StupidiNews!

• A federal judge in California has ordered a halt to most undocumented immigrant family separations at the border by the Trump regime as well as reunification of those families already separated.
• Oklahoma voters approved legalization of medical marijuana in yesterday's primary ballot initiative, it becomes the 30th state to legalize the drug in some way.
• National Security Adviser John Bolton is in Moscow for talks ahead of a planned Trump/Putin summit in late July, Trump will be in Brussels for the annual NATO summit then.
• Polls in Mexico show former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is on track to become the country's next president, he is a fierce populist who says he'll take on Donald Trump.
• Ridesharing giant Uber has won the right to operate in London through next year as the company's new conciliatory tone earned it a 15-month probationary period after being banned earlier this year.

Last Call For The War On Women, Con't

The party of Trump has truly made America special indeed, as for the first time America makes the top ten nations in the world...that are the most dangerous to be a woman in.

The United States has been ranked for the first time among the ten nations deemed to be the most dangerous for women by experts in the field. A survey by the Thompson Reuters Foundation of about 550 experts in women's issues around the globe labelled the U.S. the 10th most dangerous nation in terms of the risk of sexual violence, harassment and being coerced into sex. 

Reuters said the U.S. placement on the dubious list was down largely to the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns increasing awareness of sexual violence and intimidation of women in the U.S. in the wake of the criminal allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. 

"People want to think income means you're protected from misogyny, and sadly that's not the case," Cindy Southworth, of the Washington-based National Network to End Domestic Violence, told Reuters. "We are going to look back and see this as a very powerful tipping point... We're blowing the lid off and saying '#Metoo and Time's Up'."

We're number ten!  And topping the list?  The half-billion plus women living under the government of Trump's friend Narendra Modi.

According to the survey, which was last carried out in 2011 and did not then rank the U.S. among the top 10 most dangerous nations, India is the most perilous country for women right now. 

The survey noted that Indian government data shows reported crimes against women were up 83 percent between 2007 and 2016. During that year, there were an average of four rapes reported every hour in India. 

India has seen a series of horrific attacks on women in recent years, the most recent example being five female activists working to raise awareness of human trafficking who were gang-raped at gunpoint in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand just last week.

Rounding out the list: Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, and of course, the United States.

It's really saying something that under Trump, the US is more dangerous for women than say, China under Xi's increasingly one-man rule,  Russia under Putin's regime, Turkey under re-elected strongman Erdogan, or even Cuba, Venezuela or the Philippines, all under authoritarian control.

And the elephants in the room, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon

It's less dangerous to be a woman in Iran today than in America.  The one good thing is that now everyone is aware of just how bad the problem in this country is.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The Mueller probe is moving into the endgame as the investigation closes in on Trump and his inner circle, and possibly Trump himself.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is preparing to accelerate his probe into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians who sought to interfere in the 2016 election, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Mueller and his team of prosecutors and investigators have an eye toward producing conclusions -- and possible indictments -- related to collusion by fall, said the person, who asked not to be identified. He’ll be able to turn his full attention to the issue as he resolves other questions, including deciding soon whether to find that Trump sought to obstruct justice. 

Mueller’s office declined to comment on his plans.

Suspicious contacts between at least 13 people associated with Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians have fueled the debate over collusion.

Some of those encounters have been known for months: the Russian ambassador whose conversations forced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation and led Michael Flynn to plead guilty to perjury. The Russians who wangled a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in July 2016 after dangling the promise of political dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Other encounters continue to emerge, including a Russian’s chat with veteran Trump adviser Roger Stone at a cafe in Florida.

Signs of suspicious Russian contacts first surfaced in late 2015, especially among U.S. allies who were conducting surveillance against Russians, according to a former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

By the spring of 2016 the frequent contacts set off alarm bells among U.S. intelligence officials, according to James Clapper, who was director of national intelligence at the time. The FBI’s Russia investigation officially began that July. 

“The dashboard warning lights were on for all of us because of the meetings,” Clapper said in an interview this month. “We may not have known much about the content of these meetings, but it was certainly very curious why so many meetings with Russians.”
On three occasions, Russians offered people associated with Trump’s campaign dirt on Democrat Clinton -- all before it was publicly known that Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman. 

Mueller has interviewed or sought information about many of the people known to have met with Russians during the campaign. But it’s not known publicly whether the barrage of Russian contacts was instigated or coordinated by the Kremlin. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly denied any such plotting, tweeting on June 15, “WITCH HUNT! There was no Russian Collusion.”

The article goes on to list the folks under Mueller's sights:

1. Michael Cohen
2. Paul Manafort
3. Michael Flynn
4. Jared Kushner
5. Erik Prince
6. Rick Gates
7. J.D. Gordon
8. Carter Page
9. Roger Stone
10. Michael Caputo
11. Donald Trump Jr.
12. George Papadopoulos
13. Jeff Sessions

The question: how many of these Dirty 13 are headed for prison?  We know that Gates, Papadopoulos, Prince and Flynn are talking, Manafort and Cohen are looking at spending the rest of their lives in a box if they don't cooperate, Gordon and Caputo have most likely already flipped to get bigger fish, and that Kushner, Sessions, and Don Jr. are currently sweating it out.

Stone I think is the real prize that's shifted Mueller towards the focus on collusion.  He knows way too much about the WikiLeaks/DNC hack connection, but doesn't have the personal protection of Trump like Kushner, Junior, and Sessions does.  Mueller only went after Stone in the last month or so too, when it became clear that he couldn't keep his mouth shut.

Now don't get me wrong, Cohen, Kushner, Flynn, Erik Prince and Paul Manafort are all going to cough up what they know.  But I think it's funny that Roger Stone's discount Batman '66 Penguin self could be the guy that actually brings down Trump.

Stay tuned.

The Supreme Time Of Year Again

The last week in June always means the biggest, most consequential US Supreme Court decisions of the term, and this year has been no exception for the Roberts court.  Monday, we got a massive decision on race and gerrymandering, and the fact that it was a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito should be enough to infer the disaster that awaits the country.  SCOTUSblog's Amy Howe confirms that the decision in Abbott v. Perez is a near-total victory for the GOP on the subject of redistricting with the intent of suppressing the minority vote.

Alito then turned to what he characterized as the main question on the merits of the state’s appeal: whether the district court was wrong “when it required the State to show that the 2013 Legislature somehow purged the ‘taint’ that the court attributed to the defunct and never-used plans enacted by a prior legislature in 2011.” According to Alito, the district court’s analysis was exactly backward: Even if a state has been found to have discriminated in the past, he observed, there is still a presumption that it acted properly in drafting later redistricting plans. This means that the plaintiffs challenging a redistricting plan still have to show that the legislature intended to discriminate when it enacted the current plan.

Alito acknowledged that the intent of the Texas legislature when it enacted the 2011 plan was something that a court could consider, and he added that the mere fact that the 2013 plans largely mirrored the 2012 interim plans adopted by the court did not immunize the 2013 plans from a challenge. But when all of the evidence is considered together, Alito concluded, it does not show that the legislature intended to discriminate against minority voters. If anything, Alito stressed, the available evidence suggests that the legislature did not intend to discriminate, but instead adopted the 2013 plans because it had been advised that doing so was the best way to end the “expensive and time consuming” litigation over the redistricting plans.

The majority’s holding that the district court had applied the wrong test resolved almost all of the case in Texas’ favor, leaving only four districts that the district court had invalidated for reasons other than discriminatory intent. Here the majority reversed the district court’s holding that three of the districts diluted the votes of minority voters, but it upheld the district court’s ruling that a state legislative district in Tarrant County was the product of racial gerrymandering. The legislature had “substantially modified” the Tarrant County district in 2013, and the state contended that it had done so to comply with the Voting Rights Act. But the reasons that the state cited to justify its decision to focus on race in drawing the district were “simply too thin a reed to support the drastic decision to draw lines in this way,” Alito concluded. The court therefore sent the case back to the lower court, presumably for it to apply the correct test to the districts that it had previously struck down.

In other words, after five years ago when the Roberts court blew a hole in the Voting Rights Act's Section 5 by throwing out pre-clearance rules in Section 4 of the law, Alito all but finished the job by effectively neutering Section 2.

It basically makes it impossible to bring a redistrcting challenge based on race, because Alito basically says that state legislatures that draw districts must be given the benefit of the doubt and they can't be racist.

Think about that.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor ripped Alito a new one.

In a blistering final paragraph that closed with the phrase “I dissent,” rather than the “I respectfully dissent” often used by the justices, Sotomayor protested that today’s ruling “does great damage to” the right “to equal participation in our political processes.” “Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement. The Court intervenes when no intervention is authorized and blinds itself to the overwhelming factual record below. It does all of this to allow Texas to use electoral maps that, in design and effect, burden the rights of minority voters.”

Understand that if Republicans are still in charge of your state when redistricting rolls around in 2021, minority voters are going to be gerrymandered into oblivion.  The VRA's protections for minority voters have been fully dismantled.  Trump will never sign a new VRA into law, even if Democrats somehow manage to win back the House and the Senate and get something passed.

It was bad five years ago.  It's worse now.  It will be exponentially worse in 2020, 2022, and 2024.

StupidiNews!

• Voters go to the polls in seven states today to decide primary and runoff elections, including in New York, where convicted former GOP Rep. Michael Grimm is running for his old seat.
• Trump's NOAA weather chief wants to remove the word "climate" from the agency's mission statement and instead focus on the agency's role in supporting economic and homeland security.
• Macedonia’s President Gjorge Ivanov says he will not sign a "criminal" law changing the country's name to North Macedonia to settle a decades-long dispute with Greece, calling it unconstitutional.
• After victory in Sunday's Turkish elections, allies of re-elected President Erdogan have taken out a full-page ad in the country's largest newspaper to publish an "enemies list" targeting journalists.
• Historic FDA approval of a new anti-epilepsy drug made from marijuana could open the gates to new research, as well as political reclassification of pot as a Schedule I drug by the Trump DEA.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time

Time to check in with the Mueller probe as the investigation continues to close in on Donald Trump, and while last week I mentioned that former Blackwater CEO (and brother of current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) Erik Prince is now cooperating with Mueller on Prince's role brokering meeting between the Trump campaign and foreign interests, it seems this Prince is now singing as prolifically as his late musical namesake.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is digging deeper into Trump ally and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.

Prince, America’s most famous private military contractor, acknowledged last week that he “cooperated” with Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election after falling under scrutiny amid questions about an alleged effort to establish a backchannel between the Trump administration and the Kremlin, something Prince has vehemently denied.

ABC News has since learned that Mueller is also reviewing Prince’s communications. In response to questions from ABC News, a spokesperson for Prince released a statement noting that Prince has provided Mueller with “total access to his phone and computer.” 

“As Mr. Prince told the Daily Beast he has spoken voluntarily with Congress and also cooperated completely with the Special Counsel’s investigation, including by providing them total access to his phones and computer,” the spokesperson said. “Mr. Prince has a lot of opinions about the various investigations, but there is no question that they are important and serious, and so Mr. Prince will keep his opinions to himself for now and to let the investigators do their work. All we will add is that much of the reporting and speculation about Mr. Prince in the media is inaccurate, and we are confident that when the investigators have finished their work, we will be able to put these distractions to the side.”

Prince knows full well what Mueller and his team are capable of wringing out of him, and those meetings in the Seychelles are looking more and more like serious pay-for-play action with foreign powers.  That may be cool when you buy and sell wars all over the globe, but being, say, frozen out of Pentagon contracts for being a felon is bad business.

Prince also isn't taking the fall for Trump, and he knows he has enough to be useful to Mueller in exchange for a deal.Dying on Trump's hill isn't profitable, after all.  He wants this done with ASAP so he can get back to being, you know a respectable international arms dealer and James Bond villain.

He also figures he's smart enough to get out of this mess, and that Trump isn't.  He's more than likely correct on both accounts.

We'll see.

Trump Trading Blows, Con't

Iconic American motorcycle brand Harley-Davidson makes bikes right here in the US, but it looks like it will make far fewer bikes here in 2018 as Trump's trade war is forcing the company to move production  -- and potentially hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs -- overseas.

The European Union on Friday began rolling out tariffs on American imports like bourbon, peanut butter and orange juice. The EU tariffs on $3.4 billion worth of U.S. products are retaliation for duties the Trump administration is imposing on European steel and aluminum. 

President Donald Trump has used Harley-Davidson as an example of a U.S. business that is being harmed by trade barriers. Yet Harley has warned consistently against tariffs, saying they would negatively impact sales. 

Harley-Davidson Inc. sold almost 40,000 motorcycles in the Europe Union last year, generating revenue second only to the United States, according to the Milwaukee company. 

The maker of the iconic American motorcycle said in a regulatory filing Monday that EU tariffs on its motorcycles exported from the U.S. jumped between 6 percent and 31 percent, which translates into an additional, incremental cost of about $2,200 per average motorcycle exported from the U.S. to the EU. 

“Harley-Davidson maintains a strong commitment to U.S.-based manufacturing which is valued by riders globally,” the company said in prepared remarks. “Increasing international production to alleviate the EU tariff burden is not the company’s preference, but represents the only sustainable option to make its motorcycles accessible to customers in the EU and maintain a viable business in Europe. Europe is a critical market for Harley-Davidson.” 

Harley-Davidson will not raise its prices to avert “an immediate and lasting detrimental impact” on sales in Europe, it said. It will instead absorb a significant amount of the cost in the near term. It anticipates the cost for the rest of the year to be approximately $30 million to $45 million. 

Harley-Davidson said that shifting targeted production from the U.S. to international facilities could take at least nine to 18 months to be completed. 

The company is already struggling with falling sales. In January, it said it would consolidate its Kansas City, Missouri, plant into its York, Pennsylvania, facility. U.S. motorcycle sales peaked at more than 1.1 million in 2005 but then plummeted during the recession. 

So Trump is happily wrecking Harley-Davidson in order to win his trade war.  US automakers are next, when it becomes cheaper to make cars and car parts in Europe and Asia, that's where production lines will be headed, and they'll take a whole lot of American jobs with them when plants here are mothballed.

I keep warning that there's plenty of red flags that Trump's trade war, in combination with his massive and increasingly unpopular tax cuts for the rich, is going to help cause a recession.  Whether or not that becomes obvious by November is still up in the air, but by 2019 things are going to starting becoming increasingly grim economically, and this time we won't have Obama around to try to fix it.

By this time next year, we're going to be hurting.  Of course, by this time next year we'll be deep in a Constitutional crisis from the Mueller report on Trump's misconduct, so who knows.

Mad Dog In The Doghouse

Not that Trump's decision Friday to officially drop joint military exercises between the US and South Korea didn't already prove this beyond a doubt or anything, but yes, Defense Secretary James Mattis is clearly getting the Rex Tillerson treatment these days as his Pentagon tenure appears to be increasingly in trouble.

Defense Secretary James Mattis learned in May from a colleague that President Donald Trump had made the decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal, and scrambled to get his boss on the phone before a formal announcement was made. It wouldn't be the last time he was caught off guard by a presidential announcement.

A month later, Mattis was informed that Trump had ordered a pause in U.S. military exercises with South Korea only after the president had already promised the concession to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Last week, Trump again blindsided and overruled his defense secretary by publicly directing the Pentagon to create a sixth military branch overseeing operations in space.

The way these recent presidential decisions on major national security issues have played out, as detailed by current and former White House and defense officials, underscores a significant change in Mattis's role in recent months. The president is relying less and less on the advice of one of the longest-serving members of his cabinet, the officials said.

"They don't really see eye to eye," said a former senior White House official who has closely observed the relationship.

It's a stark contrast to Trump's early enthusiasm for the retired four-star Marine general he proudly referred to as "Mad Dog." And while the two men had disagreements from the start — on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, for instance — Trump still kept Mattis in the loop on major decisions and heeded his counsel.

"He's never been one of the go-tos in the gang that's very close to the president," a senior White House official said. "But the president has a lot of respect for him."

In recent months, however, the president has cooled on Mattis, in part because he's come to believe his defense secretary looks down on him and slow-walks his policy directives, according to current and former administration officials.

The dynamic was exacerbated with Trump's announcement in March that he had chosen John Bolton as national security adviser, a move Mattis opposed, and Mike Pompeo's confirmation as secretary of state soon after.

The president is now more inclined to rely on his own instincts or the advice of Pompeo and Bolton, three people familiar with the matter said.

There's no question now that Bolton and Pompeo are running our military policy on the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia and Europe.  Whether or not he'll make enough noise on the way out the door may play a role, but at this point there's no reason to believe that Mattis has any clout anymore.  This is exactly what happened to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Also, compare Mattis, who is repeatedly overruled and marginalized by Trump, to EPA head Scott Pruitt, who by all rights should have been fired months ago for his obvious corruption and incompetence, but he's still riding high as Trump loves the guy because he's doing what Trump wants.

Maybe Mattis will survive the way Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly has, by keeping his mouth shut and rolling over.  But Kelly, Mattis and Tillerson were supposedly the "adults in the room" keeping Trump's authoritarian impulses in check.  If anything, Trump is riding roughshod over them, and they are doing nothing while Trump calls for the end of due process.

Tillerson is gone, replaced by the totally subservient Pompeo.  Kelly has rolled over completely, not that he wasn't a seething racist to begin with like his boss.  Now we learn Mattis has effectively been replaced by John Bolton's mustache.  The "moderating influences" on Trump by the professionals are completely gone.

Now we have Trump unleashed upon the world.

 

StupidiNews!

• Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan easily won reelection Sunday as he avoided a runoff against opposition party candidate Muharrem Ince as voters gave Erdogan sweeping new powers.
• Saudi air defenses intercepted two Yemeni missiles over Riyadh on Sunday, Yemen's Houthi militia is locked in a military battle for control of Yemen's capital, Sanaa.
• The last week in June means several expected major US Supreme Court rulings including decisions on Trump's Muslim travel ban, public sector union dues, and California's regulations on crisis pregnancy centers.
• Both China and the EU are warning that Trump's trade war could ignite a global recession as trade talks between Beijing and Brussels continue.
• A new study by the Environmental Defense Fund and 15 universities finds the Trump EPA is drastically under-reporting methane emissions from US oil and gas production.

Immigration Nation Becomes Deportation Nation

America took another dangerous shift towards authoritarian rule this weekend as Dear Leader Trump publicly declared that undocumented immigrants crossing the border be deprived of due process and immediately deported without trial.

In a pair of tweets sent during his drive to his Virginia golf course, Trump described immigrants as invaders and wrote that U.S. immigration laws are “a mockery” and must be changed to take away trial rights from undocumented migrants.

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,” Trump wrote. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents.”

The president continued in a second tweet, “Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit — we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!”

The latest presidential exhortations came as House Republicans were prepping for a vote on comprehensive immigration legislation, after a more hard-line bill failed last week. Neither bill has Democratic support, and prospects for the second one passing appeared dim, although the White House still supports it.

“I did talk to the White House yesterday. They say the president is still 100 percent behind us,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said Sunday on “Fox News Sunday.”

Some Republican lawmakers are preparing a more narrow immigration bill that would address one of the flaws in Trump’s executive order mandating that children and parents not be separated during their detention.

“I think, at minimum, we have to deal with family separation,” McCaul said.

The 1997 “Flores settlement” requires that migrant children be released from detention after 20 days, but the new GOP measure would allow for children and their parents to stay together in detention facilities past 20 days.

Once again, Trump is moving the Overton window sharply to the right by proposing eliminating due process for non-citizens, while the real goal is to hide Republican lawmakers quietly eliminating the Flores settlement provisions that have stood for two decades, preventing indefinite detainment of undocumented.

The Flores settlement requires the federal government to do two things: to place children with a close relative or family friend “without unnecessary delay,” rather than keeping them in custody; and to keep immigrant children who are in custody in the “least restrictive conditions” possible.

Republicans in Congress have proposed legislation that would overrule Flores and allow children to be kept with their parents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody while they are put through criminal prosecution and deportation proceedings — which many migrant families fight by claiming asylum in the US, a process that can stretch out for months or years.

Trump can’t overrule the Flores settlement with the stroke of a pen. But getting rid of the court agreement has been in his administration’s sights for months. While Republicans frame Flores as the obstacle to keeping families together, many of the people outraged over family separation might not be too happy with a world without Flores, either.

Trump has also tweeted multiple times that getting rid of immigration judges altogether is one of his true goals.

In his classic stream-of-consciousness style, President Donald Trump took aim at immigration judges, saying “I don’t want judges, I want border security.”

“I don’t want people coming in,” he said, referring to immigrants. “If a person comes in and puts one foot in our ground, it is essentially ‘welcome to America, welcome to our country,’ and you never get them out.

“Because they take their name, they bring the name down, they file it, they let the person go, they say ‘show back up to court in one year from now,'” he continued. “One year. But here’s the thing, that in itself is ridiculous. Three percent come back.”

According to a 2016 report from the Syracuse University Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a collection of nonpartisan reports on federal spending and enforcement actions, in 2015, 86 percent of undocumented immigrants who were released from detention and given a later court date showed up.

Trump also attacked the entire process by which we choose immigration judges, calling the nomination and vetting process “graft.”

“Who are these people?” he said, of immigration judges. “When we vet the single federal judge, it goes through a bid process, everybody that’s ever met her or him, they come, they complain, they don’t complain, they say he’s brilliant, she is brilliant, he’s not smart enough to be a judge, now we are hiring thousands and thousands — what country does this?”

He added that people “line up” to become immigration judges, calling the process “horrible.”

Immigration judges are selected by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, part of the Department of Justice.

Trump also asserted that some immigration lawyers are “bad people” for coaching asylum applicants about what to say during their hearings.

Once again, this is all part of a plan to create a system where the government can rapidly detain and deport large numbers of people quickly.  It's only a matter of time of course before this mass deportation infrastructure, without due process, is used not just on those crossing the border now, but used on those already here. 

Once you establish that those who are declared non-citizens by the government are not subject to due process, the government has the ability to strip citizenship -- and the legal rights that citizenship guarantees -- from anyone it chooses.  And once you have established that, that non-citizens have no legal rights, well, you can do pretty much anything to them.

I cannot overstate the dangers here.
History tells us exactly what authoritarian governments do in situations like this.

 

Sunday Long Read: A Situation Depp Ending

This week's Sunday Long Read is Stephen Rodrick's detailed Rolling Stone chronicle of actor Johnny Depp's decade-plus crash and burn routine, where in the era of #MeToo, there may not be anyone in Hollywood less prepared and less able to make the transition to the future of entertainment.

Johnny Depp isn't here yet. Still, his presence is all around the 10,500-square-foot rented mansion at 16 Bishopswood Road in London's Highgate neighborhood.

He is here in the busy hands of Russell, his personal chef working up the Peking duck. He is here in the stogie-size joint left by the sink in the guest bathroom. He is here in the never-ending reservoir of wine that is poured into goblets. And he is here in a half-done painting upstairs that features a burning black house, a child Johnny and an angry woman who resembles his mother, Betty Sue.

And then he is actually here. He is in the living room, crooning his entrance: "Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, my darling Clementine."

Depp has come from a photo shoot for the Hollywood Vampires, his sometime band that features Alice Cooper and Joe Perry. Trailing behind is his lawyer Adam Waldman. Depp is dressed like a Forties gangster, jet-black hair slicked back, pinstripes, suspenders and spats. His face is puffy, but Depp still possesses the fixating brown eyes that have toggled between dreamy and menacing during his 35-year career. Now, Depp's studious leer is reminiscent of late-era Marlon Brando. This isn't a coincidence, since Depp has long built his life by imitating his legends – buying an island like Brando, becoming an expert on quaaludes like Hunter S. Thompson.

"Hey, I'm Johnny. Good to meet you."

He reaches out a right hand whose fingers recently had their tats changed from "slim" – a reference to his ex-wife Amber Heard – to "scum."

"So are you here to hear the truth?" asks Depp as Russell brings him a glass of vintage red wine. "It's full of betrayal."

We move to the dining room for a three-course meal of pad thai, duck and gingerbread with berries. Depp sits at the head of the table and motions toward some rolling papers and two equal piles of tobacco and hash, and asks if I mind. I don't. He pauses for a second. "Well, let's drink some wine first."

This goes on for 72 hours.

It had taken a month and almost 200 e-mails for the message to become clear: Come to London; Johnny Depp wants to bare his soul about his empty bank accounts.

It's estimated that Depp has made $650 million on films that netted $3.6 billion. Almost all of it is gone. He's suing The Management Group, run by his longtime business manager, Joel Mandel, and his brother Robert for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and fraud. The suit cites, among other things, that under TMG's watch Depp's sister Christi was given $7 million and his assistant, Nathan Holmes, $750,000, without his knowledge, and that he has paid the IRS more than $5.6 million in late fees. (Most of the ire is directed toward Joel, who had day-to-day responsibility for Depp's account.) There are additional charges of conflict of interest, saying that TMG invested Depp's money for its own purposes and returned it without profit. The suit seeks more than $25 million from TMG, accounting for "tens of millions" it claims TMG illegally took for its commission, plus any additional damages the court sees fit.

The Mandels categorically deny all wrongdoing and are countersuing, alleging that Depp breached his oral contract with the company. The suit suggests that Depp has a $2-million-a-month compulsory-spending disorder, offering bons mots like "Wine is not an investment if you drink it as soon as you buy it." Depp was continuing to "concoct malicious and false allegations" against the company, according to TMG's countersuit, because TMG had filed a private foreclosure notice on one of Depp's properties, claiming Depp owes TMG $4.2 million in unpaid loans.

Over the past 18 months, there has been little but bad news for Depp. In addition to the financial woes, there were reports he couldn't remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece. He had split from his longtime lawyer and agent. And he was alone. His tabloid-scarred divorce from actress Heard is complete, but not before there were persuasive allegations of physical abuse that Depp vehemently denies. Depp's inner circle had begged him to not wed Heard or to at least obtain a prenup. Depp ignored his loved ones' advice. And there were whispers that Depp's recreational drug and alcohol use were crippling him.

During my London visit, Depp is alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent. The days begin after dark and run until first light. There is a scared, hunted look about him. Despite grand talks about hitting the town, we never leave the house. As Depp's mind leads us down various rabbit holes, I often think of a line that he recited as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland: "Have I gone mad?"

His closest confidant seems to be Waldman, a lawyer he met less than two years ago. Waldman, 49, possesses an unlined face, sandy hair, a designer black leather jacket and a soothing voice that could make the bird-flu epidemic sound reasonable. He tells me he is married to the "world's number-one face doctor."

Depp seems oblivious to any personal complicity in his current predicament. Waldman seems to have convinced Depp that they are freedom fighters taking on the Hollywood machine rather than scavengers squabbling over the scraps of a fortune squandered.

One day, Depp shows me his artwork, and it strikes me that Depp is now a worn Dorian Gray. "I imagine Johnny doing a version of Jack Sparrow at 70, at 80," his friend Penélope Cruz tells me. "It will be as charming and as great." But the things that were charming when he was 28 – doing drugs and running around the scaffolding on a high floor of Atlantic Records' L.A. building – seem disturbing at 55. (Cruz ends our conversation by telling me about Depp trying to pull his own tooth at a London restaurant while having dinner with her and Stella McCartney.)

Maybe being a permanent Peter Pan is the key to Depp's onscreen charm. But time has passed. Boyish insouciance has slowly morphed into an aging man-child, still charismatic but only in glimpses. If his current life isn't a perfect copy of Elvis Presley's last days, it is a decent facsimile.

The guy is a walking bad decision, through and through.  As the "motivational" poster says, sometimes the point of your entire life is to serve as an example of what not to do, ass a warning to others.  Yes, Depp has been taken advantage of, but he still has nobody but himself to blame for the choices he's made, and the clear wrongs that he has done to others, the story does not gloss over the damage he has done to the people in his life.

It's a good piece, but far from a cheerful one.

Border Line Sociopaths

As I said Thursday, Donald Trump is losing the battle on child separation at the border to win his war on immigration.

No, the real issue here is Trump and Jeff Sessions and their zero-tolerance policy at the border, announced back in April.  This is the real outrage we should be fighting, it's immoral, inhumane, and illegal.  People are being detained at the border before they can even seek to apply for asylum.  Instead, Trump has shifted the argument and the outrage to child separation after families are detained, and yesterday shifted back to mass zero-tolerance detainment as seemingly more humane by comparison.

Trump lost this battle, but he lost it on purpose and in such a way that it gives him the opportunity to win the war.  It's a classic abuser tactic, and I'm afraid that the rest of us are the ones who will really end up caving as zero-tolerance at the border becomes zero-tolerance inside the United States for undocumented immigrants.

There's now additional evidence that this is true.  Trump has shifted the debate so far past whether or not his zero tolerance policy is acceptable that we're stuck debating whether we should detain everyone and keep them together as families, of if we should detain everyone and separate kids and parents.

We're still detaining everyone, and Americans are definitely letting Trump escape blame for his zero tolerance immigration stance.

The Trump administration’s contradictory responses to the outrage over its family separation policy may have clouded public opinion about why the families were separated and who bears responsibility, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

The White House has gone through more than a dozen rationales, changing its story repeatedly on whether separating undocumented children from their parents at the border was an administration policy, whether it was intended as a deterrent, whether it was mandated by law and whether it could be reversed by executive order. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, after defending the policy as a deterrent, claimed Thursday that the administration had never intended to separate families, noting that “the American people don’t like the idea.”

The concept of family separation does remain deeply unpopular. The latest survey, in line with past polling, found that fewer than a third of the public considered separations to be acceptable.

Those who thought the policy was acceptable were more or less evenly split between the 48 percent who said removing children from their parents was a good thing because it served as a deterrent and the 44 percent who said it wasn’t a good thing but it was necessary to carry out U.S. immigration policy. Among those who found it unacceptable, 79 percent said they were angry that the separations were happening. (The poll was conducted largely before President Donald Trump issued an executive order Wednesday tweaking the policy to detain the children with their parents.)

There was little consensus among Americans on who bears responsibility for the separations. Just 36 percent thought the Trump administration bore at least some responsibility, several points less than the 44 percent who put at least some of the blame on undocumented parents. Slightly over a third judged the parents to hold the most responsibility; slightly under a third said the Trump administration was most responsible.

HUFFPOST

That's right, less than a third of Americans blame Trump for his own stated policy.  The same amount blame parents bringing their kids, and one in ten people actually buy Trump's lies and blame the Democrats.

Responses to the unfolding drama were especially muddled among Trump voters. Nearly three-quarters of Trump voters said they found the practice of family separation acceptable, with those who did about evenly split over whether the separations were actually a good thing. Just 11 percent of them, however, thought the Trump administration was intentionally separating families, and under a quarter said the Trump administration considered the separations a good thing. Asked who should bear at least some responsibility, 83 percent named undocumented parents and 47 percent pointed at congressional Democrats, with just 8 percent blaming the White House.

No, the Trump cultists are still absolutely behind Dear Leader on this.  Only 8% -- eight percent, mind you -- of Trump voters think the White House bears any responsibility whatsoever.   That means 92% of Trump voters are willing to let Trump get away with child internment camps.

Clinton voters, on the other hand, basically the exact opposite.

Ninety-three percent of voters who supported Hillary Clinton, by contrast, considered the separations unacceptable. Ninety percent said the Trump administration was intentionally separating families and 81 percent said the administration deserved at least some responsibility for what was happening.

No, at this point Trump voters are still enslaved by the Cult of Trump on this.  More than 9 in 10 Trump voters refuse to blame Trump for Trump's policy, and Trump knows he can move on to the next stage in the plan as soon as the logistics are in place.

The U.S. Navy is preparing plans to construct sprawling detention centers for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona, escalating the military’s task in implementing President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for people caught crossing the Southern border, according to a copy of a draft memo obtained by TIME.

The internal document, drafted for the Navy Secretary’s approval, signals how the military is anticipating its role in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The planning document indicates a potential growing military responsibility in an administration caught flat-footed in having to house waves of migrants awaiting civilian criminal proceedings.

The Navy memo outlines plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities to house 25,000 migrants at abandoned airfields just outside the Florida panhandle near Mobile, Alabama, at Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach, Alabama, and nearby Navy Outlying Field Silverhill.

The memo also proposes a camp for as many as 47,000 people at former Naval Weapons Station Concord, near San Francisco; and another facility that could house as many as 47,000 people at Camp Pendleton, the Marines’ largest training facility located along the Southern California coast. The planning memo proposes further study of housing an undetermined number of migrants at the Marine Corps Air Station near Yuma, Arizona.

The planning document estimates that the Navy would spend about $233 million to construct and operate a facility for 25,000 people for a six-month time period. The proposal suggests these tent cities be built to last between six months and one year.

A lot more immigrants are going to be detained.  And it will not be long before -- as I've said repeatedly now -- that the Trump regime will start rounding up immigrants already in the US to place in these internment camps.

Surely this is the bridge too far, right? And despite Chuck Pierce thinking this is a moment that could break America's Trump fever, I don't buy that for a second.

The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.

The migrant crisis is going to go down through history as one of the most destructive series of own-goals in the history of American politics. The establishment of the “zero-tolerance” policy made the child-nabbing inevitable. The president*’s own rhetoric—indeed, the raison d’etre of his entire campaign—trapped him into at first defending the indefensible and then abandoning what was perhaps the only consistent policy idea he ever had—outside of enriching himself and his family, that is. Then the cameras began to roll, and the nation’s gorge began to rise, and the president* couldn’t stand the pressure that was mounting around him. Of course, because he knows nothing about anything, including how to actually be president*, he bungled even his own abject surrender. He’s spent the days since signing his executive order railing against what he felt compelled to do and arguing against himself and losing anyway.

Unless he's losing on purpose, as I have explained.  If you're expecting Trump voters to start abandoning him over this, for the fever to break, then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now. President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn’t necessarily agree with how he handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.

But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.

“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.

“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.

In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November.

“He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff,” said Tony Schrantz, 50, of Lino Lakes, Minn., the owner of a water systems leak detection business. “But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.”

Republican voters repeatedly described an instinctive, protective response to the president, and their support has grown in recent months: Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent. And while polling has yet to capture the effect of the last week’s immigration controversy, the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

After 18 months of being in office, there is no sign Trump will moderate his behavior, no indication that he will "grow into the job", and no scintilla of a chance his followers will leave him.

They are a cult.  They are bound to him for better or worse.  The people in that NY Times account are using the language of those in an emotionally abusive relationship, in this case, with America.  They love America, but America doesn't love them back.

And there *is* no better.  Only worse.

Unless we prevail with an intervention in November, and even then...well, it all starts with that.

The War On The Impoverished

The latest UN report on world poverty is out and the Trump regime is livid that anyone would dare mention the fact that poverty not only exists in America but that the Trump regime is actively trying to lower to standards of living of Americans and working to destroy anti-poverty programs.

A United Nations report condemning entrenched poverty in the United States is a "misleading and politically motivated" document about "the wealthiest and freest country in the world," the Trump administration's top U.N. official said. 

U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley criticized the report for critiquing the United States' treatment of its poor, arguing that the United Nations should instead focus on poverty in developing countries such as Burundi and Congo Republic. The U.N. report also faulted the Trump administration for pursuing policies it said would exacerbate U.S. poverty. 

"It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America," Haley wrote in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday. "In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering."

The rebuke comes two days after Haley announced the United States' resignation from the U.N. Human Rights Council over that body's perceived bias against Israel and toleration of human rights abusers.

"There are really poor people in Africa you know!" is actually kind of funny coming from the former governor of South Carolina, a state constantly at or near the bottom in national poverty statistics, especially for black folk.  Sure, being poor and hungry in America isn't as awful as Yemen or South Sudan, but it doesn't mean people don't die in America because they can't afford to live here.

In May, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston released a report saying the United States has the highest rates of youth poverty, infant mortality, incarceration, income inequality and obesity among all countries in the developed world, as well as 40 million people living in poverty. Alston accused President Trump and the Republican Congress of deepening poverty and inequality in the country, citing the Republican tax law passed last fall.

"The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege," Alston wrote in the report.

Haley pushed back in Thursday's letter, arguing that the administration had created a strong economy that would lift people out of poverty and that Alston's report was premised on misleading statistics. Haley said the U.N. special rapporteur had "categorically misstated" the progress America had made reducing poverty, but she gave no examples.

"I am deeply disappointed that the Special Rapporteur used his platform to make misleading and politically motivated statements about American domestic policy issues," Haley said. "Regrettably, his report is an all too common example of the misplaced priorities [of the U.N.]."

Haley's response is exactly what I'd expect out of China's Communist bureaucracy, North Korea's state media, or India's technocratic dog and pony show.  Poverty in the US is very real for tens of millions of people, but we live in the richest country ever to exist, and being poor here still means you can be homeless, you can go hungry, and you can die from not being able to afford basics.

Of course she's going to scream and pretend like that's not happening.

The Pendejo Soybean War

Another day, another piece on Real Americans In The Heartland who now have buyer's remorse over the racist crapsack they had no problem voting for in November 2016, but now that Trump's trade war is destroying their livelihoods, maybe it's time for a second look at those dirty hippies again.

"This isn't just numbers on a sheet or percentage of trade or dollar value," said Michael Petefish, a 33-year old Trump supporter and fifth generation farmer in southern Minnesota. 

Standing on the farm he will likely run for the next 40 years, he added, "This is multi-generational American families, your base, that you are now squarely putting into financial peril." 

Petefish is one of the thousands of farmers who have seen the price of their crops tank in the face of escalating trade rhetoric between the United States and China. Growers in the area talk of their farms losing over $200,000 in value as commodity prices slump, all while the back and forth between the two countries has played out like a game of chicken, with each side trying to one up each other by raising the size of tariffs they plan to implement on each other. 

After Trump announced that he planned to implement tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods last week, the Chinese Commerce Ministry accused the United States of starting a trade war and said it will retaliate. Trump and his top aides have said they are implementing the tariffs to protect American intellectual property, but farmers like those here in southern Minnesota who are now under the threat of Chinese tariffs feel like collateral damage in a fight full of unintended consequences. 

"I cringe," Dale Stevermer, a soybean farmer and pork producer, said when asked about President Donald Trump's tit-for-tat trade spat with China. "When a tariff even gets talked about, it makes both the buyers and the sellers jumpy. It's going to impact my bottom line, it's going to impact my business livelihood, and, to an extent, it becomes a mental outlook." 

Standing on the Easton, Minnesota farm he was raised on, near the apple tree where he met his wife and the fields where he made a living for himself, Stevermer took a long pause. 

"It's hard not to have some down days," he said, looking out on his 200 acres of soybeans. 

Dale Stevermer wouldn't say who he voted for in 2016, but his wife, Lori, said she voted Republican. 

Rural  voters knew exactly what they were voting for, and exactly who they were voting for. As I keep saying, best case scenario for every single person who voted for Donald Trump was that his overt racism, sexism, and vulgarity wasn't a dealbreaker and was an acceptable "character flaw" they were willing to overlook, so they rolled the dice.

Eventually you come up snake eyes and lose.

The political irony for people like Petefish and others in southern Minnesota is that they helped propel Trump to the White House, backing the businessman-turned-politician because, in part, they felt he understood their needs better than Hillary Clinton. Trump only lost Minnesota by 2% in 2016, coming close to becoming the first Republican to win it since Richard Nixon. 

Farmers in the area are not ready to say they regret their vote for Trump but are closely watching how they will fare in the intensifying trade fight as they consider whether to break with the Republican Party in November. 

"We have got about a month and a half where we can play with this thing and then after that, these prices have to be corrected, so we urge the administration to do what it has to do and do it quickly," said Tom Slunecka, the CEO of the Minnesota Soybean Association. "If we get into harvest with prices like they are, it will decimate much of farm country." 

And it is not just Minnesota that will be impacted. States like Iowa and Illinois, both of which feature top House races this November, produce millions of bushels every year.
"Right now, people are overcome with risk," said Dan Feehan, the Democrat vying to represent southern Minnesota in Congress come November. "Those who chose to vote for the President two years ago did so because they felt anxiety about what their future and have seen things get worse."

And yet, we're still pretending it was "economic anxiety".  I'm gonna say losing 200 grand off the value of your farm because of this guy might be much more of an economic hit than anything Clinton would have done, even worst-case, but of course the economics were never the real reason people perfectly okay with racism chose to vote for the racist.

When Mike and Dale and their wives and kids and parents and neighbors and friends all vote for Republicans in 2018 and 2020, with Hillary Clinton nowhere near being on a ballot, will we still be using that "economic anxiety" line?

Last Call For A Hard Six, Heading For Seven

It's an uncomfortable subject to say the least, but human rights group Genocide Watch has identified ten stages of any government-created genocide over the years, and I'll be damned if the Trump regime isn't more than halfway into the process.






So let's get this out of the way up front: the United States has done this before, with Native Americans it was flat out genocide all the way down, with black slave massacres and lynchings reaching genocidal levels in several instances and eight of ten nationally, we came very close on this list during internment of Japanese-Americans in WW II through seven steps, we got more than halfway down this list after 9/11 and you can make the argument that we never really went back up this list when it comes to black people or Muslims in this country.

If you look where the Trump regime is now on immigrants, particularly Latinx immigrants, we're marching our way down this chart yet again.

Trump was in the middle of number six there today with his awful White House rally where he exploited the families of victims of gang killings.  Numbers 1-4 have been in operation since Day One of the regime, Trump engages in those regularly along with members of his party, as well as the transformation of ICE into the fifth point. At the very least we are at a hard, hard six as evidenced by Trump's regular campaign rallies and events like this, broadcast freely.  Trump gets plenty of assistance from state media at FOX too.




The problem now is at least at the border, we're moving into step seven.  Kids in cages, detainment facilities are being set up, military bases being converted, private prison industries springing up to profit.  Seven is well under way and will continue as the Trump regime devotes more resources into logistics and infrastructure for mass detainment.

And again, the assist here is from state media, like Sinclair Broadcast Group.




I understand that it's a big jump to go from seven to eight, and of course an exponential leap from eight to nine, but again we're already into seven as of this spring, and completing that step is a current stated goal of this administration.  Again, there's no disputing we're at a hard, hard six, well into seven, which means eight really isn't that far behind, guys, especially the theft of property once these efforts are fully turned inward against people already in the US.  Once that infrastructure is in place, it's going to be used.

The actual killing part?  History says that's going to come, especially to those who resist this government detainment.  We're already seeing ICE raids by the new Brownshirts, the transition from detainment to violence will be necessary to maintain Trump's control.  There will be a key incident, something that goes horribly wrong, something that will become deadly violence during one of these future ICE raids or Border Patrol operations and once that line is crossed we're not going back.

Once that jump is made, nine is on the horizon.  It is absolutely happening here, now, in America.  There doesn't seem to be any effort at slowing it down or stopping it.  We have a chance to change that in November, but that's a long way away.

Trump knows he can use this to help the GOP in November, he's already doing it.  The only question is if he'll decide to go this far to make that jump, because that's definitely the plan.

I don't know if we can stop it, but this is as sobering as it comes, folks.  This is real.

Be careful out there.