.  I always figured Stein was Putin backup plan, considering he had the man he wanted, Donald Trump, squarely in the spotlight.

Then again, Stein's margin in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are what cost her those states and the election.  If she hadn't siphoned votes from Clinton, Hillary would have won.

I don't feel bad at all that she's drawn the attention of investigators.  Meanwhile a Washington Post piece from last week is getting attention because it flatly points out that the nation's intelligence services knew the Trump campaign team was compromised by the Russians, but Trump refused to lift a finger to do anything to stop them...and still hasn't done so.

In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.

They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.

The story goes on to say that the intelligence bureaus straight up told Trump that they had evidence that Putin himself had given these orders to interfere in the election, but Trump's ego refused to allow him to believe that he was helped to a victory he clearly felt he had been granted by dint of his own glory.

And Trump still has yet to deal with Russia. He's not going to, because he's a Russian asset.  Don't take my word for it though, take Jim Clapper's.

While his career had its ups and downs—you don’t work in any trade for over 50 years without missteps—the former far outweighed the latter. Clapper, a retired Air Force three-star general, is widely respected in national security circles, across partisan lines, as a guy who knows his stuff and focuses on the job. Naturally, he’s exceptionally discreet as well. 

That changed yesterday, when Clapper went on CNN to drop an unimaginably large bombshell on President Donald Trump. Since the inauguration in January, Clapper has made a few critical comments regarding the president and his strange ties to Moscow, but these have been largely anodyne. Clapper began showing his hand in September, with a comment that the IC assessment of Russian interference in the 2016 election raised questions about why Trump was in the White House: it “cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory in the election,” he stated. 

At the end of October, in an interview with Politico, Clapper added more about Kremlin interference in the 2016 election: “The Russians have succeeded, I believe, beyond their wildest expectations.” Clapper dismissed President Trump’s repeated attacks on the investigation of his Moscow links as “fake news” with a warning that the Russians “have been emboldened and they will continue to do this.” 

Clapper went considerably further yesterday in his appearance on CNN’s The Lead, in which he finally let his top secret mask drop to say what he really thinks about our 45th president: 

I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president … You have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president. 

When pressed about what exactly he was saying, Clapper explained that he meant his words “figuratively,” but that barely mitigates the shock value of what he said. To be perfectly clear: America’s most experienced spy boss publicly termed our president an asset—that is, a witting agent—of the Kremlin who is being controlled by Vladimir Putin. Even if meant only “figuratively,” this is the most jaw-dropping statement ever uttered about any American president by any serious commentator.

Once again, Trump is attacking our intelligence services because they have the evidence that he is a Russian asset.

And most of the rest of the GOP knew this and went along willingly.

The Blue Wave Builds, Con't

Democrats continue to hold a double-digit lead in the generic congressional ballot numbers as Trump is now dragging the GOP down like a millstone.

If this lead continues to hold (or grows, certainly possible if things start going south on the economy or otherwise) then Democrats are looking to make big gains in the suburban swing districts that will allow them to retake the House.

From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican-held seats filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump. 

“If you look at the patterns of where gains are being made and who is creating the foundation for those gains, it’s the same: An energized Democratic base is linking arms with disaffected suburban voters,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who as a member of Congress in 2006 helped Democrats win back the House. “The president’s conduct has basically given voters this permission slip to go against the Republicans.”
Congressional Republicans are scrambling to fortify their defenses. 

On Wednesday, the last five leaders of the House Republican campaign arm privately addressed Republican lawmakers, outlining the sort of suburban districts most at risk and imploring members to contribute to their colleagues. Former Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York said it had been aimed at dozens of lawmakers elected since 2010 who had never faced a Democratic wave. 

“The general tenor was: This is not a year like most of you have seen, because you’ve not seen wind in your face,” said Mr. Reynolds, who led the House campaign committee in 2006. 

While Mr. Trump has seemed eager to engage in the midterm races, it is unclear where he would campaign and unlikely his presence would help Republicans in many imperiled districts. Already, his unpopularity is luring candidates into races once considered long shots. Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House. 

In October, Mayor Ben McAdams of Salt Lake County, a Democrat, announced a bid to oust Representative Mia Love in Utah, a conservative state stocked with educated Mormon voters who view Mr. Trump with disdain. In early December, Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Ky., a Democrat, kicked off a campaign against Representative Andy Barr, about 40 percent of whose electorate is in Lexington, home to the University of Kentucky. 

Outside Philadelphia, Scott Wallace, a lawyer and philanthropist whose grandfather was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, is exploring a challenge to Representative Brian Fitzpatrick in a traditional haven for white-collar Republicans, people who have spoken with Mr. Wallace said. And P. G. Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati City Council member who briefly ran for Senate last year, is being recruited by House Democrats to challenge Representative Steve Chabot in a district that mixes African-Americans and urban and suburban whites. 

“It has all the trappings of a winnable seat if the climate cooperates,” Mr. Sittenfeld said.
Should that climate worsen, Republicans say, lawmakers not previously thought to be at risk could be endangered, like Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who is facing a former State Senate leader.

Beyond the biggest blue states, perhaps two dozen red-hued districts with significant suburban populations could be winnable for Democrats in a banner year, including those held by Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dave Reichert of Washington State; Ted Budd and Robert Pittenger of North Carolina; and Kevin Yoder of Kansas.

Seeing Steve Chabot knocked off in Cincinnati and Andy Barr knocked off in Lexington would be the kind of wins Dems need in order to take the House back.  And a 2010-style wave election could put dozens of seats in play for the Dems that gerrymandering has put out of reach, places where Dems would need a double-digit advantage to win.

That's why the GOP is running scared right now.  They know the axe is coming.

StupidiNews!

• Federal investigators say an Amtrak passenger train was speeding as the train derailed at a highway overpass in Washington State, killing 3 and injuring more than 100.
• Columbia, South Carolina may become the first US city to ban the sale of "bump stocks", the devices were used on several guns in October's deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas.
• The US is officially putting the blame for May's "WannaCry" cyberware ransom attack on North Korea, homeland security adviser Tom Bossert makes the charge in today's WSJ.
• House Republicans plan to take up a final vote on the GOP tax bill today and send the bill to the Senate where it will face Democratic senators looking to delay the legislation.
• Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab is suing the Trump regime for banning the company's software from government PCs over possible Russian cooperation to steal data.

Last Call For The New Black Panthers

Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson has owned the team since its inception in the NFL almost 25 years ago, but he won't be the owner much longer as the league is now formally investigating his conduct towards players and staff as racist and sexist.

Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson announced Sunday that he would put his team up for sale at the end of the season after the National Football League said it was opening an investigation into accusations of workplace misconduct against him. 

"I believe that it is time to turn the franchise over to new ownership," Richardson, 81, said in a statement on the team's website. "Therefore, I will put the team up for sale at the end of this NFL season." 

Two days ago, the team said it was conducting an internal investigation into Richardson's conduct, but did not specify the nature of the allegations. Sports Illustrated says they include sexual harassment of multiple female employees and a racial slur. 

Hours before Richardson's announcement on Sunday, NFL.com reported that the league was opening its own investigation into the allegations. 

In the statement on Friday announcing the internal investigation, the Panthers said the team was "committed to ensuring a safe, comfortable and diverse work environment where all individuals, regardless of sex, race, color, religion, gender, or sexual identity or orientation, are treated fairly and equally." 

The Panthers announced that former White House chief of staff to President Clinton, Erskine Bowles — who is a minority owner of the team — would oversee the investigation by law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart and Sullivan. 

SI, quoting unnamed sources, detailed what it claims were inappropriate comments made by Richardson about how female employees fit into their jeans, as well as "Multiple female employees [recalling] to SI that Richardson asked them if he could personally shave their legs," the magazine said. 

" ... on multiple occasions when Richardson's conduct has triggered complaints—for sexual harassment against female employees and for directing a racial slur at an African American employee—he has taken a leaf from a playbook he's deployed in the past: Confidential settlements were reached and payments were made to complainants, accompanied by non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses designed to shield the owner and the organization from further liability and damaging publicity," according to SI.

Unlike Congress, it seems Richardson wont be able to get away with secret harassment settlement claims bound by NDAs.  And who would be willing to buy the Cardiac Cats?

Diddy, of course. And his first hire would be Colin Kaepernick.

Hip hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs said Sunday night he’s interested in buying the Carolina Panthers and signing quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has been unemployed this season after kneeling during the national anthem in 2016. 

Panthers owner Jerry Richardson announced Sunday he would be selling the team after the 2017 season, just hours after Sports Illustratedpublished accusations of sexual misconduct from former employees. Richardson also allegedly used a racial slur about a team scout. 

Diddy took to Twitter soon after the Panthers announced the upcoming sale, declaring his desire to own a team and increase diversity among NFL ownership.

In a video posted to Instagram on Sunday night, Combs said “I would be the best NFL owner you could imagine. I will immediately address the Colin Kaepernick situation, and put him in the running for next year’s starting quarterback. It’s just competition baby, it’s just competition.”

We'll see who owns the Panthers next season.  Having grown up in North Carolina I've been a Panthers fan since the beginning, but I'm not going to lie and say Richardson has been a good owner.  The team has made it to two Super Bowls despite him, so hopefully the new owner won't be a complete jackass who happens to have several hundred million bucks lying about.

Actually Diddy's probably right that he might be the best owner we could hope for given that criteria.

Taxing Our Patience, Con't

With Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain now expected to miss the final votes on the GOP tax bill in the Senate this week as chemotherapy for his advanced brain cancer continues, the focus turns to Tennessee GOP Sen. Bob Corker, who now has to answer for his sudden and last-second yes vote as critics have found a provision slipped into the Senate bill that will personally benefit Corker by millions of dollars.

In an exclusive interview with International Business Times, U.S. Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn, denied knowing about a controversial last-minute provision slipped into the Republican tax bill that could personally enrich him. Corker, the lone Republican to vote against the original Senate bill, which didn't include the provision, also admitted he has not read the final tax bill he announced he will support.

A trio of Democratic Senators, meanwhile, slammed the provision, which was first reported on by IBT.

Corker’s vote is considered pivotal in the closely divided Senate and he could be in a position to make or break the landmark legislation. He declared his support for the final reconciled version of the bill on Friday after GOP lawmakers added a provision that could benefit his vast real estate holdings -- a provision that Corker denied having any knowledge of.

In a series of rapid-fire telephone interviews, Corker asked IBT for a description of the provision, and then criticized it. But minutes later, he called back to walk back that criticism, saying he wanted to further study the issue, and that it was more complex than he initially understood it to be. Despite potentially holding the fate of the entire tax bill in his hands, Corker told IBT that he has only read a short summary of the $1.4 trillion legislation.

“I had like a two-page summary I went through with leadership,” said Corker. “I never saw the actual text.” Despite not reading the bill -- and having time to read it before the final vote scheduled for this week -- he reiterated his support for the bill to IBT, support he announced hours before bill’s full text was publicly released on Friday.

So Corker was a yes on the bill without reading it.  And then IBT catches him in the act of raiding the till.

Corker called IBT to respond to a series of IBT investigative reports showing that he switched his vote to “yes” on the tax legislation, only after Republican leaders added in a provision reducing taxes on income from real-estate LLCs. Federal records reviewed by IBT show Corker, a commercial real estate mogul, made up to $7 million last year from such income. President Donald Trump's financial disclosures listed between $41 million and $68 million of the same income.

After the report, Corker called IBT and asked for a detailed description of the provision, insisting he did not know about. After the provision was described, he said: “If I understand what [the provision] does, it sounds totally unnecessary and borderline ridiculous.”

A few minutes later, however, Corker called back, and tried to back off that criticism.

“I don’t really know what the provision does to be honest. I would need an accountant to explain it,” Corker said. “I had no knowledge of this and would have no knowledge of it except for you guys are calling me about it. I have no idea whatsoever whether it impacts me or doesn’t impact me.”

Corker you see would benefit from the same multi-million dollar tax break that a certain temper-tantrum tossing tangerine tyrant in training would benefit from, a provision slipped into the Senate bill text in the last minute.  He knows it, Trump knows it, and now the people know it.

The GOP is raiding the treasury on the way out before the economy collapses into a depression, and they're not even bothering to hide it.  How many other GOP senators got a kickback like Corker to screw their constituents?

They're planning to vote this week before we can find out.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Donald Trump says he has no plans to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but he does have issues with Justice Department leadership as the game of cat and mouse continues.

President Trump on Sunday sought to douse speculation that he may fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III amid an intensifying campaign by Trump allies to attack the wide-ranging Russia investigation as improper and politically motivated.

Returning to the White House from Camp David, Trump was asked Sunday whether he intended to fire Mueller. “No, I’m not,” he told journalists, insisting that there was “no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia.

The president’s comments came a day after a lawyer representing Trump’s transition team accused Mueller of wrongfully obtaining thousands of emails sent and received by Trump officials before the start of his administration — a legal and public relations maneuver seen as possibly laying the groundwork to oust the special counsel.

Trump criticized Mueller for gaining access to those emails, telling reporters the situation was “not looking good.”

“It’s quite sad to see that,” Trump said. “My people were very upset about it.”

Mueller’s spokesman denied wrongdoing, and some legal experts questioned the claim that the emails were improperly obtained.

The outcry over Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference grew louder over the weekend among Trump loyalists and conservative media figures. Although Trump has publicly and privately criticized the Department of Justice and the FBI and voiced displeasure with his appointees there, the president’s advisers insisted he is not aiming his ire at Mueller.

“As the White House has repeatedly and emphatically said for months, there is no consideration about firing or replacing the special counsel with whom the White House has fully cooperated in order to permit a fully vetted yet prompt conclusion,” Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer overseeing the Russia matter, said Sunday in a statement.

Trump’s lawyers, who have been assuring the president that Mueller’s investigation is poised to wrap up by January or so, are scheduled to meet with Mueller’s team this week for a routine status conference. They are expected to ask the special counsel if there are any other outstanding questions or materials that investigators need before concluding the probe.

Trump's not angry at Mueller, you see. He expects the investigations to be over and done with next month.  He's angry at the people who employed Mueller.  After all, Mueller's just doing his job and there's nothing to find because Trump believes he did nothing wrong, so the investigation will be over shortly.

One way or another, it will be over shortly, that is.

Advisers who have spoken recently with Trump about the Russia investigation said the president was sharply critical of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller operation — but did not broach the idea of firing Mueller.

“I think he realizes that would be a step too far,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private conversation.

Rather, Trump appeared to be contemplating changes in the Justice Department’s leadership. In recent discussions, two advisers said, Trump has called the attorney general “weak,” and complained that Rosenstein has shown insufficient accountability on the special counsel’s work. A senior official said Trump mocked Rosenstein’s recent testimony on Capitol Hill, saying he looked weak and unable to answer questions. Trump has ranted about Rosenstein as “a Democrat,” one of these advisers said, and characterized him as a threat to his presidency.

In fact, Rosenstein is a Republican. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated him to be U.S. attorney in Maryland.

After all, Trump can't actually fire Mueller himself, he can simply pull a Saturday Night Massacre and fire people in the Justice Department until he finds somebody willing to get rid of Mueller for him.

Trump regime State TV certainly wants him to jettison a lot of people.

Fox News host Jesse Watters suggested that the FBI investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election has maybe transformed into a “coup” against President Donald trump. Before a segment in which Watters interviewed Kellyanne Conway with the chyron, “A COUP IN AMERICA?” the Fox News host went on a rant about what he described as “smoking gun evidence” that the FBI agents investigating Trump are biased against the president.

“The investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign has been crooked from the jump,” Watters said on Saturday night. “But the scary part is we may now have proof the investigation was weaponized to destroy his presidency for partisan political purposes and to disenfranchise millions of American voters. Now, if that’s true, we have a coup on our hands in America.”

Watters specifically criticized FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was fired after he was found to have sent anti-Trump messages to a colleague. And Strzok is hardly alone as a target. Many at Fox have been increasing the rhetoric against FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Because the FBI has always been a hotbed of radical leftist anarchy rather than law and order, or something.

On Saturday night, another Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, outright suggested that the FBI wanted to reverse Trump’s election. She explained her reasoning:

What would you say if I told you your vote doesn’t count? That all the effort into the issues and candidates is a waste of time? That there are people at the citadel of power who believe it is their right to invalidate your choice if they don’t agree with it?

Folks, this is not about politics. It’s much bigger. I doubt in American presidential election history that there has been as great a crime or as large a stain on our democracy than that committed by a criminal cabal in our FBI and the Department of Justice who think they know better than we who our president should be.

FOX News is certainly enjoying lighting all these fuses, priming viewers and all but calling for  bloody violence against if Mueller recommends charges against Trump, and the "all but" part will disappear when Mueller does so.

You thought 2017 was bad, folks?  2018 is two weeks away and it already promises to be one of the darkest years in modern American history.

StupidiNews!

• The power has been restored to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the busiest airport in the world canceled hundreds of flights and left thousands of holiday fliers stranded.
• The NFL has taken over the sexual misconduct and racial harassment investigation of Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, the league is retaining an outside counsel.
• Republicans say they have to votes to pass a final tax bill this week and put it on Donald Trump's desk before Christmas, it would be the biggest tax rewrite in 30 years.
• Meanwhile Senate Republicans aren't quite sure they have the votes to keep the government open another month as the House GOP's budget bill gives $664 billion to the Pentagon.
• Two new studies of Hurricane Harvey find that the record rainfall that flooded Houston earlier this years was made significantly worse by global warming.

Sunday Long Read: Millennial Malaise

HuffPost's Michael Hobbes makes the solid, strong case that the cause of the dire, economic disaster with the Millennial generation is the same problem that Gen Xers like me have: the Boomers screwed us all to the wall and are looting the remaining wealth in the country.  Only the problem is exponentially worse for Millennials, because the vast majority of the generational cohort that now makes up a quarter of the country is they're broke and always will be.

Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past.

I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting for adulthood to kick in. My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted. 

We’ve all heard the statistics. More millennials live with their parents than with roommates. We are delaying partner-marrying and house-buying and kid-having for longer than any previous generation. And, according to The Olds, our problems are all our fault: We got the wrong degree. We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need. We still haven’t learned to code. We killed cereal and department stores and golf and napkins and lunch. Mention “millennial” to anyone over 40 and the word “entitlement” will come back at you within seconds, our own intergenerational game of Marco Polo.

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

But generalizations about millennials, like those about any other arbitrarily defined group of 75 million people, fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. Contrary to the cliché, the vast majority of millennials did not go to college, do not work as baristas and cannot lean on their parents for help. Every stereotype of our generation applies only to the tiniest, richest, whitest sliver of young people. And the circumstances we live in are more dire than most people realize.

They are crushed under student debt 300% of what their parents had to attend the same universities, half as likely to own a home, and 20% are living under the federal poverty line, and doomed to work themselves to death without ever getting a dime of Social Security or Medicaid that will be long gone 40 years from now.

And they are pissed.

What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a secure existence—education, housing and health care—has inflated into the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. And the opportunities leading to a middle-class life—the ones that boomers lucked into—are being lifted out of our reach. Add it all up and it’s no surprise that we’re the first generation in modern history to end up poorer than our parents.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

It’s tempting to look at the recession as the cause of all this, the Great Fuckening from which we are still waiting to recover. But what we are living through now, and what the recession merely accelerated, is a historic convergence of economic maladies, many of them decades in the making. Decision by decision, the economy has turned into a young people-screwing machine. And unless something changes, our calamity is going to become America’s.

And that calamity is coming imminently, folks.  The lunatics at the helm of the ship are bailing with everything from the safe and when we run aground its going to get violent, bloody, and awful.  We're long, long overdue for some historical corrections.  It's the Millennials who will pay the highest price, too, because the tens of millions of Millennials who couldn't afford any college at all now have zero job prospects.

It will only get worse.

Israeli Messy Right Now

The UN Security Council is attempting to do something about Trump's explosive call to end the Middle East peace process and unilaterally declare Jerusalem the sole province of Israel, but there's not much the UN can frankly do, and Trump knows it.

The United Nations Security Council is considering a draft resolution that would insist any decisions on the status of Jerusalem have no legal effect and must be rescinded after U.S. President Donald Trump recognized the city as Israel’s capital.

The one-page Egyptian-drafted text, which was circulated to the 15-member council on Saturday and seen by Reuters, does not specifically mention the United States or Trump. Diplomats say it has broad support but will likely be vetoed by Washington.

The council could vote early next week, diplomats said. A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, France, Britain, Russia or China to pass.

Trump abruptly reversed decades of U.S. policy this month when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, generating outrage from Palestinians. Trump also plans to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

After the decision, Arab foreign ministers agreed to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution. While the draft is unlikely to be adopted, it would further isolate Trump over the Jerusalem issue.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the draft. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has praised Trump’s decision as “the just and right thing to do.”

The draft U.N. resolution “affirms that any decisions and actions which purport to have altered, the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council.”

Again, such a measure would be vetoed by the US (as any real UN Security Council measure holding Israel actually responsible for its collective punishment of Palestinians over the last several decades has been vetoed by the US, long before Trump) but I'm sure the vote will be 14-1 anyway.

The reality is that the UN can't really do anything that its five permanent members don't want done collectively, so there's no real will to punish the Trump regime politically, economically, or diplomatically (and certainly not militarily!)

 I don't see that changing anytime soon.