StupidiNews!

• Severe thunderstorms and even a couple of possible tornadoes ripped through the Mid-Atlantic and New England last night, two people were killed and hundreds of thousands are without power.
• Ash, smoke, and volcanic gas still threaten residents of Hawaii as Mt. Kilauea continues to erupt, mass evacuations may be triggered if lava floes reach the island's major highways.
• North Korea has now suspended talks with both South Korea and the US, protesting scheduled joint military exercises between Seoul and Washington and saying denuclearization is off the table.
• Decommissioned Boeing 747s aren't headed for the grave after all as package companies are snapping up record numbers of the jumbo jets to haul cargo across the country.
• The CIA believes it knows the identity of "Vault 7", the source that leaked CIA hacking tools to WikiLeaks, an ex-CIA contractor being held in Manhattan on child pornography charges.

Last Call For Junior Gitmo Fun Camp For Kids

Just when you thought the Trump regime couldn't get more odious, they remind you that no matter how bad the Democrats are on things, that Republicans will always be worse.

The Trump administration is making preparations to warehouse migrant children on military bases, according to Defense Department communications, the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families who cross the border illegally. 

According to an email notification sent to Pentagon staffers, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make site visits at four military installations in Texas and Arkansas during the next two weeks to evaluate their suitability for child shelters. 

The bases would be used to hold minors under age 18 who arrive at the border without an adult relative or after the government has separated them from their parents. HHS is the government agency responsible for providing minors with foster care until another adult relative can assume custody.

The email characterized the site visits as a preliminary assessment. “No decisions have been made at this time,” it states.

An official at HHS confirmed the military site visits. Speaking on condition of anonymity because the plans are not yet public, the official said HHS currently has the bed space to hold 10,571 children in its network of 100 foster-care facilities.

It's like summer camp, only it's internment camp.  America!

Those facilities are at 91 percent capacity, the HHS official said, and the Trump administration’s crackdown plans could push thousands more children into government care. The official said DHS has not provided projections for how many additional children to expect. 

Trump officials say they are moving forcefully to halt a sharp increase in the number of families crossing the border illegally this spring, many of whom are Central Americans seeking asylum. U.S. border agents arrested more than 100,000 illegal border-crossers in March and April, the highest monthly totals since Trump took office. 

Trump has seethed at the increase, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for blame. He has ordered her to “close” the border and cut off the migration flows, which typically increase in spring with seasonal demand for rural labor. 

Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions say the government will take the extraordinary measure of filing criminal charges against anyone who crosses the border illegally, including parents traveling with their children. In most cases, that means adults will be held at immigration jails awaiting court dates while their children are sent to foster care. 

“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said in a speech last week.

“If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally” he added. “It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”

 At what point do other countries start demanding regime change for Washington?

At what point do we do it? I mean, we're literally rounding up kids, separating them from families, and then rendering them into government facilities for what, permanent detainment until they can be expelled from the country without their parents?

What country does this?

Oh yeah, America.  Being made great again, one war crime at a time.  Jesus hell.

Greitens's Game Goes Gaga

It looks like St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner got in over her head in her efforts to prosecute Missouri GOP Gov. Eric Greitens, as the case made a major turn Monday.

Prosecutors on Monday dismissed a criminal charge against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, bringing a stunning halt to his trial just before it was set to begin and with jury selection already underway.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner dropped the felony invasion-of-privacy charge, stemming from allegations that Greitens took a nude photo of a woman without her consent. The decision came after a judge ruled that the governor’s lawyers could potentially call her as a witness in the trial.

“It’s a great victory and it has been a long time coming,” Greitens, 44, a Republican and a former Navy SEAL, told reporters after his case was dismissed. The governor has repeatedly denied any criminal wrongdoing and dismissed widespread, bipartisan calls for his resignation.

But Greitens’s political and criminal troubles are far from over. The circuit attorney said she intends to refile the charge and may appoint a special prosecutor or one of her assistants to pursue the case. Greitens still faces another felony charge of computer tampering tied to allegations that he improperly used a veterans charity donor list to raise funds for his 2016 campaign for governor.

Not only could Greitens be facing a special prosecutor, but there's still the second set of charges against him over his computer fraud when he allegedly used his charity fundraising list as campaign donor information.

Oh, and he's still going to be impeached, most likely.

Legislative leaders in the Republican-controlled Missouri Senate on Monday renewed calls for the governor to resign. They said they will continue considering impeaching Greitens during a special session that is set to start this week.

The dismissal “does not change the facts” revealed to the House’s special committee investigating Greitens, the Republican leaders said in the Missouri in a statement Monday.

“The members of the House committee have discovered a disturbing pattern of allegations, most of which are completely separate from the case dismissed today,” Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard and Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe said in the statement. “We now hope the governor and his staff are more forthcoming with the facts, and they decide to appear before the special investigative committee.”

“The governor has lost the moral authority and the ability to lead the state going forward, and we reaffirm our call that he resign immediately,” the statement added. Leaders in the Republican-controlled House also urged the governor to “take advantage of our open offer to share his side of the facts” and testify to the House committee.

The dismissal of the case does however look like a complete disaster for Gardner's office.

The circuit attorney’s announcement came on the third day of jury selection for Greitens’ trial. It also followed news that investigators were unable to find evidence in Greitens’s phone, email or Apple iCloud account proving that he took the alleged photo of the blindfolded woman, a hairdresser with whom he was having an extramarital affair in 2015, before his campaign for governor.

On Monday, the defense filed a new motion to dismiss the charge. Scott Rosenblum, one of the governor’s lawyers, accused the circuit attorney of “misconduct from the beginning of this case to the end,” as recently in the last week. Rosenblum rejected the notion that prosecutors would refile the case, saying they had no evidence to support the charge.

Rosenblum told reporters the judge agreed to allow the defense team to name Gardner as a witness based on the possibility that she knew about alleged perjury committed by an investigator pursuing the case.

“The judge allowed us to endorse her as a witness,” Rosenblum said. “She made herself a witness to the perjury that her investigator created throughout the course of this case and his misconduct. She was the only witness.”

Prosecutorial misconduct has sunk many a case against a political figure (remember Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens?) and this case appears to have been bungled so badly that it had to be dropped.  When a judge flat out makes it clear the defense can call the lead prosecutor as a witness to answer questions about perjury by the prosecutor's staff, your case is fried like an egg.  Josh Marshall:

As for the criminal case, the concerns at issue date back to the first deposition of the woman at the heart of the case on Jan. 29, soon after Gardner’s probe began. 

William Tisaby, the investigator who conducted that interview alongside Gardner, later appeared to lie to the defense about key aspects of how it transpired. Tisaby said that he took no notes during the interview — a claim contradicted by a video of the conversation that was belatedly provided to defense lawyers.

Judge Burlison ultimately sanctioned prosecutors for failing to promptly turn over to the defense relevant evidence, like the video and 11 pages of notes Tisaby took while interviewing the woman’s friend. 

These missteps helped Greitens’ team frame the investigation as tainted from the start, and Gardner’s office acknowledged that they made a mistake in relying on Tisaby. 

Even without those unforced errors, prosecutors had a difficult path towards securing a guilty verdict. Under the relevant Missouri felony statute, they needed to prove that Greitens transmitted the nude photo in a way that would make it accessible via computer. But, crucially, they did not have access to the photo itself. 

Searches of the governor’s smartphone and Apple cloud data found no evidence of the image, and no witness, including Greitens’ ex-lover, has ever seen it. The judge barred testimony from three expert witnesses for the prosecution, including two electrical engineers who could speak to the technical issues regarding the photo’s potential transmission, and a law professor slated to testify about revenge pornography. 

That left prosecutors with only the woman’s testimony and corroborating accounts from her ex-husband and friend. According to the woman, she saw a camera flash through her blindfold, heard the distinctive click of an iPhone camera shutter, and then heard Greitens threaten that the photo would appear “everywhere” if she told anyone what had transpired.

Greitens’ team moved several times to dismiss the case due to the lack of hard evidence. On Monday, they also called on Gardner to drop an unrelated felony computer tampering charge she brought against Greitens for allegedly misusing a charity donor list to fundraise for his gubernatorial campaign. 

“I think anything that this circuit attorney’s office has touched or its investigators should be dropped because it’s tainted. It’s biased,” attorney Scott Rosenblum told reporters outside the courthouse.

Hopefully a more competent hand can take over and refile.  Gardner screwed up, and badly.  Luckily, it looks like there's still enough evidence in the other case against Greitens and in the General Assembly's investigation to end his political career.

We'll see.  It's an epic failure for sure, but not a fatal one.  Greitens is still going down.

Blue States Should Go TRAP Shooting

We talked about yesterday's big SCOTUS decision on states being able to determine their own laws for sports betting and how that could open the door to challenging the Trump regime's position on states banning sanctuary cities, but there was actually another big SCOTUS move from Monday and that involved whether or not there's a Second Amendment right to sell guns.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to endorse a constitutional right to sell firearms, rejecting an appeal by three men who were denied a permit to open a gun store in northern California.

The justices, without comment Monday, left intact a federal appeals court decision that said the Second Amendment doesn’t protect the rights of would-be firearm sellers. The lower court also said potential customers could buy guns elsewhere.

It’s the third time this year the court has rejected an appeal from California gun-rights advocates. The court hasn’t heard arguments in a Second Amendment case in eight years.

The men, led by John Teixeira, sought to open their store about five miles south of Oakland in Alameda County.

In denying the permit, county officials said the proposed store didn’t comply with a local ordinance because it was less than 500 feet from residential properties.

The San Francisco-based appeals court said residents could shop at 10 other gun stores in the county, including one about 600 feet away from the proposed site.

Now, if these arguments sound somewhat familiar, replace "firearm access" with "abortion access" and as the Daily Banter's Justin Rosario points out, you have TRAP laws, which the Supreme Court has found to be legal. So how about TRAP laws for limiting gun stores?

It's unclear that the original regulation was designed with this outcome in mind but it's not hard to see the possibilities and we have Republicans to thank for paving the legal road for us. They've spent the last several years creating TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws designed specifically to put abortion clinics out of business. There's absolutely no reason the same can't be done to anyone that wants to sell guns. 

Here's a brief list of ways to make guns sales safer: 

• Any location selling guns must have a full time trauma surgeon and nurse on staff at all times.
• Any location selling guns must be within 2 miles of a hospital.
• Any location selling guns must have all staff fully certified as EMTs.
• Any location selling guns must have very expensive insurance to cover loss of life in case of an accidental shooting.
• Any location selling guns must be a full functioning ambulatory surgical center in case the wound is too severe to move the victim.

This will, naturally, outrage the NRA and their mindless army of ammosexuals but so what? They have their precious right to own as many guns as they want. They'll just have to travel to get them. They thought this was a great idea when it came to punishing women and stripping them of their reproductive rights so they don't get to start crying about tyranny now. 

It's true that there are versions of this already in effect in cities like Chicago but this is how states like New York or California could make simply eliminate gun stores statewide and it would be 100% legal because, hilariously, this is essentially a state's rights issue in which states have the right to decide what kinds of businesses will be allowed to operate within their borders and under what kinds of restrictions. Watching the pro-Confederacy yahoos argue that states don't have the right to regulate within their borders is going to be amazing.

Now I want to know how legally viable this is, because I truly think California and New York should, well, shoot for the moon on this.

We'll see.  But blue states regulating gun stores the way red states regulate abortion clinics would be incredible.

StupidiNews!

• A second day of protests in Gaza is expected after Israeli security forces killed 58 and wounded thousands of Palestinians demonstrating against the US embassy in Jerusalem on Monday. 
• Former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid had surgery for pancreatic cancer on Monday, he is expected to recover after the procedure to remove a tumor.
• Voters head to the polls in Pennsylvania and three other states for primaries as the Keystone State's new congressional district map has Democrats eyeing new seats and Republican retiring.
• Wyoming is rapidly becoming America's new home for cryptocurrency companies looking to get a foothold in the US with new tax incentives and revenue for the state.
• Nintendo says the re-launch of its NES Classic and SNES Classic systems next month means the company will have units "through the end of the year" after critical shortages.

Last Call For You Can Bet On It

A major decision from the Supreme Court today, as in a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Alito, the court struck down a 1992 law prohibiting sports betting outside Nevada, Delaware, Montana and Oregon as unconstitutional after New Jersey challenged the law in 2012.  The practical upshot: states can now legalize sports betting on professional and college sports as they see fit.

The United States Supreme Court agreed on Monday to allow New Jersey's bid for sports betting at its casinos and racetracks, effectively ending on a prohibition on a $100 billion industry and striking down restrictions on wagering outside of Nevada. 

The ruling could allow as many as 25 other states to seek similar allowances.
The case, Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, dealt with if the government had the right to "impermissibly commandeer the regulatory power of States." 

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected New Jersey law in 2016, ruling that the statute violated the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) which forbids state-authorized sports gambling. 

The move in trying to get New Jersey into legalized sports betting started years ago by former governor Chris Christie and other lawmakers, with the state passing a non-binding referendum allowing sports betting in 2011. 

Each of the North American major pro sports leagues and the NCAA filed a lawsuit against the state the following year after Christie signed a sports betting law, suing in 2012 and again in 2014. 

The sports leagues players' unions have said they want to be involved in some facet amid concern about fixing games and point shaving. 

"Given the pending Supreme Court decision regarding the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) ... The time has come to address not just who profits from sports gambling, but also the costs. Our unions have been discussing the potential impact of legalized gambling on players' privacy and publicity rights, the integrity of our games and the volatility on our businesses," the Players Associations said in a joint statement in January. 

Congress did give New Jersey a chance to become the fifth state to allow gambling before the ban was enacted, but the state failed to pass a sports betting law in the time allotted.

In other words, betting on pro and college sporting events is about to become legal in New Jersey, and you'd better believe a whole lot of states are going to follow suit very quickly.  Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Connecticut and Mississippi have already passed laws in anticipation of the ruling, and 14 more states are ready to pull the trigger on sports betting laws, including California, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and of course right here in Kentucky.  Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan will almost certainly get involved as well.  The two big states you can count on not taking bets: Texas and Florida.

Illegal sports betting in states outside Nevada is a $100 to $150 billion a year industry or more, depending on who you ask, and I anticipate dozens of states are going to make it legal and start collecting taxes on it with a swiftness.

Now, Congress isn't just sitting around and is actually ready to introduce legislation that bans sports betting in a way that meets Alito's test, at least in the Senate anyway.

But speaking of Alito, here's the thing: Alito's ruling makes it clear that the federal government can force states to do things by making them illegal but it can't pass laws that prevent state legislatures from allowing things to happen.  Guess what falls into that second, unconstitutional category of "commandeering state legislatures"?

That doctrine, moreover, has implications well beyond the realm of sports betting. Murphy isn’t simply good news for Atlantic City. It also bolsters the legal case against the Trump administration’s crackdown on so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Murphy concerns the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), a very odd statute which “makes it ‘unlawful’ for a State or any of its subdivisions ‘to sponsor, operate, advertise, promote, license, or authorize by law or compact . . . a lottery, sweepstakes, or other betting, gambling, or wagering scheme based . . . on’ competitive sporting events.” 

What makes this law unusual is that Congress typically does not forbid state lawmakers from taking a particular action. If Congress wants to ban sports betting, it can simply ban sports betting, and instruct federal agents to enforce that law. Banning state lawmakers from authorizing sports betting is a strangely roundabout way of accomplishing a similar goal. And it is also, as Justice Alito explains, unconstitutional. 

The reason why stems from the Supreme Court’s “anticommandeering” doctrine, which prohibits Congress from effectively drafting states into federal law enforcement. As the Court held in New York v. United States, “we have always understood that even where Congress has the authority under the Constitution to pass laws requiring or prohibiting certain acts, it lacks the power directly to compel the States to require or prohibit those acts.” 

“Where a federal interest is sufficiently strong to cause Congress to legislate,” New York explained, “it must do so directly; it may not conscript state governments as its agents.” 

The core holding of Murphy is that the anticommandeering doctrine applies equally to federal laws requiring state officials to take a particular action and federal laws prohibiting state lawmakers from enacting a particular law. “Congress,” Alito explains, “cannot issue direct orders to state legislatures.”

In other words, this just blew a hole in the Trump regime's sanctuary city claim that state and local government have to allow federal law enforcement officers in to conduct ICE business.

We'll see this in court for sure.

You can bet on that.

Whither Wellstone's Legacy?

I lived in the Twin Cities when Minnesota Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone's plane crashed in 2002, and it was a heartbreaking moment, I was convinced Wellstone was going to go far in life as a true progressive champion, and all that ended in an instant.  But Wellstone's legacy lived on and his sons helped to put together a grassroots movement to train the next generation of 21st century liberal leaders after his death.

But now that legacy is in trouble as the eternal, unavoidable question of Democrats in the Trump era raises its head in Minnesota: which matters more in rural America, winning back white Trump voters, or keeping black, Latinx and Asian voters who stuck with the Dems through Hillary?

Founded after Wellstone’s death in a plane crash in 2002, Wellstone Action has trained thousands of progressive candidates, campaign operatives and community organizers throughout the country, with alumni serving in local and state offices and in the U.S. House. In 2016, the last year for which tax filings were available, the group reported providing training to 2,135 data and digital strategists, 723 nonprofit leaders and community organizers, and 854 aspiring political leaders. 

David Wellstone and other Democrats close to his father began objecting last year to what he described as Wellstone Action’s abandonment of disaffected Democrats in the rural Midwest — the rural poor were an early focus of the late senator — with an increasingly narrow focus on gender politics and people of color. 

“I said, ‘After Trump, we’ve got to figure out how we are going to go back after those Democrats that we lost,” David Wellstone said. “We can do all the stuff we do. We do great stuff on communities of color, we’re doing great stuff on gender identity politics. But we need to do some of these other trainings. … Nobody wanted to have a discussion about that.” 

In a prepared statement, Connie Lewis, chairwoman of the Wellstone Action board, said the group’s “mission has not changed.” But the group’s staff and board of directors appeared to suggest a shift in the progressive movement since Paul Wellstone’s death, asserting in a statement on its website that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” and that “the progressive movement also looks different today than it did when we first started.” 

In an early sign of tension at Wellstone Action, then-board member Rick Kahn, Paul Wellstone’s longtime friend and campaign treasurer, raised concerns in an email to a staffer last year about a draft tax filing in which staff proposed changing the group’s stated mission from a “advancing progressive social change and economic justice” to “advancing progressive social change and economic, racial, and gender justice.” 

“I am not remotely questioning the work we do in the realm of racial and gender justice,” Kahn said in the email, one of several documents he provided to POLITICO. “I support it, and applaud it, all of it. That has always been true, and will always remain true. What I am calling into question, and vigorously objecting to, is the strategic thinking in expressly choosing to highlight our work for just those two groups, and no others, in a document posted online, that we share with the entire world.” 

Kahn and other Wellstone allies said the board moved against them only after they began raising questions about the group’s finances. But the exchange reflected a broader undercurrent of discord. Noting Wellstone Action’s other priority constituencies included young people and working-class people, among others, Kahn wrote, “And since the language in question relates expressly to the legacy of Paul and Sheila [Wellstone], if we are willfully choosing to include some groups here, and not others, what about justice for people with mental illness, and victims of domestic violence?” 

Edith Sargon, then-executive director of the group, agreed in an email to use the group’s original mission statement in its tax filing. But she also challenged him in an email, saying, “We added race and gender because they are also part of the bigger goal of working towards social justice. Wouldn’t you all agree?” 

David Wellstone took the language on the group’s website — that “a lot has changed over the last fifteen years” — as an affront to his father’s legacy. 

“How I read it is Paul Wellstone is no longer relevant. It is the most untrue, un-thought-through and most offensive remark,” David Wellstone said. “When you’ve got people who are hurting and they’re turning to Donald Trump, we’ve got to give them something. … We should be the fighters for all folks who aren’t on top. That’s what my dad always said.”

It's a depressing situation in Minnesota even as the national Democratic platform shaping up for 2018 and 2020 is the most liberal in generations.  If even one of the most progressive organizations in the country is running away from even recognizing the voters that got them there in favor of the "political reality" of 90%+ white states in the Midwest, then who stands for people like me, black and living in Kentucky, or Kansas, or South Dakota, or Minnesota?

It's a question the Democrats better figure out and fast, because time is almost up.  We have less than six months before the 2018 midterms.

Heavens To Betsy, This Is Corrupt

You can make the argument that Trump EPA head Scott Pruitt is the most corrupt member of the Trump regime, at least from a personal perspective, and that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's corruption may be the most far-reaching, stretching all the way from Alaska to Puerto Rico and back.

But there's little argument that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's corruption has done the most damage to America because of her massive undermining of America's schools and colleges and her relentless efforts to trap millions of young people in a for-profit $1.5 trillion-plus student loan system that threatens to wreck America's entire economy for decades.

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees.

The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked.

During the final months of the Obama administration, the team had expanded to include a dozen or so lawyers and investigators who were looking into advertising, recruitment practices and job placement claims at several institutions, including DeVry Education Group.

The investigation into DeVry ground to a halt early last year. Later, in the summer, Ms. DeVos named Julian Schmoke, a former dean at DeVry, as the team’s new supervisor.

Now only three employees work on the team, and their mission has been scaled back to focus on processing student loan forgiveness applications and looking at smaller compliance cases, said the current and former employees, including former members of the team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from the department.

In addition to DeVry, now known as Adtalem Global Education, investigations into Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corporation, which also operate large for-profit colleges, went dark.

And of course let's not forget the investigation into Trump University, where the corruption goes all the way to the top.  It's obnoxious and severely damaging to the future of our country.  With people under 35 saddled with a trillion and a half dollars in debt, and Gen X still reeling from the Great Recession, how does anyone in my generation or younger afford a house these days?

Of course, working as intended I guess.

StupidiNews!

• The US is set to officially open an embassy in Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel's capital, a move that breaks with decades of foreign policy and could set off another Palestinian uprising.
• Donald Trump says he will Chinese cell phone giant ZTE "get back into business, fast" after the Commerce Department banned US firms from doing business with ZTE over IP theft.
• The Arab League will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the "illegal" move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, member states are considering several possible moves.
• Italy's new government has worked out a populist economic plan that includes a 15% flat tax, guaranteed income for the poor, and lowering the retirement age.
• Researchers have found a vulnerability in S/Mime and PGP email encryption technology that could render both useless, and are advising users to disable the technology in email clients for now.

Last Call For The Year Of Mueller

The one-year anniversary of the Mueller probe rolls around on Thursday and according to the Village, the investigation is running out of time before Trump is able to turn the people against the special counsel.

The sprawling investigations amount to a political anchor as Trump leads the Republican Party into the fall midterm elections. Though few candidates see it as a decisive issue, the probe still sows doubt among some voters about the credibility of Trump’s election and about his conduct in office.

Public opinion surveys have found wide support for the Mueller investigation. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found 69 percent of Americans backing the probe and 25 percent opposing it, though other surveys this spring have shown a modest decline from earlier polls in support of continuing the investigation.

Among the political class, there is a guessing game about whether the special counsel completes its work this summer — sufficiently in advance of the November elections — or presses well past it. The longer Mueller’s work continues, legal analysts said, the more difficult it may be for the special counsel to maintain public confidence, especially with Trump, Vice President Pence and other administration officials calling for the probe to wrap up.

“You don’t have much longer than 18 months to 24 months to get to the heart of the matter and resolve the things that need to be resolved,” said Robert W. Ray, who served as independent counsel toward the end of the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton presidency. “That’s about the length of time that public sentiment is with the investigation.”

The Mueller probe has also brought about a national reckoning on the boundaries of presidential power. Trump is at war with the leadership of his own Justice Department and FBI, has threatened to defy a subpoena to testify and even toyed with ordering the firing of Mueller.

“We want to get the investigation over, done with,” Trump said last month. “Put it behind us.”

The notion that the investigation has to end soon or it will amount to undue interference in the 2018 elections is exactly what the Republicans want to press, and at least with the Washington Post, it's starting to work.  The piece is an outright warning to Mueller to wrap things up by this summer, by Labor Day at the latest.

Expect more pieces like this to start raining down as Mueller gets closer to the truth and the clock gets closer to the GOP.'s reckoning with angry voters.

Sunday Long Read: Orange To Blue

If Democrats have any chance of flipping the House in 2018, the road will have to go through California's last true bastion of Republicanism, the suburbs of Orange County.  It's here, the New Republic's Vauhini Vara argues, that Democrats will have to decide the path between left and center-left in order to win the districts here, and try to win the country back from Trump.

What, in the age of Donald J. Trump, should a Democrat be? It didn’t take long, after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, for Democratic officials to descend into a desperate and often acrimonious argument about the future of the party. Did it still rest with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt—those factory workers and retail employees who used to form the core of the Democratic Party but have watched the American dream fall victim to globalization and automation? Would it be comprised of a diverse, urban coalition clustered around cosmopolitan, white-collar cities? And might it be possible—doubtful, perhaps, but possible—that both could be true?

With this fall’s midterm elections fast approaching, the Democratic Party has yet to resolve its internal conflicts or develop a coherent long-term vision. But it has identified a potential path back to power in the immediate term. In order to regain control of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party must flip 23 Republican-held seats. To do so, it has identified 104 GOP-held districts as targets, the biggest number in more than a decade. It is zeroing in, especially, on Republican-held districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump: suburban areas near Miami, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, and, especially, Los Angeles, where affluent, well-educated white populations have been joined in recent decades by an influx of immigrants. If Trump’s success in Rust Belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania symbolized the Democratic Party’s growing rift with white, working-class Americans, his poor showing in the suburbs has presented an opportunity for Democrats to make inroads in places that, for decades, have been thought of as inexorably conservative. “The battleground is not urban America or rural America, it’s suburban America,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Politico last year. Brian Fallon, a Democratic consultant who worked as a top Clinton aide, said that the path to a Democrat-led House “runs through the Panera Breads of America.”

The question that no one seems quite able to answer, however, is what kind of Democrat can win the Panera demographic. Last June, when Jon Ossoff failed to capture the suburban Atlanta district vacated by Republican Tom Price—in what became the most expensive House race in U.S. history—some in the party argued that Ossoff, with his lack of interest in single-payer health care and taxing the rich, had alienated potential Democratic voters by being too moderate. To win, they asserted, Democratic candidates should tack further to the left, in the mode of Bernie Sanders. In March, however, following Conor Lamb’s narrow victory in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points, pundits argued that Lamb’s careful, centrist positions helped win him the race—and that Democrats shouldn’t write off more conservative Americans as a lost cause just yet.

Going forward, there is no better place to witness the Democratic Party’s strategies play out—and no place where the stakes are higher—than Orange County, California. Wedged along the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, Orange County is home to more than three million people, living in a maze of communities ranging from surfer towns to exurbs. Orange County doesn’t offer a sense of place so much as a sense of placelessness, and if it weren’t for the consistently balmy weather, much of it, with its six-lane freeways and big-box stores and strip malls and, yes, Panera Breads, could just as soon be in Illinois or Texas. The county’s orange groves are long gone; if you are in Anaheim, say, and find yourself craving an orange, you drive to Ralphs and buy one. When, on a recent visit, I asked a lifelong resident to take me on a tour, he brought me past his childhood home in a quiet neighborhood of low-slung ranch houses, a 7-Eleven, and a large shopping center.

For decades, Orange County—the birthplace of Richard Nixon, the Crystal Cathedral, and the “Real Housewives” reality-TV franchise—was one of the country’s proudest Republican strongholds. In 2016, though, Clinton beat Trump there by a nine-point margin, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the county since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term.

It was a striking upset, but, to those who knew the county well, not an entirely surprising one. Republican sentiment has been eroding in Orange County for years. By 2016, fewer than 38 percent of Orange County residents were registered Republicans, down from 56 percent in 1990. Latinos and Asians now make up more than half the population, slowly replacing the white conservatives who flocked to Orange County in the middle of the twentieth century. “The generation of people who came here from the Midwest, attracted to the agriculture and defense industries, is really just dying out,” said Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Chapman University.

It is here, in these suburbs, that the Democratic Party hopes to return to power nationally. Anti-Trump sentiment in Orange County runs high. The morning after Trump’s inauguration, more than 20,000 people turned out for the Women’s March in Santa Ana, one of the biggest protest marches in the entire state. And the county’s four congressional districts currently held by Republicans—Darrell Issa, Dana Rohrabacher, Mimi Walters, and Ed Royce—are among the 23 districts represented by Republicans that Clinton won nationally. The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists Royce’s and Issa’s districts as leaning Democratic (Issa won by only 1,621 votes in the last election), and Rohrabacher’s is a toss-up. While Walters’s district leans Republican, Clinton nonetheless beat Trump there by a five-point margin, putting it on the Democrats’ map. The party’s hopes soared in January when Royce announced that he would not seek reelection. Just two days later, Issa said he would be retiring as well.

Democrats have made Orange County a particular focus of their organizing and fund-raising efforts. Democratic enthusiasm has swept across Orange County, with more than a dozen candidates signing up to compete for its four Republican-held congressional seats. Last spring, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made the unprecedented decision to open an office in Irvine, in the center of Orange County, to oversee races in the western states, something it had traditionally handled from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “It’s very important to us to win Orange County for the purposes of taking back the House,” Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, California, who is the vice chairman of the DCCC for the western region, told me. Tom Steyer, one of the Democratic Party’s largest donors, is pouring millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote efforts in Orange County and told me he considers the region “critical” to regaining control of Congress. According to the Democrats’ arithmetic—which assumes that the districts where Clinton won are the ripest for flipping—the four Republican-held Orange County districts should be among the 23 easiest targets in the nation. If Democrats can’t win those seats, the path to retaking Congress becomes much narrower. But their investment in Orange County represents much more than a math problem. At a time when the Democratic Party seems lacking in direction, its approach in Orange County, and whether it is successful, could provide more precise answers about the party’s future than its leaders have been willing or able to provide.

The Republican Party has tried to downplay the threat that increased Democratic engagement in Orange County signifies. “It’s a Hail Mary play. It’s desperation,” Fred Whitaker, the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, told Politico earlier this year. “Let the Democrats spend tens of millions of dollars here. Let them die on the hill in Orange County.” Still, in response to the DCCC’s efforts, the National Republican Campaign Committee has opened its own local campaign office in Orange County. And even Whitaker has admitted that retaining control of the county’s congressional seats will be difficult. “We understand what money can do,” Whitaker told me. “Certainly, if the Democrats are going to put money here, there are going to be challenging races.”

Yet even as political headwinds seem to be blowing in their favor, the chances of a Democratic sweep of Orange County are increasingly in question. Given its internal divisions, it has been unclear from the start whether the Democratic Party can harness the energy of its grassroots while also drawing in centrists and Republicans. On top of that, a quirk of California politics—a primary system in which the top two vote-getters, regardless of their party affiliation, advance to the general election—has raised the possibility that some of the Orange County districts will end up with two Republicans, and not a single Democrat, on the congressional ballot in November. What began as a murmur of self-doubt in Orange County political circles has intensified into one of the Democratic Party’s biggest nightmares: Even with all this momentum on their side, are Democrats about to blow their chance at retaking Congress?

That's the question we're about to find out the answer to.  Failure is always an option, but failure here means that GOP control of the House will survive, California jungle primary or not.  I don't buy into the doom and the gloom that the GOP has been pushing after barely surviving in Nevada last month, and I don't subscribe to the "blue wave is dead/special elections don't matter in November" idiocy from the press.  You shouldn't either.

But there are tens of millions of voters out there for whom the Democrats being the anti-Trump party just isn't enough, tens of millions of people who figure life will be fine for them with Trump and the GOP in charge.  They're still not convinced that the Democrats will make their lives better on a daily basis.

Cutting through the noise to make that case needs to be priority number one of the Dems, and so far, I'm just not seeing it. Ultimately the choice is up to us as voters.  But no two voters are the same.

Red State Dems Walk The Knife

I know that it's tough being a red state Democrat, living in Kentucky for over a decade has made it painfully clear just how wide the gulf between "Democrat" and "liberal" can be.  But I can only surmise that the move by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and now Joe Donnelly to support Trump's torture-happy pick for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, is a way to give Republicans like Rand Paul cover for voting no without actually doing so, something I'm sure the GOP will reward both Joes for come November, right?

Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) announced Saturday his support for Gina Haspel’s nomination to be CIA director, providing a crucial second Democratic vote that should provide enough margin for confirmation to overcome questions about her role in last decade’s controversial interrogation program.

Donnelly, who met with Haspel on Thursday, said in a statement that he had “a tough, frank, and extensive discussion” with her both about her vision for the agency and its past use of “enhanced” interrogations against terrorist captives, including methods such as waterboarding that are widely considered torture.

During her confirmation hearing, Haspel pledged to abide by current law that forbids those methods and that she would reject an order from President Trump to use those techniques against a terrorist now.

“I believe that she has learned from the past, and that the CIA under her leadership can help our country confront serious international threats and challenges,” Donnelly said in the statement released Saturday morning.

Of course, Haspel's efforts to cover up Bush-era torture should have ended her career anyway.

Haspel, whom under Pompeo became the agency’s deputy director, briefly ran the off-the-books prison in Thailand used as a torture laboratory for the earliest detained terrorism suspects. There, in 2002—including while Haspel oversaw the so-called black site—the man known as Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times; stuffed into a wooden box barely bigger than a coffin; had his body shackled in painful contorted positions; and had his head slammed into walls.
“If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from the past,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the intelligence committee who opposes her nomination, told The Daily Beast in a statement Tuesday.

“Ms. Haspel’s background makes her unsuitable to serve as CIA director. Her nomination must include total transparency about this background,” Wyden added.

Subsequently declassified CIA medical files assessed that Abu Zubaydah was likely willing to cooperate with his interrogators before his waterboarding, as he had with his FBI interrogators, who did not torture him.

Years later, Haspel drafted an instruction to CIA officers in the field to destroy videotapes of torturous interrogations at the site. Though the Justice Department later declined to bring charges, the destruction of the tapes was widely considered in human-rights circles to be a key moment in covering up the torture—and it prompted the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark 2014 investigation, which occurred amid the backdrop of the agency spying on the work product of the Senate investigators.

I would hope that we could get Dems who wouldn't compromise on torture, but it's not as if Obama made any effort to cashier in Haspel either.

This all sucks, and I hate it. And Manchin is in for the fight of his political life.

 

That Economic Anxiety Again

The Russians not only knew where to hit us when it came to maximum damage to our election process (voter registration and Facebook) but they knew us better than we knew ourselves when it came to getting those "economically anxious" voters to the polls for Trump.

The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race.

The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election.

While some ads focused on topics as banal as business promotion or Pokémon, the company consistently promoted ads designed to inflame race-related tensions. Some dealt with race directly; others dealt with issues fraught with racial and religious baggage such as ads focused on protests over policing, the debate over a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and relationships with the Muslim community.

The company continued to hammer racial themes even after the election.

USA TODAY Network reporters reviewed each of the 3,517 ads, which were released to the public this week for the first time by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The analysis included not just the content of the ads, but also information that revealed the specific audience targeted, when the ad was posted, roughly how many views it received and how much the ad cost to post.

Among the findings: 

Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race. Those accounted for 25 million ad impressions — a measure of how many times the spot was pulled from a server for transmission to a device. 

At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups. 

Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400. An additional 900 were posted after the November election through May 2017. 

Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton. A few dozen referenced questions about the U.S. election process and voting integrity, while a handful mentioned other candidates like Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

Thousands of ads, targeted with pinpoint accuracy, seen tens of millions of times, designed to make white voters angry enough to go to the polls and back Trump and the GOP, and to make black voters angry enough to abandon Clinton and the Democrats.

And it worked.  All it took for Trump to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was a swing of a few hundred thousand votes, a fraction of a percent of total votes cast.

That's how we lost this country.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The FBI has known about Putin pal Viktor Vekselberg for years, and even made the rare move of publicly warning US investors to stay away from his Skolkovo Foundation as it was a Russia front.

The FBI warned four years ago that a foundation controlled by the Russian oligarch who allegedly reimbursed Donald Trump's personal lawyer might have been acting on behalf of Russia's intelligence services. 

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Lucia Ziobro wrote an unusual column in the Boston Business Journal in April of 2014 to warn that a foundation controlled by Russian energy baron Viktor Vekselberg might be part of a Moscow spying campaign that sought to siphon up American science and technology. 

"The foundation may be a means for the Russian government to access our nation's sensitive or classified research, development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial applications," Ziobro wrote. "This analysis is supported by reports coming out of Russia itself." 

Fast forward to this week: Vekselberg's name has been in U.S. headlines because of allegations about his involvement with payments to Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. 

A lawyer suing Trump and Cohen, Michael Avenatti, released a document on Tuesday charging that Vekselberg might have reimbursed Cohen for the payment he made to Avenatti's client, porn actress Stormy Daniels. Avenatti's document has not been fully verified but important aspects of it have been confirmed. 

Andrey Shtorkh, a spokesman for Vekselberg, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. 

The U.S. subsidiary of the company that Vekselberg controls has acknowledged making payments to Cohen, but it denied that it served as a pass-through for Vekselberg or anyone else outside the United States trying to funnel money to him. 

FBI investigators reportedly stopped Vekselberg on his way into the United States earlier this year to question him. The 2014 column written by Ziobro suggests that Vekselberg has been of interest to U.S. intelligence officials for some time — well before the counterintelligence investigation into Russia's attack on the 2016 presidential election.

For 12 months now the refrain from Trump supporters and pro-Russia fellow travelers has been "If the Trump campaign took money from Russia, there would be a smoking gun."

This gun here may not be smoking, but it sure as hell seems to have been pretty recently fired as the barrel is very warm and it still smells of gunpowder, guys. 

The Cohen case is turning into an even bigger cesspool than Mike Flynn or Paul Manafort, and that's really saying something.

Oh, but of course, Cohen may be directly related the the recent resignation of NY AG Eric Schniederman.

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was informed about allegations of sexual misconduct by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman around 2013, according to a letter filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday.

An attorney, Peter Gleason, submitted a letter to the court Friday explaining that two women had come to him a half-decade or more ago with complaints that they were “sexually victimized” by Schneiderman.

Counseling against reporting the allegations to Manhattan’s district attorney based on his past experiences with political corruption cases, Gleason says, he discussed the women’s allegations with a retired New York Post journalist, Stephen Dunleavy.

Dunleavy who offered to discuss the matter with Trump. “Mr. Dunleavy did indeed discuss this very matter with Mr. Trump as evidenced by a phone call I received from attorney Michael Cohen,” Gleason, a lawyer in Mahopac, New York, wrote to the judge. “During my communications with Mr. Cohen I shared with him certain details of Schneiderman’s vile attacks on these two women.”

Schneiderman’s lawyer, Isabelle Kirshner, declined to comment. 

Gleason’s letter was the latest salvo in a battle over the records seized by the FBI last month from Cohen’s office and residences and electronic devices. The lawyer requested a protective order to seal all correspondence that Cohen may have had about the women, in part to protect their identities as assault victims. 

Trump’s potential knowledge of allegations against Schneiderman haven’t previously been dislosed, although the men have publicly feuded over Trump’s business practices. Schneiderman sought to sue Trump University in state court in 2012, and filed a complaint the next year in federal court, claiming the for-profit school defrauded students. 

In a tweet on Sept. 11, 2013, Trump took aim at Schneiderman while also referring to New York politicians who’d resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer.

“Weiner is gone, Spitzer is gone -- next will be lightweight A.G. Eric Schneiderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see, worse than Spitzer or Weiner,” Trump tweeted.

He knew, guys.  Not that Schneiderman didn't deserve the boot, he's still a sexual predator and monster who abused women, full stop.  But Trump knew about at least some of the accusations against him and knew about them four years ago.

A lot of people looked the other way on Schneiderman and enabled him to keep his position and to continue to harm women. 

One of those people was Donald Trump.

Kentucky Sucker's Club

Here in Kentucky there's plenty of buyer's remorse over Trump, especially for small businessmen like Eddie Devine.

Eddie Devine voted for President Donald Trump because he thought he would be good for American business. Now, he says, the Trump administration’s restrictions on seasonal foreign labor may put him out of business. 

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” said Devine, owner of Harrodsburg-based Devine Creations Landscaping. “I feel so stupid.” 

Devine says it has been years since he could find enough dependable, drug-free American workers for his $12-an-hour jobs mowing and tending landscapes for cemeteries, shopping centers and apartment complexes across Central Kentucky. 

So for years he has hired 20 seasonal workers, mostly from Guatemala, through the U.S. Labor Department’s H2-B “guest worker” program. Importing these workers for a few months cost him an additional $18,000 in fees and expenses beyond their wages, which must be the same as he pays American workers. But that’s the only way he could serve his customers. 

Restrictions on guest-worker visas, which began during President Barack Obama’s second term as immigration became a hot issue for conservatives, have gotten worse under Trump. And it’s even more of a problem now that the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in years. 

Devine says he lost a $100,000 account because he didn’t have enough men to do the job. He’s worried he may be out of business next year if things don’t improve.
He isn’t alone. Cuts in H-2B visas are hurting small businesses across the country that can’t find Americans willing to do hard, manual labor: Maryland crab processors, Texas shrimp fishermen, and Kentucky landscapers and construction companies. 

Nowhere in the article does Devine say he would be willing to 1) pay workers more for backbreaking landscaping work or 2) try voting Democratic in November.

Devine said he believed Trump’s America-first promises. But cutting off a good supply of seasonal foreign labor when Americans won’t take those jobs is only hurting American business owners and the U.S. workers they employ, he said. 

These workers aren’t immigrants, and there is no path to U.S. citizenship. When their seasonal work is done, they return home. That’s why Devine thinks the Trump administration’s stifling of guest-worker programs has more to do with racism than economics. “I think there’s a war on brown people,” he said. 

But what makes him most angry is that Trump’s properties in Florida and New York have used 144 H-2B workers since 2016. “I want to know why it’s OK for him to get his workers, but supporters like me don’t get theirs,” Devine said.

Because Trump got 100% of what he needed out of you: you voted for him and for his party.  Unless that changes Eddie, he owes you nothing.

And nothing is exactly what you'll get out of Donald Trump.  Millions of us saw him for what he was, and you're the reason we're all suffering now.

Man up and help us fix it in November.