Last Call For Supreme Misgivings, Con't

They're not even pretending anymore that Kavanaugh wasn't put on the bench to serve as Trump's proxy on the Supreme Court, and they don't have to care anymore now that he's there for life.

The Roger Stone aide who is mounting a constitutional challenge to special counsel Robert Mueller wants to take his case to the Supreme Court and feels "great" that Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be on the bench to, hopefully, deal a major blow to the Russia investigation. 

Andrew Miller previously worked as an aide to Stone, a longtime Trump ally who is under scrutiny in the Russia investigation. Miller was subpoenaed earlier this year to testify before the special counsel's grand jury. Instead of complying, he waged a legal battle to invalidate Mueller's authority to act as a prosecutor. A federal judge ruled against him, holding him in contempt of court for failing to testify, and he has appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

Asked how he feels about Kavanaugh's presence on the court, as someone who might be sympathetic to his case, Miller said, "I feel nothing but great. I'm cool as a cucumber now." 

Miller made the comments on a radio show Tuesday morning, when Kavanaugh heard his first oral arguments as a newly minted justice. The program on WBEN in Buffalo, New York, was hosted by former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo, a staunch Mueller critic who has been questioned as part of the investigation and is partially funding Miller's legal team. 

Earlier in the show, Miller's attorney said he hoped to take the case to the Supreme Court and predicted that a majority of the justices would support his argument against Mueller's authority, if they decided to take the case. The probability that Kavanaugh and his colleagues on the court would get to hear Miller's challenge of Mueller anytime soon is a stretch.

For the case to reach the Supreme Court, Miller would have to lose at the appellate court first. His case is scheduled to be heard by three appellate judges on November 8, and a decision would come later. 

Kavanaugh would be "very good on this issue," Miller's attorney Paul Kamenar said on WBEN. 

"He would be a good ally," Kamenar said of Kavanaugh, "because he has talked about these cases before in terms of presidential power and limiting the power of the government and has written about this very issue of the constitutionality of the independent counsel."

They're publicly doing victory laps.  They know exactly why he was appointed, and they know exactly why Justice Kennedy retired.

The fix is in.  We have to start undoing the damage in November, and while it will take the rest of my lifetime, if we don't start next month with the House and the Senate, we may never get the chance at all.

A Higher AI-er That Hires, Expired

Judging from Amazon's latest experiment in machine learning in removing the bias in HR from hiring for technical positions, AIs are only as intelligent as the data you feed them to learn and grow from.

Amazon.com Inc’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.

The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.

That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said.

The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.

Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges, but the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.

The irony here is that when it comes to technical positions, Amazon, like most American corporations, wants cheap H1-B labor from overseas, and the massive majority of H1-B workers are male.  The bias in STEM has been towards men for decades, so when Amazon put in ten years of hiring 75-80% men for technical positions into the hopper, the program "learned" that bias too and spat out the same results.

The problem with AI, like any computer program, isn't the program.  It's the people who program it.

You don't have to be a genius super-coder to pick that up.

Tramp Trades Blows, Con't

Trump tariffs are now starting to bite on automakers and the first of many to announce major layoffs is Ford, announcing that some 24,000 American auto jobs are going away.

Ford will be making cuts to its 70,000-strong white-collar workforce in a move it calls a "redesign" of its staff to be leaner, have fewer layers, and offer more decision-making power to employees, the company announced.

The number of jobs that will be axed is unknown at this point.

“A lot of the (reorganization) is about making different choices about strategy,” Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks told NBC News, adding that the goal isn’t just to slash spending but to improve the “fitness” of the company.

However, a recent report by Morgan Stanley estimates "a global headcount reduction of approximately 12 percent,” or 24,000 of Ford's 202,000 workers worldwide. "Such a magnitude of reduction is not without precedent in the auto industry,” analysts wrote in the investment note.

The decision is part of Ford's $25.5 billion reorganization plan, which includes slashing $6 billion in improved capital efficiencies. Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who cut more than 12,000 jobs as head of office furniture maker Steelcase, had been expected to make cutbacks even sooner, according to some observers. Hackett took over from Ford veteran Mark Fields when he was ousted from the company in May 2017.

Ford is lagging behind the competition, selling an anemic 32.8 vehicles per employee. Long-time rival GM puts out 52.7 vehicles per employee. But it's unclear exactly how improved efficiencies will impact potential job cuts.

Ford has already warned that President Donald Trump's auto tariffs have impacted the company to the tune of $1 billion, and the president’s trade policies threaten to play havoc with Ford’s ongoing reorganization, Shanks told NBC News.

Trump and Ford have been squaring off since well before the 2016 election, when then-presidential candidate originally threatened to impose hefty tariffs on vehicles Ford intended to start importing from a factory in Mexico. The carmaker eventually scrubbed that plan, but rather than return production to the U.S. it decided to move it to China.

Earlier this year, Ford said it would all but pull out of the U.S. passenger car market, citing the rapid shift in demand from sedans, coupes, and wagons to SUVs, CUVs and pickups. It was going to eliminate the conventional Focus models in favor of a crossover version, the Active. Now, with that model dropped, the still-popular Mustang will be the only remaining passenger car model in its line-up, with Ford relying in the future almost entirely on light trucks — such as the F-Series pickups that last year generated nearly all of its profits.

Ironically, Ford actually may have to cut production of the Mustang and some other models — in the process, potentially reducing U.S. jobs — as a result of the tariffs China has enacted on American-made vehicles in a tit-for-tat trade war. The Mustang had been one of the most popular U.S. vehicles sold in that country. 

Expect more "reorganizations" from automakers in the months ahead.  The way the housing and financial markets are right now, it won't take much to push them over the edge into another 2008-style collapse and another deep recession.

And this time we won't be getting out of it nearly as well.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Michael is now a Category 4 storm heading for the Florida panhandle, with heavy rain and storm surge already affecting the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Miami.
• Outgoing UN Ambassador Nikki Haley may have owed more than a million dollars according to federal ethics disclosures at the time of her resignation on Monday.
• A federal judge has blocked parts of Missouri's photo ID requirement law for voting, ruling that the state failed to tell voters what other forms of ID are acceptable at the polls.
• A major US telecom firm discovered hacked hardware from a Chinese supplier and removed it after a report last week that China inserted chips into servers to hack into US businesses.
• A major class-action suit against Google has been filed in California after Monday's news that the tech giant exposed the private details of a half-million users.

Last Call For The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

The "Kavanaugh Crush" that Republicans have been crowing about for the last week isn't materializing and if anything, Republicans have lost serious ground in the last several weeks with women according to the latest CNN poll.

Four weeks out from Election Day, Democrats remain well ahead of Republicans in a generic ballot matchup, with 54% of likely voters saying they support the Democrat in their district and 41% backing a Republican, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. 

This is the widest margin of support for Democrats in a midterm cycle since 2006, when at this point, the party held a whopping 21-point lead over Republicans among likely voters. That's also when Democrats seized control of the House from Republicans, making Nancy Pelosi speaker until 2011. 

This year, Democrats' enthusiasm about their congressional vote has increased and 62% now say they're extremely or very enthusiastic to vote, up seven points since September among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Among Republicans and Republican leaning independents, enthusiasm has remained relatively steady, going from 50% in September to 52% in the most recent poll. 

Democratic enthusiasm this year is more intense than it has been in previous midterm cycles, which typically engage voters less than presidential years. The 40% who call themselves "extremely enthusiastic" is the highest share to say so in a midterm election cycle since CNN first asked the question in 2009. 

In fact, Democrats' enthusiasm today more closely resembles the 2008 presidential election. Just before President Barack Obama was elected, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners said they were extremely enthusiastic about voting that November. In 2008, Democrats won eight seats in the Senate and 21 in the House, as well as a victory in the presidency. 

The real issue though is now the gender gap is a gender chasm.

Women's support for Democratic candidates remains extremely strong; 63% of women say they'll vote for the Democrat and only a third say they'll vote for the Republican. Men are more closely divided, but tilt in the opposite direction, with half backing the Republican and 45% behind the Democrat.

Republicans up five points with men.  Democrats up thirty points with women.

Tell me again how Kavanaugh helped?

A Haley Bail-y Tale-y

The latest departure from the Trump regime is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who apparently blindsided everyone in the White House when she submitted her resignation last week, effective at the end of the year.

Haley discussed her resignation with Trump last week when she visited him at the White House, these sources said. Her news shocked a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration.

Background: Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, was easily confirmed four days after President Trump's inauguration in 2017.

She has overseen Trump's shift in dealing with the UN, including the U.S. exit from the UN Human Rights Council, which Haley called the organization's "greatest failure."

Worth noting: Haley wrote a public op-ed in September challenging the N.Y. Times' anonymous op-ed:

• "I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person."
• "Like my colleagues in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council, I have very open access to the president. He does not shut out his advisers, and he does not demand that everyone agree with him. I can talk to him most any time, and I frequently do."
• "If I disagree with something and believe it is important enough to raise with the president, I do it. And he listens."

Not anymore, he does.   And why would Haley up and leave?  Like most Trump regime officials, if you're not actually Trump, being openly corrupt still gets you busted.

Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley should be investigated to determine if she complied with ethics regulations when she accepted seven free flights for herself and her husband on luxury private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen, according to a request filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) with the State Department’s Inspector General.

Ambassador Haley’s 2017 public financial disclosure report listed her acceptance of gifts of seven free flights on private aircraft from three South Carolina businessmen for herself and her husband. Those flights were between New York, Washington, DC, and three cities in her home state of South Carolina, and appear to have been worth tens of thousands of dollars to her. In her financial disclosure report, Ambassador Haley asserted that each gifted flight qualified for an exception based on a personal relationship with the giver. The report, however, does not provide enough information to demonstrate that this exception was applicable to the flights. Whether the exception applies depends partly on whether the three businessmen were the only sources of the gifts; if business entities were sources of the gifts, the exception was inapplicable.

Federal ethics regulations prohibit employees from soliciting or accepting gifts given because of the employee’s official position. They also direct employees to consider declining otherwise permissible gifts if they believe a reasonable person would question their integrity or impartiality as a result of accepting the gifts. At a minimum, Ambassador Haley should have been conscious of the appearance concerns surrounding her acceptance of gifts of private luxury air travel at a time when her colleagues in the administration were making news with their own lavish air travel.

“By accepting gifts of luxury private flights, Ambassador Haley seems to be falling in line with other Trump administration officials who are reaping personal benefits from their public positions,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. “Our ethics laws are clearly written to prevent even the appearance of corruption and improper influence. We’re calling on the State Department’s inspector general to further investigate the nature of these gifts, determine whether they are in line with ethics rules, and ensure that employees like Ambassador Haley are fully trained on the application and importance of ethical standards.”

This CREW legal request came today, the same day Haley's resignation was announced, so there's about a 99% chance that we actually found the one person in the regime who still is capable of shame when it comes to ethics violations.

And if you believe that, well...

Haley joins a long list of corrupt Trump regime officials who overstayed their welcome by grifting on the public dime, of course the biggest violator is Trump himself, and he could not care less about that.

Here's my gut feeling:  Jeff Sessions is done as AG as soon as the midterms are over.  Trump will need a new AG.  My money is on Lindsey Graham.  Which means Graham's Senate seat will be open.  Both Haley and Graham are from SC.

It's not hard to be this cynical, but that's what is coming.  Graham becomes Trump's hatchet man, the Saturday Night Massacre happens, and Haley gets appointed to fill out Graham's term.

I hope I'm wrong, but to me, Haley's sudden resignation screams that this is in the works.

We'll know soon enough.

It's Mueller TIme, Con't

The Trump regime has installed its Potemkin court and believes they have won, and will coast to an easy victory in November followed by the end of the Mueller probe and with it, American democracy.  Unfortunately for them, reality is a harsh mistress.

A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome,” used code names to identify the players — Mr. Trump was “Lion” and Mrs. Clinton was “Forest.” Mr. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear.”

There is no evidence that the Trump campaign acted on the proposals, and Mr. Gates ultimately was uninterested in Psy-Group’s work, a person with knowledge of the discussions said, in part because other campaign aides were developing a social media strategy. Psy-Group’s owner, Joel Zamel, did meet in August 2016 with Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s eldest son.

Investigators working for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired, have obtained copies of the proposals and questioned Psy-Group employees, according to people familiar with those interviews.

The scope of the social media campaigns, essentially a broad effort to sow disinformation among Republican delegates and general election voters, was more extensive than the work typically done by campaign operatives to spread the candidate’s message on digital platforms. The proposal to gather information about Mrs. Clinton and her aides has elements of traditional opposition research, but it also contains cryptic language that suggests using clandestine means to build “intelligence dossiers.”

We know now that ultimately instead of going with Psy-Group that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Steve Bannon went with Cambridge Analytica for their social media manipulation tactics to be used on American voters in 2016.  But the real story here is that this ties Rick Gates to Zamel, and Zamel to Donald Trump Jr. as linked in the article above, and we know Zamel's Psy-Group and Bannon's Cambridge Analytica announced a partnership just after Election Day 2016.

This was the May 2018 NYT article that found Zamel met with Trump, Jr. and Erik Prince in the Seychelles, along with Saudi, Emirati, and Russian nationals to discuss a larger plan involving the 2016 election.  As I said in May:

So this brings up an excellent point.  It wasn't just Putin who wanted to see Trump win.  The Trump campaign was open for business, and Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Russia, and possibly more foreign influences knew that Trump was open to the highest bidder.  And they took them up on the offer.

So now we have the timeline more clearly:  Kushner turned Zamel down officially, but then Trump's son met with Zamel after, off the books, with Erik Prince facilitating.  Kushner couldn't be caught with this meeting on record, so Junior did the dirty work.

Zamel gets a fat partnership contract with CA.  Erik Prince's sister Betsy DeVos becomes Education Secretary, while Erik Prince himself gets to pitch privatizing Trump's war in Afghanistan (and still is.)  The Saudis, Emiratis, and Russians get the access they want to the White House.

And Mueller knows it all.

Clock's ticking...

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Michael is expected to strengthen to a Category 3 storm as it heads through the Gulf for the Florida panhandle and is expected to make landfall Wednesday afternoon.
• Convicted felon Bill Cosby is seeking a new trial or a reduction in sentence citing new evidence of prosecutorial misconduct after his conviction of sexual assault last month.
• Two Americans have won this year's Nobel Prize in Economics for work on long-term sustainable prosperity models in the age of climate change.
• The IMF is cutting global economic growth forecasts for the first time in two years as Trump's trade war is causing downward revisions in GDP growth for 2019.
• Hot on the heels of last week's Google Stream gaming service announcement and testing, Microsoft is introducing its own Project Xcloud game streaming service for mobile phones and tablets.

Last Call For Paying The Piper

Alaska Republicans are furious with Lisa Murkowski's failure to vote yes on confirming Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and now she will be made to pay the price.

Alaska Republican party leaders plan to consider whether to reprimand U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski for opposing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The party has asked Murkowski to provide any information she might want its state central committee to consider.

Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock says the committee could decide to issue a statement. Or he says it could withdraw support of Murkowski, encourage party officials to look for a replacement and ask that she not seek re-election as a Republican.

He says the party took that more extreme step previously with state legislators who caucused with Democrats.

He says all this follows outrage from Alaska Republicans.

Murkowski told reporters that if she worried about political repercussions she wouldn’t be able to do the job Alaskans expect her to do.

Meanwhile, on the Dem side, West Virginia's Joe Manchin is in his own mess of his own making as both parties are taking their shots.

Danielle Walker cried on Joe Manchin's shoulder after she shared her story of sexual assault in the senator's office. She thought he listened. The 42-year-old Morgantown woman said she was both devastated and furious when Manchin became the only Democrat in the U.S. Senate to support President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

"I feel raped all over again," Walker told The Associated Press.

A day after Manchin broke with his party on what may be the most consequential vote of the Trump era, the vulnerable Democrat is facing a political firestorm back home. While Republicans — including one of the president's sons — are on the attack, the most passionate criticism is coming from Manchin's very own Democratic base, a small but significant portion of the electorate he needs to turn out in force to win re-election next month. A Manchin loss would put his party's hopes of regaining control of the Senate virtually out of reach.

Walker, a first-time Democratic candidate for the state legislature, said she may not vote at all in the state's high-stakes Senate election. Julia Hamilton, a 30-year-old educator who serves on the executive committee of the Monongalia County Democratic Party, vowed to sit out the Senate race as well.

"At some point you have to draw a line," Hamilton said. "I have heard from many, many people — especially women. They won't be voting for Manchin either."

Here's the difference: at the end of all this, Lisa Murkowski will still be in the Senate.  It's increasingly clear that Joe Manchin and North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, who bravely voted no on Kavanaugh, will most likely not be.

Now tell me, who comes out ahead in January if the lesson is Red State Dems are screwed no matter what they vote for in the Senate?

Hint: it won't be the Dems. 

Deportation Nation, Con't

The first major case that will include Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice may very well be Nielsen v. Preap, a class-action suit against Homeland Security to determine if the Trump regime can simply deny bond hearings to those who ICE have detained for deportation because of crimes they committed years, and sometimes decades ago.

Nielsen is a class action brought by a group of immigrants in the Ninth Circuit who have been or are being detained under 8 U.S.C. § 1226, a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That section authorizes federal authorities to detain any alien who may be subject to “removal”—the technical term for deportation. That term covers a lot of immigrants—border-crossers arrested after entering the U.S. illegally, tourists or students who have overstayed their visas, and lawful permanent residents who have committed certain crimes.

The statute creates two classes of “removable” aliens—first, ordinary detainees who haven’t committed crimes but are facing removal on other grounds and, second, “criminal aliens” facing removal because of criminal convictions.

Once ordinary aliens are detained for removal, they face three different legal tests: First will be a “bond hearing,” at which they can try to convince an immigration judge that they can be safely released, and will show up for their deportation hearing. They can put on evidence of their community, and family members can attend to give their support. If they get bond, they can go back to their lives until their next hearing. Next, whether they get bond or not, they receive a “removal hearing” at which they can try to show that they are not “removable” after all. If they win there, they are free to go. But even if they fail in that effort, they can still to try to show that they are eligible for what is called “cancellation of removal”—for example, because they have been lawfully present in the U.S. for years and have family ties here, or because deportation would subject them to danger in their country of origin. If the immigrant can prove that claim, immigration authorities have the discretion to allow him or her to remain and “adjust” to legal status.

But go back to the beginning—the bond hearing. Some “criminal aliens” have been convicted of certain specified statutory crimes (such as drug or firearms offenses, sex offenses, terrorism or espionage, or crimes of “moral turpitude”). For this “criminal alien” group, the statute says that “when the alien is released” from imprisonment, the government “shall take [him or her] into custody.” These immigrants get no bond hearing; they must be held in detention until their cases are resolved. They can still challenge removal; they can still ask for cancellation; but they must remain behind bars for the months or even years those proceedings can take.

This is the issue in Nielsen v. Preap: It is not whether authorities can detain these aliens—they can. But does the statute really deny bond hearings to all of them—longtime residents of the U.S. who were convicted of minor offenses 5, 10, 15 or more years ago? What if a person has long ago been released and has returned to a community, established a family and put down roots, and lived a blameless life since that brush with the law? In other words, what if the immigrant would otherwise be a prime candidate for bond?

These aliens can be detained and deported. There is no question that ICE agents can show up at their homes, arrest them, and hold them for removal proceedings. But does the “when” language mean they don’t get a bond hearing? If a non-citizen has left prison and established a new life, did Congress in writing the statute really mean to deny that person the chance to show an immigration court that he or she will show up for a removal hearing, the way other “noncriminal” aliens can?

And that’s where the meaning of the word “when” comes in.

This is a class action case on behalf of immigrants, many of whom served or are serving sentences, or even probation, for minor offenses. One of the lead plaintiffs, Mony Preap, was born to Cambodian parents in a refugee camp; he has lived lawfully in the U.S. since 1981. In 2006, he was convicted on two misdemeanor counts of possessing marijuana—an offense that would have subjected him to mandatory detention. However, immigration authorities did not arrest him then. Instead, he returned to his community and was convicted of battery—which does not trigger the mandatory detention statute. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at that point took him to a detention center, and he was denied a bond hearing. He was eventually able to show an immigration judge that he was eligible for “cancellation,” and so he has been released.

Another plaintiff, Eduardo Vega Padilla, arrived as a toddler and has been a lawful resident for 52 years; his six grandchildren are all U.S. citizens. He was convicted of controlled-substance offenses in 1997 and 1999 and placed on probation; while he was serving that sentence, he was convicted of possessing an unloaded pistol, then released in 2002. In 2013, ice agents arrested him at his home. Because of the drug offense, ice denied him a bond hearing until a district court ordered them to provide one—at which point he won release.

Representing all immigrants arrested under similar circumstances, the plaintiffs argue that, if ICE wants to detain an immigrant without hope of bail, it must detain him or her at the moment of release; any other reading of the “when” in the statute, they say, allows authorities to wait years, and then detain immigrants long after they have successfully returned to their lives. Congress cannot have intended that.
That reading is something like “when” in this sentence: “When you have completed the quiz, turn in your paper and pencil and exit quietly.” The government’s reading might seem more like this chestnut: “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Effectively, the Trump regime wants the power of indefinite detainment for deportable aliens, even the ones who have been in the country for decades, living peaceful lives.  It's a necessary step to mass roundups of undocumented immigrants that are surely coming just as soon as SCOTUS gives the green light.

Brett Kavanaugh will get to hear such a case next week where he would most certainly be the fifth vote to allow ICE such broad powers.

No rest for the wicked, it seems.

Gaia, You Look Like Death Warmed Over

Catastrophic events from climate change are not a "by 2100" thing that only Generation Z's future grandkids will have to deal with, it's so bad now that it's a "by 2040" thing that my generation will have to deal with.

The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.

With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found.

“There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

At the same time, however, the report is being received with hope in some quarters because it affirms that 1.5 degrees Celsius is still possible — if emissions stopped today, for instance, the planet would not reach that temperature. It is also likely to galvanize even stronger climate action by focusing on 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees, as a target that the world cannot afford to miss.

“Frankly, we’ve delivered a message to the governments,” said Jim Skea, a co-chair of the IPCC panel and professor at Imperial College London, at a press event following the document’s release. “It’s now their responsibility … to decide whether they can act on it.” He added, “What we’ve done is said what the world needs to do.”

The transformation described in the document is breathtaking, and the speed of change required raises inevitable questions about its feasibility.

I expect the Trump regime will dismiss the report as "fundamentally flawed" before the end of the day, after all they fully admit that temperatures are going to rise a whopping 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, causing mass catastrophe, and there's no way to stop it, so why bother?

The IPCC report tells us that we're going to see some of those effects within 20 years, not 80.

Specifically, the document finds that instabilities in Antarctica and Greenland, which could usher in sea-level rise measured in feet rather than inches, “could be triggered around 1.5°C to 2°C of global warming.” Moreover, the total loss of tropical coral reefs is at stake because 70 to 90 are expected to vanish at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report finds. At 2 degrees, that number grows to more than 99 percent.

The report found that holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could save an Alaska-size area of the Arctic from permafrost thaw, muting a feedback loop that could lead to still more global emissions. The occurrence of entirely ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean goes from one per century to one per decade between 1.5 and 2 degrees, it found — one of many ways in which the mere half a degree has large real-world consequences.

Risks of extreme heat and weather events just rise and rise as temperatures do, meaning these would be worse worldwide the more it warms.

To avoid that, in barely more than 10 years, the world’s percentage of electricity from renewables such as solar and wind power would have to jump from the current 24 percent to something more like 50 or 60 percent. Coal and gas plants that remain in operation would need to be equipped with technologies, collectively called carbon capture and storage (CCS), that prevent them from emitting carbon dioxide into the air and instead funnel it to be buried underground. By 2050, most coal plants would shut down.

Cars and other forms of transportation, meanwhile, would need to be shifting strongly toward being electrified, powered by these same renewable energy sources. At present, transportation is far behind the power sector in the shift to low-carbon fuel sources. Right now, according to the International Energy Agency, only 4 percent of road transportation is powered by renewable fuels, and the agency has projected only a 1 percent increase by 2022.

Meanwhile the Trump regime is currently in the process of scrapping all of these Obama-era programs, and is actually looking to greatly increase coal plant usage and emissions.  Odds are we're going to reach the 1.5C mark before 2040.

By then, it will be far too late.  We'll go down as global villains in the history books for centuries.

And we will deserve it.

StupidiNews!

• A limousine carrying several people to a birthday party in upstate New York struck a parked vehicle and killed 20, including all aboard the limo, the driver and two bystanders.
• Singer Taylor Swift has weighed in on politics in her home state of Tennessee, saying that Republican Marsha Blackburn "appalls and terrifies" her as she endorsed Democrat Phil Breseden for the Senate.
• Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan says he is following the story of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi after reports the Washington Post writer was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
• Right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro has the lead in the first round of voting, making him the prohibitive favorite to win a run-off in late October.
• The Trump regime is giving the green light for funding Ohio's first offshore wind power project in Lake Erie, eight miles off the coast, the first freshwater offshore wind project in the US.

Last Call For That Second Civil War

The Power Line boys can't wait for the brave heroes of right-wing Jesus to start filling liberals full of bullets.

What we are seeing today is mob action by Democratic Party activists: harassing Republicans when they go out to dinner or walk through airports; busing activists to Republicans’ homes to harass them and frighten their children; invading Republican Congressional offices with threatening mobs; and, in some cases, shooting or violently assaulting Republican office-holders. I wrote yesterday about Kellie Paul’s appeal to Cory Booker to withdraw his incitements to violence. Maxine Waters is another prominent Democrat who has endorsed immoral and potentially illegal harassment of Republicans.

Why are Democrats confident that political violence is a one-way street? Conservatives are, on average, better armed than liberals and–I think it is safe to say–more personally formidable. Yet liberals clearly have no fear that conservatives will respond to their violence and mob intimidation in kind. I think that is because they assume we are better than they are. We care about our country, we value its institutions, and we try to maintain the basic presumption of good faith that underlies our democratic system.

The Democrats are right to think that we are better than they are, but conservatives’ patience is not infinite. The potential for significant political violence is higher today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and perhaps since the Civil War. The Democrats are sowing the wind, and they may reap the whirlwind.

They cannot wait for that Second Civil War to start, where they can use the full power of the Trump state to crush the necks of liberals.  They know what Kavanaugh means in the long run.  They can't help themselves, their dreams of righteous soldiers exterminating the sub-human vermin in their otherwise pristine country, their hunger for martial rule is cavernous.

This is who the GOP is, aging Boomers wanting to go back to the days of the Kent State Massacre and church burnings and public lynchings and the younger crowd who have heard the stories, but their black hearts achs for the bloodshed of the bad old days.  They dream of the era when they can crack skulls and smash heads and get away with it, because it will be the right thing to do.

They've been training all their lives.

We're one Reichstag Fire away...

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Peter Smith, the GOP operative who went deep into the Russian weeds to buy the "incriminating missing Clinton emails" and who committed suicide last year after his plan went public, was much further along in his scheme than anyone realized.  

Well. not anyone...Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew.

A veteran Republican operative and opposition researcher solicited and raised at least $100,000 from donors as part of an effort to obtain what he believed to be emails stolen from Hillary Clinton, activities that remain of intense interest to federal investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller’s office and on Capitol Hill.

Peter W. Smith, an Illinois businessman with a long history of involvement in GOP politics, sought and collected the funds from at least four wealthy donors as part of the plan to obtain Mrs. Clinton’s stolen emails from hackers just weeks before election day in 2016, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Smith’s effort to find what he believed were some 33,000 deleted emails Mrs. Clinton said were personal was first reported by the Journal in a 2017 story, but the extent of his planning went far beyond what was previously known. Mr. Smith died 10 days after describing his efforts to a reporter for the Journal newspaper.

The documents and people familiar with the matter depict a veteran political operative with access to wealthy donors and deep connections in Republican politics on a single-minded quest to find incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton even after government officials warned of Russian involvement in U.S. politics. People familiar with the investigations described Mr. Smith’s activities as an area of expanding interest.

Mr. Smith went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the privacy and secrecy of his projects, according to emails and court records reviewed by the Journal and a person familiar with the matter.

One email showed the anti-Clinton funds referenced as donations that were to be sent to a Washington, D.C.-based scholarship fund for Russian students.

Mr. Smith often communicated with associates using a Gmail account under the name “Robert Tyler” that both he and several others had access to, according to emails and a person familiar with the matter. He sometimes asked associates to communicate with him by writing a note and saving it the draft folder of the account, according to correspondence reviewed by the Journal.

He also had one phone number that he used for sensitive matters and a commercially available encrypted email account. Hard drives that Mr. Smith’s estate turned over to federal investigators were also encrypted, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to an email in the “Robert Tyler” account reviewed by the Journal, Mr. Smith obtained $100,000 from at least four financiers as well as a $50,000 contribution from Mr. Smith himself. People familiar with Mr. Smith’s financial transactions confirm there were donations.

The email, dated Oct. 11, 2016, in the “Robert Tyler” account, included the subject line “Wire Instructions—Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative” and was addressed to Mr. Smith. The writer, who identified himself as “ROB, ” said: “This $100k total with the $50k received from you will allow us to fund the Washington Scholarship Fund for the Russian students for the promised $150K.” The Journal couldn’t determine if such a fund actually exists.

“The students are very pleased with the email releases they have seen, and are thrilled with their educational advancement opportunities,” the email read. Because multiple people had access to the “Robert Tyler” email account, it couldn’t be determined who sent the email to Mr. Smith.

The email about obtaining the pledges came just days after WikiLeaks and the website DCLeaks began releasing emails damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and four days after the U.S. government publicly warned that Russia was attempting to interfere in the U.S. election through the hacking and release of stolen emails and doing so at the direction of the Kremlin’s “senior-most officials.” Russia denies interfering in the election.

So yes, Peter Smith was neck deep in the GOP effort to get the dirt on Clinton from the Russian hacks, and he took his own life rather than face the music.

Mueller knows all of the notes in this tune, however, and when the diva Lady Justice sings this opera, it's going to be curtains for a lot of Republicans.

Sunday Long Read: Art Of (Post) War

Claudia Roth Pierpoint at The New Yorker gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, the story of the post-WWII NYC art scene that gave us the rise of Jackson Pollock.  Of course, as the story goes, behind every great man is a woman putting up with all his bullshit but loving him anyway, and in our case, that woman is Lee Krasner, one of several woman featured in Mary Gabriel's book, "Ninth Street Women".

The photograph of Jackson Pollock that appeared in Life in August, 1949, didn’t look like anyone’s idea of an artist. Although he stood in front of an enormous painting, a fantastic tracery of loops and swirls that most readers would have found perplexing or ridiculous, the man himself was something else: rugged, intense, with paint-splattered dungarees and a cigarette dangling, with a touch of insolence, from the corner of his mouth. A rival painter, Willem de Kooning, said that he looked like “some guy who works at a service station pumping gas.” But the image was sexy, too—notably similar in type to the working-class stud made famous by Marlon Brando on Broadway the previous year. The subtitle of the accompanying article read, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The answer was presumably affirmative: why else was a little-known artist being featured in the biggest mass-circulation magazine in the country? The editors, however, were too skittish to render judgment on his mysterious new art. Instead, they offered the phenomenon of Pollock himself: a conspicuously modern artist without a trace of European la-di-da, an artist born in Wyoming, no less, who did his painting in a barn, using not a palette but cans of aluminum paint, into which he occasionally mixed (how much more macho could it get?) nails and screws. The big news was that it was safe, at last, in America, for a real man to be an artist.

Allowing Life to do the article, despite Pollock’s hesitation, was Lee Krasner’s idea. Otherwise known as Mrs. Jackson Pollock, Krasner was a fervent booster of her husband’s work, outspoken in her conviction that he was, as she liked to say, numero uno. She claimed to have believed in his genius from her first visit to his studio, in 1941, and she’d seen him through years of alcoholic turbulence, when he was selling so little that he couldn’t afford to heat their ramshackle house, on the outer reaches of Long Island. Krasner had worn long johns and heavy sweaters to work in the freezing room that served as her own studio—for she, too, was a fiercely serious artist. She had trained at Cooper Union, in a section of the school reserved for women, and at the National Academy of Design, where she learned to draw and paint in a rigorously traditional style. After discovering modernism, she had gone on to become a star pupil of the revered teacher Hans Hofmann, who praised her work as good enough to pass for a man’s. In the late thirties, working for the W.P.A.’s Federal Art Project, a government program that promoted strictly nondiscriminatory policies, she had led a crew of ten men working on a giant mural, now lost, on the subject of navigation. As was true for many women artists of the time, the program gave her a professional start, hands-on experience, and enough confidence to think that she might make it as a painter, even after the war effort brought the W.P.A. to an end, along with all vestiges of an art world that viewed women as equal players.

It’s impossible to know how she might have developed on her own. By the early forties, she was committed to an upbeat style of geometric abstraction, brightly colored, that gave Cubism a rhythmic swing. But meeting Pollock, moving in with him (in 1942), and marrying him (in 1945) radically reset her course. Beginning in 1943—the year of Pollock’s first solo gallery show—she painted almost nothing but “gray slabs,” as she put it, for three despairing years, while she struggled toward his kind of deeply personal abstraction, attempting to paint not what she devised but what she felt and, even more psychologically daunting, who she was. The answer would once have been clear: she was an escapee from an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, an Artists Union protest organizer, a gutsy woman who took no guff, an ambitious artist. Now, though, she seemed to have been transformed, as in some cruel fairy tale, into a lowly creature known as an artist’s wife. She got past the gray slabs in 1946, and for the next few years kept trying out new approaches, working mostly on a modest scale—she called her best work the “Little Image” paintings—and pushing on with quiet resolve. In 1949, however, just a couple of months after Pollock’s appearance in Life, she decided to stop exhibiting, following a series of dismissive she’s-no-Pollock reviews of a gallery show titled “Artists: Man and Wife.” At the age of forty, she was a scarred veteran who stood for everything that younger women artists feared and rejected. She was even known to cook.

Krasner ventured to exhibit again two years later, in the historic Ninth Street Show. Held in an empty storefront just off Broadway, rented by the artists themselves, the show was a boisterous call for attention by a new generation, artists for whom Pollock and de Kooning (both of whom took part) had the status almost of Old Masters. Since few of them had ever received any significant notice, the rush to participate was so intense that everyone was limited to a single piece. Even in this renegade atmosphere, there was some initial discussion of whether including women in the exhibition would diminish its chance of being taken seriously. Eventually, the jury selected eleven women, and sixty-one men, to represent the creatively rich (if otherwise impoverished) new downtown art world, with its cheap industrial lofts, high communal spirits, and almost universal devotion to abstraction. Five of the women went on to have international careers, their work collected by major museums and subject to ever-expanding bibliographies: Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning (who was married to Willem), and Krasner—the oldest of them but the last to bloom, coming into her own only after Pollock’s death, in 1956, a painful loss yet the start of a remarkably productive twenty-eight years of widowhood.

Mary Gabriel’s timely and ambitious new book, “Ninth Street Women,” provides a multifaceted account of the five odds-defying female artists who travelled from Ninth Street to the Museum of Modern Art and beyond. Gabriel warns at the start that her seven-hundred-page text lacks “traditional biographical detail”; instead, it is a widely roving group portrait, evoking an entire era and aspiring to explain it. She dwells on broad social and political events, which she believes were not merely a context for the artists’ work but the raison d’être for their allegiance to abstraction. Declaring her opposition to theorists who claim that painters respond primarily to other painters, she begins by proposing that the larger New York group of artists “stripped their work of all life except their own internal meanderings because they existed in a world destroyed by war, dehumanized by the death camps, and denied a future by the atomic bomb.”

One can see the appeal of this idea: it makes the art seem bigger, braver. And Gabriel is deft at weaving an artist into a piece of political history. Still, it’s difficult to demonstrate the weight of a world that remains invisible on the painters’ canvases. Even Krasner, who was politically active, said, “I, for one, didn’t feel that my art had to reflect my political point of view.” Judging by Gabriel’s own account, references to contemporary horrors by any New York artists are rare, and learning of an occasion when Willem de Kooning voiced concern about the atomic bomb does not necessarily convince one that his world view was expansive. (Furthermore, he departed from abstraction when the spirit moved him, as did Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan; had they given up worrying about the bomb?) In fact, much as one might expect, Gabriel’s subjects displayed the all-too-human tendency to respond to world events in ambiguous ways, including keeping their heads down—particularly easy when the rent is overdue—and responding in no apparent way at all.

Fortunately, Gabriel lets the political thesis fade as events take over and the immediacy of these lives becomes all-engrossing. There was so much happening at close range: making art, selling art, not selling art, falling in love with genius, attempting to be a genius, the unforeseen rise of a movement fuelled by creative energy, oil paint, and alcohol. The development of a culture is deeply consequential, and its story—even a very specialized piece of its story—requires no apologies or augmentation. And this piece of the art-world story happens to be very exciting, as brought to life in the balance of Gabriel’s rich, serious-minded, and (in a good way) sometimes gossipy book. It was Elaine de Kooning, after all, who characterized the era under consideration, roughly 1949 through 1959, as a “ten-year party.” 

A very dear friend of mine who loves art history would think me remiss if I didn't include this piece this week, so this one is for her, and for all the women who do the work and get a fraction of the credit.  Do give it a read, I learned quite a bit about these artists who I did not know about...which is of course, the point.

Lat Call For Institutes Of Destruction

As Steve M. reminds us, Republicans won on Kavanaugh because there is nothing they wouldn't have destroyed in order to win, and winning is all that matters now.

No, there won't be hell to pay. Republicans have demonstrated that they see public confidence in institutions as an expendable luxury. Americans will now lose confidence in the Supreme Court as they've lost confidence in Congress, the presidency, and our electoral system. Republicans don't care. They control all these institutions, which do what they want done. That's all that matters to them.

What's the approval rating of Congress? It's 19%, according to Gallup.Gallup polls this question monthly, and the number has been 20% or less every month since Republicans took over the House in January 2011.

And that's working out just fine for them. They got their tax cut this year. The Republican Senate has put dozens of far-right judges on the courts, including two on the Supreme Court. Obamacare repeal could happen in the lame-duck session. Who needs public respect for the institution?

Republicans have persuaded much of the country that our electoral system is corrupted by massive amounts of voter fraud, even as they do nothing to prevent Russian interference in elections -- but elections have been going Republicans' way for years, so it's all good. (If elections don't go Republicans' way this year, they can yell and scream about a corrupted system.)

Republicans elected a president who dishonors the presidency at every opportunity. So what? He's signing the bills they want and appointing the judges they want.

So we should all stop saying that institutions are being damaged as if we expect anyone in power to care. The people who run the government have calculated that respected institutions simply aren't necessary.

The only thing that matters is winning, and they have won.  We have a chance to win in November.  If we don't, well, your prepper friends are probably right that there will be a nasty little war in our future.  Hell, even if we do win the House back, it's going to be a street brawl until Trump is gone.

Everything is a fight now that must be won, and they are willing to sacrifice everything to win.

Our side is not.

It won't be pretty.

The Plan From Here

The Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice 50-48 (Manchin's vote wouldn't have made a difference either way) and while we're basically in the full nightmare scenario of 2016-2018, things are just getting started.

Mitch McConnell isn’t done with his “project” to revamp the nation’s courts.

Hours before the Senate was set to approve Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Senate majority leader said in an interview Saturday that he plans confirmations of more lifetime justices before the November election. The Kentucky Republican plans to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) about a package of nominees — and Schumer's response could determine when or whether Schumer’s vulnerable members will be able to go home and campaign for their seats.

“There are still tools that I have available, that’s why I canceled the August recess. And that’s something I’ll discuss with Sen. Schumer before we leave for the election,” McConnell said in a telephone interview, as he began an extended victory lap on Kavanaugh’s confirmation. He said “of course” more judges will be confirmed before Nov. 6, though Democrats may now be under enormous pressure to block as many judges as they can after the deflating loss on Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh's ascension to the high court marks the 69th judicial confirmation of Donald Trump’s presidency under McConnell stewardship of the Senate. There are more than 30 lifetime District and Circuit court nominees ready for floor action in the Senate that McConnell could try to confirm before the election, though under Senate rules Democrats could delay them and would likely be able to narrow that list if the two parties try to strike a confirmation deal.

McConnell can tie up Senate Democrats through the rest of October if he wants to, and probably will.  They'll get no chance to campaign at home for the last month before the Midterms, and that's exactly how he wants it.

The goal at this point is whether Democratic anger materializes at the polls or not.

Democrats doubt the GOP can sustain the energy and ride it to a decisive election win. They say after the furor over Kavanaugh dies down, the election will still turn on issues like health care premiums and protections for preexisting conditions, and McConnell may actually suffer blowback to his hardball confirmation tactics.

“Undermining the integrity of the Supreme Court and undermining the integrity of the Senate is never a good idea. And I think the American public will see that,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who heads the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “What you’re going to see are people that think this is travesty and a sham are going to be very fired up.”

Regardless of the electoral consequences, the payoff of Kavanaugh’s confirmation for conservatives will be enormous. After taking the majority in 2015, McConnell blocked many of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, including Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court — before confirming Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and now Kavanaugh.

McConnell declined to say whether he anticipated another Supreme Court vacancy as majority leader. But his work to cement a conservative majority on the court will resonate long past McConnell’s tenure as majority leader and the senior senator from Kentucky.

“This project ... is the most important thing that the Senate and an administration of like mind — which we ended up having — could do for the country,” McConnell said. “Putting strict constructionists, relatively young, on the courts for lifetime appointments is the best way to have a long-term positive impact on America. And today is a seminal moment in that effort.”

Clawing back our democracy will be the work of the rest of my lifetime.  Trump judges will be taking civil rights and ruling in favor of Christian and corporate ownership for decades.  They will be dismantling classic liberalism all the back to the New Deal, if not Reconstruction.

The next several decades will be of darkness.

It's up to us to light the way through it.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The "Democrats have failed us!" people are outside on Kavanaugh, and they'd like to speak with you.

Let’s be clear: Republicans are to blame for the fact that Brett Kavanaugh is about to become the next justice of the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats don’t have anything to apologize for.

Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a string of women. The evidence of his excessive drinking, his temper, his elitism and snobbery, and his sheer personal repulsiveness grows by the day. He also displayed most of these tendencies on television, in front of the entire world, in a hearing in which he demonstrably lied, repeatedly. And, oh yes, he is an extremist, obviously partisan person who is about to pull the Supreme Court far to the right, possibly for decades to come. What I’m saying is, there’s a lot to work with here if you want to make a strong case against him.

Instead, Democrats put all their chips on an investigation by the FBI—an inherently evil organization which they have no control over. They could have gone right after Kavanaugh during his hearing. They could have questioned him, over and over again, about his drinking. They could have questioned him, over and over again, about the many allegations against him, or the many dubious characters swirling around him. They could have forcefully campaigned against him in public. But they decided to spend what felt like an eternity asking him why he didn’t want the FBI to investigate his case.

Well, they got what they wanted—and now Kavanaugh is going to the Supreme Court.

Or.

Or, hear me out now, Jack, a smarter individual would have surmised that two years ago, millions of us failed the Democrats by voting for two third-party clowns who were specifically in the race to siphon Clinton votes away in battleground states and put Trump in office.

Kavanaugh should have never been nominated, because Trump never should have won.  You can scream at all the Democrats you want to, but giving Donald Trump a GOP Congress, and specifically a GOP Senate, because we couldn't be arsed enough to vote, is precisely why this happened.

Period.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Against all odds, a Chicago police officer has been convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Laquan McDonald.

Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer in half a century to be found guilty of murder for an on-duty shooting. He faces a minimum of 6 years in prison when he’s sentenced by Judge Vincent Gaughan.

The jury deliberated for about 7 ½ hours before finding Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder instead of the first-degree charges for which he was indicted.

The veteran officer was also convicted of all 16 counts of aggravated battery for each shot he fired at McDonald. The jury, however, acquitted him of a single count of official misconduct.
The verdict comes after a landmark trial that featured testimony over 10 days by 44 witnesses, 24 called by the prosecution and 20 by the defense.

The three-week trial flipped the script of most murder cases at the Leighton Criminal Court Building with prosecutors questioning the credibility of police officers who typically serve as their most trusted witnesses.

Van Dyke himself broke from normal protocol for police officers facing charges of wrongdoing, opting to have a jury decide his fate instead of asking the judge to weigh the evidence in a bench trial. His decision to testify in his own defense was also rare for a building where most criminal defendants — especially those charged with murder — invoke their right to remain silent.

The charges against Van Dyke centered on the dashcam video depicting the moments leading up to the shooting on Oct. 20, 2014 — footage that has been played around the world for nearly three years. The graphic images sparked protests and political upheaval and led to a sprawling federal civil rights probe into the systemic mistreatment of citizens by Chicago police, particularly in the city's minority communities.

It's a start.  Nothing will truly qualify as justice here, but it's a start.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Supreme Misgivings, Con't

The procedural vote this morning for Brett Kavanaugh will be in about a half-hour from this post, so by lunchtime we ought to know where things are going.  The one thing I do know is as of this morning, Mitch still doesn't have the votes.  Three Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin are still in play.  Mitch needs two of the four.

Murkowski: Murkowski was scheduled to go back in to review the FBI report late Thursday evening. While she wasn't spotted by CNN, two senators she is friendly with were -- Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and John Hoeven of North Dakota. Murkowski reviewed the report multiple times on Thursday and largely avoided reporters. 

Collins: Collins gave GOP leaders an early boost when she said the FBI report appears to be "very thorough." But she declined to weigh in on the nomination itself through the day, and went back to review materials multiple times. She completed her review of the materials Thursday night. In past votes of this magnitude, she will put out a lengthy statement and give a floor speech laying out her decision before the vote. 

Flake: Flake gave another boost to GOP leaders saying he didn't hear "additional corroboration" of the Kavanaugh allegations in the first staff briefing. But he too largely went silent and avoided reporters the rest of the day. Sources with knowledge of how he approached the day tell me he is not as skittish as some were reporting about his final decision. But he did want to make sure he went thoroughly through the report he was essentially responsible for existing. 

Manchin: "Heidi made her decision. I'll make mine." That's what Manchin said when asked about the decision by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, another red state Democrat who voted for Justice Neil Gorsuch, to oppose Kavanaugh. The cross-current pressures are intense between his party, his state, and the nominee himself. He will review the material again this morning before making a final decision, he told reporters.

My gut says we will not be saved by these Republicans.  Even if Manchin votes no, if the others vote yes it's meaningless.  I in fact suspect all four will vote for cloture this morning to proceed with Kavanaugh's confirmation after a "lengthy and difficult process" or whatever.

The same votes will be made to confirm on Saturday afternoon, and then that's it. 52-48 to confirm.

The consequences to America will be dire.  Our only hope after that is to vote out Republicans across the board starting in November.