StupidiNews!

• Senate Appropriations Chair Republican Thad Cochran of Mississippi is retiring on April 1 citing health concerns, an interim senator will be appointed by GOP Gov.  Phil Bryant.
• Yesterday's March 5th deadline for action on DACA recipients has passed without action as Donald Trump's order rescinding protections for Dreamers has been put on hold by the courts.
• Voters in Texas head to the polls for statewide primaries today, where early voting favors Democrats but Republicans remain confident that they will win in November.
• North Korea has announced a summit with South Korea at the end of April, Pyongyang says it is open to ending its nuclear weapons program if the safety of the Kim regime is guaranteed. 
• A federal judge has ordered former pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli to forfeit more than $7 million in assets, including a Picasso and a Wu-Tang Clan album.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

Jane Mayer's profile of Steele dossier author Christopher Steele is a hell of a read, worthy of your time, but the real news is that Mayer dug up something that has direct implications for the 2018 Senate races: one of Steele's claims is that the Russians flat out told Trump to sink former GOP presidential candidate, Massachusetts governor and current Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney as his Secretary of State.

In the spring of 2017, after eight weeks in hiding, Steele gave a brief statement to the media, announcing his intention of getting back to work. On the advice of his lawyers, he hasn’t spoken publicly since. But Steele talked at length with Mueller’s investigators in September. It isn’t known what they discussed, but, given the seriousness with which Steele views the subject, those who know him suspect that he shared many of his sources, and much else, with the Mueller team. 

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President. 

As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and Rosneft.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia, in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted enacting them.

Now, I'm not sure how accurate this is, but maybe Robert Mueller does.  Maybe this is all a ploy to make sure Trump goes after Romney in the 2018 Utah Senate race, maybe it's not.  But it makes sense, and it would be just another log on the pyre of Trump's administration when Mueller shows up to light the fire.

The biggest tell that this is legitimate is Trump's actions.  He's refused to implement sanctions overwhelmingly passed by Congress and he's tried to outright revers Obama-era sanctions, he hasn't ordered US Cyber Command to protect the country's internet infrastructure, and the biggest tell we found out this weekend: Trump has spent exactly $0 of $120 million allocated to State Department to counter Russian influence.

As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy. 

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts. 

The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions. More broadly, the funding lag reflects a deep lack of confidence by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in his department’s ability to execute its historically wide-ranging mission and spend its money wisely. 

Mr. Tillerson has voiced skepticism that the United States is even capable of doing anything to counter the Russian threat.

“If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Mr. Tillerson said in an interview last month with Fox News. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”

We'll see what happens, but in my mind the depths of the Russian control over Trump is near absolute.  They have him wholesale, and America is in peril.

So Far, Gunmerica Is Still The Same After Parkland

The battle over gun safety continues to play out, but we've reached the point in the proceedings where Congress quietly does nothing and Trump moves on to other things as the election cycle heats up.

Despite the bravery of the Parkland shooting survivors using their voices for change, no legislation is coming at the federal level until a new Congress is sworn in next January, and even then it will take the NRA-GOP suffering dozens of losses in the House and Senate combined to even get a bill on the table.

For now, this fight remains at the state level, and as Sam Thielman at TPM points out, multiple red states are moving ahead with new pro-gun legislation.

Here are five pro-gun bills that have moved forward in state legislatures since the February 14 shooting: 

On February 15, the day after the Parkland shooting, Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill to strengthen the state’s “stand your ground” law to the floor. The measure would expand the definition of justifiable homicide to include not merely defending a shooter’s home but his or her vehicle or place of employment, as well. On Monday, the bill passed the majority-Republican Senate after a vote along party lines. 

A South Dakota bill exempts private schools and churches from a law that made it illegal to carry guns on school grounds. The bill, introduced in January, passed the House on the day of the Parkland shooting, then the Senate on Thursday. 

On Tuesday, the West Virginia House passed, by 85-14, an NRA-backed bill forcing private businesses to allow employees and visitors to keep firearms in cars parked on private property. Twenty-two states have similar “parking lot” laws. West Virginia lawmakers rejected amendments that would have made exceptions for chemical plants and churches. 

In Indiana, Rep. Jim Lucas filed an amendment this week to expand an existing bill aimed at letting Hoosiers take guns into schools and churches. Citing Parkland, Lucas says the bill now needs to be broadened to guarantee a right to carry on all state-owned property. “We just need to eliminate gun-free zones,” Lucas said according to the Indianapolis Star. 

On Wednesday, Tennessee state Rep. Andy Holt, a Republican, introduced a bill to let people carry guns in airports, with a special provision that bars local governments from passing their own gun regulations. It is next scheduled for consideration on Tuesday, March 6. 

And of course, pro-gun lawmakers have also been busy fighting off gun control measures. In Virginia alone, the NRA took a victory lap for having defeated more than 60 restrictions on guns proposed to the general assembly during a single legislative session, including universal background checks, and a law that would have required gun owners to report firearms stolen. The group declared that particular victory six days after Parkland.

Ohio Republicans too are moving forward with a stand your ground bill as I said last week.  The only path to meaningful legislative change is going to be a massive defeat at the polls for NRA-backed candidates in November, folks.

We need to help make that happen.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Axios's Jon Swan gives us something that could be a major leak in the Mueller probe: a list of communications related to a Grand Jury subpoena.

Axios has reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena that Robert Mueller's team sent to a witness last month.

What Mueller is asking for: Mueller is subpoenaing all communications — meaning emails, texts, handwritten notes, etc. — that this witness sent and received regarding the following people:

1. Carter Page
2. Corey Lewandowski
3. Donald J. Trump
4. Hope Hicks
5. Keith Schiller
6. Michael Cohen
7. Paul Manafort
8. Rick Gates
9. Roger Stone
10. Steve Bannon 

The subpoena asks for all communications from November 1, 2015, to the present. Notably, Trump announced his campaign for president five months earlier — on June 16, 2015.

If this is true (and the Mueller probe has been pretty damn good up until now with leaks, so I have some mild doubts) then the question becomes who's the witness, who is the person not on this list who would know everyone else and would have the pull to communicate directly with all these people, including Trump, and was with the Trump campaign since November 2015?

The obvious answer at first glance is former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, but we already know there's a 99.99% chance he's cooperating given the only charge he's facing is lying to the FBI, so Mueller wouldn't need to issue a subpoena as he already has Flynn by the short hairs.  It's most likely not him.

It could in theory be Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but this is a pretty wide-ranging list.  Sessions may be an unapologetic antebellum Southern good-ol'-boy racist, but he isn't personally sloppy enough to leave all this communication around in an e-mail trail, particularly with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.  He doesn't really have a reason to communicate with Schiller (Trump's former bodyguard) or Roger Stone, so it's not Sessions, either.

It could be Donald Trump Jr., he seems like the kind of guy (unlike Sessions) to be this sloppy and he does know all these people and could communicate with them, but if that were true, well, the guy can't keep his mouth shut as he's just like his dad.  We'd know if he had been subpoenaed as he'd be screaming on Twitter about it.  Junior seems unlikely to be the witness here as a result.

So who is it?

My guess is the witness in question is Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  He's under the most pressure right now from all the events last week.  We know Mueller is concentrating on him as the nexus of the Russian involvement in the 2016 election, the international money laundering, and the resulting obstruction of justice cover-up.  He would definitely have the clout to communicate directly with all ten of the above people, and he definitely would have been involved in the Trump campaign from November 2015 until now.  He fits all the criteria.

But the bigger question is how Mueller would be able to confirm all of Jared's communications with all these people.  You would almost think that the FBI has investigations into all the people on that list that it could use to confirm the witness was indeed providing the information in the subpoena.

That's what really makes me think the witness in question is Kushner.  He's the most important name not on the list, who isn't known to be cooperating, and there's just too much bad news coming out about him now to make me think this isn't an avalanche of pressure designed to get him to play ball.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is meeting with officials from South Korea as Seoul tries to pave the way for high-level talks between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jai-in.
• "The Shape of Water" took Best Picture at last night's Oscars with Guillermo del Toro winning Best Director, Jordan Peele became the first black writer with a screenplay win for "Get Out".
• Sunday's Italian elections have left anti-establishment 5-Star Movement with the most seats in a hung parliament, the far-right anti-migrant Northern League finished second.
• Facing increasing pressure to resign over multiple corruption investigations, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu visits the US Monday to meet with Donald Trump.
• Commercial rocket company SpaceX is expected to make its 50th launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, taking just under eight years to accomplish the task.

Last Call For Betting It All

As constant scold Josh Kraushaar points out, the GOP is in real trouble in the upcoming special election in PA-18 in ten days, looking at a tied race in a district Trump won by 20 points.  Trump is now betting the future of the GOP on the past: ugly trade wars and protectionism.

Here’s how tricky things have gotten for Republicans: GOP outside groups have dramatically scaled back their ads promoting the party’s tax cut, with the messaging barely moving the needle in the district’s working-class confines. The latest round of advertisements focus on law-and-order issues, like immigration and crime. A new spot from the Paul Ryan-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC slams Lamb for supporting “amnesty to illegal immigrants” because he “worked in the Obama administration.” A National Republican Congressional Committee ad portrays Lamb as soft on crime because he negotiated a plea deal with a notorious drug kingpin during his tenure as a federal prosecutor. These culture-war ads are reminiscent of those run by Ed Gillespie in his failed Virginia gubernatorial campaign, and they carry the whiff of desperation.

Meanwhile, Republicans are sufficiently concerned about the energy from the Democratic base that CLF is distributing a mailer in suburban precincts of Allegheny County “thanking” Lamb for supporting gun rights. It’s a cynical attempt to dampen Democratic enthusiasm for his campaign. The mailer, first reported by The Washington Post, underscores how even in a district where Second Amendment support is strong, gun control has become a fresh rallying cry for a supercharged Democratic electorate post-Parkland.

In another warning sign for Republicans, there are indications that conservative-minded voters in this district value government entitlements as much as tax cuts. Lamb’s rebuttal to the GOP tax-cut argument was that he supported “middle-class tax cuts” but not ones that could lead to cuts to Social Security and Medicare. In an acknowledgment that the Democratic message resonated, a new CLF ad turns the tables and accuses Pelosi of supporting “massive Medicare cuts” while arguing that Lamb “won’t protect seniors.” As Republicans learned in the 2016 presidential campaign, the agenda backed by GOP donors doesn’t necessarily jibe with the issues that the GOP rank-and-file cares about—especially in a blue-collar district like this one.

Republicans are eager to pin a disappointing result in this election on their candidate—state Rep. Rick Saccone—but the reality is the race is being defined on Trump’s terms. Saccone is running as an unapologetic Trump supporter, calling himself the president’s “wingman” in an interview with National Journal last month. Trump will be campaigning for Saccone on March 10, and he is likely to promote his newly announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. It’s a protectionist position that Saccone quickly embraced, and one that is popular with the district’s sizable union membership.

This southwest Pennsylvania district is about as Trumpian as it gets: racially homogeneous, predominantly blue-collar, and filled with energy workers revolutionizing the region’s economy. To Lamb’s credit, he’s run a disciplined campaign and staked out moderate views on guns and fracking that have distinguished him from typical Democrats. But if Republicans can’t hold onto this seat with more than $9 million of outside GOP money invested here, it will serve as an awfully rude awakening to what’s likely to come for the midterms.

Trump clearly believes steel and Aluminum tariffs will "make America great again" and in the short run it's going to help, it may even be enough to save the GOP in PA-18 (and hey, Trump's said he'd do a lot of things that he hasn't bothered to actually do yet.)

But if he goes through on these tariffs, the odds of us crashing into a depression get exponentially higher.  It might save Trump's neck but everyone else, including the Rust Belt, will pay dearly.  At least one Trump cabinet member is very loudly saying that the tariffs will happen.

Sort of.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Sunday said he has no reason to believe President Donald Trump will reverse his controversial tariff announcement this week, but left room for the often unpredictable president to change his mind.

“Whatever his final decision is, is what will happen,” Ross said on Sunday’s “Meet The Press.” “What he has said he has said; if he says something different, it'll be something different.”

“The president has announced that this will happen this week. I have no reason to think otherwise," Ross added.

Trump announced a plan Thursday to impose a tariff of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum, which sent the stock market into a tumble and sparked fierce pushback from numerous Republicans in Congress amid international fears over a trade war.

Some United States trading partners have threatened retaliation, but Ross indicated that wasn't a concern. He did not say whether any nations could get an exception.

"Retaliation isn't going to change the price of a can of beer," he said. "It isn't going to change the price of a car. It's just not going to."

The GOP just bet their entire political future on the above sentence.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Dictator

As Chinese President Xi Jinping has now abolished term limits on his own office, meaning the 64-year-old can and most probably will be China's leader into 2030 and beyond, Donald Trump's reaction to such a clear warning that Beijing is becoming far more aggressive and authoritarian is that hey, maybe we should get rid of the 22nd Amendment!

President Donald Trump bemoaned a decision not to investigate Hillary Clinton after the 2016 presidential election, decrying a "rigged system" that still doesn't have the "right people" in place to fix it, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors in Florida on Saturday. 

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China's President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn't mind making such a maneuver himself. 

"He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great," Trump said. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day." 

The remarks, delivered inside the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate during a lunch and fundraiser, were upbeat, lengthy, and peppered with jokes and laughter. But Trump's words reflected his deeply felt resentment that his actions during the 2016 campaign remain under scrutiny while those of his former rival, Hillary Clinton, do not. 

"I'm telling you, it's a rigged system folks," Trump said. "I've been saying that for a long time. It's a rigged system. And we don't have the right people in there yet. We have a lot of great people, but certain things, we don't have the right people."

Oh but Zandar, he's joking!

Oh, but he's not.  And even if somehow this was a bad attempt at humor, given Trump's record of actions, it's not very funny now is it?  This guy is still a fascist.  He's not joking about wanting to lock Hillary up, and openly calling on the Attorney General to do it.

Trump has repeatedly said that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, should launch investigations into Clinton, and has continued to lambast Sessions on Twitter for not taking what he views as appropriate steps to probe Clinton's actions involving her private email server. 

The stewing anger with Sessions has soured Trump's mood over the past week, including on Wednesday evening, when he fumed inside the White House over his attorney general's decision to release a statement defending himself after Trump chastised his approach to an investigation into alleged surveillance abuses as "DISGRACEFUL" on Twitter.

Trump doesn't joke about his authoritarian impulses, folks.  Never.

Sunday Long Read: Working As Intended

Firearms remain the only product that when works as advertised, kills things, and when the product is clearly defective, it's still deadly.  Brazilian gun manufacturer Taurus has sold potentially a million firearms in the US with defective safeties that can still fire even when in the safe position when the gun is bumped, jarred, or dropped, and the NRA has made sure that no gunmaker can be touched for such a lethal product liability.  Bud and Sonie Brown found that out the hard way on New Year's Eve in 2016.

The simple answer is that no government entity has the power to police defective firearms or ammunition in America—or even force gunmakers to warn consumers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall and repair of thousands of things, from toasters to teddy bears. If a defective car needs fixing, the U.S. Department of Transportation can make it happen. The Food and Drug Administration deals with food, drugs, and cosmetics. Only one product is beyond the government’s reach when it comes to defects and safety: firearms. Not even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can get defective guns off the market. If a gunmaker chooses to ignore a safety concern, there’s no one to stop it.

To understand how firearms makers escaped government oversight of the safety of their pistols, revolvers, and rifles, you need to go back to 1972, when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Four years earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which regulated several aspects of firearm sales, and advocates of gun control hoped to give this new agency oversight of defective weapons. Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan and a hunter with an A-plus rating from the ascendant NRA, blocked them. In 1975 he did it again, when a colleague introduced a bill making a second run at giving the CPSC firearms authority. “We put in there an express prohibition against them getting their nose into the business of regulating firearms and ammunition,” Dingell said in debate in Congress. That second bill was crushed, 339-80, and the issue has never been seriously considered again.

For Brown, none of that explains why he hadn’t heard that Taurus had sold bad guns. It’s one thing if the government didn’t do anything, but he reads every issue of American Rifleman, the NRA’s official magazine, and he never saw a warning about Taurus guns. “Why didn’t the NRA warn us? I guess there’s too much money and politics going into the NRA, so they had reason not to tell us,” he says.

The NRA lists gun safety as among its concerns, and in recent years, American Rifleman has covered voluntary safety recalls from Colt’s Manufacturing, FN America, and SIG Sauer. But articles on Taurus’s class-action settlement or any of the lawsuits could not be found by search on the magazine’s website. Shooting Illustrated, another NRA publication, ran a three-paragraph story on the class-action settlement.

Taurus and the NRA have had a mutually beneficial relationship for years. A lot of that was the work of Robert Morrison, president of Miami Lakes-based Taurus International Manufacturing Inc., until 2011. Morrison is a close friend of Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president. Taurus has received at least eight NRA awards and has been mentioned in dozens of articles in American Rifleman.

Morrison started as an independent Taurus salesman in 1994 before moving up through the ranks to run U.S. operations in 2004. He aggressively used the NRA to sell guns, introducing a program, still in effect, whereby anyone who buys a Taurus weapon is given a free one-year membership in the NRA. The strategy appears to have worked: In 2016, American Riflemanprofiled an Alabama pawnshop that sold 1,000 Taurus firearms in a month with the promotion. The standard price for an NRA membership is currently $40.

Many Taurus models are considered starter guns. Bass Pro Shops, one of the largest firearms sellers in the country, sells nine Taurus-made models for under $400, including the $179.99 Heritage Rough Rider revolver. The cheapest Glock—a brand that works a different part of the handgun market—is $469.99.

The low end sees plenty of activity. Last year, six Taurus guns made category-based top-10-selling lists published by Gun Genius, a website owned by GunBroker.com LLC, the country’s largest online auction platform for firearms. That included the Taurus Model 85, the No. 1-selling revolver in America, which goes for as little as $219 on GunBroker.com. (The NRA didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment for this article. Morrison, reached at his Florida home by phone, didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

The NRA is not an enthusiast's group or consumer protection organization, although it used to be.  For the last couple of decades the NRA has been a gunmaker's lobbyist group, the most effective industry lobbyist organization in political history.  They always win.  And like any pusher, they need cheap foreign starter product with shoddy safety to get new members hooked.

But maybe, just maybe, that will start to change.

Strike Up The Band One Last Time

The New York Times finally pays attention to the ongoing West Virginia teachers' strike, which now enters its second week after the deal last weekend with GOP Gov. Jim Justice fell through.

Home from a long day teaching English last month at Mingo Central High School, Robin Ellis told her husband the latest talk among the teachers. They were tired of low pay and costly health benefits — and they were mulling a “rolling strike,” in which teachers in a few counties would walk out each day.

“You don’t want to do that,” Donnie Ellis, her husband, said. As a veteran of strip mines and the intense labor conflicts that often came with them, he knew what made some strikes succeed and others crumble.

“It’s got to be all-in or nothing,” he said.

It has definitely been all-in in West Virginia. For seven days now, teachers have refused to work in all 55 counties, shutting down every school in the state.

Every school day since last Thursday, thousands of red- and black-clad teachers, bus drivers and cooks have descended on Charleston to fill the halls of the State Capitol, chanting and singing defiantly in one of the few statewide teachers’ strikes in American history.

On Saturday, teachers and superintendents crowded back into the Capitol, where the Senate Finance Committee was expected to consider a 5 percent pay raise, which has support from the governor and the Republican-controlled House.

Senate leadership had previously suggested using revenue that would be set aside for a pay raise to shore up the public employees’ much-criticized health insurance plan. But striking teachers are adamant that they want both matters addressed.

The teachers disregarded their own union leaders’ advice to return to work earlier this week, opting instead for a thunderous showdown with members of the state’s increasingly conservative leadership. The direction in the next few days is anyone’s guess.

“If there’s no deal,” said Katrina Minney, 44, a high school English teacher in Kanawha County, “we’re not going back.”

Frustration at the state of pay and health insurance — in addition to proposed changes to rules governing hiring, firing and the payment of union dues — had been building for a while.

Smaller walkouts began in early February, organized by the sons and daughters of coal miners who had stood on the picket lines themselves.

“When I was in diapers, he was involved in a mine strike,” Justin Endicott, 34, a fourth-grade teacher in Mingo County, said of his father.

“Southern West Virginia’s often forgotten, and if we were not loud, we would be completely forgotten,” said Mr. Endicott, who traveled to Charleston on Feb. 2 with teachers from neighboring counties to take part in the first of the school walkouts.

Public employee unions are on their last legs.  Membership is down, more states are passing union-busting legislation, Trump has all but dismantled the NLRB, and the Supreme Court is expected to soon rule on the end of fair-share requirements.

That's why this strike is especially important, because it could basically be the last major public employee union strike in America.

Here's hoping I'm wrong about that.

The Petty Punitive Prez

Donald Trump has always been one of those people who has demanded respect, not commanded it. As I've pointed out numerous times over the last 14 months, Trump never forgets or forgives a slight, real or perceived, in the end he will always exact some kind of revenge.

He's always wanted respect in the Big Apple especially, but he's been an asshole to everyone in the city for decades and everyone knows it.  But now that he has the power of the White House, the kind of revenge he can wreak on millions of Americans for failing to recognize his "greatness" is potentially deadly.

President Trump is pushing congressional Republicans not to fund a crucial infrastructure project — a long-delayed plan to build a new rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey — setting up a confrontation that could complicate passage of a massive government spending bill this month. 

Trump personally appealed to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) this week to target federal funding for the $30 billion Gateway project, which would construct a tunnel into New York’s Penn Station to supplement two aging tubes that are at risk of failing in the coming years. 

The project is widely considered to be among the most pressing and most expensive infrastructure needs in the country, and state and local leaders have long sought federal funding to jump-start work on it. But the Trump administration threw the project into doubt late last year by casting aside an agreement reached during the Obama administration that would have the federal government pick up half the project’s cost. 

And now, according to four officials familiar with the discussions, Trump has taken a personal interest in making sure no federal dollars flow to a project that is considered critical to his hometown’s long-term economic prosperity. 

Trump delivered his message to Ryan on Wednesday during a meeting at the Capitol, three people familiar with the conversation said. Trump was on the Hill for a ceremony for the late Rev. Billy Graham, who lay in honor in the Rotunda. Ryan seemed surprised that Trump brought up the project in their conversation, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

A spokesman for Ryan declined to comment. A White House representative did not respond to a request for comment.

This is how Trump operates.  Millions here voted against him, thousands protest his tower, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, Gov. Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and state AG Schniederman regularly attack him.

Trump wants to destroy the place now.  He's going to make NYC bleed.

But the Gateway project also has had powerful Republican backers, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), who represents thousands of suburban constituents who rely on the Hudson River rail tunnels for their daily commutes to and from Manhattan. 

Congressional appropriators, with Frelinghuysen’s backing, are looking to spend at least $950 million in federal funds on the Gateway project in the coming omnibus spending bill. Lawmakers are expected to pass the legislation ahead of a March 23 government shutdown deadline.

A spokeswoman for Frelinghuysen did not respond to a request for comment.

I'd feel bad for New Jersey Republicans, who are going to get wiped off the face of the map in November, except they chose to enable the party of Trump every step of the way.

At this point, Trump no longer cares who knows about his plans for petty tyranny.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Well, Jared Kushner is now in a gigantic world of trouble, folks.  Remember yesterday's story on Jared Kushner magically getting millions in business loans from companies after inviting them to the White House?  It turns out that the criminality in that little arrangement was so obvious that even the Securities and Exchange Commission reared its head like a Brontosaurus out of the swamp to take a look, but it turns out that probe mysteriously was dropped after a month.

The Securities and Exchange Commission late last year dropped its inquiry into a financial company that a month earlier had given White House adviser Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm a $180 million loan. 

While there’s no evidence that Kushner or any other Trump administration official had a role in the agency’s decision to drop the inquiry into Apollo Global Management, the timing has once again raised potential conflict-of-interest questions about Kushner’s family business and his role as an adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump. 

The SEC detail comes a day after The New York Times reported that Apollo’s loan to the Kushner Cos. followed several meetings at the White House with Kushner. 

“I suppose the best case for Kushner is that this looks absolutely terrible,” said Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Without presuming that there is any kind of quid pro quo ... there are a lot of ways that the fact of Apollo’s engagement with Kushner and the Kushner businesses in a public and private context might cast a shadow over what the SEC is doing and influence consciously or unconsciously how the agency acted.” 

Apollo said in its 2018 annual report that the SEC had halted its inquiry into how the firm reported the financial results of its private equity funds and other costs and personnel changes. Apollo had previously reported that the Obama administration SEC had subpoenaed it for information related to the issue. 

The SEC, which often makes such inquiries of financial firms, declined Friday to comment on the probe or its decision to halt it.

I don't know guys, it's a complete and total mystery as to how an investigation into Donald Trump's son-in-law  magically vanished within a month.  If only there was some sort of government oversight committee that could look into this or something maybe?

I dunno.  I guess we'll never know if Jared Kushner's businesses played a role in US foreign policy decisions or not.

Jared Kushner’s father met with Qatar’s minister of finance last April, to solicit an investment in the family’s distressed asset at 666 Fifth Avenue, according to a new report from the Intercept. 

The Qataris shot him down. 

Weeks later, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates organized a blockade of Qatar. The Gulf monarchies claimed that this act of aggression was a response to Donald Trump’s call for the Arab world to crack down on terrorists — after taking in the president’s majestic sermon in Riyadh, the Saudis simply couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t take action to thwart Qatar’s covert financing of Islamist extremism. 

In reality, the Saudis’ primary aim was to punish Doha for asserting its independence from Riyadh by, among other things, engaging with Iran and abetting Al Jazeera’s journalism. This was obvious to anyone familiar with the Saudis’ own affinity for (shamelessly) exporting jihadism — which is to say, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Middle East politics. 

And it was equally obvious that the United States had nothing to gain from a conflict between its Gulf allies. Qatar hosts one of America’s largest and most strategically important air bases in the Middle East. Any development that pushes Doha away from Riyadh pulls it toward Tehran. Thus, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — and virtually every other arm of the U.S. government — scrambled to nip the blockade in the bud. 

But Jared Kushner was (reportedly) an exception. Donald Trump was more than happy to endorse the idea that his speech had moved mountains, and commended the Saudis for punishing Qatar — first on Twitter, and then during a press conference in the Rose Garden. According to contemporary reports, his son-in-law was one of the only White House advisers to approve of this stance.

As J.M. Ashby reminds us over at Bob Cesca's place, the Kushner/Qatar story was known about in back in July when it happened.   Like all the obvious criminality going on from the outset of this regime, it's so brazen and so common that it disappears down the memory hole into the chaos Trump creates.

I wonder if Robert Mueller is looking into all this?  Certainly he's the type of guy to ask questions about such a blatant quid pro quo arrangement.

Federal investigators are scrutinizing whether any of Jared Kushner's business discussions with foreigners during the presidential transition later shaped White House policies in ways designed to either benefit or retaliate against those he spoke with, according to witnesses and other people familiar with the investigation. 

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team has asked witnesses about Kushner's efforts to secure financing for his family's real estate properties, focusing specifically on his discussions during the transition with individuals from Qatar and Turkey, as well as Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates, according to witnesses who have been interviewed as part of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 election. 

As part of the scrutiny of Kushner's discussions with Turks, federal investigators have reached out to Turkish nationals for information on Kushner through the FBI's legal attache office in Ankara, according to two people familiar with the matter. Separately, Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. in late January and early February considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their country's Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country, four people familiar with the matter said. The Qatari officials decided against cooperating with Mueller for now out of fear it would further strain the country's relations with the White House, these people said.

Boy I mean given the fact that Kushner was involved in real estate deals all over the globe, the potential for money laundering and influence peddling would be titanic.

It might just be the kind of thing that could bring down the Trump regime.

The GOP Shootout In Ohio

Outgoing Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich suddenly wants several new gun safety provisions in state laws after signing into law a 2011 bill that allowed concealed carry in bars and a 2017 bill that expanded concealed carry to workplace parking lots.  Kasich now wants major new safety laws for firearms, saying it's a "different day" in Ohio.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is backing six gun control measures that he believes have a support from both sides of the debate and that hopes will help end the horror of American mass shootings.

Kasich brushed aside questions about hard line opposition to gun control. “It’s a different day,” he said.

The governor will ask the Ohio General Assembly to pass measures to take guns away from people at risk of hurting themselves or others, keep guns away from those convicted of domestic violence or subject to protection orders, close some gaps in the background check system, strengthen the law against “straw man” gun purchases, and ban bump stocks and armor-piercing ammunition.

“No one is interested in some slippery slope in trying to go and grab everyone’s guns,” he said.

The response from Ohio Republicans, who currently have a supermajority in both the state House and Senate, was both swift and utterly predictable.

The leader of Republicans in the Senate says he thinks a “stand your ground” bill that Gov. John Kasich said he wouldn’t sign will pass anyway.

The bill removes the requirement for a person to try to retreat before using lethal force in self-defense. Kasich said on NBC’s Meet the Press Daily last week that he wouldn’t sign it. For a while it’s appeared the bill was stalled. But Senate President Larry Obhof of Medina says he’s not sure about that. 

“I think that would easily pass the Legislature. I don’t think there would be any problem with that, no. Now whether we choose to go that route or not remains to be seen.” 

The so-called Stand Your Ground bill is one of 23 pieces of gun-related legislation at the Statehouse – 14 of which would expand gun owners’ rights, including adding places where permit holders could carry concealed weapons.

We'll see what the General Assembly does, but my guess is that Obhof has the votes to override Kasich's veto, they've done it before.

Of course, how long Ohio has a GOP supermajority, I can't tell you.  Something tells me this fact will change abruptly in November.

Trading Blows WIth The World

It's hard to overstate just how pissed off Republicans are over being blindsided by Trump's trade war announcement yesterday.  Rust Belt and Farm Belt Republicans just saw their 2018 re-election hopes go up in flames and they're not taking it quietly.

GOP lawmakers from farming states sharply warned President Donald Trump Thursday that his decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will cost Americans consumers — and could be devastating for him at the polls.

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, struggled to find words to describe his emotions after being blindsided by Thursday's news that Trump would impose tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports that sent stocks spiraling downward amid fears of a trade war.

"These are the people who voted for the president," Roberts said. "These are his people. One county in Kansas even voted for him 90 percent and they're not going to be happy at all about this."

Roberts was joined in criticizing the proposal by U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from neighboring Nebraska. Together they said the effect on farm states would be costly if foreign governments retaliate with tariffs on imports of U.S. goods, such as agricultural products.

"Let's be clear: The president is proposing a massive tax increase on American families. Protectionism is weak, not strong. You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one," Sasse said.

The stern admonishing was reminiscent of the pushback Republicans and conservatives gave Trump on immigration following a meeting in January.

However, Trump said the tariffs would help right decades of unfair trade policies. Trump told the group of executives who gathered at the White House, including representatives from Nucor Corp., AK Steel Holding Corp. and U.S. Steel Corp., that "you will have protection for the first time in a long while."

Trump said the full plan will be announced next week. The White House would not provide any specific details, including whether some trade partners would be exempt.

But Roberts and other Republicans from the Senate Finance Committee described the penalties as a ultimately "consumer tax," that would boomerang badly on the very rural and middle-class voters who supported his election in 2016.

Roberts worried that imposing the steep tariff could also wipe out any benefits from tax reform if higher manufacturing costs are passed on to consumers. He fears that unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA could be next on Trump's chopping block.

If Trump blows up NAFTA like everyone expects on top of this, the global trade war will be fully on and it's going to wreck the US economy overnight.  Retaliation from the EU and Asia will be swift, but if the tarriffs don't exclude Mexico and especially Canada, the economic damage will be immense.

President Trump on Friday continued bucking his advisers and GOP leaders by acknowledging for the first time he could be triggering a global trade war by imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum. 

And a few hours later he said that this was just the beginning, promising “RECIPROCAL TAXES” against any country that has an import duty on U.S. goods or services. 

In a series of Twitter posts, the first of which was launched before 6 a.m., Trump argued that the United States was being ripped off by other countries because the U.S. imports more goods than it exports from many countries. 

Many economists and trade experts have said this is how free trade works, particularly because the United States is the world’s wealthiest nation and wants access to foreign markets. But Trump believes that this is a reflection that importers take advantage of weak U.S. trade policies.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

Yeah, Trump tweeted that little advice gem this morning. Now take this staggering igorance of world trade policy, factor in the end of NAFTA on top of the terrible GOP tax scam bill from December, and you guarantee another steep recession if not full-blown depression that will make 2008 look like a sunny day in Pago Pago.

The only bright spot is that I can't think of a better way to get Midwestern Trump voters to abandon the GOP in a more rapid and dramatic fashion in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.  The GOP can count out Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa too if NAFTA goes, maybe even Texas and Oklahoma, maybe even long term.

For the rest of us though, dramatically higher prices on durable goods, construction materials and anything packaged in steel or aluminum cans are on the way.  You know, like pickup trucks, double wides and beer!

Enjoy, MAGA-land.  You're about to find out what happens to anyone who works with Trump and expects to win.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's announcement that he will be implementing steep tariffs on steel and aluminum has roiled world markets over fears of sparking a new global trade war.
• US Ambassador to Mexico Robert Jacobson has resigned her post over the Trump regime's positions on Mexico and Central America.
• Boston, NYC and Washington DC are under the gun from what could be record flooding from a Friday nor'easter that could bring near hurricane strength winds. 
• Firearms sales in the Trump era continue to slide as gun maker stocks are plummeting in the wake of last month's Parkland high school shooting and overall lower demand.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning that Russia's newest generation of nuclear weapons will render US ballistic missile defense technology "useless".

Last Call For The Drums Of War, Con't

As the Mueller trap closes in on Trump, I become more and more convinced he will attempt to order a catastrophic military conflict with North Korea in order to provide the chaos he'll need to resist the consequences, because at this point the Pentagon is running wargames of military strikes on Pyongyang and the resulting troop deployments and mass casualties.

A classified military exercise last week examined how American troops would mobilize and strike if ordered into a potential war on the Korean Peninsula, even as diplomatic overtures between the North and the Trump administration continue. 

The war planning, known as a “tabletop exercise,” was held over several days in Hawaii. It included Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, and Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command. 

They looked at a number of pitfalls that could hamper an American assault on North Korea’s well-entrenched military. Among them was the Pentagon’s limited ability to evacuate injured troops from the Korean Peninsula daily — a problem more acute if the North retaliated with chemical weapons, according to more than a half-dozen military and Defense Department officials familiar with the exercise. 

Large numbers of surveillance aircraft would have to be moved from the Middle East and Africa to the Pacific to support ground troops. Planners also looked at how American forces stationed in South Korea and Japan would be involved.

Pentagon officials cautioned that the planning does not mean that a decision has been made to go to war over President Trump’s demands that North Korea rein in its nuclear ambitions.

Sure it hasn't, it's just readiness exercises.  No need to be alarmed, citizens!

A war with North Korea, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said, would be “catastrophic.” He and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have argued forcefully for using diplomacy to address Pyongyang’s nuclear program. 

Commanders who attended the exercise in Hawaii were told that roughly 10,000 Americans could be wounded in combat in the opening days alone. And the number of civilian casualties, the generals were told, would likely be in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands. 

The potential human costs of a war were so high that, at one point during the exercise, General Milley remarked that “the brutality of this will be beyond the experience of any living soldier,” according to officials who were involved. 

So, too, would be the sheer logistical enterprise of moving thousands of American soldiers and equipment to the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, senior military officials worry that after 17 years in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops have become far more used to counterinsurgency fighting than a land war against a state, as an attack on North Korea would likely bring. 

But Mr. Mattis also has ordered top Pentagon leaders to be ready for any possible military action against North Korea. Already, ammunition has been pre-staged in the Pacific region for ground units. 

And Mr. Trump’s words — “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely,” he said in an August post on Twitter — have left senior officers and rank-and-file troops convinced that they need to accelerate their contingency planning.

It's one thing to simply say "the Pentagon is keeping its options open" if the point was saber-rattling.  This is a very specific leak of very specific information on preparations for what would be one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

If anything I hope this leak is being made to convince Trump and the people around him that military action against North Korea will result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of casualties.  Trump would go down as an absolute monster and the horror sinking in of the first major American war in the era of instant social media would be completely unprecedented.

Meanwhile, John Bolton's Mustache is penning op-eds in the Wall Street Journal calling for pre-preemptive strikes on North Korea.

Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an “imminent threat.” They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation. 

In assessing the timing of pre-emptive attacks, the classic formulation is Daniel Webster’s test of “necessity.” British forces in 1837 invaded U.S. territory to destroy the steamboat Caroline, which Canadian rebels had used to transport weapons into Ontario. 

Webster asserted that Britain failed to show that “the necessity of self-defense was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” Pre-emption opponents would argue that Britain should have waited until the Caroline reached Canada before attacking.

Would an American strike today against North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program violate Webster’s necessity test? Clearly not. Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different than in the age of steam. What was once remote is now, as a practical matter, near; what was previously time-consuming to deliver can now arrive in minutes; and the level of destructiveness of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is infinitely greater than that of the steamship Caroline’s weapons cargo.

Those drums of war are getting extremely loud now.  It may be only a matter of time.  Exactly who would alter Trump's course on this?  Where's Defense Secretary Mattis?

Why, Mad Dog is busy clearing the decks and removing the people who might stop Trump's war.. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is now leaving this mess behind and not of his own volition.

The White House is preparing to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as early as next month in a move orchestrated by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to five people familiar with the discussions. 

The move would be the latest in a long string of staff shakeups at the White House over the past year and comes after months of strained relations between the president and McMaster. 

A leading candidate to become President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser is the auto industry executive Stephen Biegun, according to the officials.

Whoever they are, I hope they save us, but it's not looking good.  Bolton's Mustache is also reportedly in the running for McMaster's job, and if that happens, the odds of a military conflict with North Korea moves well above 50%.

Millions will die, and that's just the opening few stanzas of this blood-soaked epic.  It's a race now between Mueller and the military.