Sunday Long Read: Trash Can't

In a pretty sobering piece, Kiera Feldman at ProPublica takes a long look at the most dangerous job in the Big Apple: working the private garbage trucks that roam the city in the darkness.

Shortly before 5 a.m. on a recent November night, a garbage truck with a New York Yankees decal on the side sped through a red light on an empty street in the Bronx. The two workers aboard were running late. Before long, they would start getting calls from their boss. “Where are you on the route? Hurry up, it shouldn’t take this long.” Theirs was one of 133 garbage trucks owned by Action Carting, the largest waste company in New York City, which picks up the garbage and recycling from 16,700 businesses.

Going 20 miles per hour above the city’s 25 mph limit, the Action truck ran another red light with a worker, called a “helper,” hanging off the back. Just a few miles away the week before, another man had died in the middle of the night beneath the wheels of another company’s garbage truck. The Action truck began driving on the wrong side of the road in preparation for the next stop. The workers were racing to pick up as much garbage as possible before dawn arrived and the streets filled with slow traffic. “This route should take you twelve hours,” the boss often told them. “It shouldn’t take you fourteen hours.”

Working 10- to 14-hour days, six days per week, means that no one is ever anything close to rested. The company holds monthly safety meetings and plays videos, taken by cameras installed inside the trucks, of Action drivers falling asleep at the wheel. “You’re showing us videos of guys being fatigued, guys falling asleep,” a driver told me. (All Action employees asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation.) “But you aren’t doing anything about it.”

“In the history of the company I am sure there have been times where supervisors have inappropriately rushed people,” said Action Carting CEO Ron Bergamini. “They shouldn’t be, and they’d be fired if they ever told people to run red lights or speed. But you have to find the balance between efficiency and safety, and that’s a struggle we work on every day. But you cannot turn around and say, ‘Hey just take your time, go as long as you want.’” He pointed out that workers can anonymously report concerns to a safety hotline. As to the questions of overwork and driver fatigue, Bergamini responded, “That’s a struggle that the whole industry has — of getting people to work less.”

In the universe of New York’s garbage industry, Action is considered a company that takes the high road. A union shop, it offers starting pay of about $16 per hour for helpers and $23 for drivers, far more than many other companies. And unlike some other companies, Action provides high-visibility gear and conducts safety meetings. But since 2008, the company’s trucks have killed five pedestrians or cyclists.

In New York City overall, private sanitation trucks killed seven people in 2017. By contrast, city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t caused a fatality since 2014.

Pedestrians aren’t the only casualties, and Action isn’t the only company involved in fatalities. Waste and recycling work is the fifth most fatal job in America — far more deadly than serving as a police officer or a firefighter. Loggers have the highest fatality rate, followed by fishing workers, aircraft pilots and roofers. From the collection out on garbage trucks, to the processing at transfer stations and recycling centers, to the dumping at landfills, the waste industry averages about one worker fatality a week. Nationally, in 2016, 82 percent of waste-worker deaths occurred in the private sector.

There are two vastly different worlds of garbage in New York City: day and night. By day, 7,200 uniformed municipal workers from the city’s Department of Sanitation go door-to-door, collecting the residential trash. Like postal workers, they tend to follow compact routes. They work eight-hour days with time-and-a-half for overtime and snow removal and double-time for Sundays. With a median base pay of $69,000 plus health care, a pension, almost four weeks of paid vacation and unlimited sick days, the Department of Sanitation workforce is overwhelmingly full time and unionized. It’s also 55 percent white, and 91 percent male.

But come nightfall, an army of private garbage trucks from more than 250 sanitation companies zigzag across town in ad hoc fashion, carting away the trash and recycling from every business — every bodega, restaurant and office building in the five boroughs. Those private carters remove more than half of the city’s total waste. 

Since each business chooses its own carter, a dozen garbage trucks might converge on a single block over the course of a night. In one five-block stretch near Rockefeller Center, for example, 27 garbage companies stop at 86 businesses, according to an analysis of city data by ProPublica and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Plenty of other U.S. cities split trash collection along the same lines — residential waste on the municipal side, commercial waste on the private side — but New York is singular in the scale of private collection operations.

Many waste companies pay workers a flat fee, some as little as $80 a shift, no matter the hours, with no health benefits, overtime pay or retirement plans. The practice of employing helpers off the books is widespread, according to a 2016 report by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. The workforce is more than 60 percent minority, and more than half of Latino workers and about a third of black workers earn less than $35,000 annually. Many of these jobs are non-union, and while the drivers tend to be full-time employees, the helpers are often contract workers with unstable hours — some scrambling to work enough to feed their families, others clocking 18-hour or longer days. A May 2016 study by the nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health found that the underpayment or nonpayment of wages is “rampant in the commercial waste industry.”

$80 bucks a shift for 18 hours and no benefits whatsoever, paid cash off the books and you have to buy your own uniform and safety gear, if you get paid at all.  That's where "cheaper, private carting" gets you in NYC these days.  And that's just the start of this piece.

Hopefully DeBlasio will do something about it.  Cuomo too.

It Doesn't Matter If The Villain Is Ill

...It only matters that Trump is unfit for office.  The "Is Trump nuts?" argument, as Josh Marshall correctly points out, is ultimately meaningless and a distraction from the truth.

One of the diagnoses you often hear tossed around, rightly or wrongly, is Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), a Class B personality disorder. I think most psychologists and psychiatrists would tell you, privately if not publicly, that a number of Trump’s behaviors could (I stress, “could”) be explained by NPD. But that doesn’t tell us that much. Lots of symptoms and behaviors can be explained by many different diseases and disorders. Or no disorder or problem at all. That’s why you need a proper examination. (This applies of course to both somatic and mental illnesses.) Some shrinks may say they’ve seen enough to know; others would say, no, never without a full examination. Again, for our purposes, it doesn’t matter. If the entire psychiatric profession got together and examined Trump and pronounced him entirely free of any mental illness, his behavior wouldn’t be any less whacked or dangerous in a President.

That brings us back to the point. It’s really only the behavior that matters to us as citizens. A diagnosis would only be helpful to learn about behavior we don’t know about or predict future endangering behavior. Since we know about the behavior we’re talking about, none of that matters or applies. In common sense, every day rather than clinical language Trump is clearly unstable, erratic, impulsive. In a word, he’s nuts and not well. As citizens, we are entirely able and entitled to make these determinations. They are ordinary English language descriptors that the psychiatric profession doesn’t control and shouldn’t want to control. The entire debate over whether Trump is “mentally ill” is simply a diversion, premised on the idea that we need either permission or dictation to say he is not able to safely or competently fulfill the job of President. We don’t. The observed behavior is really all that is necessary and all that matters. It’s very clear.

In other words, the reason why Trump is unfit for office as demonstrated by his behavior in office is irrelevant.  The key here is that Trump is unfit for office, and should be removed from it.

We have three mechanisms to remove Trump: the 2020 election, impeachment on high crimes and misdemeanors and then conviction/removal by the Congress, and removal under the 25th Amendment.   The latter two are both controlled by Trump's party, and neither one will be used unless an overwhelming majority of the American people start calling for that to happen.  We're not at that point yet.

The real problem is that Trump's unfitness for office is obvious to the party that nominated him, and yet they will do nothing.  That is the failure of the American political system right now, and one that will cost us for decades, if not generations.

Last Call For Mandel Drops Out

Current Ohio GOP Treasurer Josh Mandel, running to unseat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, is now out of the 2018 Ohio Senate race.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel quit the race Friday, citing his wife's health. 

He had been hoping to unseat U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat. Mandel came up short in 2012, when he lost by six percentage points to Brown.

The shocking move leaves Republicans with barely a month to find a formidable candidate in a key state. The filing deadline is Feb. 7. 

There is another Republican running, a Cleveland banker and political novice Mike Gibbons.

Gibbons is a Republican, but Mandel was widely expected to give Brown a brutal race.  Now?  Who knows?  Ohio Republicans have a month  to come up with someone to run against Brown in a year where Trump will be crushing the GOP under the weight of his failures.

Good luck with that.   As for Mandel?

Over a year ago, I launched a campaign for US Senate to make our state and country a better place for my children and yours. Since then, we’ve built a campaign that has us on a path to defeating Sherrod Brown this November. We’ve led him in every public poll and we’ve been the top fundraising Republican challenger in the country. 

That being said, I was raised to believe that family always comes first. I still remember the first two words of advice my father gave me when Ilana and I had our first child: “Be there.” These were the same two words his father told him when I was born. 

We recently learned that my wife has a health issue that will require my time, attention and presence. In other words, I need to be there. 

Understanding and dealing with this health issue is more important to me than any political campaign. For as long as that takes, whether it is months or years, it is important that I heed my dad’s advice and be there for my wife and our kids. 

After recent discussions with our family and healthcare professionals, it has become clear to us that it’s no longer possible for me to be away from home and on the campaign trail for the time needed to run a US Senate race.

It sounds like whatever health issue his wife has, he's made the decision to drop out as a result.  How true that is, we'll see.

But things just got a lot better for Brown's re-election chances.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

How many Jeff Sessions stories are there going to be this week?  In the midst of all the revelations about Trump from the Michael Wolff book and the DoJ opening investigations into Clinton on Trump's orders, now we find out Trump had WH lawyers pressure Sessions to not recuse himself from the Russia case.

President Donald Trump directed his White House counsel to tell Attorney General Jeff Sessions to not recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

The conversation between Don McGahn, the president’s White House counsel, and Sessions took place on the president’s orders and occurred just before the attorney general announced that he would step aside from the ongoing inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction. Two other people confirmed details of the conversation between McGahn and Sessions. 

All three people spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press to avoid publicly discussing an ongoing investigation.

The episode is known to special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and is likely of interest to them as they look into whether Trump’s actions as president, including the May firing of FBI Director James Comey, amount to improper efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. Investigators recently concluded a round of interviews with current and former White House officials, including McGahn and former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. 

The New York Times first reported that Trump had McGahn lobby Sessions against a recusal. 

Reached Thursday evening, Trump personal attorney John Dowd said, “I know nothing about that,” and hung up. Jay Sekulow, another of the president’s personal lawyers, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. 

The White House also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a pretty big one.  The NY Times corroborates the AP story.

President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. 

Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode. 

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him. Mr. Trump said he had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general, had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama. 

Mr. Trump then asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986. 

The lobbying of Mr. Sessions is one of several previously unreported episodes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has learned about as he investigates whether Mr. Trump obstructed the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. The events occurred during a two-month period — from when Mr. Sessions recused himself in March until the appointment of Mr. Mueller in May — when Mr. Trump believed he was losing control over the investigation.

Trump expected Sessions to protect him from the investigation.  Sessions stepped back and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Mueller as special counsel.  That's obstruction of justice, whether or not it was successful, guys.  This is gigantic.

And speaking of recusal and Russia, we now know what Wednesday's meeting between Rosenstein and House Speaker Paul Ryan was about.

President Donald Trump's allies in the House for months have demanded documents they insist will point toward political bias against the president. But DOJ and FBI officials have resisted. 

On Wednesday, just as it seemed the clash was careening toward a constitutional crisis, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray walked into Ryan's office. 

Two sources familiar with the meeting say Wray and Rosenstein, who requested the sitdown, pressed Ryan to narrow the scope of a document request by the House Intelligence Committee. Ryan countered, insisting they turn over the full slate. 

Eventually, they struck a deal. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes announced the agreement later that night and said it would include access to all documents and witnesses he had sought. DOJ aides have declined to comment on the deal or Nunes' characterization of it.

The counter-attack on Mueller and Clinton is now confirmed.  The FBI is going after the Clinton Foundation and the GOP is going after the FBI.  We're entering a full-blown constitutional crisis in 2018, and all bets are off.  We now know Trump attempted to have Jeff Sessions stay on to kill the Russia probe.  We now know that the DoJ is opening new investigations into political enemies on the order of the man in the Oval Office.

And we know that the GOP in Congress won't only refuse to stop Trump, but that they will openly help him attack his political enemies.

More than a year after Republican leaders promised to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election, two influential Republicans on Friday made the first known congressional criminal referral in connection with the meddling — against one of the people who sought to expose it. 

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a senior committee member, told the Justice Department they had reason to believe that a former British spy, Christopher Steele, lied to federal authorities about his contacts with reporters regarding information in the dossier, and they urged the department to investigate. The committee is running one of three congressional investigations into Russian election meddling, and its inquiry has come to focus, in part, on Mr. Steele’s explosive dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference and the Trump campaign’s complicity. 

The decision by Mr. Grassley and Mr. Graham to single out the former intelligence officer behind the dossier — and not anyone who may have taken part in the Russian interference — was certain to infuriate Democrats and raise the stakes in the growing partisan battle over the investigations into Mr. Trump, his campaign team and Russia.

That's right, Grassley and Graham are now recommending criminal investigation into Christopher Steele because of his dossier exposing Trump.

We're quickly getting to the point where rule of law becomes whatever Trump says it is, and the GOP will not save us.

2018 is already shaping up to be one of the most consequential years in American history, and not in a good way.  Since the year started five days ago, we now have the DoJ opening new investigations into Clinton and the Clinton Foundation and now the GOP wants to go after the Steele Dossier.

The sitting government is persecuting and prosecuting its political enemies.  This is what autocrats, fascists, and dictators do.  We are getting close to being under all three at once.

Cashing In To Drop Out

Ohio GOP Rep. Pat Tiberi is leaving the House on January 15th to "pursue other opportunities", triggering a special election later this year for his 12th district seat in the suburbs north of Columbus.  No surprise then that it turns out those "other opportunities" that Tiberi mentioned involve him directly cashing in on the GOP tax bill he helped to write and get passed.

Congressional ethics laws appear to require lawmakers to recuse themselves from shaping or voting on laws that would financially benefit themselves, their family or their future employers. But Ohio Rep. Pat Tiberi accepted an offer to run a state trade organization, the Ohio Business Roundtable (BRT), while helping write the Republican tax bill. 

The trade group’s member companies have donated to Tiberi’s political campaigns, and many of them stand to gain from the bill, which slashed business income taxes and introduced several provisions that will benefit wealthy investors and corporate executives in various industries. He will begin the job by January 31st. 

International Business Times has identified 17 companies that are both members of BRT and donors to Tiberi’s 2018 campaign committee. Some of these businesses, including Marathon Petroleum, have lobbied Congress as recently as the fourth quarter of this year on tax issues that will directly benefit them. Executives from three of these companies — Marathon, Huntington Bancshares and L Brands — are members of the BRT Executive Committee. The BRT chairman, who is the CEO of Marathon Petroleum, discussed the specifics of the job with Tiberi during this time. 

Tiberi’s office denies that the congressman’s role in writing the tax bill was influenced by his future employment. But ethics experts told International Business Times that the circumstances of Tiberi’s role in Congress and his upcoming job give the appearance of a conflict of interest. 

“I think [Tiberi’s] constituents had a right to ask whether he was representing their interests or those of the businesses he’ll be working for,” Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy and external affairs at government watchdog Common Cause, told IBT. “Tiberi shouldn’t have had a pen near the legislation, much less vote on it.” 

Tiberi, whose estimated worth in 2016 was around $925,000, will see a major pay bump when he starts his new job. According to tax documents, current BRT president and CEO Richard Stoff made over $500,000 in 2016 including bonuses, deferred compensation and benefits. Senators make $174,000 per year.

So Tiberi helped write a law to make Ohio business owners wealthier, and he gets to cash out and pick up a nice industry group job to boot.  He doesn't care, his work is done, the GOP tax scam got passed, and Tiberi's gonna get his fat stacks.

The rest of Ohio's 12th district?

Suckers.

StupidiNews!

• North Korea has accepted South Korea's offer of peace talks next week in order to try to defuse tensions between the two countries over Pyongyang's nuclear tests.
• The Department of Justice is opening another investigation into the Clinton Foundation,  FBI agents in Little Rock have begun witness interviews and are taking the lead on the probe.
• As anti-regime protests in Iran continue into their second week, Iran's army chief is claiming that unrest has been quelled but that the military is ready to deal with any new demonstrations.
• Angola is the latest OPEC nation to ditch the dollar as a currency peg as oil exporters are still trying to recover from the 2014 oil price crash.
• 2017 saw America take the lead again in space mission launches, powered by commercial spaceflight company SpaceX with 18 of 29 US launches last year.

Last Call For The Injustice Department

Three big stories on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump Department of Injustice today, first, the AG is rescinding a 2013 DoJ policy on marijuana and is now leaving prosecution of state legalized pot (both medical and recreational) up to individual US attorneys.

In a seismic shift, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce Thursday that he is rescinding a trio of memos from the Obama administration that adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws, according to a source with knowledge of the decision. 

While many states have decriminalized or legalized marijuana use, the drug is still illegal under federal law, creating a conflict between federal and state law. 

The main Justice Department memo addressing the issue, known as the "Cole memo" for then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole in 2013, set forth new priorities for federal prosecutors operating in states where the drug had been legalized for medical or other adult use. It represented a major shift from strict enforcement to a more hands-off approach, so long as they didn't threaten other federal priorities, such as preventing the distribution of the drug to minors and cartels. 

The memo will be rescinded but it's not immediately clear whether Sessions will issue new guidance in its place or simply revert back to older policies that left states with legal uncertainty about enforcement of federal law. 

The decision had been closely watched since Sessions was sworn in. He told reporters in November he was examining a "rational" policy.

That policy is now "Whatever the US attorney for the federal district wants to pursue" which could indeed lead to massive raids of state-legal pot shops and state-licensed growers across the country.  I would suspect the first targets would be in blue states like California rather than say, Arizona or Montana but then again many of the states that do allow pot are pretty blue.

So far, Congress has put an amendment in appropriations bill that prevents the Justice Department from spending money on busting people in states where pot is legal.  Ohio has a medical marijuana bill on the ballot in 2018, and Kentucky has long been trying to do the same.  But if that amendment in appropriations goes (and Sessions has asked for that) I'm guessing this will have a big effect on that vote if feds start raiding dispensaries as "major drug-related financial crimes" and whatnot.

And speaking of feds raiding, that brings us to story number two, as I predicted earlier this week, the gap between Trump's "lock her up" tweets and Justice Department prosecution is rapidly closing. BUT HER EMAILS, THE REVENGE!

Justice Department officials are taking a fresh look at Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, The Daily Beast has learned. 

An ally of Attorney General Jeff Sessions who is familiar with the thinking at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters described it as an effort to gather new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material. Officials’ questions include how much classified information was sent over Clinton’s server; who put that information into an unclassified environment, and how; and which investigators knew about these matters and when. The Sessions ally also said officials have questions about immunity agreements that Clinton aides may have made. 

A former senior DOJ official familiar with department leadership’s thinking said officials there are acutely aware of demands from President Donald Trump that they look into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state—and that they lock up her top aide, Huma Abedin. 

For instance, Trump tweeted on Dec. 2, “Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails? No justice!” 

The former official said tweets like this present two challenges for department leadership: looking into the matter in a way consistent with normal Justice Department approaches, and trying to avoid the appearance that they are trying “to put Huma in jail.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment for this story. 

It’s an open question as to whether Justice Department officials would have the same level of interest in Clinton’s server without a political directive from the White House, the former official said.

So Sessions is going after pot, and he's going after Trump's political enemies, and it's just Day 4 of 2018.  Both are instances where Republicans are going after political enemies, in this case Clinton and California.

But then again, Sessions may not be around much longer, as we get to the third story.

Republican Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan said Thursday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should step aside "now," citing the Justice Department's handling of the investigation into President Donald Trump's campaign ties to Russian operatives and intelligence leaks to media as key concerns with his performance. 

In a joint opinion piece published in the Washington Examiner, Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman and former chairman, respectively, of the influential conservative House Freedom Caucus, decried the "manufactured hysteria" over the probe into Russian election interference, faulting Sessions — who has recused himself from the inquiry — for allowing revelations about the investigation to reach the press.

Meadows and Jordan said that "in spite of the constant headlines, rampant speculation, and overshadowing of accomplishments, a simple truth remains: There is no evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians." 

The two GOP lawmakers also questioned why the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently did not interview George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, until January 2017. A New York Times report published over the weekend said Papadopoulos was aware of Russian intelligence on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which played a key role in the bureau opening a probe in July 2016 into Russian efforts to influence the U.S. elections. 

"If Sessions can't address this issue immediately, then we have one final question needing an answer: When is it time for a new attorney general? Sadly, it seems the answer is now," the two GOP lawmakers wrote.

Going after Sessions from the right like this for failing to stop Mueller is pretty awful, the GOP has finally learned that the best way to get Trump to do something is raise enough of a stink to get it on FOX and Friends in the morning for him to watch.

This will certainly make the list.

Gonna be a long, long year.

The Mind Of Trump

At long last Congress is starting to ask serious questions about Trump's mental fitness for the position of Chief Executive of the United States and invoking the 25th Amendment as a possible solution.

Lawmakers concerned about President Donald Trump’s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior. 

In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on Dec. 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers — all Democrats except for one Republican senator, whom Lee declined to identify. Her professional warning to Capitol Hill: “He’s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.”

In an interview, she pointed to Trump “going back to conspiracy theories, denying things he has admitted before, his being drawn to violent videos.” Lee also warned, “We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.” 

Lee, editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which includes testimonials from 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assessing the president’s level of “dangerousness,” said that she was surprised by the interest in her findings during her two days in Washington. “One senator said that it was the meeting he most looked forward to in 11 years,” Lee recalled. “Their level of concern about the president’s dangerousness was surprisingly high.” 

The conversation about Trump’s fitness to serve is ongoing — and gaining steam after Trump’s tweet this week taunting the leader of North Korea with my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours bravado. 

“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” the president wrote online Tuesday night. 

The tweet resuscitated the conversation about the president’s mental state and the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president from office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet deem him physically or mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

I'm not a mental health professional by any means (although the Zandarparents both are.)  I've been around dementia and mental decline enough to recognize it in family.  Trump doesn't look well physically or mentally, and for even one GOP senator to attend a meeting on the President's health is something significant.

How far a 25th Amendment plan would go, I have no idea.  It's never been done and it would take the agreement of the Vice President plus the majority of the Cabinet to deem Trump unfit under Section 4 of the amendment, something that I don't see happening.

Still, the issue is that Trump isn't fit for the office for a number of reasons, and keep in mind that in many ways Mike Pence would be worse.

The End Of The Voter Suppression Commission, But Not The Fight

I've talked about Trump's Voter Suppression Commission throughout 2017, the efforts by the GOP to create a national voter ID standard and database that would force all states to implement onerous rules to restrict voting as much as possible and disenfranchise millions, possibly tens of millions of poor, elderly, and college voters across the country, mostly Democrats. 

The commission, headed by VP Mike Pence and Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was designed to force states to hand over all voting data to Trump so that the regime could design national legislation to disenfranchise Democratic voters across the country.  But even red states told Kobach to go to hell, first blue states said no way, then red states admitted that the Russians had compromised our election process and decided handing stuff over to Trump was unacceptable.  When it became clear that the effort was about massive voter suppression of Democrats through a federal Jim Crow background check voting law, it became too much for even the GOP to handle. Even red states refused to drop their lawsuits.

And yesterday evening, Trump quietly pulled the plug on Kobach's commission.

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

The fight is far from over however.

But Mr. Kobach insisted in an interview that the commission’s work would not end but rather would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring election integrity and one that he said critics would find more difficult to target.

As a White House commission, the voter-fraud panel was subject to public-disclosure requirements and other restrictions that Mr. Kobach said opponents of the inquiry had seized on in “a determined effort by the left” to hamstring its investigation. At last count, he said, the panel faced at least eight lawsuits accusing it of ignoring various federal requirements, including one from a commission member, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, that claimed he had been illegally excluded from its deliberations.

“It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Mr. Kobach said. “Think of it as an option play; a decision was made in the middle of the day to pass the ball. The Department of Homeland Security is going to be able to move faster and more efficiently than a presidential advisory commission.”

Kobach at least will be busy running his campaign for Kansas Governor to replace GOP Gov Sam Brownback, so we may have dodged a bullet for now.  But this isn't going to go away.  I'm betting the goal now is to have voter suppression tactics come down as Homeland Security directives. How quickly that can be accomplished, well, we'll see.

The commission is done, but not the war on voting.  Trump tweeted about the need for national voter ID laws again today, and the effort to protect voting access cannot let up.

We still have a long fight ahead.

StupidiNews!

• A major nor'easter is dropping up to 18 inches of snow on Boston and New England today, blizzard warnings are posted as far south as North Carolina.
• Control of Virginia's House of Delegates will be decided today after the final race from last November was declared a tie, officials will draw a random winner today.
• The Turkish government is furious at the conviction of a banker with ties to President Erdogan, calling it an "unprecedented interference" in Turkey's affairs and vowing retaliation.
• Congressional leader from both parties met this week on averting a budget shutdown in two weeks, but another stopgap spending bill may be needed before January 19.
• Two major security flaws in Intel chips are leading to a flurry of security patches worldwide for servers as hackers could exploit virtual memory to deliver payloads of malware.

Last Call For The 2018 Races Begin

The 2018 elections are more than 300 days and ten months away, but it means that we're still getting candidates for House, Senate, and gubernatorial seats coming into races, and at least on the Republican side some of these individuals running for office are real doozies. Arkansas is no different, the state that gave us Bill Clinton 30 years ago now has open bigots like Jan Morgan running for his office.

A Hot Springs Republican has entered the governor's race and will challenge Gov. Asa Hutchinson in the GOP primary in May. 

Jan Morgan, 54, announced her candidacy in a new release sent Sunday night and at an event in Hot Springs. 

She owns the Gun Cave shooting range in Hot Springs. In 2014, she drew national media attention by declaring her gun range a "Muslim Free Zone," saying that she was concerned about the safety of other customers if Muslims patronized her business. 

In her campaign's news release, Morgan said she traveled the state for six months talking to Arkansans before making her decision to run. 

"As we embark on the dawn of a new day and new year in Arkansas, I am excited about the future potential of our beautiful state and her people," she was quoted as saying. 

Morgan has criticized Hutchinson as someone who "campaigns like a conservative Republican but governs like a liberal Democrat." If elected, Morgan would become Arkansas' first female governor. 

Last year, she was an opponent of legislation that Hutchinson signed into law aimed at barring concealed-carry permit holders, even those with up to eight hours of extra training, from Razorback Stadium and other locations hosting college sporting events.

In a normal universe, Morgan would be laughed out of politics and possibly business, as even GOP Second Amendment purists would realize that denying sales of firearms to people based solely on religion would in fact be a massive violation of the Constitution.

Sadly, Islamophobia is now not only proper impetus to propel Morgan into state GOP politics, but I'd dare say that it makes her the frontrunner to succeed Hutchinson. 

Hutchinson by the way is a doctrinaire tea party Republican who happily signed into law a raft of terrible anti-choice abortion bills and scrapped Medicaid expansion.  He's now a "liberal Democrat" according to Morgan.

If only.

Immigration Nation, Con't

One of the many state laws that went into effect in California (besides legalized recreation marijuana) is that it's now the first "sanctuary state" for undocumented immigrants. The Trump regime issued a nasty warning to the state through ICE this week as a result.

Donald Trump’s pick to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued a chilling warning to California to “hang on tight” as he threatened a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, also suggesting politicians who back sanctuary status should be charged with crimes.

The department’s acting director Thomas Homan on Tuesday evening spoke of a crackdown on places that have so-called sanctuary status, meaning there is a limit on how far local law enforcement will aid ICE officials. 

In particular, Homan pledged California would see more ICE agents following its governor's October decision to give the entire state such status.

“We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court, and we gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes," Homan said in an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, explaining he believed politicians who pushed sanctuary city legislation should be held "personally accountable” for their actions.

Autocracy a-go-go.

His comments came during a discussion on the move by California Governor Jerry Brown to sign into state law a bill giving the whole of California sanctuary status, in a move that appears to have infuriated immigration hardliner Homan. 

“I think it’s terrible–you got the state of California that wants to put politics ahead of public safety, ahead of officer safety. What they have done is forced my officers to arrest dangerous criminals on their turf, in their homes and places of business, rather than arresting them in the safety and security of a county jail. It’s ridiculous to annoyingly and intentionally put law enforcement at risk,” he said. 

“If he thinks he’s protecting immigrant communities, he’s doing quite the opposite because if he thinks ICE is going away, we’re not. There’s no sanctuary from federal law enforcement. Matter of fact we’re in the process now… I’m going to significantly increase our enforcement presence in California, we’re already doing it.” 

“California better hold on tight. There’s about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation hours in the state of California,” he added.

So we've got a sitting federal executive law enforcement agency director using the phrase "There's no sanctuary from federal law enforcement" in the context of an open threat against a state that has one-seventh of America's population.

Gosh, that's not chilling or anything as America takes one step closer to fascist dictatorship.

How long before Homan makes good on his threat to start rounding up mayors, city council members, county commissioners, and state lawmakers that defy the Trump regime? Will ICE become the new Brownshirts?

Why are we having to ask these questions?  Jesus hell.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent asks the million-dollar question on Trump and Russia: when Mueller issues his expected scathing report on the Trump administration, to what extent was the collusion aided and abetted by congressional Republicans?

As we head into 2018, one big, looming unknown is this: Just how far will congressional Republicans go to prevent a full accounting of Russia’s interference in our election and any possible Trump campaign conspiracy with it?

Certain House Republicans are already working to frustrate the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation. Do Democrats have any recourse? The answer is yes — but within limits.

In an interview with me, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut — the No. 2 Democrat on the House intel committee — said that Democrats are seriously exploring the possibility of issuing a minority report that details (among other things) the degree to which Republicans tried to impede a full investigation, should that end up happening. In this scenario, the public would at least have a clear sense of just how far Republicans went to protect President Trump and his top officials from accountability.

“It’s in both the Democrats’ and the Republicans’ interests to … write a report based on a common set of facts,” Himes told me. “It would be a tragedy if the report has a minority section that says, ‘Look, we wanted to talk to these two dozen witnesses and weren’t able to do so.'”

The focus is on GOP House Intel Chair Rep. Devin Nunes of California, who recused himself on the Russia investigation only to try to start a new investigation of the FBI and Clinton. Nunes has been killing Democratic subpoenas.

Democrats want to ask Trump Jr. about a phone call he held with his father about his June 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer, which he took in the expectation of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton supplied by the Russian government. Trump Jr. and his dad discussed this meeting just after news of it broke in July 2017. When questioned about this call by committee Democrats, he invoked attorney-client privilege. Democrats want to subpoena Trump Jr. to compel his testimony, which could shed light on what happened at that meeting and how far Trump has gone to prevent the truth about it from coming out.

It appears Nunes may have killed that effort. Meanwhile, Nunes’s investigative zeal is directed elsewhere: Politico recently reported that Nunes is quietly leading a group of House Republicans in an effort to build a case that senior Justice Department and FBI officials improperly handled the explosive “Steele dossier,” which describes links between Trump and Russia.

These are pretty explosive allegations, intimating that Nunes is part of an effort to obstruct justice by preventing investigations into the Trump regime.   The problem for Nunes is the Mueller probe. If Mueller finds out the information that House Intel Democrats are looking for and were blocked by Nunes from getting, it's not going to look good for Nunes in particular from a, you know, legal standpoint.

Meanwhile, over in the NY Times, the founders of Fusion GPS, the political opposition research firm that gave us the Steele Dossier, have penned a scathing op-ed demanding Congress release their testimony on Trump.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

It's the second-to-last paragraph that's the doozy. If the Steele Dossier corroborated what the FBI investigators already had, rather than instigating the investigation, the Republicans are in far more trouble than previously reported.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

Again, very explosive allegations.  Fusion GPS is saying that the Steele Dossier (and their testimony to Congress about it) confirms that the Trump regime was working with the Russians in order to get Trump elected.  That's about as big as it gets, guys.

Oh, but it gets worse for the Trump regime.  Today the Guardian unlimbered their preview of Michael Wolff's tell-all book of the Trump campaign, and it's nothing short of amazing.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him. 

Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language. 

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.” 

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. 

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.” 

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

Where we go from here, I don't know, but the House and Senate investigations into the Trump regime just got turned up to 11.  And Bannon is now running around covering his ass and throwing Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner under the bus.

Bannon certainly believes there's something to the Russia collusion story. He just admitted to the massive long con that he was using Breitbart to cover for Trump's denials for months.

This just got real interesting.  Welcome to 2018, Day 3.

StupidiNews!

• Winter storm warnings have been issues from Florida to Boston as a major nor'easter is expected to drop ice, freezing rain, and snow along the eastern seaboard today and tomorrow.
• With Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch announcing his retirement at the end of the year, the speculation is that Mitt Romney will run for Hatch's open seat.
• North Korea has reopened its border hotline with South Korea after ending the practice in 2016, Donald Trump responded by boasting about the "size" of his "nuclear button".
• The White House is demanding Democrats agree to end to "chain migration" and fully fund a southern border wall in exchange for saving DACA as a government shutdown looms.
• The advent of solid-state lidar sensors could be the key to making autonomous vehicles vastly less expensive and safer in the future.

Last Call For The Enemies List

Didn't even take a day for Trump to start out 2018 with calls on Twitter for the Justice Department to round up and arrest his political opponents.

President Trump on Tuesday appeared to suggest that Huma Abedin, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton, should face jail time, days after the State Department posted emails found on her estranged husband's computer that included confidential government information. 

In a tweet, Trump also urged the Justice Department to act in prosecuting Abedin and former FBI director James B. Comey, who the president fired in May amid the mounting investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election and contacts between Moscow and Trump's campaign.

The State Department, responding to a lawsuit from Judicial Watch, posted online copies of Abedin's emails from her nongovernment address that had been discovered on the laptop of her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, during an FBI investigation. 

In his tweet, Trump appeared to be reacting to a report in the Daily Caller that found Abedin had forwarded State Department passwords to her personal Yahoo account before Yahoo faced high-level hacks that affected all account-holders. 

Trump has previously accused Comey of leaking sensitive information after the former director testified that he had asked a friend to pass on notes he had taken of his interactions with Trump to a reporter for the New York Times in hopes of securing a special prosecutor to take over the Russia investigation. Ethics experts said Comey's actions appeared to be legally protected, provided he did not disclose classified information.

In his tweet, Trump referred to the “Deep State Justice Department,” an apparent reference to the president's contention that some elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have attempted to undermine his election. Trump has said there is no evidence that he colluded with Russian agents during the campaign.

At some point very soon these tweets about jailing Clinton campaign officials are going to become orders to start jailing Clinton campaign officials, and then things are going to get a lot darker around here very quickly.