StupidiNews!

• A gunman killed two and injured 11 more before turning the gun on himself on Sunday in Jacksonville at a Madden NFL video game tournament.
• Pope Francis says that he will not respond to criticism over allegations by the former Vatican ambassador to Washington that the Pontiff covered up sexual abuse by priests and should resign.
• Iran and Syria have signed a mutual military defense agreement in Damascus as the United States is calling for Iran to remove all forces from Syria.
• The US and Mexico are expected to come to a NAFTA agreement as early as today, paving the way for renewing the trade agreement with Canada.
• A 2017 class action suit against ride-sharing giant Uber is expected to reach a settlement soon with 4,500 drivers expected to benefit from the payout.

Last Call For All About The Garbos

At least in Sweden, money does indeed buy you happiness, as a new study from two Stockholm University researchers (and one from NYU) finds, and there's direct evidence that increased overall life satisfaction can be attributed to people who win lotteries. Justin Wolpers from the NY Times explains.

New research suggests that more money really does lead to a more satisfying life. Surveys of thousands of Swedish lottery winners have provided persuasive evidence of this truth.

Lottery winners said they were substantially more satisfied with their lives than lottery losers. And those who won prizes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars reported being more satisfied than winners of mere tens of thousands.

These effects are remarkably durable. They were still evident up to two decades after a big win. (The researchers lacked the data to trace out even longer-term consequences.)

The findings appear in a research report, “Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being,” that has generated a lot of buzz among economists over the summer. The working paper, by Erik Lindqvistfrom the Stockholm School of Economics, Robert Ostling from Stockholm University and David Cesarini from New York University.

It is certain to feed a long-running debate about the role that personal finances play in shaping subjective well-being.

Many previous analyses — including several that I have conducted with my partner, Betsey Stevenson, a fellow University of Michigan economist — have documented that people with higher incomes tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction. The relationship between income and satisfaction is remarkably similar across dozens of countries, suggesting that findings about Sweden likely apply to the United States.

Those earlier studies merely documented a correlation. What’s new here is the evidence that higher income is causing higher life satisfaction.

The study also makes the distinction between happiness and life satisfaction, much like the difference between weather (a snapshot in time) vs climate (a long-term observable trend).  Not having to worry about basics like food, shelter, and the like does relieve a lot of stress, turns out.

That's something America should keep in mind, I think.  We still believe that being able to eat and live in a place is something that must be earned through a lifetime of hard work, and then through the discipline of a lifetime of frugal savings once retired, resulting in being able to pass a home on to your children, or having a home passed down to you from a parent or grandparent that did the same to earn the privilege of land ownership, otherwise you're "lazy" and deserve to be homeless.

It's not right, but there it is, and of course that will never change while we have the current administration in power.

The End of the Session(s), Con't

Donald Trump has definitely settled on Attorney General Jeff Sessions as the bad guy in all this after the worst week of his regime (so far at least) and Trump continued to attack Sessions over the weekend on the Tweeting machine.

President Trump lashed out again at Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying he lets "real corruption" go untouched while special counsel Robert Mueller's team is "having a field day."

Trump appeared to be responding to an unusual statement by the attorney generals this week defending himself against the president’s attacks, with Sessions saying: "While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations."

The president shot back in a tweet Saturday morning that Sessions "doesn't understand what is happening" beneath him. The tweet reiterated the president's attack on the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election as politically motivated and a distraction from "real corruption."

The president also quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said this week that he thinks the president may fire Sessions and appoint a new attorney general, though the senator said he hopes that won't happen until after the November midterms. 

Again, the goalposts here will be moved: Sessions is gone before the end of the year for sure, he may be gone before the end of the summer. Maybe he'll resign, maybe he'll be fired, but he won't be Attorney General in January, that much is clear.

Trump doesn't have much of a choice left.  The wall of secrecy that has protected him for thirty years of criminal activity is cracking.

The result has been a moment where Trump seems politically wounded, as friends turn and embarrassing revelations about his alleged affairs and his charity trickle out, uncontained. In coming months, certain cases could force Trump’s company to open its books about foreign government customers, or compel the president to testify about his relationships with ­women.

“The myth of Trump is now unraveling,” said Barbara Res, a Trump Organization executive from 1978 to 1996. “He’s becoming more obvious and people are starting to know what he’s like, and what he’s doing.”

Whether the president faces legal peril is not clear, but his presidency is at a precarious point. Recent polls suggest his repeated attacks on Mueller for leading a “witch hunt” have lost their effectiveness. And if the Democrats win a majority in at least one house of Congress in the midterm elections, now less than 10 weeks away, they would gain the power to investigate or even impeach.

“The whole reason he is freaking out is he can’t get rid of any of this,” said a longtime adviser to Trump, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House dynamics.

The president’s sense of betrayal came through last week when he derided cooperating witnesses as “flippers.” “Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they — they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go,” he told Fox News. In contrast, he tweeted that his “brave” former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who was convicted last week of bank fraud and tax fraud, had “refused to ‘break.’ ”

Trump has also focused his ire on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he has repeatedly and publicly attacked for his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. White House aides have explained to him that firing Sessions would not end the probe, but he remains livid, officials said, particularly after Sessions responded last week with a statement declaring that “the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”

Again, in the end, Trump will try to save himself.  He will do whatever he thinks is necessary.

That is when we find out if we still have a Republic.

Sunday Long Read: Hack The Planet

Wired's Andy Greenberg gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, with the story of Russia's most wide-ranging cyber warfare strike to date.  Last summer's NotPetya worm devastated Ukraine and the European Union and served as a clear warning shot that Russia could disable computer networks around the globe if it chose to, and the truth behind the attack was that it was far more powerful and destructive than first thought, reading like a modern Bond villain's plot.

IT WAS A perfect sunny summer afternoon in Copenhagen when the world’s largest shipping conglomerate began to lose its mind.

The headquarters of A.P. Møller-Maersk sits beside the breezy, cobblestoned esplanade of Copenhagen’s harbor. A ship’s mast carrying the Danish flag is planted by the building’s northeastern corner, and six stories of blue-tinted windows look out over the water, facing a dock where the Danish royal family parks its yacht. In the building’s basement, employees can browse a corporate gift shop, stocked with Maersk-branded bags and ties, and even a rare Lego model of the company’s gargantuan Triple-E container ship, a vessel roughly as large as the Empire State Building laid on its side, capable of carrying another Empire State Building–sized load of cargo stacked on top of it.

That gift shop also houses a technology help center, a single desk manned by IT troubleshooters next to the shop’s cashier. And on the afternoon of June 27, 2017, confused Maersk staffers began to gather at that help desk in twos and threes, almost all of them carrying laptops. On the machines’ screens were messages in red and black lettering. Some read “repairing file system on C:” with a stark warning not to turn off the computer. Others, more surreally, read “oops, your important files are encrypted” and demanded a payment of $300 worth of bitcoin to decrypt them.

Across the street, an IT administrator named Henrik Jensen was working in another part of the Maersk compound, an ornate white-stone building that in previous centuries had served as the royal archive of maritime maps and charts. (Henrik Jensen is not his real name. Like almost every Maersk employee, customer, or partner I interviewed, Jensen feared the consequences of speaking publicly for this story.) Jensen was busy preparing a software update for Maersk’s nearly 80,000 employees when his computer spontaneously restarted.

He quietly swore under his breath. Jensen assumed the unplanned reboot was a typically brusque move by Maersk’s central IT department, a little-loved entity in England that oversaw most of the corporate empire, whose eight business units ranged from ports to logistics to oil drilling, in 574 offices in 130 countries around the globe.

Jensen looked up to ask if anyone else in his open-plan office of IT staffers had been so rudely interrupted. And as he craned his head, he watched every other computer screen around the room blink out in rapid succession.

“I saw a wave of screens turning black. Black, black, black. Black black black black black,” he says. The PCs, Jensen and his neighbors quickly discovered, were irreversibly locked. Restarting only returned them to the same black screen.

All across Maersk headquarters, the full scale of the crisis was starting to become clear. Within half an hour, Maersk employees were running down hallways, yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from Maersk’s network before the malicious software could infect them, as it dawned on them that every minute could mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs. Tech workers ran into conference rooms and unplugged machines in the middle of meetings. Soon staffers were hurdling over locked key-card gates, which had been paralyzed by the still-mysterious malware, to spread the warning to other sections of the building.

Disconnecting Maersk’s entire global network took the company’s IT staff more than two panicky hours. By the end of that process, every employee had been ordered to turn off their computer and leave it at their desk. The digital phones at every cubicle, too, had been rendered useless in the emergency network shutdown.

Around 3 pm, a Maersk executive walked into the room where Jensen and a dozen or so of his colleagues were anxiously awaiting news and told them to go home. Maersk’s network was so deeply corrupted that even IT staffers were helpless. A few of the company’s more old-school managers told their teams to remain at the office. But many employees—rendered entirely idle without computers, servers, routers, or desk phones—simply left.

Jensen walked out of the building and into the warm air of a late June afternoon. Like the vast majority of Maersk staffers, he had no idea when he might return to work. The maritime giant that employed him, responsible for 76 ports on all sides of the earth and nearly 800 seafaring vessels, including container ships carrying tens of millions of tons of cargo, representing close to a fifth of the entire world’s shipping capacity, was dead in the water.

Maersk recovered, but since businesses around the world treat IT as an grudging expense that destroys profit and data protection as a waste of resources that should never be needed, the NotPetya scenario will happen again and again.

The Old Pilot's Last Flight Ends

Sen. John McCain passed away last night, and his legacy is that of a veteran and senator who saw his party crumble into the abyss, his hand more than a bit responsible.  When it was clear he was done ten years ago, he made the call to bring in Sarah Palin as his running mate. McCain was not a "maverick" and the words of then candidate Barack Obama make that clear.

[T]he record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Sen. McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change.

The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives — on health care and education and the economy — Sen. McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made “great progress” under this president. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisers — the man who wrote his economic plan — was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a “mental recession,” and that we’ve become, and I quote, “a nation of whiners.”

A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud autoworkers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.

The very next day, August 29, 2008, McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

You can draw a direct line from that event to the Trump regime today.  I spoke my mind yesterday about it and I haven't changed my mind from then.

This is a man who voted against a federal Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 because it was politically expedient for him to do so then.  When it was no longer politically expedient because he was running for president, he announced he had been wrong.  He's not the first politician to do this, he won't be the last.  Very few did it regarding the legacy of Dr. King however.

Chuck Schumer wants to rename the Senate's Russell Office Building after McCain.  I don't particularly believe he deserves that honor, but this is why I'm not an elected official. Nine years ago to the day yesterday, Ted Kennedy passed.  Would that this be the Kennedy Senate Office Building, but no.

It is not something I will forgive McCain for anytime soon.  Maybe someday, when America emerges from the hell it is in today.  John McCain is a better man than Donald Trump to be sure, but that bar to clear is on the ground.  McCain requested that his eulogies be read by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Donald Trump?  He'll probably be at a rally.

But Donald Trump would not be in the Oval Office at all if it wasn't for John McCain.

I will forgive the man someday, yes.  He lived a full life, he served his country for decades, he suffered like no human being should ever have to suffer, but in the end he was flawed and he made terrible decisions that hurt the country he loved.

I will forgive the man someday, yes.  But not today.  I leave with this tweet from author Dianne Anderson:

We can hold multiple truths at once in the event of someone’s death: 1. that his passing is a loss for his family and those in mourning deserve respect and understanding, and 2. Death does not erase a lifetime of bad political decisions.

— Dianna E. Anderson 🏳️‍🌈 (@diannaeanderson) August 26, 2018

And so, John McCain is gone.

Last Call For Superdelegate Superdeletion

The Democratic party's Unity Reform Commission has effectively neutered the power of superdelegates, in a definite win for Bernie Sanders heading into 2020.

The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to neutralize the votes of unpledged convention delegates, part of a package of hard-fought reforms designed to prevent a repeat of the bitter 2016 presidential primary as the party looks toward the 2020 election.

“We listened and we acted, and I’m proud that our party is doing everything we can to bring people in and make it easier to vote,” said DNC Chairman Tom Perez after the reforms were unanimously approved.

The new party rules undo decades-old reforms that empowered hundreds of party activists and elected officials, often referred to as “superdelegates,” whose presidential convention votes were not bound to the results of primaries or caucuses. They also affirm the decision of six states to move from caucuses, which have favored insurgent candidates, to primaries, which tend to have higher turnout.

The Democrats’ journey to that decision lasted more than two years, and divided party leaders even as activists who had supported both Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) organized behind them. Anger at the results of that primary campaign, and at Clinton’s defeat, has dogged the DNC under Perez’s leadership; despite a run of election wins, it has raised $116.5 million since the start of the cycle, compared with $227.2 million for the RNC.

To mollify supporters of Sanders, Democrats in July 2016 created a Unity Reform Commission that met four times through 2017. It originally proposed a cut to the total number of superdelegates, a move that was changed when the reform package got to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which met four more times to debate amendments. The eventual compromise — to prevent all superdelegates from voting unless a convention went to a second ballot — was proposed by Ken Martin, the chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL).

“This is a way for us to heal the wounds of the 2016 election,” Martin said in an interview before the vote. “Minnesota was a 62 percent Bernie state. People cared about this. We were dealing with a perception problem more than a reality problem, but that perception problem mattered. People believed so passionately that this issue cost their candidate the nomination, that we had to fix it.”

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  I honestly believe that when Bernie fails to secure the nomination in 2020, they'll find some other conspiracy to blame for his loss besides superdelegates, because given all the 50 states (plus DC and territories) caucuses and primaries, he still lost the nomination in 2016 convincingly.  It wasn't close, but blaming superdelegates was the way to go.

Moving six states from caucuses to primaries is a bigger issue and something that will help settle things, but again, this doesn't mean that the fight is over.

Perez and other delegate reform supporters succeeded in weakening the establishment opposition by giving it more time to protest. But the opposition made one final push, picking up on a theme that the Congressional Black Caucus had aired last month — that to take away the votes of black superdelegates was to effectively suppress them. The unofficial leaders of that faction, former party chair Don Fowler and California DNC member Bob Mulholland, are white. But Mulholland, a gruff Vietnam veteran, invoked the legacy of the civil rights movement to argue that his party risked alienating its most loyal voters to appease a faction of elite Sanders fans.

“There’s an awful lot of white males pushing this [reform] idea, and they have no idea of the message this is sending to the Latino community and the African American community,” Mulholland said Friday. “If I was Trump, and the DNC decided it’s not going to let black members of Congress on the floor to vote, I’d exploit the hell out of that. ‘The Democrats just threw out your vote!’ ”

But that message did not unify the DNC’s black members, some of whom pointed out that the 2016 pool of superdelegates skewed whiter than the delegates elected through primaries. While former party chair Donna Brazile gave a 10-minute speech decrying the reform, Nina Turner, president of the Sanders-founded group Our Revolution, whipped votes in favor of it.

“Real voter disenfranchisement is living in a state where you forfeit your rights if you’re a felon,” Turner said. “Real disenfranchisement is officials closing down polling places that disproportionately affect black voters. This is a false equivalency, to talk about something that happens in the DNC and compare it to the hard, bloody fight to secure the franchise in the real world.”

It pisses me off to no end to say this, but Nina Turner is correct here, mainly because being on the opposite side of the CBC is an easy layup.   If this was the real battle, and fighting GOP voter disenfranchisement of black and Hispanic voters united the Democrats going forward in 2018 and 2020, we'd be in much better shape.

Sadly, experience tells me that this won't happen.  More infighting is ahead, because it's what Democrats do.

Where The Country Goes From Here

"Surely," you say, "Donald Trump's personal lawyer pleading guilty and implicating Trump in commission of a felony for an illegal payoff of campaign funds for a playmate mistress, the same week his former campaign manager was convicted on fraud, the same week his long-time business CFO agreed to immunity from prosecution, is enough to break the hold on Trump's supporters and allow us to end this long national nightmare, correct Zandar?  Surely this is the inflection point where it all comes apart, yes?"

To which, I point you to this week's NY Times column by Roger Cohen, where the answer is "No, and they will never abandon him."

The thing about all the shocking Trump revelations — Michael Cohen’s about violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to two women in coordination with a “candidate for federal office” being the latest — is that they are already baked into Trump’s image. His supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one, Babcox included, who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the “Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.

It’s also why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything starts to unravel must be viewed warily. Sure, Trump sounds more desperate. But who’s the enforcer if Trump has broken the law? It’s Congress — and until things change there (which could happen in November) or Republicans at last abandon a policy of hold-my-nose opportunism, Trump will ride out the storm.

There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?

Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.

It will take decades to clean up the mess that Trump has caused after just 19 months.   If he is allowed to serve out a full term, the rest of my lifetime will be required just to get us back to the post-Bush era of world mistrust against us.  If he is re-elected in 2020, it will never happen.

The main reason for that is the GOP enablers who have covered for Trump, most of all his supporters.  They simply don't care anymore.  We've reverted, full-form, to the American status quo, a country founded on slave labor, racism, Calvinist hypocrisy, and greed, the country that has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing, and only after everything else has been tried.

The Obama experiment was the right thing, but now everything else must be tried.  The fact we followed up with Trump, rather than elect America's first woman president, is everything you need to know.

Trump's not the problem.  It's the people who voted for him, and support him now.

Pardon, The Interruption

The Trump regime is openly floating the trial balloon of a Manafort pardon to Politico in order to see how badly it actually crashes.

President Donald Trump’s lawyers and a cadre of informal White House advisers claim they’ve convinced him not to pardon Paul Manafort — but White House officials expect the president to do it anyway.

The president’s characterization of his former campaign chairman as a victim and “brave man” is being read by aides as a signal that Trump wants to use his unilateral authority to issue pardons to absolve Manafort, according to eight current and former administration officials and outside advisers.

“Trump is setting it up. He’s referring to the investigation as a ‘witch hunt’ and saying this never would have happened to an aide to Hillary Clinton,” said one former campaign official.

Three senior administration aides said the president has not expressed to them directly any immediate intention of pardoning Manafort, who was convicted earlier this week on eight counts of felony tax evasion and bank fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told The Washington Post on Thursday that the president had agreed not to pardon Manafort, who faces a second trial on lobbying violations in Washington next month, until after the midterms if at all. Giuliani did not return a call for comment.

Members of the president’s informal group of outside advisers, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have stepped in over the past few weeks to caution the president against exonerating Manafort before the midterms.

“He certainly does not need to do it. The things Manafort has been convicted of have nothing to do with Trump,” Gingrich told POLITICO. “The president thinks Manafort’s biggest crime was running the Trump campaign. If he had run the Clinton campaign, then he would have gotten immunity and never would have had any problems.”

White House counsel Don McGahn is also dead set against a presidential pardon of Manafort, according to one administration official — though a person close to McGahn said that he and the president had not discussed the issue.

"Eight current and former administration officials", and I'm betting at least one of them is Trump himself, just to see how this plays in Peoria.  He's really terrified with Weisselberg and Cohen turning on him.  Manafort is his only real play short of waiting it out, and he knows it.

We'll see what the response is, but unless Republican senators start screaming bloody murder this weekend, this could happen (and even then he still may do it anyway.)  On the other hand, the fact that 60% of Americans are against it, and only 11% are for it, means he could be talked down.  Even Republicans aren't willing to back Trump on this (38% against, 20% for, 42% unsure) but that 42% unsure would almost certainly back Trump if he did it.

Stay tuned.

The Old Pilot's Last Flight, But The Plane Is Burning

I do not believe history will be kind to Sen. John McCain for the last decade.  The man who gave us Sarah Palin and began the cycle of elevating racist dogwhistles to mainstream Republican presidential politics, culminating in the rise of Donald Trump, has no one to blame but himself for his failures.  

He has done the right thing in his life every now and again, and he served his country well as a Navy pilot and survived a hell as a Vietnam POW that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but when given the multiple opportunities to be the voice of reason to salvage the smoking remains of the Trump GOP, McCain bunted, punted, and stunted.

Now the 81-year-old veteran faces his final days on his own terms, foregoing further treatment for brain cancer as he has decided to surround himself with friends and family.

Mr. McCain, 81, had been undergoing treatment since July 2017, and has been absent from Washington since December. Mr. McCain’s family has gathered in Arizona, and people close to him say his death is imminent.

From his ranch in Arizona, Mr. McCain had managed to maintain a voice in key foreign policy and military policy debates, sharply criticizing President Trump after his summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, an old adversary of Mr. McCain. At home, he has welcomed close friends to renew ties. But after decades as a fixture in Washington and a larger-than-life character, he had largely retreated from the public eye.

Senators from both parties quickly wrote to comfort Mr. McCain’s family and lauded his service. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader and an occasional McCain sparring partner, wrote on Twitter that Mr. McCain has been a “dear friend” with whom he was lucky to serve in the Senate.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, “May the prayers and affection of his country, and of friends around the world, surround John and his beloved family in these peaceful final hours.”

The son and grandson of four-star Navy admirals who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. McCain rose to become one of the towering figures in American politics, twice seeking the presidency and winning the 2008 Republican nomination for president. In the Senate, he has been both revered as an iconoclast and criticized by many, including Mr. Trump, for his willingness to buck his party on issues like campaign finance reform and, last summer, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, Mr. McCain has watched his party steer sharply away from many of the values he long championed. A fierce advocate for an expansive and interventionist American foreign policy, Mr. McCain has fretted as Mr. Trump moved the party toward “America First” policies, criticizing longtime American allies and institutions like NATO, while praising adversaries like Russia.

For decades, Mr. McCain advocated on behalf of refugees and was a leading — if intermittent — Republican voice in a few efforts to overhaul the American immigration system. Mr. Trump has tried to strictly limit both.

Though he was unable to vote on the Republican tax cut bill late last year, a top Trump priority, Mr. McCain’s endorsement helped secure its passage.

I'm hoping the old warhorse can summon one last condemnation of the party that has abandoned him and abandoned America in the name of white nationalism, and admit to his role in helping to enable it.  He owes the country, Barack Obama, and posterity a huge apology, quite frankly.

I'm not holding my breath.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump regime strongly opposes any measures to toughen up election interference defenses because the Trump regime knows full well that legislation like the Secure Elections Act would make it harder for them to hide what they're up to.

A bill that would have significantly bolstered the nation’s defenses against electoral interference has been held up in the Senate at the behest of the White House, which opposed the proposed legislation, according to congressional sources.

The Secure Elections Act, introduced by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in December 2017, had co-sponsorship from two of the Senate’s most prominent liberals, Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as from conservative stalwart Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and consummate centrist Susan Collins, R-Me.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was set to conduct a markup of the bill on Wednesday morning in the Senate Rules Committee, which he chairs. The bill had widespread support, including from some of the committee’s Republican members, and was expected to come to a full Senate vote in October. But then the chairman’s mark, as the critical step is known, was canceled, and no explanation was given.

As it currently stands, the legislation would grant every state’s top election official security clearance to receive threat information. It would also formalize the practice of information-sharing between the federal government—in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—and states regarding threats to electoral infrastructure. A technical advisory board would establish best practices related to election cybersecurity. Perhaps most significantly, the law would mandate that every state conduct a statistically significant audit following a federal election. It would also incentivize the purchase of voting machines that leave a paper record of votes cast, as opposed to some all-electronic models that do not. This would signify a marked shift away from all-electronic voting, which was encouraged with the passage of the Help Americans Vote Act in 2002.

“Paper is not antiquated,” Lankford says. “It’s reliable.”

A paper record could prove effective against hackers if they tried to change the reporting of votes on the internet, as opposed to altering the votes themselves. Election officials needs to be able to say, “‘Nope, we can check this,’” as Lankford puts it. “Here’s the paper, here’s the machine, here’s our poll count.”

The Trump regime's official excuse is that election integrity matters are already under the Department of Homeland Security, and firmly protected by the executive branch, therefore there's no need to have Congress interfere with "the principles of Federalism".

But let's be honest: it's the audit of paper ballots that the Trump regime will never allow to happen.

We all know why that is.

Great Scott, Donald! It's Your Kids!

The Michael Cohen investigation has broken the dam on implicating not only Trump, but his companies and charities as well.  Remember that Cohen was Trump's personal lawyer for a very long time, and that includes being Trump's legal eagle behind all of his business ventures involving the Trump family.  It's these ventures, specifically Trump's charity outfit, the Trump Organization, that has caught the eye of NY state prosecutors in the wake of the Cohen plea.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two senior company officials in connection with Michael D. Cohen’s hush money payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter.

A state investigation would center on how the company accounted for its reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who has said she had an affair with President Trump, the officials said.

Both officials stressed that the office’s review of the matter is in its earliest stages and prosecutors have not yet made a decision on whether to proceed.

State charges against the company or its executives could be significant because Mr. Trump has talked about pardoning some of his current or former aides who have faced federal charges. As president, he has no power to pardon people and corporate entities convicted of state crimes.

The Trump Organization recorded the reimbursement as a legal expense. But Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer, said on Tuesday that he paid Ms. Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, to buy her silence during the 2016 campaign. Federal prosecutors have said the reimbursement payments were for sham legal invoices in connection with a nonexistent retainer agreement. Mr. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges, did no legal work in connection with the matter, prosecutors said.

“On its face, it certainly would be problematic,” said one of the officials familiar with the district attorney’s office review, noting that listing the reimbursement as a legal expense could be a felony under state law.

The billion-dollar questions are "who are the two senior company officials" and "will they be prosecuted", and the best part of all of this is that many of the Trump Organization's "senior company executives" are in fact Donald Trump's kids.

Wouldn't that be something?

Now, it's entirely possible that the two executives could be former Trump Organization executive VP Jason Greenblatt, who ran the outfit's day-to-day operations, and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who has been Trump's money guy for decades.  In a lot of ways, these two would actually be worse for Trump than his kids, because unlike Trump's useless and greedy kids, Greenblatt and Weisselberg actually know where all of the Trump money laundering bodies are buried.

But guess what happened this morning?

Allen Weisselberg, President Trump’s longtime financial gatekeeper, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen in the criminal investigation into hush-money payments for two women during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Weisselberg was called to testify before a federal grand jury in the investigation earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, citing people familiar with the investigation.

The decision by prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to grant immunity to Mr. Weisselberg escalates the pressure on Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Weisselberg has served for decades as executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. After Mr. Trump was elected, he handed control of his financial assets and business interests to his two adult sons and Mr. Weisselberg.

So if Weisselberg's not one of the two "senior company officials" in the Trump Organization that's facing prosecution, then who is?  The only reason he gets immunity is if he can provide information on a bigger fish.  Above Weisselberg, all the bigger fish are named "Trump".

It's open season, folks.  The Trumpies could argue that Cohen was only going down for the Stormy Daniels payouts and campaign and tax fraud.  But Weisselberg cutting a deal means he has direct information of immense value on a much larger crime.

Stay tuned.  I bet we find out what that crime is, and that it was committed by a Trump.

The End Of The Session(s)

If you're wondering what the congressional GOP response would be to this week's Michael Cohen/Paul Manafort bombshells, the answer is that Senate Republicans are signalling that they're fine with replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions in favor of someone who will end the Mueller probe once and for all.

Two key Republican senators signaled to President Donald Trump that he could replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the midterm elections in November, a move that would open the way for firing Robert Mueller or constraining his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“The president’s entitled to an attorney general he has faith in, somebody that’s qualified for the job, and I think there will come a time, sooner rather than later, where it will be time to have a new face and a fresh voice at the Department of Justice,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who may be in line to head the Judiciary Committee next year, told reporters Thursday. “Clearly, Attorney General Sessions doesn’t have the confidence of the president.”

Senator Chuck Grassley, the current Judiciary chairman, also changed his position on Thursday, saying in an interview that he’d be able to make time for hearings for a new attorney general after saying in the past that the panel was too busy to tackle that explosive possibility.

Several other Republicans rejected the idea of replacing the attorney general, while Sessions defended his performance in a statement Thursday. He said “we have had unprecedented success at effectuating the President’s agenda” and added, “While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”

In warning against ousting Sessions before the election, Graham called that possibility “a nonstarter” that “would create havoc” with Senate efforts to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as well as with the midterm elections in November.

But his statement that such a move could come after the election represents a significant shift from Graham’s stance a year ago, when he warned Trump publicly that if he fired Sessions “there will be holy hell to pay.”

It's pretty clear what Graham and Grassley want: once Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, it doesn't really matter what Trump does anymore as far as they're concerned.  Once Kavanaugh is sworn in, they'll have what they wanted: huge corporate tax cuts for the rich, two SCOTUS picks who will finish off the civil rights era for good, and an orange lightning rod to take all the blame.

It's all upside for them at this point.  Maybe getting rid of Sessions and firing Mueller is the excuse they need to bag him up and bring in Pence.  Maybe they're okay with him sticking around.  But once Kavanaugh is there, the damage becomes permanent and irreversible.  Trump will get free reign, because ultimately, it won't matter past that point.

Regardless, Jeff Sessions now must know that his time is up.  Trump may not be able to fire Sessions directly right now, but the point of the news that he's being shown the door after the elections may be to get him to resign now, which would be optimal for Trump, allowing him to go with a Saturday Night Massacre plan as soon as possible and get rid of Mueller almost immediately.

He may stick around to secure his legacy, he may have congressional Republicans whispering in his ear to go now before that legacy transforms into "the loser who failed to protect Dear Leader Trump" and he becomes GOP public enemy #1.  I don't know, honestly.

This morning, Trump went on a Twitter tirade that included this order for Sessions to investigate Trump's political opponents.

This is the real endgame now: Trump unleashed to indulge his autocratic impulses and the people who enabled him can walk away and rake in the spoils.  And should anyone try to stop him, well, it would be a shame if he let the white nationalist militias freely indulge their killing fantasies, wouldn't it?

StupidiNews!

• Category 4 Hurricane Lane is expected to deluge parts of the Hawaiian Islands with more than 19 inches of rain over the next 48 hours.
• With National Enquirer head David Pecker now receiving immunity from prosecution over the Cohen investigation, yesterday the magazine revealed it has a vault of information on Donald Trump.
• Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison will be the country's next Prime Minister after a brutal Liberal party leadership battle stripped PM Malcolm Turnbull of his office.
• The states that have required E-Verify to check the citizenship and eligibility status for all employees simply don't enforce the law, a new study finds.
• Cable giants Comcast and Charter are teaming up to lobby the FTC to kill net neutrality regulations that the FCC has already repealed while saying the FTC should enforce them.

Last Call For Calling A Lie, A Lie

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has refused to call Donald Trump's lies what they are, contemptible, purposeful, and told with intent to deceive.  But this week's Cohen plea on the Stormy Daniels payoff finally gets Kessler to use the L word.

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “we have no knowledge of any of this.”

The second came in January of this year, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that Trump denied all the allegations and any payments. Even Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, got in on the action, saying the president “was not aware of any of it.”

In April, Trump finally weighed in, answering a question about whether he knew about a payment to porn star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, with a flat “no.”

It’s now clear that the president’s statement was a lie — and that the people speaking for him repeated it.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his loose relationship with facts. As of the beginning of this month, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had documented 4,229 false or misleading claims from the president — an average of nearly 7.6 a day.

Trump’s allies have defended the president by suggesting that facts are debatable. Early into his presidency, one aide famously said he was operating with “alternative facts.” On Sunday, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani declared: “Truth isn’t truth.”

How to characterize Trump’s statements has become its own pitched political battle, with many of the president’s critics demanding that they be called “lies.” The Fact Checker has been hesitant to go that far, as it is difficult to document whether the president knows he is not telling the truth.

On Wednesday, Sanders said during a White House briefing that it was “a ridiculous accusation” to say the president has lied to the American people.

But this week’s guilty plea by Cohen, offers indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest at every turn in their statements regarding payments to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.

It's a start.  Pretending that Trump says things and doesn't intend them as lies is such a ghastly failure of journalistic integrity and accountability that it has led directly to Trump knowing full well that he can lie with impunity.

Those days have apparently ended as Michael Cohen turned on Trump, and there's not like he had much choice.

Michael Cohen had many reasons to play ball last weekend when his legal team sat down to talk to federal prosecutors.

The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office had testimony from Mr. Cohen’s accountant and business partners, along with bank records, tax filings and loan applications that implicated not only Mr. Cohen in potential criminal activity, but also his wife, who filed taxes jointly with her husband. Prosecutors signaled Mr. Cohen would face nearly 20 criminal counts, potentially carrying a lengthy prison sentence and staggering financial penalties.

Adding to the pressure, David Pecker, the chairman of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, provided prosecutors with details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged with women who alleged sexual encounters with President Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.

This account of how Mr. Cohen went from a pugnacious defender of the president to turning on Mr. Trump is based on details provided by people close to Mr. Cohen and others briefed on the discussions with prosecutors.

For weeks, the president had been distancing himself from Mr. Cohen, including by stopping paying his longtime attorney’s legal fees, making clear amid the pressure that he was on his own.

Under oath on Tuesday, before a packed courtroom, Mr. Cohen created a spectacular moment without parallel in American history when he confessed to two crimes that he said he committed at the behest of the man who would become president.

Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes, including tax evasion and making false statements to a bank, capping a months-long investigation into his business dealings and work as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. For the president, it opens up a perilous new legal front.

Cohen was going away for the rest of his life.  He chose instead to implicate Donald Trump. And while I'm painfully aware that impeachment remains a fantasy that Democrats should best avoid, the rest of the GOP does not enjoy that kind of protection and is very vulnerable.

Regardless, the GOP in Congress continue to ignore the situation.  They have to be voted out before anything will be done.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Beto O'Rourke has a real shot against Ted Cruz, and this is why. 

‘I can think of nothing more American.’ — Beto O'Rourke — the man taking on Ted Cruz — brilliantly explains why NFL players kneeling during the anthem is not disrespectful pic.twitter.com/bEqOAYpxEL

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) August 21, 2018

This is by far the best answer from a politician on exactly why NFL players kneeling is quintessentially an American sports movement, and Beto nails this.

“My short answer is no, I don't think it's disrespectful," O’Rourke said. "Here's my longer answer but I'm gonna try to make sure that I get this right because I think it's a really important question. And reasonable people can disagree on this issue. Let's begin there. And it makes them no less American to come down on a different conclusion on this issue, right?"

"Peaceful, non-violent protests, including taking a knee at a football game to point out that Black men, unarmed, Black teenagers, unarmed and Black children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now, including by members of law enforcement, without accountability, and without justice," he added. "And this problem – as grave as it is – is not gonna fix itself and they're frustrated, frankly, with people like me, and those in positions of public trust and power, who have been unable to resolve this or bring justice for what has been done and to stop it from continuing to happen in this country. And so non-violently, peacefully, while the eyes of this country are watching these games, they take a knee to bring our attention and our focus to this problem to ensure that we fix it. That is why they are doing it. And I can think of nothing more American than to peacefully stand up, or take a knee, for your rights, any time, anywhere, in any place.”

This man is going to go far, but he has to beat Ted Cruz in November.  GQ's Christopher Hooks profiles the race:

The day after Cruz's rally, O'Rourke is in Hutchins, a small town in Dallas County. Though he and Cruz are roughly the same age—45 and 47, respectively—O'Rourke looks and talks like a much newer model. The fervor that greets him verges on the messianic. (A state representative speaking at the event invoked Nelson Mandela.) He feels like a candidate tailored for the moment.

His campaign's product—what Beto offers—is an opportunity for dispirited Democrats to take part in something hopeful. But as Election Day has drawn closer, the tone has slowly shifted. It's gotten more urgent and a bit darker. Our country is in peril, he tells the crowd in Hutchins, and if there isn't a change in 2018, things could get worse: The “slip that we took in 2016, if unchecked in 2018, could become a slide,” he says, and “we could lose the things that have made us who we are for 242 years and counting.” Time is running out. “No pressure, folks. The entire fortune and future and fate of this country rests on our shoulders,” he says. O'Rourke calls the 2018 election the “moment of truth.” There is not the slightest bit of ironic distance here, and the crowd loves it. Somehow, it's cathartic.

Later that day, in the well-off suburb of Farmers Branch, over a thousand people pack a college gymnasium to hear O'Rourke speak, shutting out hundreds more. Even those unable to get into the rally are excited about the attendance. “Wonderful. Awesome,” one turned-away latecomer says. “It's so good that people are coming out.”

Standing in the shade with me near his campaign minivan after the event, O'Rourke acknowledges the tough road ahead—while noting that much good has already been done. His rallies, he says, are about something bigger than the current Senate race. “There's so many things going on right now that literally can't wait until the next election,” he says, still fired up just after having taken selfies with a line of hundreds.

Win or lose, the fervor brought about by the campaign could be leveraged on other issues, he says. “I feel that judgment of my kids and of history if we fail to do this. I mean, it is going to be on us. They won't say that Trump [alone is to blame], because they'll know that this is a democracy that all of us had a chance to participate in. They'll say, ‘Those pendejos in 2018, they were the ones who screwed this up.’ We can't screw this up.”

And God bless him, he's right.  O'Rourke is now within 4 points of Cruz and closing.

Let's help Beto seal the deal.  He gets it, guys.  He really does.