The Drums Of War

Over in Foreign Policy, Ed Luttwak calls for bombing North Korea, openly saying that the deaths of tens of millions on the Korean Peninsula should not and cannot stop Trump from acting.

Nothing can be known about this week’s talks between North and South Korea other than their likely outcome. As in every previous encounter, South Korea will almost certainly reward North Korea’s outrageous misconduct by handing over substantial sums of money, thus negating long-overdue sanctions recently imposed by the United Nations Security Council. Meanwhile, the North will continue to make progress toward its goal of deploying several nuclear-armed, mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, having already tested nuclear-explosive devices in October 2006, May 2009, February 2013, January 2016, September 2016, and September 2017

Each test would have been an excellent occasion for the United States to finally decide to do to North Korea what Israel did to Iraq in 1981, and to Syria in 2007 — namely, use well-aimed conventional weapons to deny nuclear weapons to regimes that shouldn’t have firearms, let alone weapons of mass destruction. Fortunately, there is still time for Washington to launch such an attack to destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. It should be earnestly considered rather than rejected out of hand.

Of course, there are reasons not to act against North Korea. But the most commonly cited ones are far weaker than generally acknowledged.

One mistaken reason to avoid attacking North Korea is the fear of direct retaliation. The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly claimed that North Korea already has ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach as far as the United States. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration, or rather an anticipation of a future that could still be averted by prompt action. The first North Korean nuclear device that could potentially be miniaturized into a warhead for a long-range ballistic missile was tested on September 3, 2017, while its first full-scale ICBM was only tested on November 28, 2017. If the North Koreans have managed to complete the full-scale engineering development and initial production of operational ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in the short time since then — and on their tiny total budget — then their mastery of science and engineering would be entirely unprecedented and utterly phenomenal. It is altogether more likely that they have yet to match warheads and missiles into an operational weapon.

It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted.

When then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to withdraw all U.S. Army troops from South Korea 40 years ago (ultimately a division was left behind), the defense advisors brought in to help — including myself — urged the Korean government to move its ministries and bureaucrats well away from the country’s northern border and to give strong relocation incentives to private companies. South Korea was also told to mandate proper shelters, as in Zurich for example, where every new building must have its own (under bombardment, casualties increase dramatically if people leave their homes to seek shelter). In recent years, moreover, South Korea has had the option of importing, at moderate cost, Iron Dome batteries, which are produced by both Israel and the United States, that would be capable of intercepting 95 percent of North Korean rockets headed to inhabited structures.

But over these past four decades, South Korean governments have done practically nothing along these lines. The 3,257 officially listed “shelters” in the Seoul area are nothing more than underground shopping malls, subway stations, and hotel parking lots without any stocks of food or water, medical kits or gas masks. As for importing Iron Dome batteries, the South Koreans have preferred to spend their money on developing a bomber aimed at Japan.

In other words, Ed Luttwak is saying that the coming loss of life from Pyongyang's inevitable retaliation of a decapitation strike against the Kim regime is going to be South Korea's fault, so f'ck em if they die, we've got Evil™ to bomb.

EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!
EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!
EUUU ESSSS AYYYY!

Which, coincidentally, is exactly what the Trump Regime is apparently planning.

The Trump administration is debating a "bloody nose" attack on North Korea, recent reports say, with the president's inner circle split and apparently teetering between endorsing a strike and holding out hope for diplomacy.

Both The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal have portrayed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis as trying to caution President Donald Trump against a strike, and the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, as advocating it.

The reports come after months of mixed messages and dozens of shifts in the US's stance on North Korea.

The bloody-nose strategy, which calls for a sharp, violent response to some North Korean provocation, puts a lot of weight on the US's properly calibrating an attack on North Korea and Pyongyang's reading the limited strike as anything other than the opening salvo of an all-out war.

For that reason, even the limited strike envisioned by North Korea hawks carries a tremendous risk of global — and possibly nuclear — catastrophe.

No big deal.  I'm sure the Trump regime's experts will thread the needle and see the world through this mess safely.

Right?

Corker Flips The Script

A few months ago, SC GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham was among Trump's loudest critics.  Now he is firmly in Trump's corner, defending Trump on TV as his friend and golf buddy. Graham still believes Trump won't fire Robert Mueller and he's also currently ruling out joining the Trump administration in a cabinet position, but he's done a complete 180 since last year.

And now we see yet another Republican senator and now former Trump critic is doing the same thing, in this case, Tennessee's Bob Corker.

Sen. Bob Corker, who is traveling Monday on Air Force One with President Donald Trump, has repaired his relationship with the commander in chief after the two men exchanged fierce words in the fall, sources familiar with their discussions told CNN. 

The two have spoken several times since late last year, particularly as Corker was weighing whether to support the sweeping tax overhaul. Ultimately, Corker reversed his position and backed the tax bill -- and endured sharp criticism over what he said was erroneous reporting suggesting he backed the bill because of a provision that would enrich him financially. Corker complained about the news coverage to Trump, who deemed it "fake news," the sources said. 

Corker's moves to make amends with Trump reflect a calculation among many Senate Republicans: While they may complain about what they view as his erratic behavior, they will soothe over tense relations and look past previous disputes to get on his good side in order to influence him over key decisions. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, two men who have exchanged bitter words with Trump in the past, have taken similar tacks, which seem to have worked with the transactional President. 

For Corker, who serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, fixing the Iran nuclear deal is a key priority -- one that will require the President's support. As they bonded over the tax bill and their complaints about the media, Corker has been working behind-the-scenes with senior administration officials -- including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster -- to make changes to the Iran deal through new legislation in Congress, sources say.

Here's the thing though, Corker is retiring at the end of the year.  He announced that in September. So why is he suddenly being Trump's buddy?  In fact, so many Republicans are now heading for retirement despite controlling all three branches of government that the Blue Wave scenario is coming true through GOP attrition alone.

Unlike Lindsey Graham, I think Corker wants that Secretary of State job after Rex Tillerson leaves. Or maybe, like Graham, he's being blackmailed like many Republicans may be.

We'll see.  But all these GOP "never Trump" critics are suddenly coming around even as Mueller closes in.  These are not stupid people.  There's a "why" here and we need to find out what it is.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump regime from deporting DACA recipients and ruled that the government must resume renewing applications pending multiple legal cases.
• A three-judge panel has unanimously struck down North Carolina's federal election districts as unconstitutional, the 191-page ruling gives lawmakers until Jan. 29 for a new map.
• Senate Democrats have released a report showing two decades of Russian interference in European elections, demanding Donald Trump protect elections in the US. 
• A magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck off the cost of Honduras in the Caribbean Sea late Tuesday, the quake was felt across the region and did light damage, no casualties have been reported.
• GOP Sen. Susan Collins says she will vote for a Democratic bill to restore net neutrality rules, but the bill has no chance in the GOP-led House, let alone surviving a Trump veto.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Bevinstan...

Kentucky GOP House Speaker Jeff Hoover resigned from his leadership position last month after it came out that he had settled a sexual harassment claim with a female staffer using taxpayer money. There's only one problem as the 2018 Kentucky General Assembly session got underway last week: Jeff Hoover was still House Speaker.  On Monday, Hoover finally resigned, but only after a 20-minute tirade where he declared himself the real victim.

Oh, and he's staying in the KY House.

On Monday, after vacillating for weeks about whether to step down, Hoover announced in a bitter and defiant speech from the House floor that he would give up his role as speaker but hang onto his seat in the legislature.

In remarks lasting more than 20 minutes, Hoover portrayed himself as the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy to oust him from power, accusing the governor and fellow lawmakers of lying about his actions.

With his wife of 26 years watching from the balcony, he acknowledged having traded inappropriate texts with the staffer, but denied any misconduct, saying that while the messages were ill-advised, they were consensual.

“What’s the one thing you’re most ashamed of that you have done in the past five years?” Hoover asked the chamber. “What if you woke up one morning and that one thing that you’re sitting there thinking about was on the front page of every newspaper in this state?”

His voice quavered as he explained how the scandal had impacted him and his family, saying he had lost 33 pounds in the span of four weeks because he couldn’t eat.

“I laid on my couch day after day after day in the fetal position,” he said. “I got down on the floor when no one was at home, crying uncontrollably and screaming out to almighty god to help me through this situation and to help my family and my daughters. I went into depression. I went into isolation.”

In defying calls to quit the House entirely, Hoover stands as something of an exception among the dozens of powerful men in government, media and entertainment who have been toppled by sexual misconduct claims in recent months. Many have been fired or forced to resign as a growing wave of women, and some men, have come forward with allegations of rape, assault and harassment.

Unfortunately there's not a lot Kentucky Dems can do at this point.  Indeed, the state party is crumbling in the House as major retirements are starting to mount.  GOP Gov. Matt Bevin still believes Hoover should leave the House as well as the remaining GOP leadership in the Kentucky House and Senate, but that seems very unlikely now.

Oh, and let's not forget Hoover is an awful human being.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Last week, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, the man who employed Christopher Steele to create the now infamous Steele Dossier on Trump, demanded that the closed-door testimony that Simpson gave to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the dossier be released to the public.  Republicans balked, so ranking Democrat on the Committee California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, released the transcripts.

And they are pretty shocking, even at this point in the proceedings.

The British ex-spy who authored a dossier of allegations against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was told the FBI had someone inside Trump’s network providing agents with information, according to a newly released transcript of a congressional interview.

Glenn R. Simpson, a founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, spoke to investigators with the Senate Judiciary Committee for 10 hours in August. As the partisan fight over Russian interference in the 2016 election has intensified, Simpson has urged that his testimony be released, and a copy of the transcript was made public Tuesday.

It was released by the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. That decision marks the most serious break yet in the cooperative relationship she has had with the Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

[Read the full transcript of Glenn Simpson’s Senate testimony]

Fusion GPS was hired in mid-2016 by a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig into Trump’s background. Earlier that year, the firm had been probing Trump for a conservative website funded by a GOP donor, but that client stopped paying for the work after it became clear Trump would win the GOP nomination, according to people familiar with the matter.

The FBI had a mole in the Trump campaign, and we know that because the FBI said as much. The FBI said as much because Steele corroborated their inside person on the Trump campaign.

Steele first reached out to the FBI with his concerns in early July 2016, according to people familiar with the matter. When they re-interviewed him in early October, agents made it clear, according to Simpson’s testimony released Tuesday, that they believed some of what Steele had told them.

“My understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,” Simpson said. Using the parlance of spies and law enforcement officials, Simpson said the FBI had a “human source from inside the Trump organization.” Simpson added that his understanding was the source was someone who had volunteered information to the FBI or, in his words, “someone like us who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

Somebody who volunteered to the FBI that something bad was going on.  This was the reason why the Trump campaign got caught up in FBI surveillance.  I surmised as uch, Simpson all but said so last week and essentially said "I stand by my testimony, make it public."  He did that because of course the GOP is demanding an investigation into Steele himself for lying to the FBI...only the transcript kills that dead when it was released.

Sen. Feinstein did just that, although parts are heavily redacted.  Still, the transcript backs up Simpson's story. The FBI knew that parts of the Steele Dossier were credible because they had a person inside the Trump campaign saying the same thing.

So who was the whistleblower in the Trump campaign?  We don't know.  Yet.  We may never know.  But the GOP isn't standing still on this, they're fully going after the FBI and the media for daring to report on Dear Leader Trump.

Broadening their political counterattack in defense of the White House, President Donald Trump's allies in Congress are placing new scrutiny on contacts between top Justice Department officials and reporters covering the Trump-Russia investigation.

In recent weeks, GOP congressional investigators have publicly and privately questioned senior Justice Department and FBI leaders about interactions with reporters covering the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. The goal, according to a half-dozen lawmakers and aides, is to expose any concerted effort by law enforcement officials to spin an anti-Trump narrative in the media through unauthorized leaks.

"There are a number of other inappropriate communications that have transpired between the FBI/DOJ and media outlets that have not been disclosed," said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a top House conservative and member of the Oversight Committee.

On Thursday, Republicans demanded more information from the Justice Department officials about a meeting Andrew Weissman, a career federal prosecutor now on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team, held with reporters last April. In a Jan. 4 op-ed, Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be replaced, citing in part an "alarming number of FBI agents and DOJ officials sharing information with reporters."

Last month, House Republicans cast public suspicion on communication they say occurred in the fall of 2016 between former FBI general counsel James Baker and a Mother Jones reporter who wrote stories at the time about the FBI’s probe of Trump-Russia ties. The lawmakers cited Justice Department documents for the claim but have provided no further details.

Republicans have offered no evidence of wrongdoing and say they are merely seeking more information for now. Democrats call the focus on reporter contacts the latest front in a wide-ranging campaign by some GOP lawmakers to discredit the Russia probe as an anti-Trump conspiracy fueled by what Trump has characterized as a “deep state” determined to bring him down.

We now know why the GOP is so eager to attack the FBI now.  Stay tuned.

Nevada Justice, Gunmerica Style

The federal government has dismissed all charges against Cliven Bundy and his co-conspirators for his 2014 armed standoff in Nevada.

A judge in Las Vegas has decided to dismiss criminal charges against a Nevada rancher and his sons accused of leading an armed uprising against federal authorities in 2014.

Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro signaled when she declared a mistrial last month that she might dismiss the case outright against 71-year-old Cliven Bundy, sons Ryan and Ammon Bundy, and Montana militia leader Ryan Payne.

The judge severely criticized prosecutors for what she called “willful” violations of due process rights of defendants, including failing to properly turn over evidence to their lawyer.

But she gave the government a chance to submit written documents opposing dismissal of all charges.

The Monday decision is sure to reverberate among states’ rights advocates in the Western U.S., where the federal government controls vast lands that some people want to protect and others want used for grazing, mining and oil and gas drilling.

The tense armed standoff outside Bunkerville, about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas, stopped a federal Bureau of Land Management roundup of Bundy cattle from public land including what is now Gold Butte National Monument.

About three dozen heavily armed federal agents guarding corrals in a dry riverbed faced hundreds of flag-waving men, women and children calling for the release of some 400 cows. The cattle had been rounded up under court orders issued over Bundy letting his herd graze for 20 years without paying government fees.

No shots were fired before the outnumbered and outgunned federal agents withdrew.

Several gunmen among the protesters who had assault-style rifles were acquitted of criminal charges in two trials last year.

As I said almost four years ago, if Cliven Bundy weren't white, he'd be dead.  Feds would have mowed him down and FOX News would have cheered the same way they did when Ferguson and Standing Rock happened.

Ryan Payne still faces charges from the armed takeover of a federal wildlife office in Oregon in January 2016, but most of those charges have been dismissed as well, especially against the Bundy family.  They're basically clear as of today.

Nice gig if you can get it.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time

Trump's lawyers are apparently trying to get out ahead of any request by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to interview Donald Trump himself as Mueller's investigation closes in on the Oval Office.

Anticipating that special counsel Robert Mueller will ask to interview President Donald Trump, the president's legal team is discussing a range of potential options for the format, including written responses to questions in lieu of a formal sit-down, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Lawyers for Trump have been discussing with FBI investigators a possible interview by the special counsel with the president as part of the inquiry into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

The discussions were described by one person with direct knowledge as preliminary and ongoing. Trump's legal team is seeking clarification on whether the president would be interviewed directly by Mueller, as well as the legal standard for when a president can be interviewed, the location of a possible interview, the topics and the duration. But the president's team is also seeking potential compromises that could avoid an interview altogether, two of those interviewed told NBC News.

With the possibility now looming that the president himself could be subject to an interview by the FBI or Mueller's investigators, Trump's legal team has been debating whether it would be possible to simply avoid it. One individual familiar with the strategy said those internal discussions within Trump's legal team began shortly after the president's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was indicted in late October for money laundering in connection with his business dealings with Ukraine.

Trump's legal team sat down with representatives from the special counsel's office in late December.

In a statement to NBC News, Trump lawyer John Dowd said: "The White House does not comment on communications with the OSC (Office of Special Counsel) out of respect for the OSC and its process. The White House is continuing its full cooperation with the OSC in order to facilitate the earliest possible resolution."

Peter Carr, spokesperson for the special counsel's office, declined to comment.

Of course Trump is going to refuse. He'd be stupid not to. Mueller will either have to subpoena Trump or accept whatever garbage deal comes from his lawyers.  That's why the attacks on the grand jury proceedings from Trump's media enablers have been so heavy in the last month or two.  They've known for some time now that eventually Mueller was going to subpoena Trump.  They've been attacking the proceedings for six months now.

So sometime soon we're going to be in a position where Mueller subpoenas Trump, and Trump can either comply or face federal contempt charges.  It's at that point where we determine whether or not rule of law applies to Trump.

That is, of course, unless Mueller is fired first.

Immigration Nation, Con't

As threatened, the Trump regime is ending all federal protections for some 200,000 Salvadoran refugees that have been in the US for years, saying get out or get deported out.

Nearly 200,000 people from El Salvador who have been allowed to live in the United States for more than a decade must leave the country, government officials announced Monday. It is the Trump administration’s latest reversal of years of immigration policies and one of the most consequential to date.

Homeland security officials said that they were ending a humanitarian program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Salvadorans who have been allowed to live and work legally in the United States since a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001.

Salvadorans were by far the largest group of foreigners benefiting from temporary protected status, which shielded them from deportation if they had arrived in the United States illegally. The decision came just weeks after more than 45,000 Haitians, the second largest group, lost protections granted after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, and it suggested that others in the program, namely Hondurans, may soon lose them as well. Nicaraguans lost their protections last year.

Immigrant advocates and the El Salvadoran government had pleaded for the United States to extend the program, as it has several times since 2001, saying that conditions in El Salvador were still dire. A sense of dread gripped Salvadorans and their employers in California, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere.

“We had hope that if we worked hard, paid our taxes and didn’t get in trouble we would be allowed to stay,” said Veronica Lagunas, 39, a Salvadoran who works overnight cleaning offices in Los Angeles, has two children born in the United States and owns a mobile home.

But the Trump administration has been committed to reining in both legal and illegal immigration, most notably by ending protections for 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, beginning in March unless Congress grants them legal status before then.

Understand that the goal among Trump's white supremacist followers is not just the end of undocumented immigrant, not just the de facto end of legal immigration, but the end of bitrthright citizenship and the near-complete reversal of the last 50 years of immigration and the American-born children of these immigrants and the resulting deportation of about one-fifth of our population.

This is what Republicans mean by "immigration reform".  It's time to stop pretending otherwise. The corporate wing of the GOP figures their cheap labor can be replaced by robots or mass incarceration and besides, they just got the best tax deal since Reagan.  They'll comply. The courts will follow suit as Trump continues to pack them and they will define what the Republicans want "citizenship" to mean.

Trump's deporting hundreds of thousands now.  Soon it will be millions, and after that it will be tens of millions.  2018 and 2020 are our last chance to stop this.

The Up At Noon Presidency

Grandpa Donny is sick of the job these days because it's cutting into his Twitter and Yelling At The Teevee time. Jon Swan:

President Trump is starting his official day much later than he did in the early days of his presidency, often around 11am, and holding far fewer meetings, according to copies of his private schedule shown to Axios. This is largely to meet Trump’s demands for more “Executive Time,” which almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence, officials tell us.

The schedules shown to me are different than the sanitized ones released to the media and public.

• The schedule says Trump has "Executive Time" in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting. 
• Trump comes down for his first meeting of the day, which is often an intelligence briefing, at 11am. 
• That's far later than George W. Bush, who typically arrived in the Oval by 6:45am. 
• Obama worked out first thing in the morning and usually got into the Oval between 9 and 10am, according to a former senior aide. 

Trump's days in the Oval Office are relatively short – from around 11am to 6pm, then he's back to the residence. During that time he usually has a meeting or two, but spends a good deal of time making phone calls and watching cable news in the dining room adjoining the Oval. Then he's back to the residence for more phone calls and more TV.

The "hardest-working president ever" is of course a gigantic lie.  Trump only cares about Trump and that's always been true.  The truth also happens to be that he's lazy, bigoted, arrogant and generally awful on top of being 100% unfit for the office of President, but we've known that for years.

Doesn't matter now, he got the job and nobody's willing to fire him as long as he signs whatever Mitch and Paul put on his desk.  That's the state of the presidency today: he's a cartoon fascist with a pen.

Beating Trump At His Own Game

I still haven't bought a copy of Michael Wolff's new tell-all book on the first year of the Trump Regime, Fire & Fury, and I don't plan on it.  I'm pretty angry that the anecdotes about Trump in the book clearly show he's unfit for office and that the rest of the Village stenographers covering Trump all seem to think Wolff's profile of Trump as an incurious, clinical narcissist who can't handle the physical, emotional, or intellectual rigors of the job are "common knowledge" and "an open secret".  I'm angry that these same journalists didn't have the guts to expose Trump time and again 18 months ago when our Republic might have been spared.

But over at GQ, Drew Magary makes the argument that Wolff is the man who beat Trump at his own game with his book, doing what our fourth estate wouldn't do when it decided to become a fifth column instead.

I’m gonna begin this post with the same disclaimer that needs to come with every post about Michael Wolff, which is that Wolff is a fart-sniffer whose credibility is often suspect and who represents the absolute worst of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding. But in a way, it’s fitting that our least reliable president could finally find himself undone at the hands of one of our least reliable journalists.

All of Wolff’s excerpts from Fire & Fury so far (the book was rushed into stores today) read like jayvee fan fiction. They read like a pilot that Steve Bannon himself wrote, pitched to Hollywood, and had rejected 17 times over. They read, in short, like bullshit. And yet…Wolff has audio. He’s got hours upon hours of audio. Not only that, but the book has already caused legitimate upheaval in the administration, opened a permanent rift between President Trump and Bannon, AND it confirms what we have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the cognitive ability to do this job, and that he is surrounded at all times by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves. As much as I wanna discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff got it all. Wolff nailed them.

And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then taking full advantage of the administration's basic lack of knowledge about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim to be unaware that they were on the record. Wolff denies this, but he's very much up front in the book's intro about the fact that he was able to exploit the incredible "lack of experience" on display here. In other words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.

Thank God for that. Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.

The argument that it took a journalist who trashed the usual presidential coverage norms in order to expose a chief executive who trashed the usual norms is pretty solid, frankly.  I'm still not buying Wolff's book.  But I understand why people would, and I'm glad he went the regime when our more...credible...journalistic outfits are still playing Access Journalism Bingo.

The Emperor has no brains.  Everyone can see that now.  Trump is seething on Twitter and will continue to seethe for days, if not weeks.  But he's been pantsed on the national stage, by the people he most dearly wants to buy respect from, and they know he's a joke.

Maybe this is where Trump starts to go down along with the ship, I don't know.  But at least somebody took action, even if it was a fart-sniffing asshole like Wolff.  Trump's exposed now, and the rest of the news outlets finally smell blood in the water, even though it's been red for months.

Here's CNN's Jake Tapper destroying Trump adviser slash neo-Nazi Stephen Miller for ten minutes. It's brutal.  Miller gets decimated.

Maybe the Village is learning, or is at least now seeing the benefits of enlightened self-interest.  I'll take that.

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.