StupidiNews!

• Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker is expected to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday to answer questions about possible undue influence over the Mueller probe.
• Iran's Revolutionary Guard showed off a new medium-range ballistic missile that it warns will put Israel and US military bases in the Middle East within striking distance.
• Democrats in Congress say a deal to keep the government open could be reached by this weekend ahead of another possible shutdown on February 15.
• A new housing survey finds nearly ten percent of US mortgages are still underwater, a decade after the housing market crash triggered the Great Recession of 2008.
• A cable TV lobbyist group is petitioning Congress and the FCC for "paid prioritization" laws to allow internet providers to charge content providers for faster network traffic.

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

I'm enormously gratified to see Democrats taking the threat of Republican suppression of millions, perhaps tens of millions of voters nationally as a serious and existential threat to American democracy in an effort to win in 2020.

With the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, one of the largest outside Democratic groups announced on Thursday a $30 million effort to register voters, push ballot measures that expand voter rights and fight Republican-backed laws in court that restrict ballot access.

“At every stage of the game, Republican and conservative state legislatures around the country, when they are given the opportunity, make it more difficult for people to vote,” Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, told The Associated Press. “Essentially what you have are the descendants of Jim Crow who are trying to make it difficult for people to reach the ballot box.”

Democrats have historically supported expanded voting rights, which helps turn out their base, while Republicans have enacted ballot restrictions, citing concern about widespread voter fraud without offering proof. But the new two-year effort, which will spend roughly triple what Priorities had devoted to a similar initiative during the last election cycle, comes as an increasingly diverse Democratic Party has upped the intensity of its focus on ballot access.

Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost a recent bid to become the nation’s first black female governor, delivered a rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday that singled out Republican efforts to limit voter participation.

“Let’s be clear: Voter suppression is real,” she said.

The launch of Priorities’ effort also coincides with debate in Congress over a sweeping reform of campaign finance and voting rights laws. The legislation, called H.R. 1, is widely supported by the new Democratic House majority but was criticized by GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “power grab” because it would make Election Day a holiday.

Much of the money Priorities plans to spend will be directed toward litigation, Cecil said. It’s an area where they had considerable success in the run-up to last fall’s midterms, blunting the impact of election laws in Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Florida and New Hampshire.

For example, a Missouri judge last year blocked portions of a law from taking effect that would have required voters to present a valid photo ID or sign a sworn statement and present some other form of identification to cast a regular ballot.

In Iowa, a Priorities lawsuit resulted in a court order that said the state cannot throw out an absentee ballot based on a judgment by local election officials that the voter’s signature doesn’t match one on file.

And in Indiana, the threat of legal action stymied local officials from acting on a Republican-approved state law reducing the number of polling locations during the 2018 election in one of the state’s largest minority-population counties, the group said.

Now Priorities is turning its attention to Georgia and Texas, states that have both drawn recent scrutiny over claims of voter fraud.

Fighting red state voter suppression at the state level with groups like Priorities USA and nationally with House Democrats pushing legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act is exactly what Democrats need to be doing in 2020, and for once I'm actually impressed that the Democrats are already moving ahead with these efforts now, rather than waiting until it is too late.

You Wrecked It, Ralph, Con't

"Absolute failure of leadership descending to Trumpian levels of disaster" doesn't begin to describe how badly Virginia Democrats have screwed up in the last week.  The Washington Post editorial board today officially joined the national party apparatus in calling for Gov. Ralph Northam's resignation.

GOV. RALPH NORTHAM (D) can no longer effectively serve the people of Virginia who elected him. His shifting and credulity-shredding explanations for the racist photograph on his medical school yearbook page, and the silence into which he then succumbed for days — after initially promising to do “the hard work” of atonement and apology to restore his standing with Virginians — is simply too much. His decade-long record in public office is admirable; it is equally true that his governorship has been irredeemably wrecked by the self-inflicted, racially callous and clueless mess he has made in recent days.

Having initially admitted and apologized for appearing in the offensive photo, which showed one person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb — Mr. Northam performed a head-spinning pivot a day later and denied being either personin that image. His about-face was undercut by simultaneous revelations and acknowledgments — that he wore shoe polish on his face for a dance contest after medical school; that “Coonman” was among his nicknames in college.

He put out word that he was determined to stay in office and clear his name and that he would seek a private investigator to unearth the truth about the yearbook photo, which he said is “not me.” It struck us as reasonable that he should have that chance. But since his artless, tone-deaf news conference Saturday, the governor has gone to ground and been heard from no more. No more light has been shed, no exculpatory information has emerged.

Facts do matter, and the ones surrounding the Northam fiasco remain unsettled and unanswered. First and foremost among the questions they raise: How could he possibly have admitted to something as damning as appearing in the photo if he was certain he wasn’t one of the people in it? How did that photo wind up on his page if he didn’t furnish it to the yearbook editors? What do the governor’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t statements say about his judgment? The explanations Mr. Northam has proffered are vague and unconvincing. Virginians deserve better. Mr. Northam’s time is up. 

Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more clear that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax cannot serve as the state's chief executive either.

Virginia Democratic Congressman Bobby Scott was made aware of allegations of sexual assault against now-Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax over a year ago by the alleged victim herself, ABC News has learned.

Scott learned of the allegations directly from Dr. Vanessa Tyson, who on Wednesday released a statement detailing the alleged 2004 assault, which took place at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Fairfax vehemently denies the assault claim.

In a statement given to ABC News on Wednesday, Scott wrote, "Allegations of sexual assault need to be taken seriously. I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. She deserves the opportunity to have her story heard.”

The accusations against Fairfax did not come out of the blue.  Karen Tumulty at the Post has every right to ask if Democrats will back Dr. Tyson in the same manner that they did Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh.  The answer must be yes, or we are the party of Trump's misogyny and racism too.

As Peter Hamby at Vanity Fair writes, there's no fixing this.  The best Dems can hope for is that Northam appoints someone other than Fairfax, and ideally a black woman, to become Virginia's first female Governor of color to start learning from this utter debacle.

By the standards set forth by Democrats over the last two years, all three of these men should have resigned by now. In the cases of Northam and Herring, it’s clear cut: racism has no home in the Democratic Party, full stop. It is a party committed to racial justice and empowerment, and even the most modest of racial transgressions have to be reckoned with. A white man with a racist blemish on his record must face public consequences, because for every tarnished white man, there is an equally capable woman or person of color ready to step into the political breach. Every Democrat in the country made this loud and clear after Northam’s yearbook photo surfaced, fueled in part by the comfort that his replacement would be Fairfax, a next-generation leader who would be only the second African-American governor in the South. Herring, too, called on Northam to resign, a four-day-old statement that Herring now must reckon with given his own stupid behavior. All of it has provided us with a new definition for white supremacy: when you’re a white person who does dumb, racist shit—and you don’t know even know it.

The Fairfax situation, as with many cases of sexual assault, is more complicated. Fairfax’s callous dismissal of his accuser’s claim as “uncorroborated” reminded us of the uncomfortable truth around these stories, which is that the facts surrounding them are usually of the he-said-she-said variety. (Our nation’s long, disgraceful history of harshly punishing African-American men based on false accusations of sexual assault complicates the equation further.) But the #MeToo revolution has affirmed for the world that accusers deserve the benefit of the doubt and an honest airing of their charges, in order to hold powerful men to account. This, too, is a standard that has been adopted by the Democratic Party, first with the Al Franken controversies and then with the Kavanaugh hearings. Franken was accused of groping many women, and several of those accusers were anonymous. And yes, some of their stories were “uncorroborated.” But led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a brave group of female senators stood up and spoke out against Franken, demanding that he resign. “We should demand the highest standards, not the lowest, from our leaders, and we should fundamentally value and respect women,” Gillibrand wrote on Facebook at the time. Democrats must hold themselves to a standard higher than partisanship, the argument went. If members of our party behave badly, we must treat them the same as Republicans who do. “You have to stand up for what’s right, especially when it’s hard,” Gillibrand said in another interview during the Franken drama. “And if you create a pass because you love someone, or you like someone, or admire someone, or they’re part of your team, it’s not O.K., it’s just not.”

The Kavanaugh parallels might be more direct. An accuser from another time comes forward with a credible charge, just as the accused is preparing to assume a position of considerable power. At the first hint of Ford’s accusation, Democrats spoke up, demanding that the confirmation process be paused and that Kavanaugh confront the charges. But at the first hint of Fairfax accusations, Democrats were uncomfortably silent, and they continue to be, in some cases embarrassingly so. At the State of the Union address on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders and D.N.C. Chairman Tom Perez were chased down by pesky conservative reporters asking for comment on Fairfax. Both hilariously pretended to be taking calls on their iPhones to avoid them, even though video plainly showed that their screens were not in call mode. At another time, would they have stopped to deliver a comment about Kavanaugh? You bet.

With apologies to Gillibrand, who is now running for president under the banner of female empowerment, there are no Democrats standing up for what’s right at a moment when it’s really, really hard. National Democrats can claim that this Fairfax story is none of their business, because they aren’t immersed in the details of Virginia politics. Unfortunately, since every Democrat in America felt comfortable weighing in on Virginia politics after the Northam scandal broke, that is no longer an argument they can make. Democrats, too, are urging caution and waiting for the facts to come out, which would have been reasonable in an earlier time. But as with most matters of race and sex in the age of Twitter, the public standard on the left is no longer wait and see. It’s rush to judge. That there are zero Democrats willing to speak up on the Fairfax matter is an intellectual and moral headache for the party. What’s more, it’s a dynamic easily weaponized by bad-faith actors on the right who are more than happy to paint Democrats as sanctimonious hypocrites on cultural issues.

We will not beat Trump in 2020 if we can't be better than him.  Right now we are not.  The longer this Northam/Fairfax/Herring mess goes on, the more clear that becomes.  It's no longer a question of dirty tricks and oppo research bombshells, it's now "do the right thing or perish as a party."

And the state's Republican leaders?  Same problem. 

A Virginia Military Institute yearbook overseen by future state Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment in 1968 features a host of racist photos and slurs, including blackface.

The revelation about one of Virginia's most powerful Republicans comes as the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general are facing calls to resign over their own admissions they wore blackface as young men.

Norment, R-James City County, was managing editor of The Bomb publication that year. He went to VMI after graduating from James Blair High School in Williamsburg and has been a state senator since 1992.

Do better, entire state of Virginia.  That needs to start today.

The Boys' Club, Con't

Last December I told you all about the Miami Herald's investigation into the sweetheart plea deal that Florida hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein received in the trafficking case of underage girls he faced.  Now the Herald's story has resulted in the Justice Department is finally investigating Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta's role in that plea deal when Acosta was a US Attorney in Miami.

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta’s role in negotiating a controversial plea deal with a wealthy New York investor accused of molesting more than 100 underage girls in Palm Beach.

The probe is in response to a request by Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was critical of the case following a series of stories in the Miami Herald. The Herald articles detailed how Acosta, then the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, and other DOJ attorneys worked hand-in-hand with defense lawyers to cut a lenient plea deal with multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.

The Herald’s three-part series, Perversion of Justice, was cited by Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd in his letter to Sasse. DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility will head the investigation, he said.

“OPR has now opened an investigation into allegations that department attorneys may have committed professional misconduct in the manner in which the Epstein criminal matter was resolved,’’ wrote Boyd in the letter dated Wednesday. 

Acosta, 50, had been considered a rising star in the Republican Party and was once mentioned as a possible candidate to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He did not respond to a request for comment emailed to his office on Wednesday.

Sasse and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Sunrise Democrat, have pushed for a DOJ investigation into whether there was any undue influence that tainted the case. 

“Jeffrey Epstein is a child rapist and there’s not a single mom or dad in America who shouldn’t be horrified by the fact that he received a pathetically soft sentence,’’ Sasse said on Wednesday. “The victims of Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring deserve this investigation — and so do the American people and the members of law enforcement who work to put these kinds of monsters behind bars.’’

Former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter — who pressured Acosta and former Palm Beach state prosecutor Barry Krischer to more aggressively prosecute Epstein — said he would like to see Epstein’s victims finally receive some form of justice.

“I hope that the Department of Justice investigation answers the questions of why this case was handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in the way that it was, and may it somehow result in justice and an apology by the government for the victims and their families,’’ Reiter said.

Again, Epstein was facing more than 100 counts of sexual molestation of underage girls.  This is a vile scumbag who should be rotting in a windowless hot box in the Florida sun for the next eternity or two, but Epstein had powerful friends in both parties, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. 

Acosta too should be disbarred and chucked out of the Labor Department.  There's no way he should ever have been confirmed, but Republicans are perfectly fine letting a guy who let a super-rich child molester get away with it, because that's what powerful Republicans do.

We'll see if anything comes from this.

StupidiNews!

• The Pentagon wants to buy several Israeli-made Iron Dome missile defense weapons systems, the IDF has been using the portable anti-air system since 2011.
• Dutch environmental scientists are investigating a massive bird kill of nearly 20,000 guillemots that have washed up on North Sea beaches over the last week.
• House Judiciary Democrats will hold hearings on gun control legislation, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act has 230 sponsors, including five Republicans.
• Donald Trump is standing behind his State of the Union call for more legal immigration, a sharp departure from the regime's current policy of significant cuts to refugee and visa programs.
• Charter Spectrum is the latest cable company to raise broadcast TV rates, customers will pay nearly 35% more for networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC in March compared to October of last year.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Rep. Adam Schiff and the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are now ready to rock Donald Trump's world. Spencer Ackerman:

The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into President Trump’s ties to Russia is officially back. And under the panel’s new Democratic management, it’s beyond supersized.

In its first official business meeting of the new Congress on Wednesday—facilitated by the House Republican leadership’s somewhat belated announcement of GOP membership on the committee—the much-watched House panel voted to re-establish an inquiry into what now might be called Collusion-Plus.

It’s about as different as possible from the committee’s previous investigative incarnation under Republican management, which last year released a report absolving the president and his campaign of any culpability in Russian manipulation of the 2016 election and turned its ire on those within the Justice Department and FBI investigating Trump.

Democratic committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) has made no secret of his emphasis on going after financial ties between Trump and Russia and subpoenaing documents thus far untouched by the panel. And on Wednesday, the committee voted to execute another long-standing priority of Schiff’s: giving Special Counsel Robert Mueller the transcripts of all witnesses before the House probe. Misleading the committee and its Senate counterpart has already led to indictments of former Trump advisers Michael Cohen and Roger Stone—and they may not have been the only ones to give false or incomplete testimony.

But an announcement from Schiff shortly after the Wednesday morning vote underscored the ginormous reach of the 2.0 version of the investigation.

The investigation will examine the “scope” of the Kremlin’s influence campaigns on American politics, both in 2016 and afterwards, and “any links/and or coordination” between anyone in the Trump orbit—the campaign, transition, administration, or, critically, the president’s businesses—and “furtherance of the Russian government’s interests.” It will also look at whether “any foreign actor,” not only Russians, has any “leverage, financial or otherwise” over Trump, “his family, his business, or his associates”—and whether such actors actively “sought to compromise” any of those many, many people.

A related line of inquiry will examine whether Trump, his family, and his advisers “are or were at any time at heightened risk of” being suborned by foreign interests in any way. That includes a vulnerability to foreign “exploitation, inducement, manipulation, pressure or coercion.” All that makes it very likely that the committee examines Trump administration policy—think the Syria pullout, or ex-national security adviser and admitted felon Mike Flynn’s attempts to work with Russia’s military in Syria, or Trump’s infamous Helsinki meeting with Vladimir Putin—through that lens.

For nearly two years, we had Devin Nunes do everything he could to sink a real investigation into Trump's collusion.  Those days are now over, and a new sheriff is in town.  Trump and especially his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, his daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are going to be in real trouble and soon.

Stay tuned.

You Wrecked It, Ralph, Con't

At this point the Virginia Democratic Party is descending into self-parody.

The political crisis in Virginia escalated dramatically Wednesday when another top Democrat — Attorney General Mark Herring — admitted putting on blackface in the 1980s, when he was in college.

With Gov. Ralph Northam’s career already hanging by a thread over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook, Herring issued a statement saying he wore brown makeup and a wig in 1980 to look like a rapper during a party as a 19-year-old at the University of Virginia.

Herring — who has been among those calling on Northam to resign — said he was “deeply, deeply sorry for the pain that I cause with this revelation.” He said that in the days ahead, “honest conversations and discussions will make it clear whether I can or should continue to serve as attorney general.”

The 57-year-old attorney general issued the statement after rumors of a blackface photo of him had circulated at the Capitol for a day or more. But in his statement, he said nothing about the existence of a photo.

The disclosure further roils the top levels of Virginia government, which has been hit with one crisis after another since the yearbook picture came to light last Friday.

On Monday, Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would become governor if Northam resigned, was confronted with uncorroborated allegations of sexual misconduct dating to 2004. He denied the accusations, calling them a political smear.

Herring would be next in line to be governor after Fairfax. After Herring comes the speaker of the state House, Kirk Cox, a Republican.

I can't believe that Democrats would let the line of succession crumble like this all the way to letting a Republican run the state, but at this point they haven't exactly shown good judgment in the first place.  Virginia Republicans should have a field day with their "See, Democrats are racist and misogynist too, just like Trump!" commercials heading into 2020.

And yes, it gets worse for Justin Fairfax today too.

The woman at the center of a sexual assault scandal involving Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax is a Stanford University fellow scheduled to appear at a symposium next week on sexual violence and the #MeToo movement.

Professor Vanessa Tyson’s allegations, stemming from an interaction at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and the explosive political fallout echo those of Christine Blasey Ford, another university professor living in Palo Alto, who last year accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers.

Tyson’s Stanford colleague Jennifer Freyd told the Bay Area News Group on Tuesday that sometime last fall, at the start of their fellowship program, Tyson told Freyd and a couple of other colleagues about the 2004 encounter at the Boston convention. Freyd doesn’t remember whether Tyson named Fairfax, but said that she spoke about it while “illustrating a concept” they were discussing about sexual violence.

“It was not that remarkable in that many times I’ve sat with colleagues and they talked about being victimized and how it fits in with what we are talking about,” said Freyd, a University of Oregon psychology professor who is part of the same Stanford behavioral sciences fellowship program with Tyson.

No, it doesn't make Trump's Racism or misogyny any better.  Fairfax's accuser should not be attacked for trying to bring him down, if she says it wasn't consensual, then it wasn't consensual. But we know Republicans will never hold their politicians accountable for stuff like this, and I'm hoping this isn't the end of the Democrats holding their side accountable either, or the party's in dire trouble.

The Misstatement Of The Union Address

Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post's fact-checking team tackled the Wall of lies in Donald Trump's SOTU speech last night, and it's pretty brutal stuff.  Some low-lights:

“Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century. African American, Hispanic American and Asian American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded.”

This is all in the past. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the unemployment rate had increased to 4 percent in January. The unemployment rate in December had no longer been at a 49-year low, but an 18-year low. Now it was merely the best since the beginning of 2018.

The African American unemployment statistic has been in existence for less than 50 years. It reached a low of 5.9 percent in May 2018, but had risen to 6.8 percent in January. The Hispanic American unemployment statistic has been in existence for less than 50 years. It reached a low of 4.4 percent in 2018, but had risen to 4.9 percent in January. The Asian American statistic has been around for less than 20 years. And while it reached a low of 2.1 percent in May 2018, it rose to 3.2 percent rate in January.

“And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy.”

The United States has exported more energy than it has imported since 2015. Trump overstates the impact of his energy policy. 

“The border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities. Now, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of our safest cities.”

Trump appears to be echoing comments he heard from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Jan. 10, but this claim is wrong.

The El Paso Times, in a fact check, said some form of barrier has existed between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez for decades, though Trump appeared to be referring to fencing that was completed in mid-2009: “Looking broadly at the last 30 years, the rate of violent crime reached its peak in 1993, when more than 6,500 violent crimes were recorded. Between 1993 and 2006, the number of violent crimes fell by more than 34 percent and less than 2,700 violent crimes were reported. The border fence was authorized by [President George W.] Bush in 2006, but construction did not start until 2008. From 2006 to 2011 — two years before the fence was built to two years after — the violent crime rate in El Paso increased by 17 percent.”

The city had the third-lowest violent crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 — before construction of a 57-mile-long fence started in mid-2008. 

"We have spent more than $7 trillion dollars in the Middle East.”

Trump started making a version of this claim shortly after taking office, first saying $6 trillion but then quickly elevating it to $7 trillion. Trump acts as if the money has been spent, but he is referring to a Brown University study that included estimates of future obligations through 2056 for veterans’ care. The study combines data for both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq (2003) and the war in Afghanistan (2001), which is in Central/South Asia, not the Middle East. The cost of the combined wars will probably surpass $7 trillion by 2056, when interest on the debt is considered, almost four decades from now.

The guy actually managed to lie more this year than last.

Hopefully we won't have to hear from him again in January 2020, but there was never any chance of Trump actually practicing the "unity" he screamed about in his address when he spent the entire day attacking the Democrats before his televised rant.

For public consumption, President Trump planned to use his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to appeal for bipartisan unity. But at a private lunch for television anchors earlier in the day, he offered searing assessments of a host of Democrats.

Mr. Trump dismissed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as “dumb,” called Senator Chuck Schumer of New York a “nasty son of a bitch” and mocked Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, who he said “choked like a dog” at a news conference where he tried to explain a racist yearbook photo, according to multiple people in the room.

I'm so tired of this racist, misogynist buffoon. I'm even more tired of the people who voted for and enable him.

The Democratic party response from Stacey Abrams was much better.

In a brief speech lauded by Democrats, Abrams succeeded in elevating an event that is often awkward and anticlimactic by nature. With a measured tone and her trademark working-class anecdotes, Abrams outlined a raft of policy measures, from the potential of Medicaid expansion in combating infant mortality to the importance of gun control and immigration reform. But the high point of the speech was her strong and vocal stance on protecting voting rights. As the national face of the party for a few minutes on Tuesday, Abrams pushed the issue of the franchise closer to the heart of Democratic politics, and gave Democrats another rhetorical weapon against the Republican Party.

Abrams appeared on air shortly after President Donald Trump, who during his address to Congress appeared at times to seek bipartisan praise, while also sticking to his familiar stances on law enforcement, immigration, abortion, and foreign policy. During key moments when Trump talked about women’s suffrage, criminal justice reform, and cancer research, members of both parties cheered. But for much of his speech, he sounded like the president who staged countless political rallies last summer and fall. “Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards,” he said, admonishing Democrats for not agreeing to his demands for a border wall that led to the longest government shutdown in history. “Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal immigration.”

While the president defended his border wall and recited stories of kidnapping and rape along the border, he made no reference to the financial pain suffered by federal employees during the government shutdown. In the moment, he seemed eager for applause and conciliation.

Abrams, by contrast, zeroed in on the workers’ pain. She recalled the time she spent distributing meals from food pantries to furloughed federal workers. Abrams called the impasse “a stunt engineered by the President of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people—but our values.”

She also called the White House’s response to rampant gun violence “timid,” a barb that seemed designed to irritate Trump. Abrams lamented the lack of any new immigration reform, and promoted Medicaid expansion as a way to reduce overall mortality among vulnerable groups. She called for action on climate change, criticized the 2017 Republican tax cuts, and hoped for the appointment of “fair-minded judges.”

Still, it was Abrams’s call for a renewed focus on voting rights that seemed to distinguish her rebuttal. “None of these ambitions are possible without the bedrock guarantee of our right to vote,” she said.

And it is this right that Trump threatens the most.  Never forget that.

StupidiNews!

• A new United Nations Security Council report accuses North Korea of hiding nuclear weapons in order to protect them from potential US military strikes.
• An Alabama police officer has been cleared of wrongdoing by the state's Attorney General in the shooting death of 21-year-old Emantic "E.J." Bradford at a Birmingham mall last Thanksgiving.
• Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle reintroduced legislation to lower prescription drug prices on Tuesday with identical House and Senate versions of a bill to speed up the generic drug process.
• The Central African Republic has signed a cease fire agreement with multiple militia groups to end a six-year armed conflict in the country.
• Web browser Firefox is trying to win over users with a new policy against auto-playing audio on webpages, going one step further than Google Chrome's less strict "guessing" system.

Last Call For Warren (No) Peace

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is apologizing for claiming Native American heritage tonight, but it's probably not going to stop Trump from calling her "Pocahontas".

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Tuesday that she was sorry that she identified herself as a Native American for almost two decades, reflecting her ongoing struggle to quiet a controversy that continues to haunt her as she prepares to formally announce a presidential bid.
Her comments more fully explain the regret she expressed last week to the chief of the Cherokee Nation, the first time she’s said she was sorry for claiming American Indian heritage.

The private apology was earlier reported as focusing more narrowly on a DNA test she took to demonstrate her purported heritage, a move that prompted a ferocious backlash even from many allies. Warren will be vying to lead a party that has become far more mindful of nonwhite voters and their objections to misuse of their culture.

“I can’t go back,” Warren said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But I am sorry for furthering confusion on tribal sovereignty and tribal citizenship and harm that resulted.”

Warren has been trying for the past year to get past the lingering controversy over her past assertion that she is Native American.

In addition to the DNA test, she released employment documents over the summer to show she didn’t use ethnicity to further her career. And in a speech a year ago she addressed her decision to call herself a Native American, though she didn’t offer the apology that some wanted at the time.

But as Warren undergoes increased scrutiny as a presidential candidate, additional documents could surface to keep the issue alive.

Using an open records request during a general inquiry, for example, The Post obtained Warren’s registration card for the State Bar of Texas, providing a previously undisclosed example of Warren identifying as an “American Indian.”

Warren filled out the card by hand in neat blue ink and signed it. Dated April 1986, it is the first document to surface showing Warren making the claim in her own handwriting. Her office didn’t dispute its authenticity. 

Unfortunately, if Warren benefited from her claim of heritage, I'm going to have to say that the apology isn't going to be enough for most voters.  She's a great senator and Massachusetts is pretty happy with her, but I don't see her presidential prospects going much further after tonight, which is a shame because I'd think she'd make a pretty decent President.

We'll see where this ends up, but you can bet the oppo research teams are in overdrive tonight.

A Taxing Strategy

Team Trump is fighting tooth, nail, and orange tan to keep Democrats from using subpoena power on Trump's tax returns, making me believe very much that somewhere in that mess is the end of his regime.

The new House Democratic majority is widely expected to test one of Donald Trump’s ultimate red lines by demanding the president’s personal tax returns — and the Trump administration has been gearing up for months to fight back hard.

Trump's Treasury Department is readying plans to drag the expected Democratic request for Trump’s past tax filings, which he has closely guarded, into a quagmire of arcane legal arguments.

At the same time, officials intend to publicly cast the request as a nakedly partisan exercise. The two-pronged scheme was developed by a handful of top political appointees and lawyers inside the department — with the ultimate goal of keeping the president’s past returns private, according to four people familiar with the administration’s approach.

The strategy will hinge on an argument that politically motivated Democrats will inevitably leak Trump’s tax information — a felony in and of itself — if the IRS hands over the documents. So because Democrats can’t be trusted to keep the documents private, they shouldn’t get them in the first place, officials will insist. Treasury officials have been waiting since early January for a top Democrat to make the request.

The battle between Treasury and the Democrats could plunge the country into yet another norm-breaking moment for the Trump presidency — with the fight stretching on for months and well into the 2020 campaign.

“What happens if the Treasury secretary just doesn’t answer or sends back a note saying we refuse to do what you are saying?” said George Yin, a former chief of staff on the House Joint Committee on Taxation, one of the three congressional committees involved in major tax issues on Capitol Hill. “To my knowledge, that has never happened. … We are essentially in uncharted territory if he refuses.” 

A Treasury Department spokeswoman would only say: “Secretary [Steven] Mnuchin will review any request with the Treasury General Counsel for legality.”

And refuse Mnuchin shall.

There's every reason to believe that this is a two-pronged attack, that the Trump regime will stonewall Democrats for as long as they can, and that the regime will nakedly threaten prison time for anyone involved in publishing any leaks about the return.

We'll see what happens, but don't plan on finding out anything soon.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

It's very possible that the Trump regime will continue to interfere with the Mueller probe and even bury Mueller's final report, but there is no saving Donald Trump from the state investigation that is zeroing in on his Russian money laundering using his 2016 inaugural committee as a slush fund.

Escalating one of the investigations into President Trump’s inaugural committee, federal prosecutors ordered on Monday that its officials turn over documents about donors, finances and activities, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.

The subpoena seeks documents related to all of the committee’s donors and guests; any benefits handed out, including tickets and photo opportunities with the president; federal disclosure filings; vendors; contracts; and more, one of the people said.

The new requests expand an investigation prosecutors opened late last year amid a flurry of scrutiny of the inaugural committee. And they showed that the investigations surrounding Mr. Trump, once centered on potential ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential election, have spread far beyond the special counsel’s office to include virtually all aspects of his adult life: his business, his campaign, his inauguration and his presidency.

In the subpoena, investigators also showed interest in whether any foreigners illegally donated to the committee, as well as whether committee staff members knew that such donations were illegal, asking for documents laying out legal requirements for donations. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions to federal campaigns, political action committees and inaugural funds.
Prosecutors also requested all documents related to vendors and contractors with the inaugural committee, which raised a record $107 million and spent lavishly.

People familiar with the subpoena said prosecutors are interested in potential money laundering as well as election fraud, though it is possible that the prosecutors do not suspect the inaugural committee of such violations. The prosecutors cited those crimes in the subpoena simply as justification for their demand for documents, the people said.

Only one individual was named as part of the subpoena’s demand for documents: Imaad Zuberi, a former fund-raiser for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who was seeking inroads with Mr. Trump, and whose company, Avenue Ventures, gave $900,000 to the inaugural committee. The subpoena also seeks documents related to his company.

A spokesman, Steve Rabinowitz, said Mr. Zuberi was unaware of having been named in the subpoena, and noted that he gave “generously and directly” to the inaugural committee, along with many others who donated more.

Another entity that the subpoena seeks documents on is Stripe, which created technology to help process credit card transactions. According to published reports, the company counts Josh Kushner, the brother of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, among its investors. Josh Kushner is not named in the subpoena, and a spokesman for him declined to comment.

A spokesman for the inaugural committee said it was still reviewing the subpoena and intended to cooperate with the investigation. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. ABC first reported that a subpoena was in the works.

Prosecutors have pursued the possibility that the inaugural committee made false statements to the Federal Election Commission, according to people familiar with the matter. It can be a crime to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to a federal agency.

There's an extremely good chance that Russian nationals donated to Trump's inaugural committee in payment for services to be rendered to Putin and his oligarchs, and Trump pocketed much of the payoff, and this is just the tip of the iceberg: there's the Mueller probe, the NY state investigation into the Trump Organization, and now the Southern District of New York federal case against Trump's inaugural committee.

All three investigations are deep into grand jury indictments.  When they are all unsealed, this administration is going to be crushed.

Stay tuned.

StupidiNews!

• Lawmakers in Hawaii are considering a Democratic bill that would raise the age to buy cigarettes in the state to 100.
• General Motors is the latest major US manufacturer to announce more layoffs in 2019, the automaker is expected to hand out 4,000 pink slips for tech and support jobs.
• Donald Trump is expected to formally nominate David Bernhardt to lead the Interior Department, the former energy lobbyist is currently Acting Secretary as Ryan Zinke resigned in December in disgrace.
• Senior Treasury Department official David Malpass will be Trump's nominee to head the World Bank, Malpass has criticized the institution in the past calling it too big and outdated.
• A federal appeals court has handed the FCC a major loss, ruling that Tribal residents can use federal Lifeline phone subsidies to purchase mobile service from resellers.

Last Call For Shutdown Meltdown, Con't

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is warning fellow Republicans that they will either get behind Trump's ludicrous wall, or be crushed by it in 2020.

Share

Tweet

Post

Emai

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, warned his fellow Republicans to back the president if he declares an emergency to build a wall on the southern border.

"To every Republican, if you don’t stand behind this president, we’re not going to stand behind you, when it comes to the wall," Graham said in a speech in Greenville, South Carolina, of the political fight with Democrats over a border barrier. "This is the defining moment of his presidency. It’s not just about a wall, it’s about him being treated different than every other president."

Graham said he doesn’t expect Congress to come up with a deal that would provide money for a wall in spending negotiations to avert another government shutdown after Feb. 15. He said he fears a "war within the Republican Party over the wall."

"This is about more than a barrier. This is about us as a party," he said.

At this point, I firmly believe Graham's warning is coming out ahead of a Trump move to declare a national emergency and assume powers over Congress, and Graham is expecting full backing when Nancy Pelosi moves to put the GOP on record to vote for Trump's autocracy.  Greg Sargent:

Senate Republicans appear to be in a panic about President Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency to realize his unquenchable fantasy of a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Republicans are reportedly worried that such a move could divide them, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has delivered that warning to Trump in private conversations.

Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position.

Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.”

But Pelosi has recourse against such a declaration — and if she exercises it, Senate Republicans may have to vote on where they stand on it.

Trump does have the power to declare such an emergency under the post-Watergate National Emergencies Act, which also requires him to identify which other specific statutedelegating emergency powers he’s invoking. Trump is expected to rely on one of several statutes that authorize military officials, in a presidentially declared emergency, to redirect funds for purposes that are either “essential to the national defense” or support “use of the armed forces.”

The Post reports that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has privately told Trump that a national emergency is “viable,” and officials at the Army Corps of Engineers are searching for ways to build the wall. This would be challenged in the courts, which would have to decide whether the statute Trump invoked actually does authorize this type of spending. 

But Pelosi has a much more immediate way to challenge Trump’s declaration. Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency.

And there's a very good chance that Pelosi wins both votes and cancels Trump's emergency declaration.

Now, that could be exactly what Trump wants.  He can blame somebody else for the wall mess.  But that risks alienating the GOP Senate support Trump will need to survive the Mueller report later this year.

Having said that, Lindsey Graham is absolutely behind Trump.  It makes me wonder what Trump's leverage is...or Russia's.

You Wrecked It, Ralph, Con't

The picture of Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in blackface that surfaced on Friday was indeed a right-wing anti-abortion hitjob, as the Washington Post's story on the source of the scoop finds the conservative site that broke the story was tipped off by one of Northam's medical school classmates furious at the Governor's comments on a proposed abortion access expansion bill.

The reporter who exposed the racist photo on Gov. Ralph Northam’s yearbook page said a “concerned citizen” led him to the story that has prompted widespread outrage and calls for the Democrat’s resignation.

Patrick Howley, editor in chief of the website Big League Politics, first reported Friday the existence of a photo on Northam’s page of his medical school yearbook depicting a figure in blackface standing next to another person in a Ku Klux Klan hood.

“It’s very easy to explain,” Howley, 29, said in an interview Saturday. “A concerned citizen, not a political opponent, came to us and pointed this out. I was very offended [by the photo] because I don’t like racism.”

The tip came after Northam’s comments on Wednesday about late-term abortions, he said. Howley declined to give any further information about his source, citing a confidentiality agreement. But he said it took him just a few hours to confirm that the photo was authentic.

The source of the tip appears to have been a medical school classmate or classmates of Northam who acted as a direct result of the abortion controversy that erupted earlier in the week, according to two people at Big League Politics, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

“The revelations about Ralph Northam’s racist past were absolutely driven by his medical school classmate’s anger over his recent very public support for infanticide,” one of the two said.

So does this mean that Democrats should rescind their calls for Northam's resignation, given that this is very obviously Republicans taking revenge as Howley is an ex-Breitbart and Daily Caller writer?

The answer to that is absolutely not.  Northam still needs to resign and hopefully he does so today.  The fact remains he did it, then lied about, then tried to pass it off as nothing, and that's not how it works.

But now the issue has gotten far more complicated as the same Big League Politics site is reporting that Virginia's Democratic Lt. Govenor, Justin Fairfax, committed sexual assault at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax issued a statement early Monday after an online article hinted at sexual assault allegations against him in 2004.

The site “Big League Politics” shared a private post from a woman who said an office holder who assaulted her at the the Democratic National Convention was about to get “a very big promotion.” She says her attacker won a statewide office in 2017.

On Monday morning, Fairfax released a tweet that said “the person reported to be making this false allegation first approached the Washington Post ... after being presented with facts consistent with the Lt. Governor’s denial of the allegation, the absence of any evidence corroborating the allegation, and significant red flags and inconsistencies with the allegation, the Post made the considered decision to not publish the story.”

Fairfax says he will take legal action at anyone “attempting to spread this defamatory and false allegation.”

If this is true, Fairfax will need to resign as well.

It's not a good look, Democrats.

Not at all.