Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Less than a week into the Florida gubernatorial contest between Trump-loving GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis and Democratic Mayor of Tallahassee Andrew Gillum, who would be Florida's first black governor, and we've now had three "Southern Strategy" moments that would have made Lee Atwater proud.

On Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the winning in Florida's Tuesday primaries, DeSantis called Gillum "articulate" and warned Florida voters not to "monkey this up" by voting for his opponent.

DeSantis, whose rise to national prominence was bolstered by his frequent appearances on the network, praised Gillum on Fox News on Wednesday as “an articulate spokesman” for those holding “far-left views” but warned that he would be damaging to the state.

“The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state,” DeSantis said. “That is not going to work. That’s not going to be good for Florida.”

The use of language seen as containing coded racism prompted an extraordinary rebuke from the network.

DeSantis pulled a "who, me?" and walked the comments back, sort of, but then on Thursday white supremacists bought robocalls in Florida with an unmistakably racist message.

Racist robocalls targeting Andrew Gillum, the first black nominee for Florida governor from a major party, have been placed to residents from an out-of-state white supremacist entity.

Mr. Gillum, 39, the Tallahassee mayor and a progressive candidate who won an upset victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, will face Representative Ron DeSantis, 39, a Republican who embraced the style and policies of President Trump, in the November election.

In the audio of one robocall placed on Friday and obtained by The New York Times, a man pretending to be Mr. Gillum can be heard talking in the exaggerated accent of a minstrel performer. “Well hello there,” it begins, “I is Andrew Gillum.” He then talks for a little over a minute about mud huts and unfair policing practices, and asks repeatedly for the listener’s vote. In the background are the sounds of drums and monkeys.

The recording, reported on Friday by The Tallahassee Democrat, ends with a man saying that the message was paid for by the Road to Power, an Idaho-based website and podcast with white supremacist and anti-Semitic content.

It is unclear how many people received the robocalls, but Mr. Gillum’s campaign spokesman, Geoff Burgan, said that multiple people had reported them to the campaign. He called the message “reprehensible” and said it “could only have come from someone with intentions to fuel hatred and seek publicity.”

Now DeSantis, in an interview today, wasted no time going after Gillum again, accusing Gillum of being a "far-left fringe socialist" who will "turn Florida into Venezuela". 

DeSantis told host John Catsimatidis in an interview airing Sunday on AM 970 in New York that Gillum, who is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and advocates for more left-leaning proposals such as "Medicare for all" and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is an "untraditional" opponent.

"I would say it's very untraditional for Florida, [though] not anything to do with me, I'm a solid conservative in the Reagan tradition and I've been supportive of the president's agenda," DeSantis said.

"This Andrew Gillum, he's on the far-left socialist fringe," DeSantis continued. "He's a Bernie Sanders, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez type candidate."

"If you have a guy like this enacting a socialist agenda it's going to absolutely destroy all the progress that Florida has made," he added. "He wants to turn Florida in to Venezuela."

It hasn't even been a week yet, and we already have three ear-splitting racist dog-whistles in the race, one from actual card-carrying white supremacists in support of Ron DeSantis, a race which is now 100% about Gillum being black.

And we still have two months to go.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The Secretary of State for Kansas, and now gubernatorial candidate for November, our old vote-suppressing friend Kris Kobach, will imminently be under grand jury investigation for dereliction of duty in purposely failing to register voters in the 2016 election.

Douglas County will have to summon a citizen-initiated grand jury to investigate allegations that Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office mishandled voter registration information during the 2016 election, the Kansas Supreme Court said Friday.

In a one-page order signed by Chief Justice Lawton Nuss, the court denied Kobach’s request to review a Kansas Court of Appeals decision in June that said Lawrence resident Steven Davis had met the legal requirement for circulating petitions to summon a grand jury.

The Supreme Court did not provide any further explanation of its decision.

Davis, a Lawrence resident who ran unsuccessfully for the Kansas House in the 2016 and 2018 Democratic primaries, circulated petitions following the 2016 elections, calling for a grand jury to investigate whether Kobach or others in his office had engaged in “destroying, obstructing, or failing to deliver online voter registration,” as well as possessing falsely made or altered registration books, preventing qualified electors from voting, and “being grossly neglectful with respect to their election duties.”

Kobach’s office has rejected the allegations, saying they relate to a short period of time in 2016 when certain online voter registration systems were malfunctioning and that those problems have since been resolved.

Kobach himself, who is now the Republican nominee for governor, has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated.

Initially, Douglas County Judge Peggy Kittel dismissed Davis’ petition, saying he had not made specific enough allegations to suggest that crimes had been committed.

But in June, a three-judge panel of the Kansas Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying Kansas statutes only require general allegations that, if proven to be true, would constitute crimes.

While the case was pending at the Court of Appeals, Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s office withdrew the state as a party to the case.

Once the Court of Appeals ruled, Kobach asked the Kansas Supreme Court to review the matter, and he filed a motion to intervene, saying neither he nor his staff had been adequately represented in the Court of Appeals decision.

On Friday, though, the Supreme Court declined to review the matter, and in a separate order it denied Kobach’s motion to intervene as moot.

A spokeswoman for the Office of Judicial Administration said the grand jury will have to be summoned once the Court of Appeals issues what is called a “final mandate” in the case, but it was not immediately clear how long the appellate court has to do that.

These accusations are enormous, as they directly accuse Republican Secretary of State, Kansas's highest election official, of failing to register Democratic voters.  The fact that there's enough evidence to open a grand jury investigation at all should be the death knell for Kobach's run for governor, and for his entire political career.

And these are criminal acts, mind you.  Kobach could be headed for prison over this.  Granted, the grand jury investigation would take months and the following criminal case months as well, but it would be a sitting Governor under possible criminal investigation.  Like Missouri's criminal former GOP governor Eric Greitens, he'd have to resign.

Of course, even with a full indictment, Republicans can still be favored to win.  Just ask California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, under fraud and campaign finance charges, a man almost certainly headed for expulsion from the House and prison, but almost certainly headed for reelection first.

The corrupt GOP remains as long as we allow them to remain.

Sunday Long Read: Ten Years After The Nightmare

As we enter September, this month marks the ten-year anniversary of the housing collapse.  I started this blog as a result of that mess, moving from BooMan Tribune to my own place once it became clear that documenting the atrocities was going to be a part-time job in 2008.

Now in 2018, most Americans still haven't recovered from the financial disaster, and a second housing crisis now looms very large on the horizon.  We're still in the same mess we were, and at every turn, corporate and Republican forces have worked to keep us in the hole. Our Sunday Long Read at the Penny Hoarder goes over the details.

Heather and Rick Little learned in court that they would have to leave their home by Dec. 10 — just two weeks before Christmas.

The Littles knew the foreclosure was coming before the October 2008 hearing.

The bank was relentless with calls and notices and big fat envelopes, Heather remembers. She called and begged for help, but there was nothing the bank could do. “Nothing they would do,” she said.

She stopped trying to stall the foreclosure.

The day of the hearing, the Littles wheeled their daughter, Emma, then 19 months old, into the Manatee County, Florida, courthouse in her stroller. Their son, John, was in kindergarten that day.

The judge was sympathetic, Heather recalls. He asked them how much time they needed to pack up and move. The hearing took less than 15 minutes.

“There was no one around, thankfully,” she said, “because I fell apart.”

Their house became one of the 9 million homes that would go into foreclosure nationwide between 2007 and 2010.

The Littles went from hosting barbecues in their backyard with a swimming pool and outdoor kitchen to taking whatever they could get from local food banks.

A decade after the height of the Great Recession in 2008, people who lost homes and careers are still recovering.

For the Littles, life is more stable now, but the swimming pool and outdoor kitchen are long gone.

Today, the family’s backyard holds plastic pots where Heather grows fruits and vegetables — signs she still remembers what it felt like to question where their next meal would come from.

“We had nothing extra at the end of every month,” Heather said of the years after their foreclosure. “Nothing. Not even a dollar.”

Trillions in wealth was destroyed, and the recovery vastly favored those who already had wealth after 2008.  They got exponentially more wealthy, while the rest of us have put the American dream of homeownership and passing on a family place to our kids aside.

We're just trying to make the next rent payment.

President Obama did what he could, but it simply wasn't enough.  And after 2010, we hung him out to dry in favor of the "populist" GOP.  That mistake sealed the deal and left us in the lurch where we are now, ten years later.

And now Trump is in charge, and the reality is unless we break the GOP's hold on government in 2018, we're going to collapse again, and this time, America's not coming back.

The Old Pilot's Final Sendoff

Chuck Pierce notes that Sen. John McCain's funeral on Saturday was one final, gigantic, worldwide screw-you to one Donald John Trump, and nobody deserved the mass shunning more.

In the magnificent, lordly church-house, there were speeches and prayers. There were songs and hymns. There were bands and pipers and choirs and soloists. John McCain was given a national send-off in a National Cathedral and there was a great gathering of emotion that was almost frightening in its intensity because you knew that it was aimed at a solitary, angry, unbalanced man left back at the White House, at someone who nonetheless is the president* of the United States, with all the powers inherent to his office, a man who has created a situation in which he is an object of dislike and disrespect, because that is all that he's given to the world in return.

It was said almost immediately after the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies on Saturday that, for a few hours anyway, we were back in a familiar country with familiar customs and manners and norms, a country with institutions built to last. That may well be true. I felt it, too. But in back of that is the realization that all of us, including the deceased, had taken those customs, manners, norms, and institutions terribly for granted. We thought they could withstand anything, even a renegade president* in the pocket of a distant authoritarian goon. We let the customs, manners, norms and institutions weaken through neglect and now we are in open conflict with an elected president and, make no mistake about it, John McCain's funeral was a council of war, and it was a council of war because that's what John McCain meant it to be.

He deliberately made known to people that the president* was not welcome at any of the services. He deliberately chose the previous two presidents to deliver the formal eulogies. He deliberately created that scene in the Capitol rotunda at which Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence, an unholy trio of Trumpist quislings, had to choke down their own cowardice and say how much they loved him and his irascibility. He deliberately created a mirror in which, if they still have an ounce of self-awareness, they could see the rot that has set in on their souls. Even at the end, John McCain knew what he was doing and he was a fearsome opponent. He wanted a pageant of everything this administration* has trashed and put up for sale, and that's what he got Saturday—a morality play shot through with Shakespearian portent and foreshadowing, a pageant of democracy's vengeance.

This is not to minimize the genuine affection and love that was on display. John McCain was a beloved figure to many of the people who came to bid him farewell. But there was so much subtext under the proceedings that the mantle shattered, and subtext became text, plain as the rain that fell and passed while the service continued. This was a funeral with more than one purpose—to celebrate the passing of John McCain and to summon a rebirth of politics that did not so much reek of grift and vodka. 

John McCain, a man better loved by Democrats than Republicans currently, was no saint.  I've said my piece about the man and his myriad failures, especially in the last ten years.   But in the end, for one day, he got to tell Donald Trump to go screw himself.

It was petty as hell, and Donald Trump understands the motivations of pettiness better than anyone on earth.  He went golfing instead, and everyone laughed at him.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings

The White House isn't even pretending about Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, he's there to be rubber-stamped by 50 GOP senators, plus John McCain's replacement in order to give the Republicans the final vote they need to dismantle 80 years of classic liberalism permanently, and they're not even feigning that his odious record as a jurist matters in the least anymore.

The Trump administration is withholding more than 100,000 pages of Brett Kavanaugh’s records from the Bush White House on the basis of presidential privilege ahead of the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was notified of the action Friday. George W. Bush’s attorney Bill Burck told the panel it had essentially completed its work compiling documents, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press. Bush directed them to err “on the side of transparency and disclosure, and we believe we have done so.”

But the current administration is also able to review the records, and the Trump White House “has directed that we not provide these documents,” the letter says.

In all, 267,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents from his Bush years are being made public.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called it “a Friday night document massacre.”

Schumer said the decision to withhold the documents “has all the makings of a cover-up. ... What are they trying so desperately to hide?”

What does it matter, Chuck?  You already made your deal with the GOP devils, and you'll fold on Kavanaugh too.

A sudden deal made by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on a set of judicial nominees has made Democratic activists livid.

With Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing looming next week, Schumer reached an agreement late Tuesday with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to fast-track the confirmations of 15 Trump-nominated judicial picks. Seven federal district court judges were confirmed that day, and eight were put on the docket for confirmation next week.

A Senate Democratic aide says that the majority of the nominees greenlit as part of this deal were uncontroversial anyway — and emphasizes that Schumer’s efforts enable Democrats to hit the campaign trail, giving red-state Democrats a few extra days in their home states before coming back for Sen. John McCain’s memorial services this week.

But Democratic activists aren’t buying it — and many were concerned that this move showed weakness, especially going into the high-stakes Kavanaugh hearing.

“Mitch McConnell is in the middle of stealing the federal courts for conservatives, and Democrats continue to bring a butter knife to a gunfight,” said Brian Fallon, the head of activist group Demand Justice, which is leading opposition efforts against Kavanaugh, in a statement. “Democrats should be resisting Trump’s judge picks at every turn, not agreeing to fast-track them, as happened this week. It is hard to think of a more pathetic surrender heading into the Kavanaugh hearings.”

In the end I expect Kavanaugh to be confirmed with more than 55 votes, if not 60.   And when he's the fifth vote that gives Trump the power he needs to shut down the Mueller probe and start with full autocracy, maybe we'll remember.

The inevitability of Kavanaugh isn't thanks to 51 Republicans, but 49 cowards.

Trump In The Bunker, Con't

As Greg Sargent at the Washington Post notes, this week marked a notable, frightening, and dangerous shift in Trump's rhetoric at rallies as the Mueller investigation closes in on the Trump regime.  He's no longer campaigning for Republicans or rallying the base, he's naming enemies and expecting his supporters to take action regarding them.

At his rally on Thursday night in Indiana, President Trump unleashed his usual attacks on the news media, but he also added a refrain that should set off loud, clanging alarm bells. Trump didn’t simply castigate “fake news.” He also suggested the media is allied with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — an alliance, he claimed, that is conspiring not just against Trump but also against his supporters.

“Today’s Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake-news allies,” Trump railed. “Our biggest obstacle and their greatest ally actually is the media.”

In case there is any doubt about what Trump meant by the “deep state” that is supposedly allied with the news media, Trump also lashed out at the FBI and the Justice Department, claiming that “people are angry” and threatening to personally “get involved.”

Robert D. Chain, who was arrested this week for allegedly threatening to murder journalists at the Boston Globe while mimicking Trump’s language, also connected Mueller’s investigation to the media. “You’re the enemy of the people, and we’re going to kill every f–––ing one of you,” Chain snarled into one employee’s voicemail, according to FBI documents. “Why don’t you call Mueller, maybe he can help you out.”

Trump surely knew about this arrest when he repeated his attacks on the news media Thursday night — and when he connected the media to the Mueller investigation as part of a grand conspiracy against him and his voters.

Periodically in this country, whenever there is violence with a political cast, or whenever political rhetoric strays into something more menacing than usual, we hold debates about the tone of our politics and their capacity for incitement. Whether rhetorical excess can be blamed for violence or the threat of it is a complicated topic with no easy answers. But even so, in most or all of these cases, whichever side is culpable, most of our elected leaders on both sides have used their prominence to calm passions in hopes of averting future horrors.

This time, something different is happening. At this point, there is no longer any denying that Trump continues to direct incendiary attacks against working members of the free press even though his own language is being cited by clearly unhinged people making horrifying death threats against them.

That a raging Donald Trump was going to incite more violence against journalists was a given, and bad enough given the fact more journalists will be killed as a result of his violent, eliminationist rhetoric.  But now he's extending the "Enemies of the People" category to those investigating him, and to those politically opposing them.

This week, Trump marked them for violence too.

It's only a matter of time before somebody takes him up on the offer.

Lundergan in Trouble Again

Looks like the feds have finally dropped the hammer on both the Lundergans, Dem party boss Jerry and his daughter, current KY Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, over major campaign finance violations.

Longtime Kentucky Democratic operatives Jerry Lundergan and Dale Emmons were indicted by a federal grand jury in Lexington Friday for allegedly making illegal contributions to the 2014 U.S. Senate campaign of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes and then conspiring to cover them up.

Emmons was indicted on six counts and Lundergan was indicted on 10 counts after investigators found they “willingly and knowingly” made corporate contributions of more than $25,000 to Grimes’ campaign and then worked to make false entries in the campaign’s financial records to cover up the contributions.

The indictment alleges that Lundergan and an employee of his company approached campaign consultants and vendors and told them to bill S.R. Holding Co. for work they did for his daughter’s campaign. He then did not seek reimbursement from Grimes’ campaign and only sought partial reimbursement after a grand jury subpoenaed records from Lundergan.

It also alleges that Emmons provided political consulting to the campaign, but billed Lundergan and S.R. Holding instead of the campaign, and was paid with corporate funds. When vendors billed Emmons’ business for campaign services, he was allegedly reimbursed by Lundergan and not the campaign.

The indictment says Lundergan and Emmons concealed the scheme from the campaign, causing them to file false reports with the Federal Elections Commission.

The indictments strike at the heart of the Democratic establishment in Kentucky and raise serious questions about the political future of Lundergan’s daughter, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Grimes is considering a run for either attorney general or governor in 2019.

Lundergan, 71, has for years led a faction of the Kentucky Democratic Party, taking control of the entire party as its chairman twice: once between June and August of 1988 and again from 2005 to 2007. He later would serve as the architect behind his daughter’s campaigns for secretary of state and U.S. Senate.

Emmons, 66, is a close friend of the Lundergan family and has worked on numerous statewide and legislative campaigns as a political consultant, including Grimes’ 2014 Senate campaign.

At this point the question has to be asked about how much Alison Grimes knew.  And I hate to say it, but compared to Jack Conway and Andy Beshear, Grimes was our best shot at taking down Matt Bevin in 2019.

Bevin jumped into the race last weekend. Before, there was serious speculation as to if he would even bother running earlier in August after this spring's teachers' strike, seeing how unpopular he taking away Medicaid from 10% of the state's population is and how Grimes was in a great position to kick his ass.  She responded yesterday:

Grimes is out with a statement on Facebook: pic.twitter.com/J55rKn1vyk

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 31, 2018

Now that's in the toilet, and I have to say I'm betting Bevin suddenly threw his hat into the ring because he knew this hammer was about to fall.  Kentucky Republicans are already demanding that Grimes all but resign:

.@KYGOP spox calls for Grimes “to recuse herself and her office from any and all election related activities this election cycle and cede control of this fall’s elections to the other 6 members of the State Board of Elections.”

— Joe Sonka 😐 (@joesonka) August 31, 2018

That pressure won't let up, either.  I'm sure Bevin will direct AG Andy Beshear to investigate Grimes well into 2019. Either way, I'm tired of dynastic Democrats losing in this state, and losing for increasingly stupid reasons.  This state can't take another four years of Bevin.  Lives are literally on the line here.

It's infuriating.

The Cracks Are Finally Getting Big Enough To Notice

If this month's Washington Post/ABC News poll is accurate, it marks the first real time we've seen Trump lose support from his base as his total disapproval rating is now 60%, a majority believe he has obstructed the Mueller probe, and a plurality now favors impeachment.

President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a high point of 60 percent, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that also finds that clear majorities of Americans support the special counsel’s Russia investigation and say the president should not fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

At the dawn of the fall campaign sprint to the midterm elections, which will determine whether Democrats retake control of Congress, the poll finds a majority of the public has turned against Trump and is on guard against his efforts to influence the Justice Department and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s wide-ranging probe.

Nearly half of Americans, 49 percent, say Congress should begin impeachment proceedings that could lead to Trump being removed from office, while 46 percent say Congress should not.

And a narrow majority — 53 percent — say they think Trump has tried to interfere with Mueller’s investigation in a way that amounts to obstruction of justice; 35 percent say they do not think the president has tried to interfere.

Overall, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, with 36 percent approving, according to the poll. This is only a slight shift from the last Post-ABC survey, in April, which measured Trump’s rating at 56 percent disapproval and 40 percent approval.

The new poll was conducted Aug. 26 to 29, in the week after former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of federal tax and bank fraud and after former Trump attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and implicated the president in illegal payments to silence women who alleged sexual encounters with Trump.

The four-month gap between Post-ABC polls makes it difficult to attribute the modest uptick in disapproval of Trump to specific events. Other public polls have shown Trump’s disapproval rating in the low- to mid-50s and have not tracked a rise since the Manafort conviction and Cohen guilty plea. 

Here's the real problem for Trump however:

You catch that?  His approval rating among Independents is down to 35%, and among his own party it's now under 80%.  Trump's approval rating among Republicans has been very high, in July it was a whopping 87%.  It hasn't been this low since January and the tax/budget mess in this poll.

However, the prospects for Trump's news getting better were much higher in January, and from January to July, Trump's numbers got significantly better.  He's given all that back now, and he's back in the hole again.

We'll see if he stays there.

Last Call For It's Definitely Muller Time

With Labor Day on Monday, the scuttlebutt in DC is that Mueller would drop at least one final bombshell on the Russia case before "Justice Department guidelines" kicked in about non-interference in the 60 days before the 2018 midterms. (Didn't stop James Comey two years ago, right?)  

The man did not disappoint.  Not by a long shot.

A former Paul Manafort associate who pleaded guilty to a lobbying crime admitted that he helped foreign donors give money to President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Committee.

In a plea agreement made public Friday, prosecutors outlined other crimes that the lobbyist, Sam Patten, admitted to but wouldn’t be charged with. Among them was “causing foreign money” to be paid to the Trump inaugural committee. Patten signed off on the allegation.

Patten pleaded guilty earlier Friday to failing to disclose his lobbying on behalf of Ukraine, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

According to a court filing, Patten’s Ukrainian client wanted to attend the Trump inauguration in January 2017, but the Inauguration Committee couldn’t accept money from foreign nationals because of Federal Election Commission rules.

To get around that restriction, Patten enlisted a U.S. citizen to serve as a “straw” buyer, according to the filing. That individual, who wasn’t named, bought four tickets for $50,000, after receiving a check for $50,000 from the consulting firm run by Patten and Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s longtime fixer in Ukraine suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence. That firm, in turn, was reimbursed by a $50,000 wire from the Ukrainian oligarch’s Cypriot bank account, the filing says.

It’s unclear whether anyone on the Inaugural Committee was aware that the money came from a Ukrainian, or whether Patten has more to tell investigators about the matter.

“The big question seems to be whether he has testimony to offer about the purpose behind the payments to the inauguration committee,” said Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor in New York who’s now a white-collar criminal defense lawyer.

Konstatin Kilimnik has been Manafort's Putin contact for a while now.  I told you he was dirty two full years ago.  If Patten is ratting on Manafort and Kilimnik, then our old friend Oleg Deripaska can't be far behind.

To recap: the Trump inaugural committee took foreign donations from Putin's guys.

And we go into Labor Day weekend with that on the line.

The Battle Of Detroit

The US Army and National Guard troops are training in urban areas like Detroit in order to prepare for dealing with a terrorist attack on American soil.

As the Army and top leaders look to a potential urban fight in dense, dangerous and confusing terrain, their National Guard counterparts are working the complexities of urban response right now.

Recently, troops with the 46th Military Police Command of the Michigan National Guard began a three-year effort to respond to a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack in Detroit. When they fill that role, soldiers in that unit fall under the command of the active Army, specifically U.S. Army North.

The first stage of the exercise ran for three days, from Aug. 21-23, with a “tabletop exercise” and terrain walk through for leaders and planners to identify who would do what as the Guard units fit into the intricate ways in which many groups coordinate disaster response in urban settings.

A key role of Task Force 46 and elements of the MP command is decontaminating those exposed to toxic elements in the CBRN environment. Local agencies, from city to state government and emergency response units, lead their respective areas, but Army assets can hit certain needs at a large scale.

“As you go, the intent is to fill larger gaps rather than take over,” said Robert Naething, deputy to the commanding general of U.S. Army North, which oversees such Army responses inside the United States.

"Army responses inside the United States" in a Trump regime should be a gigantic warning sign, folks.  I can think of a whole hell of a lot of scenarios besides a terror attack where Trump would have troops go into American cities, and we're really not far from that.

There are ongoing efforts to partner with cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and Cleveland in the coming years so that command groups from the various Guard units and Army North can build out their plans and better coordinate with the local contacts in each area.

That’s an area where the Guard has had experience, Stone said. But with this new event, they’re bringing in not only the working agencies but experts in academia and industry who study disaster related problems.

But, since its inside the U.S., the chain of command is somewhat different than in war time scenarios.

“We’re never in charge, we’re always in support,” Naething said. "Either FEMA or DHS is typically in charge.”

FEMA and DHS.  In charge of an army response inside the US.  Under Trump.  Sounds fun, doesn't it?

Brian Buetler games out where we go in the lame duck session between Election Day and January.  It's not pretty.

Yes, it’s possible that Republicans will lose control of the Senate in January, so they naturally feel a bit hurried. But they are intent on confirming Kavanaugh before the election in November, foreclosing on the possibility of using the lame duck session to more completely review Kavanaugh’s public-service record. Their haste looks fairly arbitrary, unless we interpret it as an effort to lock in another Supreme Court justice before Trump takes drastic steps to protect himself from Mueller—steps that might otherwise place the Supreme Court seat itself at risk, harm Republicans in the midterms, or both.

The implication of recent reporting is that those steps will include, at a minimum, pardoning Manafort and firing Sessions. We can see his intentions both in overt and behind-the-scenes steps he’s taken against McGahn and Sessions in recent days, and in reports that he has consulted with his personal, criminal lawyers about both pardoning Manafort, firing Sessions, and impeachment.

Depending upon how willingly Republicans in the Senate will go along with Trump’s designs, Trump may also seek to rush a new, unrecused attorney general through the confirmation process, or abuse the vacancies act to install an acting attorney general who might corruptly interfere with the Mueller investigation.

If Republicans do well in the elections, all this scheming will have proved unnecessary, and Trump will be given a free hand to obstruct any investigation he’d like. But if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress, the lame-duck period will be the critical window during which Trump can take corrupt steps to insulate himself from justice. By the time Democrats took control, their ability to set things right would be limited. They could conduct oversight, which would damage Republicans politically, but Republicans would at the very least have the power to block impeachment and the restoration of the Mueller investigation.

Demonstrations will certainly arise from that.  Those demonstrations against Trump may be too large for him to ignore.

He may then act.

It's not an impossibility.

Deportation Nation, Con't

In the Trump era, the regime is making it clear that corporations that do business with undocumented immigrants will face the wrath of the federal government, and as a result, these cowards are "self-policing" and shutting off non-citizens from business services like bank accounts.

Saeed Moshfegh woke up earlier this month to discover the strangest thing: though he had plenty of money in his Bank of America account, he couldn’t access it.

An Iranian getting his Ph.D in physics at the University of Miami, Moshfegh used the account for everyday transactions. All he had to do to maintain the account was show proof of legal residency every six months.

“I think it’s onerous, but I’d been doing it,” said Moshfegh, who has lived in the U.S. for the past seven years. He recently married an American.

That Thursday, Moshfegh went to his local branch near South Miami. He was told that the documentation he had provided could not be accepted. Bank officials insisted he produce a different form, according to Moshfegh. The bank was wrong, he maintains, because the form he had supplied was the correct one based on his current status as a student nearing graduation.

“This bank doesn’t know how the immigration system works, so they didn’t accept my document,” said Moshfegh, 36.

Locked out of his account, Moshfegh couldn’t pay his rent, which was due that week. Credit card payments were suddenly rejected.

His case isn’t unique. In recent months, Bank of America has been accused of freezing or threatening to freeze customers’ accounts after asking about their legal status in the U.S.. In July, the Washington Post reported that multiple customers had been locked out of their accounts after Bank of America questioned whether the account holders were U.S. citizens or dual citizens.

The Trump regime will start forcing more and more Americans to prove their citizenship, and simply tell those that it wants gone that their proof is invalid.  History tells us exactly how this goes, and those undesirables will be locked up and then deported, or will disappear into the permanent incarceration system as revenue streams for private prison contractors.  The rest will flee the country on their own volition, or hide.

We know exactly how this played out 80 years ago in Europe.  A government that is willing to declare you a non-citizen is a fascist government, period.

Not only can it happen here, it is happening as we speak.

StupidiNews!

• Seven are dead after a tractor-trailer blew a tire and crashed into a parked Greyhound bus in New Mexico on Thursday, several passengers were injured.
• Senate Republicans are pushing for new FTC antitrust investigations into tech companies after Donald Trump criticized Google and Facebook earlier this week for "silencing" conservative voices.
• Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling has been released from prison into a halfway house in Alabama, Skilling's 24-year sentence in 2006 was reduced to 14 years in a $40 million 2013 plea deal.
• The White House is expected to move ahead with plans for $200 billion in new tariffs on Chinese imports as soon as the public comment period expires after Labor Day.
• Researchers have discovered a new vulnerability in Amazon's Alexa voice assistant that could allow users with embedded voice commands in songs or recordings to access personal info.

Last Call For (Red) Meat The Press, Con't

The FBI has rounded up a Trump supporter in California for threatening to kill Boston Globe newsroom employees, as Trump's war on the press rolls on through the "we shoot journalists, don't we?" phase.

The F.B.I. said on Thursday that it charged a California man who threatened to kill employees of The Boston Globe after calling them the “enemy of the people” in a series of menacing phone calls.

Robert D. Chain, 68, was arrested on Thursday at his home in Encino, Calif. The F.B.I. said Mr. Chain owned several firearms and had recently purchased a small-caliber rifle.

According to federal documents, Mr. Chain began calling The Boston Globe immediately after the newspaper announced on Aug. 10 that it would publish a coordinated editorial response to political attacks on the media. Prosecutors said the threats were in retaliation for The Globe’s leadership in the editorial campaign.

In one call to the paper’s newsroom, Mr. Chain threatened to shoot the newspaper’s employees in the head, the F.B.I. said. Three days later, in another call, Mr. Chain said: “You’re the enemy of the people.” Using profane language, he threatened to kill “every” Globe employee.

Mr. Trump has embraced the phrase “enemy of the people.” Media executives have decried the expression, believing it a dangerous assault on the First Amendment, warning that it could trigger acts of violence among the president’s most ardent supporters in the United States and embolden authoritarian political movements overseas.

On Thursday, the president once again used the phrase.

I mean we've already got to the point where the leader of the country is cheering on the butchery of adversarial press.  This guy was caught because he was noisy and stupid.  When the next newsroom is shot up, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later, Trump will ignore it, the press will continue to be nice to him because they don't want to lose "access" to the White House, and more journalists will die.

It's not a matter of if, or even when, but of how many dead reporters it's going to take before America's news organizations realize their survival is at stake in much more than a metaphorical sense.

Puerto Rico And Other Trump Disasters

After almost a year, the official death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria has been raised to a staggering 2,975 casualties, topping 9/11 and far outstripping the death toll of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast.  Donald Trump still insists the government did a good job however.

President Donald Trump lauded the U.S. response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year just a day after the commonwealth said almost 3,000 people died from the storm.

“I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico,” Trump told reporters Wednesday at the White House in response to a question about the new death tally. “Puerto Rico had a lot of difficulties before it got hit, and we’re straightening out those difficulties even now.”

Trump’s upbeat assessment of the disaster appears to have changed little from October 2017, when the official death toll was just 16 people. At that time, Trump compared the storm’s damage to the 1,833 people who were killed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina became a millstone for then-President George W. Bush, who had praised his administration’s response before the true toll was known.

Puerto Rico’s revised death toll from Hurricane Maria -- 2,975 people -- was released Tuesday in a study that the commonwealth had commissioned from researchers at George Washington University. The study is based on researchers’ analysis of excess deaths that took place in Puerto Rico between September 2017 and February 2018. Another report to Congress earlier this month found there were 1,427 more deaths in the four months after Maria than was typical over the comparable four months in the previous four years.

“This is unprecedented devastation,” Governor Ricardo Rossello said Tuesday. Trump praised Rossello on Wednesday for his cooperation with Washington, calling him “an excellent guy” who is “very happy with the job we’ve done.”

Responding to Trump’s assessment of his administration’s handling of storm damage, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has been consistently critical of Trump’s response, said on MSNBC that the 2,975 deaths "will follow him wherever he goes for the rest of his life."

It won't, because of another much larger number: 62,984,828.

The number of Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, despite his racism.

The number of Puerto Ricans who get to vote for President?

Zero.

Hey, in other news, FEMA employees and two million other federal workers just got their pay raises canceled.  All of them.  Because of the "nation's fiscal situation".

President Donald Trump is canceling across-the-board pay raises for civilian workers across the federal government, citing the “nation’s fiscal situation.”

“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” the president wrote in a letter Thursday to congressional leaders.

Under Trump’s policy, roughly 1.8 million people won't get an automatic pay boost next year, including Border Patrol and ICE agents.

Most civilian workers were slated to receive 2.1 percent increase under a years-old government formula. But the president argues that pay raises should be tied to “performance,” rather than “across-the-board” increases.

The administration’s stance sets up a funding fight with the Senate, which has already backed a 1.9 percent pay raise for civilian federal employees this year.

But we could afford a trillion dollars in tax cuts for America's wealthiest and corporations making record profits, right?

Suckers.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Yesterday's announcement of the coming departure of White House Counsel Don McGahn as a prelude to the firing of Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, and Robert Mueller is far worse than we originally thought.

President Trump’s advisers and allies are increasingly worried that he has neither the staff nor the strategy to protect himself from a possible Democratic takeover of the House, which would empower the opposition party to shower the administration with subpoenas or even pursue impeachment charges.

Within Trump’s orbit, there is consensus that his current legal team is not equipped to effectively navigate an onslaught of congressional demands, and there has been broad discussion about bringing on new lawyers experienced in white-collar defense and political scandals.

The president and some of his advisers have discussed possibly adding veteran defense attorney Abbe Lowell, who currently represents Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to Trump’s personal legal team if an impeachment battle or other fights with Congress emerge after the midterm elections, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump advisers also are discussing recruiting experienced legal firepower to the Office of White House Counsel, which is facing departures and has dwindled in size at a critical juncture. The office has about 25 lawyers now, down from roughly 35 earlier in the presidency, according to a White House official with direct knowledge.

Trump announced Wednesday that Donald McGahn will depart as White House counsel this fall, once the Senate confirms Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Three of McGahn’s deputies — Greg Katsas, Uttam Dhillon and Makan Delrahim — have departed, and a fourth, Stefan Passantino, will have his last day Friday. That leaves John Eisenberg, who handles national security, as the lone deputy counsel.

Trump recently has consulted his personal attorneys about the likelihood of impeachment proceedings. And McGahn and other aides have invoked the prospect of impeachment to persuade the president not to take actions or behave in ways that they believe would hurt him, officials said.

To recap, McGahn is leaving, and four of the five deputy counsels are going to be gone by the end of the week.  Trump doesn't care about the situation, because he figures as soon as Kavanaugh is confirmed, the game is over.

He will have five SCOTUS votes to end everything against him, if not a decision to protect himself from any state cases as well. Even with a Democratic House, we're not far off from the kind of one-semi-permanent party rule we're currently seeing in places like Poland and Hungary.

In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.

It will come much closer when Trump shuts down justice.  Oh, and speaking of justice, it seems George Papadopoulos is sticking with his plea deal with Mueller after all.

Stay tuned however.  Things are moving quickly now.