StupidiNews!

• Paris officials say that several artifacts have been rescued after Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire on Monday night, the fire is under control but the cathedral's famous wooden spire was destroyed.
• Ecuador says it was inundated with tens of millions of international cyber attacks after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was turned over to UK police last week.
• Both the House Financial Services Committee and House Intelligence Committee have issued subpoenas to Germany's Deutsche Bank and other banks in connection to Trump's finances.
• China's Communist Party is using the internet to test party loyalty with a new mobile app, but some have figured out how the cheat the system and earn "loyalty points" by not doing anything.
• PC DOTA 2 champions Team OG have been dethroned by an OpenAI bot able to play the game better than any team of humans can, the makers plan to allow users to download the bot for free.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

The Trump regime is so corrupt that new Interior Secretary David Bernhardt  (and former oil lobbyist, because of course) is already being investigated for ethics complaints after being confirmed just last week by Senate Republicans.

The Interior Department’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into ethics complaints against the agency’s newly installed secretary, David Bernhardt.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and agribusiness industries, was confirmed by the Senate last week to head the agency, which oversees the nation’s 500 million acres of public land and vast coastal waters. He has played a central role in writing policies designed to advance President Trump’s policy of “energy dominance” and expanding fossil fuel exploration. He has been dogged by allegations of ethics violations since joining the Trump administration as the Interior Department’s deputy secretary in 2017.

Eight senators, all Democrats, and four government ethics watchdog groups have requested that the Interior Department’s inspector general open formal investigations into various aspects of Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct. Among the chief complaints have been allegations, revealed by three separate New York Times investigations, that Mr. Bernhardt used his position to advance a policy pushed by his former lobbying client; that he continued working as a lobbyist after filing legal paperwork declaring that he had ceased lobbying; and that he intervened to block the release of a scientific report showing the harmful effects of a chemical pesticide on certain endangered species.
In a letter sent Monday to the senators who filed the ethics complaints, Mary L. Kendall, the deputy inspector general of the Interior Department, wrote that she had received seven complaints from “a wide assortment of complainants alleging various conflicts of interest and other violations” by Mr. Bernhardt, adding that she had “opened an investigation to address them.”

Mr. Bernhardt has maintained that he did not commit any ethical violations and, in fact, has worked to strengthen the culture of ethical compliance at the Interior Department, in part by hiring dozens of new ethics specialists.

Mr. Bernhardt’s spokeswoman, Faith Vander Voort, wrote in a statement, “Secretary Bernhardt is in complete compliance with his ethics agreement and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.” She added, “It is important to note that the Department Ethics Office has already conducted a review of many of these accusations at Mr. Bernhardt’s request and determined that Secretary Bernhardt is in complete compliance.”

A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has formally requested investigations into Mr. Bernhardt’s conduct, and who pushed for the delay of his Senate confirmation, wrote in a statement: “This is exactly why I wanted a delay in Bernhardt’s consideration. We now have an Interior Secretary who has been on the job for one full business day and is already under investigation.”

The corruption is baked in, guys.  It's nothing but open grifting and theft and will be long after Trump is gone, because this is what America is now.  They can do whatever they want because we won't stop them.

Nobody will.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Mouth of Sauron Sarah Sanders says nobody in Congress is smart enough to parse Trump's tax returns anyway, so why bother?  Apparently she missed the fact that three House Democrats (and several Republicans) are CPAs.

In attacking the fight to obtain Trump's tax returns, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders argued that members of Congress aren't smart enough to understand them anyway. 

But three Democratic members of Congress are trained as certified public accountants -- professionals licensed by their states to do just that. 

The Congressional Research Service said there are 10 accountants in this Congress, including two senators and eight House members.

As certified public accountants, they had to pass an exam and meet their states' work and education requirements. 

Rep. Brad Sherman of California is a tax law specialist and a CPA, and he was an instructor at Harvard Law School's International Tax Program, according to his biography. He sits on the House Committee on Financial Services. 

Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who was first elected in 1991, was a CPA and small business owner in Detroit Lakes before joining Congress. 

And Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York is trained as an attorney and a CPA and previously worked as an auditor for Arthur Andersen & Co. He is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee -- the committee that writes many of the country's tax laws, and the committee requesting Trump's tax returns.

Suozzi especially may have a big role to play here, being on Ways & Means and having been a professional tax auditor, exactly the kind of smarts needed to understand Trump's tax games.

Meanwhile, Trump is outright threatening legal action against any accounting firms that cooperate with the Democratic subpoena.

President Donald Trump’s attorneys are warning of potential legal action if an accounting firm turns over a decade of the president’s financial records to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Trump attorneys William S. Consovoy and Stefan Passantino are urging Mazars USA not to comply with a subpoena that Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) plans to issue on Monday for Trump’s financial documents, calling it a politically motivated scheme to take down the president.

“It is no secret that the Democrat Party has decided to use its new House majority to launch a flood of investigations into the president’s personal affairs in hopes of using anything they can find to damage him politically,” Consovoy and Passantino wrote to Jerry D. Bernstein, Mazars’ outside counsel.

The attorneys said they were formally putting Mazars ”on notice” — an implicit threat of legal action. They also urged Bernstein to hold off on providing the documents to Cummings until the subpoena can be litigated in court, suggesting that a protracted legal battle is likely to ensue.

“The Democrats’ fervor has only intensified after the special counsel squelched their ‘Russia collusion’ narrative,” the attorneys continued, outlining a series of legal precedents that they argue prevents Mazars from complying with Cummings’ subpoena.

Let the games then begin.  They will take years to play out, and there's a very good chance that Trump's tax returns will be a moot point by the time this is all settled.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Whether or not it's true, Donald Trump is surely acting like Bill Barr made the entire 22-month Mueller investigation go away in a matter of weeks, and as far as Trump is concerned, the country has moved on to his immigration war as the baseline fight for his 2020 reelection campaign.

Mr. Barr’s letter effectively emboldened Mr. Trump, aides said, even as they prepare for new details to emerge from a redacted version of the report — expected this week — that could renew questions about the president’s fitness for office, and even as some of them cringe at Mr. Trump’s choice of the word “exonerate.” (Privately, they admit, they would prefer he use the word “vindicate.”)

But Mr. Trump’s mood has been lighter since the report was filed, people close to him said, even though neither he nor his White House lawyers have seen the full document, or at this point plan to do so before it is released to Congress and to the public. People close to Mr. Trump said they have noticed an increase in his confidence after he spent months feeling weighed down by a loss of control.

“When they began to go after people he knew personally, who had worked for him for years, I think it gnawed at him, and I think he felt helpless,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a confidant of Mr. Trump’s.

But since Mr. Barr issued his letter, the president has felt liberated and has been testing his bounds. He has poked fun at Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president considering a presidential run, for his handsy approach to politics, despite his own troubled history with women. He has floated the idea of a pardon for Kevin McAleenan, now his acting homeland security secretary, if he encountered any legal problems in shutting the southwestern border. And he has heightened his attacks on the press beyond his normal refrain of “fake news,” falsely claiming that journalists are “knowingly” bending the truth.

Now, as Mr. Barr prepares to submit a redacted version of the report, Mr. Trump’s plan of attack, aides said, is to act as if the report itself is extraneous to Mr. Barr’s brief letter.

“The bottom line: The result is no collusion, no obstruction, and that’s the way it is,” the president told reporters on Thursday. He said that Democrats “know it’s all a big scam, a big hoax” and that he believed what they were doing was “actually treason.” Days earlier, en route to Texas, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I don’t care about the Mueller report. I’ve been totally exonerated.”

The framing is simple: Trump beat Mueller, everything else is sour grapes and fake news.  The media has already done 90% of the work for Trump with the NO COLLUSION FOUND headlines from three weeks ago.  Nobody's going to listen to what they have to say.

Mr. Trump is purposefully escalating his language, people who know him said, expressly to enliven his base of supporters and to enrage his political rivals and the news media. He has revived an idea that his administration rejected — sending immigrant detainees to so-called sanctuary cities — in part, people close to him said, to distract from the report.

“The president clearly feels vindicated now that the Mueller report is completed,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host, who recently taped a radio interview with Mr. Trump. “He will continue to remind the American people he was correct about there being no evidence of collusion with Russia.”

Other outside surrogates have been echoing Mr. Trump’s line — that the narrative has already been established and it is too late for new facts to change that — even though members of the special counsel’s team have expressed concern that Mr. Barr’s letter did not accurately portray the contents of the report.

“The facts are that there was no collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, no obstruction of justice and President Trump has been fully vindicated,” said Boris Epshteyn, a former White House aide who now serves as the chief political commentator for Sinclair Broadcast Group. “No amount of spin by the opponents is going to change that.”

But critics said the strategy is classic Trump — effective with a narrow audience, but ultimately self-limiting. “He will probably have succeeded in setting the narrative for his core supporters and hardening their attitudes, but at the expense of anyone else believing him when the report comes out and inevitably undermines what he’s been claiming,” said Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman under former President Barack Obama. “The same things that solidify his base just prevent him from expanding beyond it at all.”

His base was enough to get him elected.  As long as he keeps it, and the Democrats don't expand their own base, Trump wins again.  Democrats have to get people to vote for them and not just against Trump.  I know voting against Trump should be enough, but it wasn't.  And given the massive GOP voter suppression guaranteed in 2020, Dems will have to work extra-hard in order to get the votes they need to win.

StupidiNews!

• At least seven people have been reported killed by major storms across the Southeast and Ohio Valley over the weekend, hail, tornadoes, and even snow was reported across the Eastern half of the US.
• Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is warning that possible leaks of Mueller report redactions should delay release of any information in the report until Republicans can "defend" it.
• After an 11-year drought, golfer Tiger Woods has reclaimed his first major in over a decade and a fifth green jacket overall winning The Masters at Augusta with a 2-under 70.
• Finland's Social Democrats look to form their first government in 16 years, but face a sharply divided country as the second-place right-wing and anti-immigrant Finns Party says they will not join.
• Washington state will be the fourth state behind Hawaii, California and New Mexico to completely phase out non-renewable energy by 2045.

It's Just Plane Economics

Airlines are having to cancel hundreds of flights daily right now because of grounded Boeing 737 MAX jets, and not enough other planes available to meet regular summer flight demand.

Normally U.S. airlines compete to sell tickets and fill seats during the peak summer travel season. But operators of the grounded Boeing 737 MAX are facing a different problem: scarce planes and booming demand.

The grounding of Boeing Co’s fuel-efficient, single-aisle workhorse after two fatal crashes is biting into U.S. airlines’ Northern Hemisphere spring and summer schedules, threatening to disarm them in their seasonal war for profits.

“The revenue is right in front of them. They can see it, but they can’t meet it,” said Mike Trevino, spokesman for Southwest Airlines Pilots Association and an aviation industry veteran.

Southwest Airlines Co, the world’s largest MAX operator, and American Airlines Group Inc with 34 and 24 MAX jetliners respectively, have removed the aircraft from their flying schedules into August.

Southwest’s decision will lead to 160 cancellations of some 4,200 daily flights between June 8 and Aug. 5, while American’s removal through Aug. 19 means about 115 daily cancellations, or 1.5 percent of its summer flying schedule each day.

Low-cost carrier Southwest, which unlike its rivals only flies Boeing 737s, had estimated $150 million in lost revenue between Feb. 20 and March 31 alone due to MAX cancellations and other factors.

So far airlines have said it is too soon to estimate the impact of the MAX grounding beyond the first quarter, but the extended cancellations signal that they do not expect a quick return of Boeing’s fast-selling jetliner. The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide in March following a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash just five months after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia. All on board both planes were killed.

Economics tells us that when you have scarcity of supply and ineleastic demand,  you can raise prices and keep them there.  If you think airlines are somehow upset that they no longer have to offer discount summer ticket prices this year in order to compete, I have a few airplanes to sell you.

No, as usual in this industry, the big loser is going to be the flying public.  Longer lines, longer flight delays, and a more miserable experience with everyone packed into 100% full planes.  It's going to be the worst summer to fly in several years.

Not for the airlines, though.  They'll be fine.

Sunday Long Read: Death Of A Glacier

John Muir first discovered what was to be known as the Lyell Glacier in 1871, hanging off Mount Lyell, the tallest peak in Yosemite. Some 150 years later, the Lyell Glacier is all but gone, killed by climate change, and its epitaph remains a brutal warning sign as to where life on Earth is headed.

On a cool September morning in 2014, among lodgepole pines under blue mountain sky, Greg Stock shouldered a backpack full of camping gear and scientific equipment. Boyishly slender and athletic at 45, Stock is a climber, caver, and serious reader of books about mountaineering and the natural world. He holds the enviable job title of Yosemite National Park Geologist and mostly loves the work, especially the part he was bound for that day — the study of Yosemite’s last two glaciers.

Stock and several companions started their walk in Tuolumne Meadows, the high-country jewel of Yosemite and everything that I would ever wish to find in the pastures of heaven — many square miles of grass and wildflowers surrounded by white granite domes that reflect sunshine like polished glass. Stock followed the John Muir Trail south out of those meadows into an immense U-shaped gorge called Lyell Canyon, 8 miles long and 3,000 feet deep, carved out of granite by long-vanished glaciers during dozens of ice ages. Evergreens dot the sloped walls of Lyell Canyon — straight lodgepoles down low, bent whitebarks up high.

In that drought year of 2014, dry meadow grasses carpeted the canyon floor in pale gold. Down the middle, the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River trickled through wide, meandering oxbows. The great irrigator of Tuolumne Meadows and drinking-water source for San Francisco, that river thunders deep in spring but flows in autumn thanks to meltwater from Stock’s destination, the Lyell Glacier.

Seven miles into Lyell Canyon, Stock kept an eye out for white rocks in the grass. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would never find those rocks, much less guess they marked a particular spot. When Stock saw them, he turned east off the John Muir Trail and down into the mostly empty channel of the Lyell Fork. He hopped across the shallows and then walked into the center of the canyon.

Stock poked around in the grass for another pile of rocks, which marked the spot where, in 1883, a geologist named Israel Russell looked 4,000 vertical feet up to the jagged summit of Mount Lyell, 13,114 feet above sea level and the tallest peak in Yosemite National Park. Standing right there, Russell took the first known photograph of the Lyell Glacier, which John Muir had found only 12 years earlier. In Russell’s photograph, 13 million square feet of ice spread like a white shawl across Mount Lyell’s black metamorphic shoulders.

Geologists and park employees have been returning to Russell’s photo point — and to the glacier itself — on a more or less regular basis ever since, replicating Russell’s images to create a scientific record 135 years old and counting. Stock has been the keeper of that tradition for over a decade, making the trip through Lyell Canyon more than 20 times to check the glacier’s vital signs. He has put gauges in runoff streams to measure meltwater trickling out of openings at the toe of the glacier. He has studied data from NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, an airplane outfitted with advanced sensing equipment that calculates the water volume in the Sierra snowpack and ice fields. Using much of the same technique that Muir did in 1871, Stock drove stakes into the Lyell to measure the downslope creep of ice that defines a glacier.

Like everyone who has ever studied the Lyell — and pretty much everyone who has ever studied any glacier — Stock documented shrinkage. The Lyell has lost depth and retreated upslope and broken into a smattering of white Rorschach blots that, as of 2014, amounted to about 3 million square feet of ice. In 2012, Stock had collected data showing that the main lobe of the Lyell was not flowing downhill. The pleasure of working in that quiet alpine sanctuary kept him coming back in a spirit of optimism. Still, when Stock looked through his camera’s viewfinder at the largest of the Lyell’s remaining white blots, in 2014, he was surprised to see that a familiar dark patch had grown much larger.

Stock led his companions farther south along the John Muir Trail to where it climbed up through forest toward Donohue Pass. At a wooden bridge across the river, Stock turned west off trail. Up rocky slopes, they came to the shores of an hourglass-shaped blue lake in a bowl of white stone — cooked dinner, slept in sleeping bags. In the morning, after breakfast, they hiked another 1,200 feet up to the main lobe of the Lyell, a broad and steep mass of ice in a quiet cirque of shattered rock. Stock felt like a man coming home after a long absence, comfortable and eager to catch up. He decided to have a close look at that dark patch.

“I remember noticing that it was right under an avalanche chute in the headwall below the summit,” Stock says. Perhaps it was just rock debris from some long-ago slide, embedded in the glacier surface.

The Lyell Glacier hangs at a severe angle off the mountainside. To slip and fall can mean a long, fast plummet. Stock wore crampons on his boots and carried an ice ax as he stepped onto an ice field riddled with sun cups, bathtub-sized depressions that forced him to walk along blade-thin ridges between them. Standing at the edge of the dark patch, Stock got a terrible feeling.

“I just knew. That’s bedrock. Your wishful thinking that that’s debris can’t possibly be right. The next thought was, If that’s bedrock, there can’t be much glacier left.” Letting his eye roam the periphery of the ice and visualizing mountain contours beneath the main mass of the glacier, Stock struggled to form a mental model in which the glacier maintained significant volume. He could not picture more than about 20 or 30 feet of thickness. Given the Lyell’s melt rate, it would disappear in four or five more years of drought. The shock of this realization forced Stock to confront what the data had been hinting at: The Lyell was no longer a glacier at all. Put another way, the Lyell Glacier was already dead, and Stock was the last person ever to study it.

It's a depressing story.  A generation from now, today's kids will, as adults, only wonder what we did wrong.  Hopefully they will vow to never repeat our mistakes.  I fear that they will only choose to make even worse ones.

Last Call For You Keep Me Runnin'

As Matt Flegenheimer at the NY Times points out, Democrats in 2019 are learning what Republicans figured out in 2015: there's almost zero downside for a White House run you know you're going to lose.

There is no discernible mass groundswell for an Eric Swalwell presidential campaign. 

The case against: He is a 38-year-old California congressman of little legislative distinction. He would appear to have minimal running room in a deep and accomplished Democratic field expected to grow to 20 or so — large enough to fill two baseball starting lineups, with another contender or two left to heckle from the dugout. 

The case for: Why not? 

“We don’t have time for vanity things,” Mr. Swalwell insisted in an interview this past week, the morning after he announced his candidacy on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” pledging to anchor his bid in a call for greater gun control. “We’re doing big things.” 

That remains to be seen. But at the very least, if recent history is a guide, a run is likely to yield better things, perpetuating the victory-in-defeat incentive structure endemic to modern presidential politics. 

Today’s primaries tend to produce one nominee but many winners. Beyond the long-shot candidates effectively auditioning for cabinet positions or building a profile (and donor base) for future races, there are prospective books to sell and television contracts to sign, boards to join and paid speeches to paid-speak. Any setback is temporary, any embarrassment surmountable.

“There’s just absolutely no downside and only upside,” Antonia Ferrier, a longtime Republican strategist and former senior aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, said of quixotic presidential runs. “It is an industry of self-promotion. What better way to self-promote than run for president?”

The downside, as America found out 29 months ago, is that you might actually win when you have no business running a hot dog stand, let alone a country.

Sure hope our side actually plays to win instead of playing to lose.

A Sternly Worded Letter

House Democrats are giving Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin until April 23 to turn over Trump's tax returns or...well, they'll probably write him another letter.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) on Saturday sent a two-page letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig rebuffing Mnuchin’s statement earlier this week that Treasury would miss House Democrats’ initial April 10 deadline for the returns.

Mnuchin’s concerns “lack merit,” Neal wrote.

Neal’s latest letter sets the stage for a further escalation in the conflict between Congress and the White House, as legal experts have suggested that an outright denial of their request by Mnuchin could be followed by subpoenas or a lawsuit in federal court. Mnuchin so far has only postponed responding to Democrats’ request and said he would confer with the Justice Department, but not yet rejected it.

“Please know that, if you fail to comply, your failure will be interpreted as a denial of my request,” Neal’s letter states.

Earlier this month, Neal wrote the IRS asking for six years of the president’s personal and business tax returns, which Trump has refused to release breaking decades of precedent for candidates for the White House. In his letter, Neal argues that the IRS has an “unambiguous legal obligation" to turn over the returns under section 6103 of the tax code, which states that the treasury secretary “shall furnish” a request from the congressional committees with tax oversight.

Congressional Republicans and Trump’s personal attorney, William S. Consovoy, have argued Democrats’ request risks weaponizing the IRS for partisan political gain, with Consovoy calling it a “gross abuse of power.” Mnuchin’s letter earlier this week said Neal’s request “raises serious issues concerning the constitutional scope of congressional investigative authority.”

Mnuchin revealed in congressional testimony that White House lawyers consulted with Treasury on Trump's tax returns.

“It is not the proper function of the IRS, Treasury, or Justice to question or second guess the motivations of the committee,” Neal writes in his letter. “Judicial precedent commands that none of the concerns raised can legitimately be used to deny the committee’s request.”

Let's get one thing straight right now: all the analysis about Stephen Mnuchin going to jail for violating the law is never, ever going to happen. When this nonsense plays out in ten days, we'll get to the part where Trump finds a federal judge or two to throw out an injunction on anything that might happen to Mnuchin while this goes to SCOTUS as slowly as possible.

This will be tied up in the courts until at least 2021, if not years later.

We will not see Trump's tax returns.

We're going to have to take care of Trump ourselves.

 

Number Five For Bibi, Number Two For Donny

Roger Cohen's warning for Democrats is simple: with Benjamin Netanyahu winning a fifth term this week while under criminal indictment for bribery and corruption showing Donald Trump the way, the Democrats will lose next November unless something fundamental changes in America within the next 18 months.

It was a referendum on him and he nailed it. Nobody can take that away from Benjamin Netanyahu. This summer, in his fifth term, he will surpass David Ben-Gurion as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister. Enough said.

His victory contains a warning for any Democrat still imagining that the 2020 election will bring an easy victory over Donald Trump. The Netanyahu playbook will be President Trump’s next year. Gather nationalist and religious voters in your camp, add in a strong economy, dose with fear, sprinkle with strongman appeal, inject a dash of racism and victory is yours — whatever indictments are looming.

It’s not that this could happen. It will happen, absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it. Netanyahu is savvier than Trump, but they share a shrewd assessment of how to control and manipulate the politics of spectacle, as well as a fierce determination to stay out of jail. They campaign ugly.

Exactly a century ago, Ben-Gurion said, “Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs, but not everyone sees there is no solution to that question.” Netanyahu’s solution is by now clear. He is a true believer in Greater Israel and will not give up one inch of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. There will be no Palestinian state on his watch. Period.

Many Israelis, weary of the chimera of a two-state peace, thank him for that — as they thank him for a strong economy, Trump’s support and a sense of stability. Netanyahu is a formidable politician adept in using hate and fear, the strongest currency in contemporary politics.

His victory was personal but it was also structural. Israel now has a structural majority of the right. This will almost certainly enable Netanyahu to form a right-wing government, even though his Likud party appeared tied with the Blue and White party of his upstart challenger, Benny Gantz, each winning 35 seats.

The Gantz performance was remarkable. It demonstrated the deep disquiet of liberal Israel over Netanyahu the King. But in the end Gantz took more votes from the left — the Labor Party and Meretz — than from the right. As Avi Scharf, editor of the English edition of the liberal daily Haaretz, put it to me, “Israel’s founding left is totally obliterated.”

Obliteration is absolutely the fate of the American left in less than two years unless we get our shit together and find a way to stop Trump.  The two-state solution in Israel is dead.  Palestinian genocide is nearly guaranteed as tanks will roll into Gaza and the Golan Heights within months, if not weeks. America will do nothing until the survivors are forced to accept the peace of the grave at gunpoint.

And then our adventure down that road will begin in earnest unless Trump is stopped.

At roundtable in Texas, President Trump laments that US troops at the border can't get "a little rough," because "everybody would go crazy ... can’t act like they would normally act -- or like, let’s say, another military from another country would act." pic.twitter.com/q1TPW24Csa

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 10, 2019

Very soon they will be able to "act" in the manner Trump wants them to act.  And then America's long history of genocide against the powerless will continue in an ocean of blood.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

And finally we end the week with Donald Trump being caught in what should be yet another scandal large enough to force his immediate resignation, but that America is so broken and lawless now that it's just "Friday".

President Donald Trump told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan he would grant McAleenan a pardon if he were sent to jail for having border agents block asylum seekers from entering the US in defiance of US law, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Trump reportedly made the comment during a visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago. It was not clear if the comment was a joke.

Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he "would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants," as one of the officials paraphrased.

The White House referred CNN to the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS spokesman told CNN, "At no time has the President indicated, asked, directed or pressured the Acting Secretary to do anything illegal. Nor would the Acting Secretary take actions that are not in accordance with our responsibility to enforce the law."

Donald Trump is telling people he will pardon them if they break the law in his service.

Not one goddamn person who could do anything about it cares.

Nobody cares, least of all the Senate Republicans who should be demanding that Trump step down, because the simple fact of the matter is they've figured out that they can do whatever they want and nobody in this country will lift a finger to stop them.

We should have been in the streets years ago.

We should have been organizing crippling national strikes years ago.

It never should have gotten this far.  They're getting away with it because every day we let them.

Sudan got rid of their dictator this week after 30 years.

But hey, the P'Zone is back at Pizza Hut, so America's fine.

Immigration Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is turning to Bill Barr on not only on burying the Mueller report, but Trump's plan to end all immigration in the US as well by all but removing judges from the immigration process and giving summary judgment power on asylum cases to the White House.

Attorney General William Barr is making his first major moves on immigration policy since his confirmation, setting up big changes for the courts that decide whether immigrants will stay in the U.S. or be deported. 

The Justice Department is on the verge of issuing rule changes that would make it easier for a handful of appellate immigration judges to declare their rulings binding on the entire immigration system, The Chronicle has learned. The changes could also expand the use of single-judge, cursory decisions at the appellate level — all at the same time as a hiring spree that could reshape the court. 

The Trump administration bills the moves as efficiency measures to help fix a delay-plagued immigration court system, at a time it is being inundated by asylum seekers at the southern border. Asylum cases can take years to complete, even those that are relatively straightforward. 

But advocates for immigrants and attorneys who work in the system fear the efficiency tools could be used to dramatically reshape immigration law to fit President Trump’s political goals.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the immigration court system and suggested doing away with it entirely. 

“Congress has to ... get rid of the whole asylum system because it doesn’t work,” Trump said this month. “And frankly, we should get rid of judges. You can’t have a court case every time somebody steps their foot on our ground.”

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions frequently cited the immigration-case backlog as dire and made reducing it a central focus of his tenure, though it grew by more than 100,000 cases in that time to its current total of more than 800,000. Recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen complained that migrants with weak asylum cases were clogging the system, slowing immigration judges from handling legitimate claims. 

Last week, the Justice Department revived a proposed regulation originally initiated during the George W. Bush administration to allow the 21-judge appeals court system that hears immigration cases more latitude to issue cursory opinions without explanation.  

It would also allow the court to set precedents with only a small minority of appeals judges participating, which could sharply accelerate the administration’s ability to make changes to immigration law that wouldn’t require congressional action. 

The proposed regulation has been sent to the White House for review before being made final, according to a government database. The Justice Department declined to comment other than to confirm that it hopes to finalize the rule this year.

The coming mass deportation regime won't end with pending asylum cases either.  ICE will be coming for immigrants already here.

And soon.

StupidiNews!

• Four Republican senators have come out against Donald Trump's nomination of Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve, meaning his confirmation is all but dead and Cain is expected to withdraw.
• Texas is refusing a House Oversight Committee letter to hand over information on the state's attempts to purge millions from voter rolls in 2016, saying it reserves to right to deny a public information request.
• House Democrats plan to introduce a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying they will meet with the White House.
• Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been ousted from power and arrested by the country's army as a military coup deposed him on Thursday, a transitional council will rule for the next two years.
• Disney's new streaming service, Disney+, will launch November 12 for $6.99 a month with movies and new shows set in the Star Wars and Marvel universes as well as Fox's entire Simpsons library.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The more we learn about the Trump regime's mass deportation scheme, the more it becomes clear that Trump is using the autocrat playbook, trying to deliberately create a situation so chaotic and broken that he believes the country will turn to him in order to save America.  

The first step was his emergency declaration, followed by the disaster situation on the border right now with DHS, ICE and the Border Patrol in total disarray and tens of thousands trying to cross the southern border.

Now we see that the Trump regime wanted to create chaos inside the US, with a plan to deliberately release ICE detainees onto the streets of "sanctuary cities" in order to weaken Democratic opposition in urban areas.

White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Trump administration officials have proposed transporting detained immigrants to sanctuary cities at least twice in the past six months — once in November, as a migrant caravan approached the U.S. southern border, and again in February, amid a standoff with Democrats over funding for Trump’s border wall.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco was among those the White House wanted to target, according to DHS officials. The administration also considered releasing detainees in other Democratic strongholds.

White House officials first broached the plan in a Nov. 16 email, asking officials at several agencies whether members of the caravan could be arrested at the border and then bused “to small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities,” places where local authorities have refused to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation.

The White House told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the plan was intended to alleviate a shortage of jail space but also served to send a message to Democrats. The attempt at political retribution raised alarm within ICE, with a top official responding that it was rife with budgetary and liability concerns, and noting that “there are PR risks as well.”

After the White House pressed again in February, ICE’s legal department rejected the idea as inappropriate and rebuffed the administration.

A White House official and a spokesman for DHS sent nearly identical statements to The Post on Thursday, indicating that the proposal is no longer under consideration.

“This was just a suggestion that was floated and rejected, which ended any further discussion,” the White House statement said.

Sure, it was just a proposal.  And now all the officials that rebuffed that proposal are gone, having been summarily fired by Trump in the last week, with the agencies in question now run by "acting" heads loyal to Trump and Trump alone. 

I'm sure it's a total coincidence.

The First Rule Of Trump Club

The first rule of keeping your creepy and dangerous Trump cult secret in DC is to talk to Politico about how cool Trump club is, I guess.

The club, an informal gathering that provides solidarity and networking opportunities in a hostile Washington, is open to what it calls “the Team” — Trump administration appointees as well as alumni of the campaign, transition and inaugural committee. Members wear a lapel pin fashioned after the butt end of a .45 caliber bullet casing and attend semi-regular gatherings that often feature remarks by better-known Trump-world figures such as Brad Parscale, Corey Lewandowski and Scaramucci.

Its operations, described here for the first time, offer insight into how the anonymous foot soldiers of Trump’s Washington have organized their social lives: discreetly, with an eye toward exclusivity and the aspirational lifestyle that has always marked the Trump brand.

Not quite a secret society, the club nonetheless goes to some lengths to fly under the radar: Public hints of its existence are scarce, and the locations of its events are withheld from attendees until they RSVP, all the better to evade the notice of pesky activists and nosy reporters. “In this political climate, there’s a lot of people who would not have pure intentions of coming to network,” explained a former campaign staffer familiar with the club. “They may be trying to infiltrate.”

This is totally normal behavior for people old enough to have drivers' licenses.

While it is common for veterans of presidential campaigns and administrations to form alumni groups, the 45 Club has taken on an outsized role as a refuge for junior operatives and appointees who have few connections in the capital. Barack Obama’s young staffers were the toast of Washington, and George W. Bush rode into town with a clubby, multi-generational political network that was heavy on the GOP establishment. But, in a reflection of his outsider campaign, Trump’s hires often came from outside the traditional feeding grounds of Republican politics. And in a city that has largely shunned them — dating app profiles here often declare an unwillingness to meet Trump’s supporters, let alone his aides — Trump’s young aides have formed an insular social scene.

“When you’ve kept the Washington Illuminati at a distance, I think you’re more likely to form groups of your own,” explained one club member.

Of course, because this is the Trump administration, there has been infighting: The 45 Club has been the subject of internecine sniping over charges that it is run by hangers-on bent on exploiting their tenuous connections to the president.

“They’re trying to create an exclusive club because they’ve been banned from every other exclusive club in D.C.,” sniped one former campaign staffer.

“Ironically enough, the two guys who started it were never on the campaign, never in the administration,” lamented Kevin Chmielewski, a member of the campaign’s advance team who went on to serve at the Environmental Protection Agency. “We were all kind of pissed about it, because it’s like, ‘Who are you to do that?’”

I can understand that when everyone in DC hates you because Trump is human filth, and that outside their little White House fiefdom, Trump people are rightfully shunned, that you would want your little clubhouse so you can commiserate in how awful the world is for white guys.

But these guys are all nursing a grudge against the country just like their boss, and I'll be damned if these guys don't have visions of being Trump's army to take over DC.