In A New York (Primary) Minute

Matthew Yglesias comes not to praise NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo's 30-point plus win in last night's Democratic primary over Cynthia Nixon, but to bury his 2020 chances for having to fight this battle at all.

Somewhat ironically, it was actually Cuomo’s presidential aspirations that, in retrospect, have ended up dooming his presidential aspirations.

His father was a liberal icon in his day, and with New York a considerably bluer-than-average state, one natural role for Cuomo to have taken early in his term would have been that of progressive champion. Cuomo was first elected in 2010, the exact same year that national Democrats lost their majorities in Congress, and his New York could have been the proving ground for the next great progressive policy agenda. But he actually had the opposite fear — that governing as a progressive in such a heavily Democratic state would push him to adopt policies that would make him unelectable in a national contest.

Consequently, Cuomo has consistently worked behind the scenes to keep the New York state Senate in Republican hands via the machinations of a small group of state senators who, despite winning election as Democrats, caucus with the GOP. That kept the most ambitious progressive ideas off the legislative agenda, allowing Cuomo to avoid both having overt fights with his base and endorsing policies that pushed the state substantially to the left.

It was a subtle, well-executed game — subtle enough to not be understood by most voters in New York’s Democratic primaries — but in retrospect, it was too clever by half. The mood among national Democrats has swung substantially to the left over the past five years, with Barack Obama recently endorsing ideas like Medicare-for-all and employee representation on corporate boards.

Had Cuomo simply done the normal thing and supported Democratic state Senate candidates and gotten the chance he feared to sign ambitious progressive bills, he’d be perfectly positioned for the circumstances of 2020. Instead, as it stands, he’s left relying on a powerful state party machine and the loyalty of less attentive voters to secure what should have been a total cakewalk of a renomination.

And speaking of that "small group of state senators", the Independent Democratic Caucus as they call themselves were upstate Dems caucusing with the GOP in order to keep Cuomo from having to sign progressive legislation.  They voted to install a Republican state senate leader (Dean Skelos, who got busted by Preet Bharara, then John Flanagan who shared the job along with IDC leader Jeffrey Klein) despite the fact the Democrats had the numbers to control both chambers of the state legislature, and got plum leadership committee assignments from the GOP in Albany as a reward.

They broke up in April when they realized they were going to have a bloody fight on their hands and they wanted to pretend they were Dems again. Cuomo gave them cover.

They got rightfully obliterated last night by those "regulars".

Years of anger at a group of Democratic state senators who had collaborated with Republicans boiled over on Thursday, as primary voters ousted most of them in favor of challengers who had called them traitors and sham progressives.

The losses were a resounding upset for the members of the Independent Democratic Conference, who outspent their challengers several times over, but also a sign that the impatient progressive fervor sweeping national politics had hobbled New York’s once-mighty Democratic machine, at least on a local level.

The most high-profile casualty was Senator Jeffrey D. Klein of the Bronx, the former head of the I.D.C. In that position, he was for years one of Albany’s most powerful players, sharing leadership of the chamber with his counterparts in the Republican conference and participating in the state’s secretive budget negotiations.

But on Thursday, he was defeated by Alessandra Biaggi, a lawyer and former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, after a campaign in which Ms. Biaggi cornered Mr. Klein into spending nearly $2 million — more than 10 times what she spent — since January, an astonishing sum for a state legislative race. (Cynthia Nixon, in her bid against Mr. Cuomo, spent less.)

In addition to Mr. Klein, at least four other former I.D.C. members had lost their races: Senator Tony Avella in Queens; Senator Jose Peralta in Queens; Senator Jesse Hamilton in Brooklyn; Senator Marisol Alcántara in Manhattan.

At my count this morning six of the eight IDC members are gone now, but that still leaves a 31-31 tie with Democratic one-man roadblock Simcha Felder siding with the GOP and giving them 32.  Dems will have to win in upstate NY, and frankly, after last night's massive turnout, I'm betting they can.

That's going to leave Cuomo in a nasty spot where he may have to, you know, sign progressive legislation next year.

Meanwhile in the NY AG Dem primary to replace Eric Schniederman, NYC Public Advocate Letitia James pretty handily won her primary race over Zephyr Teachout.

New York City Public Advocate Letitia James won a four-way Democratic primary for attorney general in New York on Thursday in a race that was a competition over who could best use the office to antagonize President Donald Trump.

James, 59, would become the first black woman to hold a statewide elected office in New York if she prevails in the general election, where she will be heavily favored. Trump nemesis Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, abruptly resigned from the post in May amid allegations he physically abused women he dated.

James defeated a deep field of fellow Democrats: U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout and former Hillary Clinton adviser Leecia Eve.

New York's attorney general has long had an unusual role as a regulator of Wall Street and an occasional prosecutor of the rich and powerful. The office also recently opened an investigation of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. But in this contest, Trump emerged as the common foe among all the candidates.

This is the office that will have to continue the criminal investigation of the Trump Organization should Mueller and company get Saturday Night Massacred.

Onward to November.

StupidiNews!

• Flooding in North and South Carolina is already underway as Hurricane Florence's storm surge and heavy rains swamp coastal areas, hundreds of thousands are without power. 
• Multiple explosions were reported in Lawrence, Massachusetts as an over-pressurized residential natural gas pipeline caused fires in dozens of homes.
• The Trump regime is leveling new sanctions against a Chinese tech firm and its Russian subsidiary for evading funding sanctions on North Korea.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren is taking aim at Wall Street banking giants and major tech companies, saying the federal government needs to step in and break up "too big to fail" corporations.
• The yearly 2018 Ig Nobel Prizes are out and honor the science of roller coasters affecting kidney stones, how well human saliva cleans dirt, and just how healthy a human cannibalism diet can be.

Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

Things just took a wild turn in Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation process for the Supreme Court.  Republicans are rushing to get a full Senate vote before the court begins its term on October 1 and until today it looked like all Democrats could do is just stall for a while as Mitch McConnell and the GOP have the 51 votes no matter what the Democrats do, but now things just got a whole lot more iffy as the FBI just got involved.

The senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee referred information involving Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, to federal investigators on Thursday, but the senator declined to make public what the matter involved.

Two officials familiar with the matter say the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The statement by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California came a week before the Judiciary Committee is to vote on his nomination. “I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Ms. Feinstein said in a statement. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”

The information came in July in a letter, which was first sent to the office of Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, and accuses the judge of sexual misconduct toward the letter’s author, a person familiar with the letter confirmed.

Ms. Feinstein, who received the letter from Ms. Eshoo’s office, informed fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee about its existence and its contents on Wednesday evening but did not share the letter itself. Several Democrats advised her to take its claims to the F.B.I., and others pressed for it to become public.

In addition to criminal investigations, the F.B.I. conducts background checks on all major government appointees, including Supreme Court nominees. The F.B.I. said in a statement on Thursday that it had received Ms. Feinstein’s referral and included it in Judge Kavanaugh’s background file. A bureau official also said that no criminal investigation had been opened related to the matter.

Needless to say, this is pretty big.  The reason is that during the background check process, the FBI runs a no-holds-barred, nothing-off-limits scouring of a nominee's history.  If the FBI asked Kavanaugh about the sexual misconduct incident and he denied it, and the information Sen. Feinstein got from Rep. Eshoo's office that says otherwise, Kavanaugh could get rung up on providing false information (that "lying to the FBI" charge that seems to be so common these days among Republicans).

We'll see what comes from it.

That Economic Anxiety In Elkhart Again, Con't

Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly is trying to hold on in Indiana, and his chances of keeping his Senate seat may very well hinge on how Trump's trade war with China (and the devastating hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs it brings) plays out with voters in the RV capital of the world, Elkhart.

The impact of the president’s tariffs on everything from steel to soybeans is playing out against the backdrop of the midterm elections, with some Republicans trying to make a robust economy central to their case for maintaining control of Congress. In Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota and other states, the president’s policies are starting to be felt, especially in industries that have large trading relationships with China.

“I think there’s serious concern about the effects of tariffs on the R.V. industry,” said Senator Joe Donnelly, Democrat of Indiana and one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents this year. His home is nearby. “So many of the components that go into R.V.s are directly affected by these tariffs.”

“It is something that we watch very, very closely having gone through the other side of this when unemployment was 22 percent,” Mr. Donnelly said, referring to the unemployment rate in Elkhart at the peak of the Great Recession.

In Elkhart, a field of R.V.s is as common as corn. An RV Hall of Fame lionizes the industry and its progress from small aluminum trailers to luxury vehicles with the amenities of expensive condominiums. “We like to say we build fun in Elkhart County,” said Mike Yoder, a Republican and an Elkhart County commissioner.

But Mr. Yoder is among those who think the fun could be ebbing. “Everybody in the industry is aware of the negative significance of that,” he said of the tariffs. “We are experiencing a bit of a slowdown in R.V. production, and a number of companies are working four days instead of five to clean up inventory.”

“My personal opinion is this is horrific for the community,” he continued. “This is a really big deal for us. We export a lot of product and import a lot of product. If this whole trade dispute expands much more, it has serious implications, and we will once again lead the country into a recession, without a doubt.”

It's getting bad in Elkhart again.  Really bad.

The R.V. industry is forecasting sales of about 500,000 vehicles this year, about the same as in 2017 after several years of strong, sometimes double-digit, growth. The tariffs are adding as much as 50 percent to the price of some materials, and the companies in turn are raising prices.

If the name sounds familiar, it should be.  I've been talking about Elkhart since President Obama visited it in 2009 to kick off his stimulus program push. Unemployment skyrocketed here, and then President Obama's policies pushed that unemployment down to 4%.

Elkhart County decided Barack Obama took credit for something he had nothing to do with, and promptly voted for Trump.  Now of course, they have second thoughts.  They have actual economic anxiety, not just the grudging anger of having to give the nation's first black president credit.

But let's remember what they said in December 2016 here in Elkhart.

“He didn’t help us here, but he took credit for what happened,” Chris Corbin, 47, who works for a dispatch company in Elkhart, told me. Corbin thinks it will be Trump who improves the economy. “It’s going to take two terms, but he’ll fix things,” he said.

Trump'll fix things.  Right into another recession.

Brandon Stanley owns a bar in Elkhart. He says he’s optimistic that the economy is improving now that Republicans have regained power, but emphasizes that there are still a host of economic problems that haven’t been solved in Elkhart. As for the shrinking unemployment rate in Elkhart, “they changed how they report unemployment numbers,” he told me, so they’re not believable.

But the coming recession sure is believable.  I bet they'll blame the tariffs on Obama too.

Andi Ermes, 39, offered a number of reasons for disliking Obama. She said Obama didn’t attend the Army-Navy football game, even though other presidents had. Obama has actually attended more Army-Navy games than George H.W. Bush. She said that he had taken too many vacations. He has taken fewer vacation days that George W. Bush. She also said that he refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel. While it is true that Obama did not wear a flag on his lapel at points during the 2007 campaign, it was back on his suit by 2008. Ermes told me the news sources she consumes most are Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and a local conservative radio show hosted by Casey Hendrickson.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ermes sees the biggest signs for hope in the economy in Carrier deal struck by Donald Trump, which will keep 1,000 jobs in the U.S. “He’s not even president yet and already he’s helping the economy,” she said. 

Yeah, about that Carrier plant over in Indy, as Nelson Schwartz of the NY Times took a look just last month at it...

Twenty months ago, a freshly elected Donald J. Trump came to Carrier to claim credit for disrupting management’s plans to shut the factory and shift its jobs to Mexico. The plant stayed open, and more than 700 workers kept their positions. The deal dominated the news and became a political Rorschach test: Mr. Trump’s critics saw a minuscule victory, bought with tax credits, but for many of his supporters, the episode was proof that the incoming president would revive Rust Belt fortunes by sheer force of personality.

After three earlier visits, I wanted to know what Carrier workers themselves thought of the outcome, long after Mr. Trump and his media hurricane had moved on. From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.

“People aren’t coming to work, which is sad because we really need these jobs,” said Ms. Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for 15 years. “They had a chance to prove that staying was good, but this is ruining it for everybody. It’s killing us. It’s pushing us out the door that much sooner.”

What’s ailing Carrier isn’t weak demand. Furnace sales are strong, and managers have increased overtime and even recalled 150 previously laid-off workers. Instead, employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.

In some ways, the situation is a metaphor for blue-collar work and life in the United States today. Paychecks are a tad fatter and the economic picture has brightened slightly, but no one feels particularly secure or hopeful.

You know, economic anxiety.

Heck Of A Job, Trumpie

Dear Carolinas:

Having grown up in Western NC and having went through Hurricane Hugo in '89 (real surprise to find a tropical storm 350 miles inland, lemme tell ya) I know what's about to happen to you this weekend.  It's not going to be pretty, and if you're in the path of the storm, get out.

Having said that, I never had any doubt that federal disaster relief was going to be there when my family needed it.  Thirty years later, my family is being threatened again by a massive storm, and the jackasses in charge aren't exactly filling me with confidence.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said this week that millions of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria have been left undistributed at an airport in Puerto Rico for more than a year.

CBS News journalist David Begnaud reported on Wednesday that FEMA acknowledged that loads of water bottles were brought to the island in 2017 in the wake of the hurricane and that it turned them over to the "central government."

However, a photographer working for a Puerto Rican police agency, Abdiel Santana, noticed that the water was still sitting at the airport runway one year later, according to Begnaud.

"FEMA says the water, and we’re talking what could be millions of bottles of water, were brought to the island by FEMA last year. FEMA tells me the water was turned over to the central government," Begnaud said in a video posted on Twitter Wednesday night.

"The question is what happened after that. Where was the breakdown?" Begnaud asked.

He added that “the water was kept in an area that was pretty hard-hit during the storm and could have used all the water they could have gotten."

The finding comes as the Trump administration continues to face scrutiny over its response to the hurricane, which ravaged Puerto Rico.

According to an independent study conducted by George Washington University, nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the hurricane — a number that represents a sharp increase from the initial estimate of 64.

To recap, a runway tarmac's worth of pallets of bottled water rotted for a year and nobody admitted they knew about it until CBS spotted it from the sky.

More Details pic.twitter.com/jyPGRqiIy3

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) September 12, 2018

Almost 3,000 people in Puerto Rico died because the Trump regime dropped the ball, and there's more than a little evidence they did so out of political spite by a truly evil orange man.  So when they say the Carolinas and Virginia and Maryland are going to be OK, and that my family is going to be OK, well you'll excuse me if I don't take that at face value.

StupidiNews!

• Although the intensity of Hurricane Florence has slipped to Category 2, the size of the storm has massively increased as the Carolina coast now faces one of the largest named storms in history.
• A gunman in Bakersfield, California killed his wife at the trucking company where she worked and four other people last night before turning the gun on himself as police closed in.
• Recently-minted US Open women's tennis champion Naomi Osaka has signed a major three-year endorsement deal with Nissan to be the new face of the automaker in Japan and worldwide.
• The Trump regime has lost a lawsuit brought by 19 states over Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's delaying of Obama-era regulations to protect student loan borrowers from predatory practices.
• Apple's latest tech offerings announced at yesterday's yearly event includes the iPhone XS at $999, the iPhone XS Max at $1,099, and the iPhone XR at $749.

Last Call For Keeping Kids in Camps

The Trump regime is still refusing to reunite stolen migrant kids with their parents, and if anything, they're planning to separate more kids and put them in even bigger camps because frankly, nobody's going to stop them.

A tent camp for migrant children in the desert outside El Paso will expand to accommodate a growing number of Central American children crossing the border, the Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday.

HHS, the federal agency tasked with caring for migrant children and teenagers in U.S. custody, said it would more than triple the size of its camp at the Tornillo-Guadalupe Land Port of Entry from 1,200 beds to as many as 3,800.

The Trump administration established the camp in June as a temporary shelter because its facilities elsewhere were running out of space. That occurred at the height of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, a crackdown that separated about 2,500 migrant children from their parents.

Widespread condemnation forced Trump to reverse course and stop the separations, but since then, HHS has taken in greater numbers of underage migrants. The number of families illegally crossing the border jumped again in recent weeks, according to border agents and administration officials. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is scheduled to release its latest arrest totals Wednesday.

Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, said the need for emergency capacity was the result of the latest surge at the border, not the administration’s decision to separate families during the crackdown this spring.

“ ‘Family separations’ resulting from the zero tolerance policy ended on June 20, 2018 and are not driving this need,” Wolfe said in a statement.

HHS officials have “worked round the clock to add beds or add shelters to avoid any backup” at the border,” Wolfe added. He said the agency has 12,800 minors in its custody, the highest number ever. Minors spend an average of 59 days in HHS custody, up from 51 days in 2017.

HHS has used the Tornillo site primarily to house older teens, channeling younger children in its custody to more “permanent” sites among the approximately 100 shelters where migrant children are housed.

So more kids will separated from their parents, thousands more, and kept in hell camps in the hot Texas sun, because the Trump regime needs not only a deterrent for people crossing into America, they need a deterrent for Americans themselves.  After all, we already have people fleeing federal food programs because they know ICE will use information to target them, and finding out banks are freezing accounts of suspected non-citizens while the regime is openly calling citizenship of Hispanics into question.

Pretty soon, they won't wait for an answer.

Here's the best part.  With Hurricane Florence on the way, it turns out Trump took $10 million in FEMA funding to pay for the new camps.

President Donald Trump’s administration cut nearly $10 million out of FEMA’s budget in order to fund ICE’s immigration detention centers, according a budget document obtained by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and disclosed on Tuesday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.

As Maddow reported, Merkley’s staff believes these Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) transfers were made earlier this summer, right before the start of hurricane season.

Merkley, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, acquired the previously undisclosed document, which shows $9.8 million was diverted from FEMA to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pay for more “detention beds” and “ICE’s transportation and removal program.”

Maddow said a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not dispute the authenticity of the document when contacted about it, but said the money had not come from the agency’s “disaster and recovery response efforts.”

Merkley disputed that claim in an appearance with Maddow on Tuesday, noting the budget document he obtained shows $9.8 million was transferred to ICE from FEMA’s response and recovery budget.

That's $9.8 million that won't go to people in the Carolinas, who will need that response and recovery effort from FEMA by this time next week.

Oh well.

Papers, please.

First they came for the undocumented immigrants...

The Turtle's Revenge

With GOP control of the Senate actually looking like it may be in play in November, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to keep Senate Democrats from being able to campaign against their Republican challengers, even if that means remaining in session all the way through October as he tries to get as many Trump judges confirmed as possible before the music stops.

Traditionally, the Senate hits the road in October of an election year. But the Senate is throwing tradition out the window this year.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is planning to keep the chamber in session for a significant portion of October if not four entire weeks, costing Democrats key campaign trail days and allowing the Senate to continue its work into the fall, according to five Republican officials. The Kentucky Republican wants to keep cranking through as many lifetime judicial nominations and executive nominations as he can with his majority in the balance and the GOP still with the unilateral ability to confirm President Donald Trump’s picks.

Moreover, the Senate GOP has only two members who are considered vulnerable in the election: Ted Cruz of Texas and Dean Heller of Nevada. Democrats, meanwhile, are defending 10 seats total in states that Trump won in 2016, with at least four considered extremely competitive.

The House is expected to head home for the rest of the election season after passing a spending bill later this month. But with the Senate’s unique role confirming the president’s nominees and little political downside to staying in session, McConnell plans to forge ahead into October after slashing the August recess down to little more than two weeks.

“I plan to be here, yeah. Why wouldn’t we be?” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). “You see anything that’s traditional these days? … they don’t need more than a couple of weeks to campaign.”

They may not even get that.   I fully expect McConnell to keep the Senate in session through Friday, October 26th, leaving Democrats with at most 11 days to campaign, while their Republican challengers will have had in some cases up to three months to criss-cross the states they are trying to win in.

Of course, the best way to beat the Turtle at his own game is simply not to show up to play.  Dems should ditch and tell Turtle to go screw off.  Yeah, McConnell plans to confirm dozens of Trump-selected federal judges to lifetime appointments. So the worst-case scenario there is Dems give in to a package deal to quickly confirm the judges en masse only for McConnell to make them stay anyway and take several slow, ugly votes on House GOP packages on abortion, Obamacare, and more GOP tax cuts.

It's not going to be pretty when it happens, so expect it, and don't get suckered in, Dems.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The Washington Post is confirming Friday's Bloomberg News article that Paul Manafort is indeed in talks with Robert Mueller's team for a plea deal ahead of imminent jury selection in his federal trial next week.

Days before in-person jury ­selection is set to begin in his second trial, President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is in talks with the special counsel’s office about a possible plea deal, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to ­describe the conversations, cautioned that the negotiations may not result in a deal with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is prosecuting Manafort for alleged money laundering and lobbying violations.

But the discussions indicate a possible shift in strategy for Manafort, who earlier this year chose to go to trial in Virginia, only to be convicted last month in Alexandria federal court on eight counts of bank and tax fraud. He had derided his former business partner, Rick Gates, for striking a deal with prosecutors that provided him leniency in exchange for testimony against Manafort.

“I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence,” Manafort said in February.

The specifics of Manafort’s current negotiations with prosecutors were unclear, including whether he would provide any information about the president.

However, Manafort’s willingness to engage in talks could be a setback for Trump, who in the past has praised his former campaign chairman for his unwillingness to cooperate with the special counsel.

Prosecutors “applied tremendous pressure on him and . . . he refused to ‘break’ - make up stories in order to get a ‘deal,’ ” the president tweeted last month. “Such respect for a brave man!”

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni and Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment. Manafort’s attorneys, Kevin M. Downing and Thomas E. Zehnle, did not immediately return calls for comment.

As I said on Friday:

This could be Manafort fishing for a pardon now, but it's a dangerous game, ask Michael Cohen, who's going to be in jail for quite some time, about that.  Still, Republicans probably want the Manafort trial to go away ASAP rather than a long drawn out trial smack in the middle of midterm campaigns, and Manafort knows it.

So Manafort does have some leverage.  Remember, this trial is all about Manafort's connections to Trump, not just tax fraud and other white collar crimes...and Manafort is going into this already being a convicted felon.  Daily news coverage on this going into October is definitely going to have an effect on Republicans.

They want this trial gone.    They can do it the easy way with a full Trump pardon, or the ugly way and Manafort cuts that deal (or the really ugly way, where Manafort is on trial for the six weeks leading up to the elections with a nasty verdict right before the midterms for Democrats to seize on.)

We'll see what happens, but whatever the decision is, it'll happen this week.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Florence will drop to Category 3 strength as the storm expands before slamming into the Carolina coast early Friday, but the storm's path could take it back towards South Carolina.
• Asked about FEMA's Florence response, Donald Trump praised his "incredibly successful" response in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria despite nearly 3,000 deaths.
• Tory lawmakers are warning British PM Theresa May to change course on Brexit or face the consequences, dozens of Conservative Party PMs are considering her ouster.
• Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are now off 80% from their December 2017 highs as the crash continues, outpacing the carnage of the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000.
• Georgia GOP Secretary of State and current gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp says there's no way Georgia can go back to paper ballots as the state is being sued over voting security.

Last Call For The Law Of The Amazon

Amazon's Prime delivery services are very convenient, offering one-day and even same day delivery on items in dozens of US cities.  And the people paid to deliver those millions of packages daily are mostly contractors, not making minimum wage, in unsafe conditions, with no breaks, and no benefits.

Several people described instances when they felt their bosses at Amazon-affiliated courier companies took advantage of them.

Four drivers across three companies said their employers misrepresented the job by promising health benefits without following through. One worker said that when he started his job, his employer promised that he would get health benefits within 90 days of employment. He said he was fired within days of qualifying.

Eight workers across four companies said drivers were denied overtime pay, despite working well over 40 hours a week. Thirteen workers across five companies complained about wages missing from paychecks.

"The culture is predatory," said Ku Irvin, who started working as a driver for DeliverOL, in Aurora, Colorado, in November 2016. "It's a revolving door. A lot of promises are made that are not kept."

Nine months later, Irvin became a manager but said he couldn't stomach it. "Once I got behind the desk, I saw what was going on and it was sickening to me," he said.

A few drivers told Business Insider that they felt powerless to address problems because they feared retaliation.

They described the measures they feared as firings, withholding of wages, and denial of work — meaning drivers could be sent home without a delivery route on days they were scheduled.

"If I didn't come in on my day off, they threatened to fire me," Justin Waring, a former driver for Courier Distribution Systems, in Lisle, Illinois, told Business Insider.

A supervisor at a New Jersey-based logistics company, Prime EFS, sent a threatening text to drivers in late April:

"Tomorrow is Saturday. The Weekend. Where everyone wants to call out," read the message, which was viewed by Business Insider. "You're scheduled for tomorrow so I expect everyone confirmed and on time tomorrow. Any callouts I will make sure you do not receive a route for a week." Prime EFS did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

One Richmond, Virginia-based driver at another Amazon-affiliated courier company claimed he was sent home on a scheduled workday as punishment for arriving one minute late.

"That's their way of disciplining you," said the driver, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of getting fired.

I've talked about Amazon's Dickensian warehouses in the past, and things haven't gotten much better there, but I sure as hell wouldn't work for the company's white collar divisions either.

The company is a stain on the country, frankly.  It needs to be dismantled.

The Mustache Versus The World

Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton's Mustache made it painfully clear Monday (during a Federalist Society speech, natch) that the Trump regime wasn't going to tolerate the International Criminal Court meddling in US affairs any longer.

The United States will not in any way cooperate with the International Criminal Court, national security adviser John Bolton announced in a speech to the Federalist Society on Monday, blasting the ICC as an unaccountable, bureaucratic body that runs counter to the U.S. Constitution and is "antithetical to our nation's ideals."

In his first speech as national security adviser, Bolton made the case that the ICC's authority is invalid, subverts American sovereignty, and concentrates power in the hands of an unchecked authority in a way that is "antithetical to our nation's ideals." In November, the ICC prosecutor asked to investigate crimes allegedly committed by members of the U.S. military who served in Afghanistan. Bolton called those claims unfounded. The national security adviser said it was no coincidence he made his speech on the ICC one day before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

"Today, on the eve of September 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the President of the United States," Bolton said. "The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.We will not cooperate with the ICC," Bolton said. "We will provide no assistance to the ICC. And we certainly will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us."

The ICC was formally established in 2002, although then-President George W. Bush authorized the U.S. to "un-sign" the Rome Statute and the Senate never ratified it. Bolton suggested the ICC was created to attack U.S. leadership, not to truly hold egregious international criminals accountable.

"In theory, the ICC holds perpetrators of the most egregious atrocities accountable for their crimes, provides justice to the victims, and deters future abuses," Bolton said. "In practice, however, the court has been ineffective, unaccountable, and indeed, outright dangerous. Moreover, the largely unspoken, but always central, aim of its most vigorous supporters was to constrain the United States. The objective was not limited to targeting individual U.S. service members, but rather America's senior political leadership, and its relentless determination to keep our country secure."

If the ICC does come after the U.S., Israel, or any allies, Bolton said the U.S. will not sit quietly. He listed a number of possible actions Bolton might pursue, from withdrawing financial aid to banning judges from entering the country.

"We will respond against the ICC and its personnel to the extent permitted by U.S. law," he said.

Now there are plenty of countries who are not party to the Rome agreement of 2002 and are not members of the ICC besides the US, but all NATO members are (except for Turkey, of course). We've heard this before, Bolton's Mustache has been tangling with the ICC since it was created 16 years ago.  But Alex Whiting at Just Security cautions that this time, with Trump at the helm, the stakes are much higher, and the damage that the Trump regime will do could be irreversible.

[t]here is the looming Afghanistan investigation, which will likely be authorized any day now by a pre-trial chamber and which no doubt prompted Bolton’s speech today. Indeed, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Monday, “They told us they were on the verge of making that decision, and we’re letting them know our position ahead of them making that decision.” The pending decision is expected to authorize the prosecutor to investigate the Taliban and Afghan government forces, as well as U.S. personnel for acts of torture against detainees in Afghanistan and at black sites in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. There are reasons to believe that the ICC prosecutor will focus on the crimes of the Taliban, that far exceed in scale the allegations against U.S. persons, but just the existence of this investigation will likely become an impediment to a more constructive relationship between the U.S. and the ICC in the future. On Monday Bolton described the potential U.S. targets of an ICC investigation as “American patriots, who voluntarily went into harm’s way to protect our nation, our homes, and our families in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.” Given this framing, it will be challenging for future administrations to find a path back to even a constructive relationship with the ICC.

In sum, the policies announced today should not be dismissed as just some more overheated bluster from Bolton and this administration. The new rhetorical framing and policy positions genuinely risk serious damage to the ICC and the rule of law around the world, and these steps will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo. The court, for instance, may no longer be recognizable by the time a new U.S. administration makes the effort to pick up the pieces.

While the new U.S. posture reflects the particular ideological stances of Bolton and President Trump, it is also a further consequence of the misguided embrace of torture by U.S. government officials following 9/11. It is because the ICC is turning to scrutinize allegations of U.S. torture in Afghanistan and elsewhere that Bolton had to turn his sights on the court and bring out a wrecking ball. The U.S. has a proud tradition of initiating, supporting, funding, and participating in international institutions to achieve accountability for international crimes, dating back to Nuremberg and continuing through the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere. Today the U.S. turned against that legacy, likely for many years to come.

I fully expect Trump to demand that fellow NATO allies leave the ICC once it becomes clear that US military personnel will be facing war crimes investigations for 16 years in Afghanistan.  And if I were Vladimir Putin, I could think of no easier way to destroy NATO permanently than to talk Trump into this exact fight we're seeing play out now.

Race To The Bottom, Con't

FOX News resident white supremacist Tucker Carlson defended his white supremacist propaganda segment from Friday with the usual nonsense we've come to love and expect from the right, with such bad faith all-star hits like this:

The organized left is lying about a segment we did on Friday night. Our topic was "diversity is our strength," a phrase our leaders use to end conversation rather than spur it. You hear it all the time. We asked, what exactly does it mean? Is it true?

We only asked if having non-white people in America was actually good for America, what's the big deal?

Here are the words from our segment: "How precisely is diversity our strength? Can you think of other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?"

So he's a segregationist and implies here that marriage should only be available to men and women of the same race (one of each, can't have same-sex marriages!)  Also, the US military integrated generations ago, and we've done fine since then.

"Do you get along better with your neighbors and coworkers if you can't understand each other, or share no common values? And if diversity is our strength, why is it OK for the rest of us to surrender our freedom of speech to just a handful of tech monopolies?"

My downstairs neighbor is deaf, Tucker.  I understand them quite fine, thanks.  And plenty of co-workers where I'm at speak a number of different languages, French, German, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, and hey, English!

Also, what do tech monopolies have to do with language at your workplace?  That's not a diversity issue, it's a broader free speech one.

These are the questions our leaders out to be asking every day. How does a nation of 325 million people hang together? What do we all have in common as Americans? Why should we remain a country? Nothing is more important than answering this. 

I'd say through common values like dignity, acceptance and tolerance, but you clearly don't share those values with the rest of America.  Problem isn't us, pal.  It's you.

But our leaders aren't even asking these questions. Instead they're trying to silence anyone who raises them, while at the same time promoting mindless tribalism for political expedience. Division keeps them in power. 

The guy with the 8 PM prime time cable TV show and weekday radio show, heard and watched by millions, is "being silenced" you guys.

What's at stake isn't a cable news segment. It's the existence of rational conversation in America. If they can prevent you from asking honest questions, there's nothing they can't do. More on this tomorrow night.

Except, as we pointed out, nobody is "preventing" Tucker Carlson from using his free speech rights.  He's just upset that he's not protected from the consequences of it.

The real issue is that Carlson's rancid racism is watched by millions, including Donald Trump, on a daily basis.  He's preparing the ground for Trump's inevitable mass deportation regime and rallying white supremacists to get out and vote.

If you thought America was ugly before, wait until Republicans survive 2018 with control of Congress.  We'll never get the country back to sanity at that point.

StupidiNews!

• More than one million in North and South Carolina are expected to evacuate coastal areas in the path of Hurricane Florence, now a Category 4 monster storm headed for Wilmington by Friday.
• Russia has launched its largest military drills ever held, the "Vostok-2018" joint exercises held with China and Mongolia are being condemned by NATO as preparations for "large-scale conflict".
• US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the US will not move to block Pakistan from getting an IMF bailout despite July comments from Pompeo that the US had "serious reservations."
• A measure of small business owner confidence has hit a record high as Republicans seek to make January tax cuts permanent before midterm elections.
• California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law the state's bill to go to 100% renewable energy by 2045, and signed an executive order mandating the state be carbon-neutral by then too.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Once again, there's three aspects to the Trump/Russia story: 2016 election influencing, money laundering, and the cover-up of the first two.  NY Times columnist David Leonhardt reminds us that the money laundering aspect of the Trump mess is where the wide-scale criminality is going on, and there's a lot of evidence to support that Trump and the GOP are specifically targeting and purging the DoJ of expert investigators on the subject, and have been for some time now.

The latest reason to be suspicious is Trump’s attacks on a formerly obscure Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ohr and called for him to be fired. Ohr’s sin is that he appears to have been marginally involved in inquiries into Trump’s Russian links. But Ohr fits a larger pattern. In his highly respected three-decade career in law enforcement, he has specialized in going after Russian organized crime.

It just so happens that most of the once-obscure bureaucrats whom Trump has tried to discredit also are experts in some combination of Russia, organized crime and money laundering.

It’s true of Andrew McCabe (the former deputy F.B.I. director whose firing Trump successfully lobbied for), Andrew Weissmann (the only official working for Robert Mueller whom Trump singles out publicly) and others. They are all Trump bogeymen — and all among “the Kremlin’s biggest adversaries in the U.S. government,” as Natasha Bertrand wrote in The Atlantic. Trump, she explained, seems to be trying to rid the government of experts in Russian organized crime.

I realize that this evidence is only circumstantial and well short of proof. But it’s one of many suspicious patterns about Trump and Russia. When you look at them together, it’s hard to come away thinking that the most likely explanation is coincidence.

Consider: The financially rickety Trump Organization, shunned by most mainstream banks, long relied on less scrupulous Russian investors. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said a decade ago. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia,” Eric Trump reportedly said in 2013. And what was the rare major bank to work with Trump? Deutsche Bank, which has a history of illegal Russian money laundering.

Trump also had a habit of selling real estate to Russians in all-cash deals. Money launderers like such deals, because they can turn illegally earned cash into a legitimate asset, usually at an inflated price that rewards the seller for the risk. One especially dubious deal was Trump’s $95 million sale of a Palm Beach house to a Russian magnate in 2008 — during the housing bust, only four years after Trump had bought the house for $41 million.

Then there is Trump’s paranoia about scrutiny of his businesses. He has refused to release his tax returns. He said that Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line by looking into his finances. When word leaked (incorrectly) that Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump, he moved to fire Mueller (only to be dissuaded by aides). Trump is certainly acting as if his business history contains damaging information.

All of this taken together shows a definite pattern.  There is an obvious solution however, and it's House Democratic subpoena power with a Democratic House majority.

For months, Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has been trying to get Congress to pay attention to the possibility of money laundering. He points out that Mueller’s mandate does not necessarily include a full investigation of Trump’s businesses. But those businesses could still have behaved in ways that give Putin, a hostile foreign leader, leverage over the president of the United States.

“We need to find out whether that is the case and say so. Or we need to find out that is not the case and say so,” Schiff told me. “But to leave it as an unanswered question, I just think would be negligent to our national security.” So far, congressional Republicans have chosen negligence.

Which means that the November elections may determine whether we ever get answers. If Democrats win House control, Schiff will gain subpoena power. If Republicans keep control, just imagine how emboldened Trump will feel. He could mount a full-on assault on the rule of law by shutting down Mueller’s investigation and any other official scrutiny of the Trump Organization.

And without that oversight, it will absolutely happen.  November is of dire importance, and with 60 days to go, it's time to check your registration, get your family and friends registered, and get them to turn out.

If we lose here, the country is done.